skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That could have negative consequences. Let's say it takes a permission to play sound. If you don't tell the app they can't play sound they may spend a lot of CPU and battery generating music that no one will ever hear.

Or if you stub in the photo APIs, what does an app do when it tries to find a photo to show and the user said "no". Should Android pretend there are no pictures? Return some fake stock pictures?

If you fake GPS data than if the user accidentally turns off location access on an application that needs it the app has no way to inform the user that it won't work well. As far as your run logging software knows you are now just running on the same treadmill for the rest of your life.

Just seems like you're likely to create situations that are confusing/suboptimal for users. Let the app know what's going on. If the app doesn't behave well in that circumstance it should be removed from the store or punished by users with poor reviews.
Actually that brings up another thing I really like about Foursquare. You don't just see tips from random people, page's can also leave tips. I have learned all sorts of fun facts from tips left by the "History Channel" or "Food Network".
Right. Android permissions are a kludge to work around an insecure OS API design.
Cost of migration to anything considered "hipster" these days.
No, their trite re-branded conventional wisdom is of no use to you as a founder. Just look at the examples of people who have actually done it.
Given the amount of data available, it is not unreasonable to expect n>1000
Today's late stages financing rounds eclipse IPOs of yesterday's. One reason is inflation - more than 2 times during the last 10 years. Another is that the game has moved one step upstream. In the first boom people inside were caching in at the IPO thus leaving IPO buyers to hold the bug. These buyers think that they have learned the lesson and now they are getting in at the late stages before IPO - thus letting the inside people to cache in and leave these buyers to hold the bug.
You have to be more specific: Secure from what kind of threat? There are many threats ranging from service providers deciding to uninstall "unpopular" applications that threaten antiquated revenue models to State threats used against activists and dissidents.
No, they won't: http://sfmta.com/getting-around/parking/how-park-legally
The iOS system works pretty well, but does have a few downsides.

There are apps that spam permissions requests. Let's take some kind of Foursquare thing that needs see your photo library, GPS location, and contacts because of how it works. Poorly written apps will often just spam all three requests when you first open the app instead of asking for your contacts now, your photos when you try to select one, and GPS when you try to tag somewhere.

Notifications are also a problem. At this point nearly every single app I download has the first run experience of asking to send me push notification (answer is basically always "No") which is a poor experience and just trains people to smash "yes" or "no".

By the way, if you hit the wrong one how do you fix that? I bet 90% of users don't know, and would just delete and reinstall the app.

However on iOS apps are NOT allowed to explain WHY they need a permission. The dialog boxes are generated by the system to prevent gaming. Well designed apps will set the user up, showing you a little screen saying "We're about to ask for access to your camera roll so you can select a picture", poorly designed ones just pop-up the dialog.

It works fine for me. The only thing I'd like from Apple is an additional permission for non-push notifications. I don't want every app I install to automatically get access to send non-push notifications. I have to go turn that permission off far too much.
Every business that makes sense will try to make its customers happier.

Showing people bad news to get more engagement has roughly the same moral standing as the evening news.

I guess I don't get it.

[It must be wrong because they learned something from it, I guess?]
The problem he is talking about is market manipulation. Let's be clear, disclosure is precisely to prevent market rigging by insider trading and indirection (as the notion of a free market depends on all participants having equal information). He's in fact advocating going back to an insider's club and trying to dress it up as the opposite. I don't know if he's just stupid or he thinks the readers are.
> It's not clear to me from the article how apps are able to gain permissions just from updating. Is it because future updates run under the 'new' system while the current version still runs under the 'old' system?

The permissions required by an application can change from one version to another. Previously, if an update demanded more permissions than the version it replaced, the user would be asked to confirm the change. Now, this permission "upgrade" will sometimes be allowed silently.
Very nice. IFTTT was a nice first step, and I've been hoping more sophisticated solutions to the same problem would arrive.

Do you see this being commercial software as a service or self-hosted?
Facebook manipulating their users emotions without their knowledge
I have to work out some ideas for this, which is your username?
I highly recommend to anyone who lives in the bay area to check out some classic noir films and others at the Stanford Theatre in palo alto.

It's a real gem of a place.
How to make your profiler 10x faster
I don't have the time or the know how for that to be honest. I do think you're ahead of the curve in terms of the opportunities that are possible. If I were you I would seriously try and pitch your know-how to Yamaha or some of the other music instrument companies about building things in this realm. I heard a talk by Chris Lowis that Yamaha was exploring the web audio api for MIDI devices etc.
Prof. Knuth's point boils down to:

> To a computer scientist, this makes no sense, because every algorithm is as mathematical as anything could be.

But there is no reason for definitions in the law to mirror precisely the definitions of computer science. After all, a patentable drug formula is, to a chemist, just a description of a chemical system under the laws of chemistry. A patentable mechanical invention is, to a physicist, just a description of a physical system under the laws of physics.

The law very often makes distinctions between things that cannot be distinguished by their fundamental nature, on the basis of external policy reasons. The difference between murder and self-defense cannot be described by fundamental differences in the physical mechanics of the two actions. Now, that is not to say that software should be patentable, but rather that "all algorithms are math" is an irrelevant reason for making software not patentable. It's an interesting philosophical and theoretical point (not to mention, obviously true), but has no relation to the purposes of patent law.
Sounds very powerful.
Check back here in a bit, I'll try to make one. I already have the OSM database and some related glue code, it shouldn't be too far out the way.
Is it this site? http://www.sitebox.com/
What do you think of the study mentioned in this article that indicates that heavy drinkers outlive abstainers?

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2017200...

Here is the study itself:

http://courses.ttu.edu/jkoch/ETOH/Readings/Late_life_alcohol...
Is that only in category (read phonebook -> read phonebook & make calls) or across category (read phonebook -> read phonebook & setup a VPN)?

I can understand the first given what they're trying to do, the second would be outrageous.
Anyway, even if a encrypted anonymous message arrives for me, just working out who it's from without any metadata seems complex web of double decryption

It's simple. You can encrypt everything, including the metadata. Then, when it arrives in your box, you simply decrypt everything, and see who it's from. It doesn't have to be anonymous.
The article is public relations from Google, I wouldn't draw any conclusions from it.
HTC's grid computing app
Flask is Python so it would fall under 'etc' on Python / Django, etc.
Android permissions are entirely useless. They aren't permissions since you can't actually turn them off. All they are is a bit of warning as to what the app does. When you install a flashlight app that says it need to read your contacts, it would be MUCH BETTER for Google just to present a warning screen: "This app will upload your entire list of contacts, everyone you know or have ever communicated with, to its own servers. Do you wish to proceed [Y/N]?"

That would actually be an effective warning.

But really, Google doesn't want effective warnings.
They're attempting the carrot again with the AndoidOne platform they announced at Google I/O. Supported hardware blocks for OEMs but with google keeping the software updated, so there's reason to be hopeful going forward.

On the flip side I have a Nexus4 "GooglePhone" and the latest update basically crippled it (mobile data wise), so maybe it's not all roses o_0
Interesting--have you written up much about how you do it?
What's your position on creating fake news to get more engagement? Some lines are defended because the slippery slope on the other side is infinite.
This is probably a silly idea, but I read that 2013 chemistry Nobel prize was given to guys to simulated complex chemical system. I am probably extrapolating this WAY too much, but I think if we have more computational power we can simulate cells. Protein structures are still not understood well.
I assume he means "threats that would allow another app or actor to read your private key".
But if it's not covered yet rc-d policy would help.
I'm puzzled about the outrage.

FB _already_ filters out updates based on some blackbox algorithm. So they tweaked the parameters of that algorithm to filter out the "happier" updates, and observed what happens. How is this unethical? The updates were posted by the users' friends! FB didn't manufacture the news items; they were always there.

I detest FB as much as the next guy, but this is ridiculous.
> "If you are exposing people to something that causes changes in psychological status, that’s experimentation"

Or art, or journalism, or advertising, or football etc.
How the hell does that make any sense? I designed my app to request a permission (and if the user rejects it, at install time, my code will never run).

So now you've rigged it so that it returns bad data. And given TazeT's comment above, and scenario, now, you've broken some piece of functionality that will never breakf for any other user anywhere.

But your assumption is, "must be spyware". Gimme a break.
Fridays and Saturdays are known to be slower reading days, especially for a long article like this. Otherwise IMO people don't have the attention span to read anything longer than a TechCrunch article. That may have been a factor as well.

Glancing at your submission list, I didn't see your blog post. Would you mind sharing it?
Facebook’s Unethical Experiment: It intentionally manipulated users’ emotions without their knowledge.

I'm not defending Facebook or the experiment, but if you're going to call them out for "manipulating users' emotions without their knowledge", then you need to call out every advertising, marketing, and PR firm on the planet, along with every political talkshow, campaign, sales letter, and half-time speech...
>Can't Android just tell an app "your sound is being paused", cut sound, and display the dialog?

I don't know if it can, but it doesn't. To respond to external audio changes, an app has to use AudioManager.OnAudioFocusChangeListener [1]. You can then define behavior for various cases, like AUDIOFOCUS_LOSS (another app has started playing audio, don't expect it to stop), AUDIOFOCUS_LOSS_TRANSIENT (another app has started playing audio, but it might stop soon so be ready to regain focus) and AUDIOFOCUS_LOSS_TRANSIENT_CAN_DUCK (another app has started playing audio but it's temporary, so you can just lower your app's volume until you regain focus).

This is all voluntary. By default, an app playing audio won't respond to these signals at all. And how you respond to them is voluntary too - if you decide to just lower your app's volume instead of pausing the audio, even though you didn't hear CAN_DUCK, there's nothing to stop you.

If you want to pause audio when the headset is unplugged, you have register a receiver for the ACTION_AUDIO_BECOMING_NOISY intent. By default audio will continue playing.

>It sounds crazy to me that apps actually have to cooperate on this kind of thing, why do they even get a choice?

Some people might not want their music player to pause every time they get a new text message or email alert.

[1] https://developer.android.com/reference/android/media/AudioM...
As far as I can tell, pg wrote explicitly that this is true.

*"So the most important thing a community site can do is attract the kind of people it wants. A site trying to be as big as possible wants to attract everyone. But a site aiming at a particular subset of users has to attract just those—and just as importantly, repel everyone else. I've made a conscious effort to do this on HN. The graphic design is as plain as possible, and the site rules discourage dramatic link titles. The goal is that the only thing to interest someone arriving at HN for the first time should be the ideas expressed there."

http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html
I stand corrected. Perhaps they changed the behaviour?
Extract Cluster Elements by Color in Python Dendrograms
I just wrote a blog post about the ethical/professional obligations of the researchers associated with this study: http://www.maxmasnick.com/2014/06/28/facebook/

When you publish a paper, you are supposed to write in the body of the manuscript if it's been approved by an IRB and what their ruling was. I'm surprised it was published without this, even though it apparently was?

It's also appropriate to address ethical issues head-on in a paper about a study that may be controversial from an ethical perspective.

If it really was approved by an IRB, then the researchers are ethically in the clear but totally botched the PR.

If not, then I think the study was not ethical.
Author falsely assumes that people changes their sharing behavior due to changes in their mood.
More likely they just feel like "everyone's posting cats on Facebook, so that's a place for sharing cats, let me do too", or otherwise.
I agree. Commendations for proof by example.
The best is the enemy of the good.
I'm opposed to lying, I don't imagine that's controversial.

If the slope is so slippery smooth there has got to be a point in between changing the details of an arbitrarily complex sort and filter default on a social network site and purposely propagating lies.
And ignores the threat of a stolen device.
Human subjects research has ethical obligations that at times go beyond what seems like common sense, but are still really important because of past ethical abuses. See http://www.maxmasnick.com/2014/06/28/facebook/
and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7959941

In this case, I don't think there was actual risk but just reading the PNAS paper it doesn't sound like the study went through the proper process. If it was reviewed by an IRB then it did go through the proper process and it's ethically sound, but a PR nightmare.
As far as I can tell it was always that way.
Java (Jersey, Jackson, Guice) on Google App Engine.
Oh trust me, you do.

Not all of them, no. Of course not.

But you remember the great ones, and you remember the god damned awful ones. The great leave an emotional mark on you, they inspired you to go into their field, they showed you something that wowed you and has stuck with you over those 10 years. And the damned awful ones leave emotional scars that don't fade, and you'll talk to old veterans/classmates about them like you did a tour of 'Nam together...
They altered people's feeds for a psychological experiment with the specific intent of manipulating their mood. That is highly unethical.
Haskell / Yesod
I work at a consulting company that uses an inhouse tool that is a beast of burden. Recognise that some of this might be already solved in the listed solutions (excel included) but this is what you don't want:

7.5 hours - every working day you need to put in 7.5 hours regardless of what you do. Put in 7.4hours and it cracks it at you. What would be nice: Know that I have entered time against a code and assign the rest of the days time to a generic code that I can edit at a later date or leave.
Manual submission - every day the user needs to be submit their timesheet. People forget. People don't care. Management cares. What would be nice: If time has been entered, auto submit. Otherwise, let me be or prompt me in a nice way
Making changes - if you want to edit hours or change a job code on time that has been submitted, it requires all days back to that day to be unsubmitted, the edit made, then all time re-submitted. What would be nice: let me edit by code by day
Doesn't know where I am - we generally spend most of our time at the clients offices and we have their address(es) within the tool. What would be nice: Know that I have spent time at a client office and put in time to that clients code and prompt me to confirm it
Code search - painful. We have hundreds of client codes, past and present, and finding them is not as simple as type in client name and select. Generally there is a client codes, a project code and potentially a sub code. If someone has spelt something differently, allocated it to a different person or if you enter one character incorrectly, it can't find it. What would be nice: Search that works
Not mobile - they have put together a "mobile friendly" version but it provides limited functionality resulting in having to get onto the desktop version to do most of it and then use the mobile site. What would be nice: Mobile that doesn't require desktop intervention
Reporting - just plain ugly and hard. What would be nice: Not plain ugly and hard reporting
Visibility - if it is a fixed fee project and I have 40 hours allocated to it, I don't know that unless I'm told / project manager is riding my arse on hours. What would be nice: As time is submitted, show me how much I've consumed / how much is left
Seperation - it isn't connected to the resourcing tool that lists what people are on, how long they are on it or if they have holidays booked in. What would be nice: If person is put onto client, put that code in their time sheet. If holidays booked, put it in timehsheet
I agree with the gist of these comments; all I meant by that bit put that bit was to make the argument about the inevitability of inequality's increase a more conservative one. It seems obvious (to me) that redistribution, maybe in the form of basic income, is an inevitable result of this 'natural law' of increasing inequality.

That said: people did not pay those rates in the 50s[1]:

The Internal Revenue Service reckoned that the effective rate of tax in
1954 for top earners was actually 70 percent.

Or lower. Marc Linder, a law professor at the University of Iowa, has
shown that a more comprehensive interpretation of income that
includes capital gains suggests the real effective tax rate for millionaires
was 49 percent in 1953. The effective rate dropped throughout the
decade, reaching 31 percent by 1960. That 31 percent is just slightly
higher than the 29 percent level a Congressional Budget Office report
figures the average effective tax for the top quintile will be in 2014.

---

[1] http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2013-01-02/1950s-tax-f...
> Is it really that difficult to have a list of fine grained permissions presented to the user with on/off selections?

Difficult to do at all? No.

Difficult to do without horrible UX? Yes. Fine grained permissions means apps that do useful things need lots of them, and presenting all of them with "on/off selections" is likely to be both ugly and confusing for most users.
Thanks for your response. I've read it several times, but unfortunately it didn't click for me.

>>>Similarly, in mathematics, there's no such thing as a function that returns something different each time you evaluate it, or that gives one result on Wednesday but a different result on Friday

I don't get this example. If the function is f = t, where t is time, then f will give different results on Wed and Fri.

In both math and Python, a function such as Square = x*x will return exactly the same thing as long as x does not change.

>>>This is completely different from mathematics, where "x" doesn't equal something different just because you progress to the next step of computation

When I do math (such as algebra, or calculus), I think of a variable x as a container that can hold any value. This is exactly how I think of a variable in C or Python.

For example, I can build a graph of a parabola in Python. The way my code does it is pretty much the same as if I did it by hand with a pencil: I assign multiple values to x, and find corresponding values for y.

I can't quite pinpoint the source of my confusion...
Retroshare has quite different use case.

Also, it has terrible GUI and just too many features.
The thing about the slippery slope is that it is far more often a logical fallacy than it is a real danger.
Would it be unethical if they were trying to make people happier?
I'm trying to use Go+React and had not heard about Fluxxor. How do those (Golang and Fluxxor which is based on Node) fit together in your system?

Are you using a Node or Go frontend?
I have been working on my first Android app. Nothing big just uses a few spinners and a mathematical formula. Halfway finishing through the app I learned that my hypothesis was wrong. Lesson is before writing the code make sure one has think it through. I am just learning so that is fine.
Well that's pretty much every news portal out there, for the definition of 'fake' as 'not matching reality'.
To say this response is unnecessary and unfounded is disingenuous. Marc Andreessen (whom I respect) tweeted "Run a web site, measure anything, make any changes based on measurements? Congratulations, you're running a psychology experiment!" I could not disagree more.

This isn't simply a matter of looking at metrics and making changes to increase conversion rates. The problem is that the whole of users have come to expect Facebook to be a place where they can see any and all of their friends' updates. When I look at an ad, I know I am being manipulated. I know I'm being sold something. There is no such expectation of manipulative intent of Facebook, or that they're curating your social feed beyond "most recent" and "most popular", which seemingly have little to do with post content and are filters they let you toggle.

What FB has done is misrepresent people and the lives they've chosen to portray, having a hand in shaping their online image. I want to see the good and the bad that my friends post. I want to know that whatever my mom or brother or friend posts, I'll be able to see. Someone's having a bad day? I want to see it and support that person. That's what's so great about social media, that whatever I post can reach everyone in my circle, the way I posted it, unedited, unfiltered.

To me this is a disagreement between what people perceive FB to be and how FB views itself. What if Twitter started filtering out tweets that were negative or critical of others?
Java / Guice / PostgreSQL and.... a custom framework!
But why if it's done for science it's unethical, but when done by news stations, politicians, advertising agencies, motivational speakers, salesmen, etc. it's suddenly ok?