skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Cannabis prohibition, on the other hand, has historically been targeted explicitly at minorities

Cannabis (and pretty much every psychoactive drugs except alcohol) is prohibited in almost every countries in the world. Isn't it a bit simplistic to think that oppressing minorities was the only reason behind it?
couldn't one just flood this with false positives? looks like a POST to 'api.smoot.apple.com' in JSON format. I'd suspect random entries would make the overall data collected alot less useful...
Tim Cook last month:

“Our business is not based on having information about you. You’re not our product ... I think everyone has to ask, how do companies make their money? Follow the money. And if they’re making money mainly by collecting gobs of personal data, I think you have a right to be worried.”

“We take a very different view of this than a lot of other companies have. Our view is, when we design a new service, we try not to collect data,”

“We’re not in that business. I’m offended by lots of it. And so, I think people have a right to privacy.”

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/09/15/apples-cook-your-data...
Without the requisite user data or some fantastic and soon to be copied algorithm I would expect their search experience to start off about as well as Apple Maps.

You can bet they are going to build it though and it'll look nice.
It's amazing how open and exploitable ads on the internet remain, being one of the biggest sources of malware since the dawn of the WWW.

All of the major problems - spam, HTTP/HTTPS security, speed of protocols - have at least been met with myriad solutions. That we're still relying on Flash, JS and Silverlight, etc. for serving ads is nonsensical. Sandboxed iframes are a nice bandage, but it isn't a solution, particularly because it doesn't cover the most vulnerable anyway.

Someone has to be interested in creating a more secure standard that applies some quality standardization as well as security sandboxing.
Here's a tweet from Edward Marczak back in June about this behavior:

https://twitter.com/marczak/status/481818945318428673

with a recommendation to block api.smoot.apple.com.
Cannabis prohibition, on the other hand, has historically been targeted explicitly at minorities

Do you have a "when" in mind there? Cannabis has a colorful history in the USA, and it does not seem like its entire history has been centered on "suppressing the Other". To my knowledge it was originally regulated as a part of the opium/narcotics laws that swept the world in the early 1900's.
It also doesn't look like the standard Linux uptime command, which uses "load average", singular. The BSDs, including OS X, say "load averages"... does Twitter run FreeBSD, or is this copied-and-pasted from an OS X client machine?
That would be the CIA, but fair point.
I agree it should be legal. However it should not be fully commercialised. Colorado has gone too far.

It should be like tobacco in Australia where it cannot be advertised and is sold in plain packaging from behind a counter and cannot be displayed or promoted.

It should not be illegal but it is a health hazard and should be treated in the same terms as tobacco.

It's not a good thing that it is being sold as a "fun" product in cookies and food etc. Children should be discouraged from thinking it is a "fun" thing to do.
This doesn't contradict that. Spotlight provides web search results, how do people think that works?
Men will continue to dominate fitness events/sports for the conceivable future. There's good reasons why we have "women's sports", and not just "sports".
Polytunnels are flimsy in compression, but clear plastic can be very good in tension and can contain a bar or so of pressure fairly easily, so it may be feasible. It was only one of the solutions I thought of for coping with storms if you are growing out at sea. The other two are either being able to reel them back onto land, or just making them short and tough, so they can just roll over the waves. The buoyancy problem isn't that difficult though as you can have counter-buoyancy that rises when they sink.
I always call YC a money-making machine machine when describing it to the unfamiliar.
Your parent is certainly reacting strongly, but I think it's understandable to be upset & feel somewhat marginalized by the monoculture in the news on the subject.
nah, it's not curtin dave. It's ECU dave
Since when is Tobacco in Australia sold in plain packaging? AFAIK (it's been a while since I lived in Australia) the health messages have to be very prominent, and they can't advertise on TV, radio, or near schools, but they can still advertise in some places (print) and package as they like modulo "Smoking Kills Babies" type messages. (It's funny, my smoker friends used to identify their packets of cigarettes by the message -- "oh mine was the 'causes birth defects' package" (they all smoked Marlboro Lights or Benson & Hedges)
Yup. Written before I had coffee. Also note the poor formatting.
> The data are unambiguous: prohibition doesn't work, never has, never will

Does it mean that all drugs should be freely sold? I have no doubt that cannabis should be legal: not only is it relatively harmless, but it's very easy to grow. But what about other more addictive and dangerous drugs?
That makes it sound as if they are unique in discussing the basics.

However, reading

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/TerminologyWording.html

and

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=2695

I find that both go into the basics, with (focusing on writing style) such phrases as "Use User-Oriented Terminology", "Remove redundant text", "Create Succinct Labels for UI Elements", "When necessary, use bold in the control labels to make the text easier to scan", "Avoid the extremes of the 'machine' voice (where the speaker is removed from the language) and the 'sales rep' voice", and "Avoid large blocks of UI text"

Both text also advice the use of professional text writers for UI text:

"Using text consistently and clearly is a critical component of UI design. In the same way that it’s best to work with a professional graphical designer on the icons and images in your app, it’s best to work with a professional writer on your app’s user-visible text. A skilled writer can help you develop a style of expression that reflects your app’s design, and can apply that style consistently throughout your app."

"Comprehensible text is crucial to effective UI. Professional writers and editors should work with software developers on UI text as an integral part of the design process. Have them work on text early because text problems often reveal design problems. If your team has trouble explaining a design, quite often it is the design, not the explanation, that needs improving."
> it's quite verbose

If the error rate of programmers is related to the syntactic size of a language, then verbosity is a problem. I see Go as a good platform to build other language abstractions on top of.

Here's a submission with the same title from 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7662194
That doesn't sound like an "anonymous" vpn
It would have been a better joke if the author had pointed that that if it's controlled by the Federal Reserve, you don't need a proof of work distributed blockchain and you could simply allow all parties to connect to the Fed in some kind of Automated Clearing House network.

This hypothetical system would allow debits and credits to be settled electronically at very low transaction costs and could be scaled to billions of transactions, and anyone could participate in such a system by spending 10 minutes and opening a free "checking account" at a local credit union.
Those "random people from the Internet" you are dismissing include a number of well-respected site owners, operators, and entrepreneurs.
There aren't. Nacl certainly is credible. But it isn't (at least last time I looked) portable. As I understand this is because of a bunch of x86 assembly meant to generate very fast and constant time crypto code.

This is Bernstein's entire stick. Which is fine, but if you can't use it on ARM and therefor on mobile, you've killed a large area where adoption of new crypto could actually happen. Arguably, a slower constant time cross platform library would have been a better idea if he actually wanted to see it used widely. This is what Sodium claims to be ....but well who knows if that's secure.

And I don't think I agree with you that this is Bernstein merely saying here's why you need what I've done. It's an explanation of why it didn't happen that basically argues that people' are being so stupid about crypto that they might as well be NSA shills. As a narrative it ignores a lot of reasons this stuff didn't happen and a lot of lessons that should be applied in getting it right this time.
I'm a teacher and my kids need iPads. Spread the word
How would you represent a graph and implement DFS in K?
The address bar also has focus (blue outline), further suggesting the URL has been edited after a page load. Normally it loses focus as soon as you hit [enter].
Once change became the norm (probably the 1970s) this was probably the case all over the world. Given that it's pretty difficult to change school curricula and retrain all your teachers, what does anyone expect? In any event, it's not the purpose of education to be great vocational training. The problem in the US isn't that schools are training kids for a world that doesn't exist, it's that they are training kids to pass idiotic multiple-choice tests.
Do they do autocompletion suggestions like Chrome? That would seem like a good reason to collect this data.
http://www.apple.com/osx/better-apps/

See "Safari: A more intelligent way to search."
According to TFA, "In Yosemite, all Safari web searches are sent to not only the search engine you've selected ... but also to Apple..."

So as you say Spotlight web searches have to contact some sort of search engine, but I don't know of a legitimate reason why Apple should need to know about them as well.
PiinPoint (YC W14) Is Hiring a Spatial Statistician in Waterloo, ON, Canada
Lights, Cameras, Inaction: San Francisco's Broken Surveillance State
Mozilla safe browsing does NOT phone home with sites you're visiting.
Firefox Nightly also has a tracking protection in about:config => privacy.trackingprotection.enabled
its off by default

seems to also block some adverts when on. (probably because those adverts are also trackers)
nice catch, I definitely think that would be the nail in this coffin.
Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1137/

More details: Reading the source code from the web page, the username is \u202enahtanoJ where "\u202e" means

> RLO | U+202E | RIGHT-TO-LEFT OVERRIDE | Force following characters to be treated as strong right-to-left characters.

See: http://unicode.org/reports/tr9/#Explicit_Directional_Overrid...
I seem to have missed the memo claiming poor old Google/Facebook are entirely reliant on malware ad business to stay barely afloat. Could you please point me to a believable source that says this.
Doesn't seem like a data collection initiative. It seems more like a complementary search engine. Apple spotlight search is trying to find other contextual results which may not come back from typical search engines. For example: Apps, Music etc.

I am sure you can directly search on google or duckduckgo to avoid that.
Has this confirmed to be real? Seems somewhat trivial of an exploit for such a large company (url-based RCE)?
I did earlier and there is no noticeable difference in Safari.
The App Store is a search engine as well.
This NY Times piece appears like an attempt to save a 20th century practice that is being revealed by scientific evidence and data analytics to rest on anecdotes and pseudoscience.

Anecdotes can serve as inspiration to conduct a study, but in themselves they can be cherry-picked and interpreted in any way that serves the storyteller's (known or unknown) biases. The result of this approach in the past has been thousands of people suffering from unnecessary and risky or harmful treatments that bring no benefit, e.g., cardiac stents, arthroscopic knee surgeries, and other medical reversals. See for example:

- A decade of reversal: Analysis of 146 contradicted medical practices, Dr. Vinay Prasad, Mayo Clinic Proceedings (2013)
- A Decade of Reversal: An Analysis of 146 Contradicted Medical Practices, Dr. Vinay Prasad, Youtube video (2013)
- Reversals of established medical practice: Evidence to abandon ship, Dr. Vinay Prasad, JAMA (2012)
- The placebo effect isn't just for pills, Dr. Aaron Carroll, NY Times (2014)

Evidence-based medicine is necessary to protect patients from the (known or unknown) biases of the provider. In cases where providers want to proceed without evidence, it is their ethical obligation during the informed consent process to alert their customers that they are being used as guinea pigs.

The solution to the problem of insufficient evidence is working to acquire more and better evidence. Patients' health and well-being depends on it.
I actually personally don't mind sending my search data to Apple but I would consider myself an outlier in this regard -- it should be opt in AND especially, given their supposed commitment to privacy, is a botch.

Let's hope they did _not_ do this on purpose.
Donald E. Knuth Lectures
This is (1) in Safari, and (2) with Spotlight Suggestions disabled. Spotlight and Safari should be able to get search engine results or suggestions from the search engine without needing to go through Apple. We can speculate on what Apple is doing with this data, but it certainly seems to violate the user's "right to privacy," if not more.
I like the idea behind Friendsurance (http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/06/peer-peer-...).
A group of people (friends, colleagues) sign up are thus "in the same boat". The idea is that on average there will be less insurance fraud because your friends will not let you make fake claims.
I agree with you. There's a whole trend of advertising cannabis as something cool (or as a miracle "natural" medication that cures everything, from anxiety to back pain).

Unfortunately, it's not that harmless. I know plenty of people that have been smoking cannabis daily from an early age and they are suffering because of it.

That being said, I'm entirely for its legalisation, but there should be some reasonable middle ground between harassing users and ignoring the risks.
Safari also shows the top spotlight search result iirc.
Assuming that Apple does disclose this adequately -- meaning they'd be legally in the clear -- I'd still want to know the answers to: How do I delete the records of my searches saved on Apple's serves? (Google lets me delete my search history.) How do I randomize my unique ID? How many FedGov or state/local agencies have showed up demanding info on which users searched for "dirty bombs" or "how to join Al Qaeda?" Does Apple always require a warrant? Etc.

Separately, Kevin McArthur (author of the Pro PHP book) is reporting this evening on Twitter that Spotlight is harvesting user locations after updating to Yosemite, apparently before the opt-out option is presented:
https://twitter.com/KevinSMcArthur/status/523975643340353537
https://twitter.com/KevinSMcArthur/status/523977472627335168
Asking questions about the project is great, but there is no need to jump to conclusions and imply that the author is being disingenuous.
People Who Love Expanding Their Minds Do These 13 Things – Do You?
I only arrived late here; the thread is already too large to do any proper pedantry.

I like libsodium. It demonstrates that usable packaging is important, something that DJB seems to either ignore or not understand. But I only endorse libsodium as long as you stick to the NaCl API and not the stuff it's been slowly piling on, which may or may not be OK. What it certainly does is make choosing which function to use a lot harder: do I use crypto_secretbox or crypto_aead? crypto_hash, crypto_generichash, or crypto_shorthash? crypto_auth or crypto_generichash?
I'm not sure it's a contradiction either, more of an omission, he doesn't specifically address search data in that interview. However the comments are aimed squarely at Google so the PR message rings a bit hollow.

I don't find it surprising that they're collecting as much data as they can, it just seems odd to call out competitors who do similar things.
Elementary OS Developer Guide
Tobacco cannot be advertised at all in Australia except for I think at the Grand Prix car racing.

http://www.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/Conten...
Dynamically resizing images with nginx's ngx_http_image_filter_module
Of you know: http://imgur.com/tfjoo2k an even simpler workaround.
Ethernet over USB OTG works on it though.
Plausibly inaliable property rights.

With central servers (and today's banking system), the government can freeze bank account. Even if today's laws would prohibit that, there is no guarantee that this will also be the case in the future. Thus, the only way to plausibly guarantee that the government won't freeze your digital assets, is by issuing them on a decentralized infrastructure under the control of the public (e.g. as colored coins on the Bitcoin blockchain).
As far as a historical look at cultural stereotyping goes, Edward Said's book 'Orientalism' is not a bad starting point. From reading it I became far more aware that the way that a culture is described is usually far more to do with the culture that is doing the describing.

edit - A good example being the British tabloid view of Japanese animation. If you were to trust the UK press, then Anime is all about sex and violence. However about half of Japanese tv is animation, and most of it is pretty innocent, but what the British buy is all the sex and violence, so then we think that is what Anime is.
The obvious question is, are the tobacco companies allowed to sell marijuana cigarettes mixed with tobacco?
In that level where the buttons are deep into a maze, I punished jerks who wouldn't do their part by clicking the button until it reaches 1, but no more. For a good 30s, there was a group at the gate drawing hateful messages to me. I'd been there for a good 5 min helping people out, and letting others through. The ones that were waiting had not travelled anywhere close to a button, they'd only been waiting at the gate for others to sacrifice themselves for them. Then one of them eventually gave up and came to replace me. What a bunch of assholes.

That's not everybody of course, but the later in the levels you go, the higher the proportion of jerks you'd meet. This, I guess, because the ones who aren't jerks take more time to move forward in the levels, while jerks move faster.

So while jerks can't reach the next level without the presence of good-doers, there still less and less good-doers as you progress forward. There's also attrition in good-doers along the way from:

- Connections timing out or otherwise erroring.
- People giving up.

And the further you move in the levels, the higher the jerk proportion so the longer it takes a good-doer to move forward, increasing the probability that one of the two attrition causes occur.

So it's possible that good-doers never make it to the end of the game (and thus nobody). In fact, if the game has enough levels, I'd be surprised if anyone ever managed to finish it without deliberate coordination by a group of good-doers.

All that to say, this game is really interesting.
Agreed. This seems like a good basis for a warning at the OS UI level.
Sure, assuming it even works. It has gigantic swaths of incompatibility with many televisions and they don't seem to care about it. It works for a while then fails to display anything, no matter how much you reset it or anything -- until you move it to a new TV, then back to the original one, upon which time you'll get a few more hours/days of use. The 'support' sends you through the same canned troubleshooters then tries to authorize RMAs, which don't work either - it's some sort of software bug or (more likely) some sort of DRM lockdown bullshit incompatibility.
That's the original C file, where did your "cleaned-up" version go?
I added an up/down vote system - please check it out and let me know what you think! I'd like for this to become a go-to resource for people deciding to pursue new programming skills, so any feedback is appreciated.
>The entire purpose of the Federal Reserve is to enable a system of monetary expansion or contraction

This is just one of several mandates that the Fed has. The Fed also exists to supervise and regulate banking institutions, in addition to running the national payment system.

The author's post could fall under the latter responsibility.
I'm not convinced. Anyone could do this "hack" with MS Paint. If it were real, then surely the proof would manifest with some kind of change of the Twitter interface.
In Chrome it only gets sent to Google if Google is the default search engine. I'm willing to bet that IE is the same.
>How do I delete the records of my searches saved on Apple's serves? (Google lets me delete my search history.)

Google deletes the search history you see but everything is still stored on the servers.
On some levels I was a jerk, on other levels I was a do gooder. I had to do the punishment thing, but it took ~10 seconds for somebody to realize I thought it was my turn to move on.
The system script posted is actually a fairly bad example because that one just use apache to manage the process. Where systemd shines is where we don't need specific purpose binaries to manage each service.

[Unit]
Description=A network traffic probe similar to the UNIX top command
Requires=network.target
ConditionPathExists=/var/lib/ntop/ntop_pw.db
After=syslog.target network.target

[Service]
Environment=LANG=C
ExecStart=/usr/bin/ntop -i eth0 -w 3000
Type=simple
StandardError=syslog

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Note the lack of pid files of stop commands etc...

> And here's the best part! If the shell script seems to be broken for some reason, I can debug it! I can stuff some stdout or stderr in there; I can call my own binaries or reference other shell scripts; I can do programmer-y things to it!

systemd captures stdout/stderr and the exit code you rarely need to run it outside of systemd. Most of the time the ExecStart command would do the trick.

> I'm really beginning to think this whole systemd thing is actually a culture war between two different generations of sysadmins. The older, bearded generation wants to stay with the thing that has always worked out for them in the end, and the younger, nicer-smelling generation wants to do something new because they haven't made enough mistakes yet.

Or alternatively they've seen the millions of issues you can get with sysvinit scripts that aren't perfect and decided we can do something better.
Anecdotally, it sure felt like I had to click "agree" to a lot more during the Yosemite upgrade than any other OS in recent memory.
Disabling "Include Spotlight Suggestions" in Safari Preferences seems to make it stop.
This appears to just be Safari syncing with your iCloud Account across all your iCloud enabled devices. That would be why the data is getting sent to Apple.