skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bitcoin Apps Re-Enter iOS Store After Apple's Digital Currency Policy Shift
The source [0] is kind of an incredible copy and paste achievement. Clearly the author doesn't suffer from the "Last Line effect". [1]

Still, it was sort of fun for a minute or two.

[0]: http://dhmholley.co.uk/civclicker.js
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7858612
This is the question I hoped would bubble out of this post (as opposed to the question 'why are we seeing politics on HN'). Part of the answer would be to build tools such as SecureDrop/ StrongBox:

http://www.newyorker.com/strongbox/
https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/securedrop

And Redphone and the various things Moxie works on:
https://whispersystems.org/

But that only makes communications and authenticity possible. Access -- as in embedding problem Manning describes -- and censorship or selection bias will still be a problem. Those seem more like policy issues than technology problems. Along those lines, possibly Sunlight Foundation (http://sunlightfoundation.com/) and of course, supporting the EFF (https://www.eff.org/).

Those are my thoughts, but I second your question and hope others have input.
"Most of what people worried about over the last five years -- inflation, rising interest rates, a double-dip recession, stagnant markets, Greece leaving the euro, a government default -- never occurred."

Why? Because the reason most people are worried is based on something that they've read which is often because of this:

"I've learned that journalists' need to write far exceeds the number of things that need to be written."

The root of all opinion is generally what people are exposed to and what is written by a third party (not even an expert) as opposed to what they have actually figured out independently on their own or heard from multiple experts (who may have differing opinions). In other words their bias doesn't come from experience or informed opinion but merely what they are read that others have written.

That's why polls are not as important as they look. Even if accurate they merely measure what people read in the paper, online, or see on the nightly news.
Never never underestimate the power of N.I.H.[1] in human affairs. Creative people with time to spare can't resist the temptation to think "how would I do that? oooh I can think of several tweaks that would make it better. I should totally make one of my own." And then their work becomes "held territory" for their coterie or organization to be defended and enhanced and bingo, you have a new language or database or protocol with a community, and the more effort the community invests in the thing, the more stable and important it becomes.

Really, it's the intellectual analog of the process by which a whirling disk of dust becomes a system of planets, some big, some small...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here
As a mathematician I'll certainly endorse a number of the points in the linked post. Because what they mean is that it can be very quick to translate mathematics into code. Maybe it won't run fast or be understandable by anyone else, but I can express complicated ideas (relatively) compactly and quickly and get something working without huge amounts of tedium.
Great! Yesterday I wasted a few hours on this http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com

Do you pine the days of Knights and Merchants? Age of Empires? I wish someone would make game like that. No need for fancy graphics. No MMO. No in-app purchase. Same experience like the old ones have.
Apple has this 'feature' too.
I have only a passing familiarity with Objective C. Why is one of the "red lines" having no garbage collection?
The corpus seems oddly constructed. I have to wonder where they got the English text from -- it seems to have a very academic bias, with lots of strings containing "University", for instance. There's also a lot of redundancy; for instance, I see some near-duplicates including:

12010. "University of"
12129. "University of "
13106. "the University of"

13227. "Oxford University"
13534. " Oxford University"

(I'm sure there's other similar duplicates; I just happened to notice them while looking at all the "university"-ies in the corpus.)
> So, do we need to change our file uploaders and whatnot to autokill after a certain amount of time? Or just set `ulimit -m` or whatever judiciously?

Most image formats specify the size before providing any data, you can just check that w*h is below whatever limit you deem fit before loading the image data. The file upload size should already have a "sane" limit so people don't upload truckloads of data, the problem with compression bomb is that you can upload a very small amount of data and it eats the target's RAM on decoding.

> This looks like an annoying attack vector for people that, say, resize image uploads to make thumbnails.

It is, although for JPEG you don't need to decode the image to resize it (depending how whatever you're using is implemented it may still do so regardless).
I think the author is probably talking about total wealth, not median income; by that metric, we're richer than in 1999 (though it is less equally distributed), according to this graph: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a3/Graphic.png

But whether we go with total wealth or median income, really the point here is the following sentence in the article: I don't think it's as happy as it's ever been.

I think the author is taking the long view here, not comparing the present to 1999 or 2009. The claim is that despite having more wealth (by either measure) in the last, say, 20 years than at any other period in our history, we aren't happier because of it. I'm inclined to agree.
A Poker Champion Explains Why You Make Bad Business Decisions
I have to give credit for the idea of the article to Bret Victor. I think it was his "stop drawing dead fish" presentation during which he mentioned algebra and geometry as just different views for mathematics.
I think you still have to qualify that as 'moral or ethical credibility', and even then limit it to topics relating to government power and accountability.

By all accounts, their treatment of founders is very ethical indeed (by Founders' standards), for example, and I wouldn't expect this to impact their credibility as knowledgable VCs at all.

In short, people are complicated, and applying well-earned admiration in one area to transitively enhance someone's reputation in another is clearly an all too common error (hence celebrity endorsements, etc.)
Objective-C uses Automatic Reference Counting (Garbage Collection has been deprecated - and ARC works a lot better than the GC implementation), and as Swift had to uses Objective-C's memory model it must also use ARC.
You mean that Microsoft is a victim, who is actively fighting against this 9-figure business, not just a bystander.

Otherwise why bother with exploits, just build good, solid C# backdoors and get over with it already.
Apple did add garbage collection to Objective C, but it only lasted a few years before being pulled. Two less important reasons are that it's hard to integrate with the otherwise trivial C(++) interop, and the frameworks just weren't designed for it.

To me, the more important answers are deterministic destruction, and no GC pauses. All of Objective C is reference counted these days, with retain/releases inserted by the compiler (so all you have to do as a programmer is resolve cyclic references with weakness). Thus, you know exactly when an object will die, and have its dealloc method called. You're also sure you'll never end up in a situation where memory pressure causes system hitching due to GC. Given that a key platform for Objective C is iOS (low memory, "low" CPU), and that Apple's trademark tends to be fluid UI, avoiding these problems is really helpful.
A related hack: using the Pi to transmit at 433.92 MHz with minimal hardware [1]. This frequency is commonly used for remote controlled wall outlets and such.

[1] http://www.skagmo.com/page.php?p=projects/22_pihat
I didn't read your comment, but I can tell you you're wrong :)
/annoyed

I Agree with what Chris Granger said in https://twitter.com/ibdknox/status/473912605350719488.

I think Rust is a good example of developing a language in the open.

That said it's great to see Bret's ideas see more implementations.
Firstly, someone being wrong about one thing doesn't mean they're wrong about something else.

Secondly, there are some issues about which people have valid disagreements. This is one of them. Come to think of it, much as I wish it wasn't, gay marriage is also such an issue in most places (though clearly not in Silicon Valley or in Hacker News).

Third, I don't understand how you made the leap from him thinking that Snowden is a traitor, to him thinking that mass surveillance is okay. Maybe he said other things I'm not aware of (seriously - correct me if I'm missing something). But thinking that Snowden is a traitor has nothing to do with views on mass surveillance.

Finally, you are taking an extremely absurd position where the world is entirely black and white - someone says one thing that you disagree with, clearly he thinks terrible things, clearly this invalidates anything he has to say, including on a subject on which he is very knowledgeable, and clearly he's not worth listening to.

That is not a good way to be part of a diverse society, and definitely not a good way to expand your horizons.
As a non-Dane living in Denmark, I prefer pages to start out in Danish, and then to be able to click "translate" if I'm not able to successfully read it. I don't want to never translate Danish, but I also don't want it to translate right up front before I try to read it. Starting out in Danish and then having a little icon where I can click on a case-by-case basis to translate it is exactly the functionality I want, which is how it has worked so far.
I like the question you are posing.

Parent comment is interesting given this regarding the internet:

(per wikipedia)

"In 1992, the U.S. Congress passed the Scientific and Advanced-Technology Act, 42 U.S.C. § 1862(g), which allowed NSF to support access by the research and education communities to computer networks which were not used exclusively for research and education purposes, thus permitting NSFNET to interconnect with commercial networks.[47][48] This caused controversy within the research and education community, who were concerned commercial use of the network might lead to an Internet that was less responsive to their needs, and within the community of commercial network providers, who felt that government subsidies were giving an unfair advantage to some organizations"

Obviously Congress doesn't always get it right. Edit: This was a case where they did, right?

But a blanket "that's the problem" make no sense either.

I'm reminded of this every time I see a "man on the street" interview talk about the issue of the day in which is their opinion seems to be formed from something they overhead from someone in the coffee shop or something they read in the local paper. Because for sure we just want those people using their great data source to form policy. I mean why don't we just vote on each and every issue out there. Because ordinary people are definitely qualified to digest and come to the right conclusion. (Or better yet hey just crowdsource or wisdom of the crowds because it's the answer to everything).
Persona is a no-go for me - I just don't believe that it will ever take off now that Mozilla has put it in maintenance mode. Mozilla has vowed to keep the servers up, but other than that they don't seem to be doing anything to further Persona's mainstream adoption.
We have, but it seems we've forgotten the lessons of the Japanese interment camps, COINTELPRO, J. Edgar Hoover, etc.
Well technically, there would be no multiplicative factor for those who don't admit bias, because zero times anything would be zero. Your point is nonetheless a good one.
Very good overview, so let me just nitpick this:

PHP: [...] It also has top-notch documentation.

It has not. It is accessible, it has always been easy to find everything in it, but it is very far from thourough. You need to hunt for user comments for implementation details in the interpreter that actually influences your script's behavior.

With that said, I've sort of came to peace with PHP and use it willingly at work. (JavaScript is the industry's arch enemy now.)
http://renderingpipeline.com/2014/06/whats-the-big-deal-with...

That blog post should help you clarify the difference. I think the primary problem it that OpenGL and DirectX handle changes in pipeline state very poorly.
Apple has made it known through its chip design (and subsequent underclocking), app development limitations, etc. that battery life is of utmost importance. I suspect that some of these limits are an attempt to keep websites from draining mobile devices of energy.

Is WebGL over a browser typically as performant as native code? I would suspect no, but I'm not familiar enough with WebGL to know.
Or something similar. The important thing is that they shouldn't have to log in each time they visit the website, because then using email would cause the login process to be too slow. Again, using the password-less login for websites with sensitive data (such as banking) wouldn't work, since those sites require the user to log in for each session.
Languages are like operating systems, browsers and search engines.

Every big tech company has to have one.
/insightful

Not said often, but thanks for taking the time to submit.

> I've learned that there's a strong correlation between knowledge and humility.

Although I think, arrogance is sometimes required to make people understand that it's the Right Thing.
"You have to be greedy to go into Wall Street banking in the first place."

That sounds false. It also sounds like, after assuming that, literally any thing you can think about investment bankers will automatically be against them, so I would really really make sure that what you say is true before just assuming it.

Also:

"Most of us deliberately didn't become bankers because we aren't motivated by greed."

Really? That's why most people didn't do it? I think most people would become investment bankers with eight-figure salaries, but can't.

"This makes bankers fair game for criticism."

I think everyone is fair game for criticism if they've done something wrong. It's dangerous if you have to first assume someone is a bad person to criticize them.
I'm saving norswap's excellent survey and assessments to share with others. Fair, honest, and captures the essentials quite well.
We've taken "self-" out of the title, since it's ambiguous, as you point out, and doesn't seem necessary here.

We also took "is an operating system" out of the title for similar reasons.
Reminds me of arkOS:

https://arkos.io/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6699567

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6316888

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5838873
Is this the final piece in the soft PR work rattling through "journalism" this week? Daring Fireball did a piece not wholly unlike this as well. The timing is a bit odd for there to be this meta discussion that is pivoting Cook and Apple from the post-Jobsian "rudderlessness" to a New-New-Apple Cookian era that is both highly positive and would have been, to paraphrase, impossible with Jobs at the helm.

I'm not sayin', I'm just sayin'.
No, they're not. If you want to, you can buy an iPhone, sync it with iTunes, and apart from downloading apps and OS upgrades, that iPhone doesn't have to speak to the Apple cloud at all.
If it translate all the time, then you never get to read the original language and never get better at it. Many people (including me) intentionally browse in foreign language to exercise it while reading news and blogs. If the text gets too difficult I may need help, otherwise I want to keep it as it is.

Plus automatically translated texts are often pain to read. The translation is good enough to help you decipher meaning, but not good enough to make a real text.
We need more mischief
> It's difficult to understand why people drive such tiny distances.

I agree with a general point about benefits of non-carbon-producing transportation.

I don't want to judge any particular person, however; I simply don't know and it's not my business. Maybe Gates has a lot to carry; maybe he has bad knees; maybe his personal security is an issue; maybe he has allergies this season. Maybe he's simply uncoordinated. Also (and I doubt this applies to Gates), I've lived in places where cars are too dangerous to bicyclers to ride regularly, either because of the drivers, the rules, the lack of bike lanes, etc.
This is very well said.

I was one of the signers of the CREDO petition calling for Eich to step down. I wound up regretting that -- and I had some second thoughts even at the time -- but at the moment I signed it I had not yet read his statement pledging to uphold Mozilla's diversity policy, along with his claim (which I have never seen contradicted) that he treated everyone at Mozilla with respect. Had he failed to do those things, this would indeed have been an easy call.
Ask HN: List of Internet martyrs
This is a weird question.. I'm writing a song the theme of which is net neutrality and all that jazz. I'd like a list of guys names to blurt out at the end, Like Snowden, Assange, Manning, Swartz, Svartholm etc. People who got fucked over while trying to promote free flow of information.
You guys got any other suggestions? I'm sure I am forgetting loads!
Show HN: ConvoSpot – Geo Based Vanishing Chat
HN,

I’m a long time reader and first time submitter. I’d like to share a project we’ve been working on and recently released ConvoSpot for iOS. ConvoSpot lets you chat with everyone near you and after a while, the messages vanish, never to be recovered.

App Store:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/convospot/id856444697

Site:
http://www.convospot.com/

I tend to think of it as “SnapChat meets YikYak”, with temporary messages only available to those in the area.

I’ll be around for the next few hours to answer questions. Interested to hear your feedback, criticisms, and ideas. Thanks

Bonus if anyone in Denver is on ConvoSpot, lets chat!
Yep! I think you are referring to the SAT data. Fortunately, we have data to test our beliefs: http://isteve.blogspot.com/2014/03/2008-sat-scores-by-race-b...
Just Dropped In: Using interactive breakpoints in Ruby, Python and JavaScript
Your statement about Java or C# being "much nicer and faster" is just plain wrong (Well if that's true then what's the reason to use Go?). In fact it falls in the same vein as Java or C# in performance, but it has the advantage of being native code. It also isn't made to be a C contender. It's designed to be the simplest, compile as fast as scripts, program half as nice as Python and runs as fast as Java. Currently it excels at Cloud / server development.
Rails 4.1 Message Verifier (11 minute video)
Round cube looks just like Zimbra and is clearly an e-mail client ... I agree with the rest of your comment completely. There is a description ofmeach on the "apps" page but when I tried to get to Roundcube's documentation I found that the page hadn't been written yet.
Apparently, he just downloaded another browser.
You have an insight (bankers are self-selected to be more greedy than average), but the author's point still stands: people underestimate their tendency to do bad things when offered enough money. He phrased it in a way that might seem to morally protect the bankers ("he who is not guilty of greed may throw the first stone..!"), but I don't think that he is trying to argue that the guilty shouldn't be punished.
We've set up CloudFlare. The website should be accessible now.
The post went up on reddit as well, we couldn't handle the sudden inflow of traffic.
I haven't looked too closely at this particular project, but if I were writing something similar, I'd explicitly make it hard to access any of the security-related settings, and make the defaults (for which upgrades are tested) secure by default. In this case, changes to security settings to deal with new threats would be distributed through the package update mechanism, not overridden by it.

That is, the really interesting target user here is not the one who will drop into the command line to tweak /etc/ssh/sshd_config and then get annoyed when their changes are overwritten on the next update.
Promoted tweets by location, targeted to people talking about specific games. FB ads, Adwords - targeted to places that people talk about games. Go on Twitter and football forums and tell people why they should use it. Be friendly. Talk to any local or tech media folks you know and see if they can help you promote it.

Getting people to the site won't be your biggest issue. Getting people to sign up and take part once they're there will be. There's no real call to action on the site. It's not particularly visually appealing. Could you recruit some friends/family to generate some activity and some buzz? Right now, there only appears to be one person posting. It needs to look busier than that for people to decide to go there rather than Twitter, IRC or wherever else they are chatting about whatever game is ongoing at that time.
> Taleb talks about books/movies/etc becoming successes with little to no predictability

No, Taleb loves to sophistically equivocate between meanings of 'black swan' to neutralize any criticism. Did a perfectly ordinary phenomenon in network dynamics and winner-take-all scenarios happen? Taleb takes this as an example. Does someone point out that this is consistent with all past experience and non-power-law distributions like log-normals? Oh, suddenly, he means black swans are totally unpredictable things like 9/11!
Hands-on with Baxter, the factory robot of the future
I would expect most rusticians would give you a reasonably balanced reply. Rust sidesteps lots of issues with other languages whilst getting their advantages, but it pays for this in different ways (eg. learning curve, composibility, and incremental compile times).
Your statement about Java or C# being "much nicer and faster" than Go is just plain wrong (Well if that's true then what's the reason to use Go?). In fact it falls in the same vein as Java or C# in performance, but it has the advantage of being native code. It isn't made to be a C contender. It's designed to be the simplest language to learn, the easiest to deploy, compile as fast as scripts, coding half as nice as Python and runs as fast as Java. Currently it excels at Cloud / server development.
Throwing a Hammer on the Moon – The last Human act on the Moon
"Most of us ... because we aren't motivated by greed"

History would indicate otherwise. Maybe most of us aren't dominated by our greed to the exclusion of all else / to sociopathic levels. But, most of us certainly are greedy. I suspect it's in our genes. Greed/hoarding (to a degree) being evolutionary strengths.
Thank you for this. I find explanations that eschew category theory bizarre, this really cleared things up for me (having spent a lot of time with functors mathematically, and almost no time with them in a programming context).