skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not to mention that awful Yahoo! webcam spying thing, OPTIC NERVE - a particularly distasteful one, that. Petabytes of JPGs of private (unencrypted) webcam streams, simply hoovered up en masse and untargeted - a not-insignificant number of them extremely intimate and personal, many between people of absolutely no intelligence relevance or value whatsoever - and used as a dataset for face-recognition experiments, amongst other things. They've got an extension you can call for counselling if an analyst happens to be selecting/browsing through it and sees 'something that may disturb them' (underage sexual acts, for example). I seriously doubt any of it has ever been deleted, either, even since.

When GCHQ spout their boilerplate, what they're pointedly not disclosing is that GCHQ have a general interception policy for all communications they believe might be useful for intelligence purposes in the future (I've never quite been clear myself whether that's under some sort of actual general warrant, or they just do it under An Understanding - quite possibly the latter, because spying on MPs could be rather legally thorny!). And they try doing just that, limited only by the practicalities of storage space and processor power - hence the 72-hour ring buffers on full-take feeds on major links like Level3 and GlobalCrossing, progressively filtered down by highly-specialised lexers and parsers.

Data point: There were apparently mentions of WhatsApp at the conference, but not on transcript. It uses the TextSecure protocol now, which is remarkably good and has forward-secure ratcheting. (It's closed-source, so I'd never recommend it over TextSecure/Signal itself, but it does not appear to me to have been compromised, and the huge number of people using that app getting this sort of pretty strong encryption for free is great news overall.) So yes, it seems he does (at the moment, before any potential U-turns! - I mean, "clarifications") want backdoored encryption, and to ban any end-to-end encryption that isn't backdoored. He plans to raise it after the election, if he wins, and he wants to do this specifically because GCHQ and The Security Service ("MI5") asked him to.

It's almost like they don't realise they're doing anything wrong, and they're doubling-down on their tactics - because, save for a few very brave whistleblowers, they actually, really, don't think they are. Road to hell's paved with good intentions and all that, even if you're still buying the good intentions. Their reaction to the rise of stronger encryption since Snowden has so far been to get their friends/ex-bosses to make vague threats that this would mean they'd have to hack more (like making them need to work to do targeted interception in specific, more justified cases instead of bulk collection is a bad thing?!). Ugh.
The same as any other programming job? Well, except the pay and benefits are pretty good from what I hear.
TPM is a chip on the motherboard that stores the keys for the encrypted hard-drive. You can't move the hard disk to another machine or use a backup to go elsewhere because it won't have the correct key on the TPM to decrypt the hard drive.
Well, in the US even those who don't use GPS technology are subject to taxes. There's a pretty huge difference (in incentives, in outcome, in tax/subsidy burden) between paying for something if you use it and paying for something regardless.

In the case of the technologies mentioned, government made the explicit choice to publicly fund those things through taxes, with the assumption that the value to the economy from unfettered usage would be higher than the cost. That doesn't mean that taxes are equivalent to pay-per-use though.
That is a great point. ... and without Firefox, how painful would it have been to wrest control of the internet away from IE6? Would Apple have even had a chance, or would they be stuck with IE5.5 for Mac? What would they base Safari on, if there wasn't KHTML for KDE (which might not exist without gcc)? What if Apple couldn't make an independent phone / tablet with browser, would we all still be stuck with flash?

No way to really know what would have happened, but it's a bit scary.

(EDIT: I'm not a fan of Apple stuff due to their walled gardens, but I do recognize their role, along with Firefox, in saving us from an IE/flash internet and thus from a crazier Windows monoculture.)
Yeah the government's goal is totally a "free and open Internet."

Except that part of the government dedicated to vacuuming up and storing and analyzing every signal from every network-enabled device on the planet.
What a coincidence; I just posted this to my Facebook feed yesterday:

Dealing with ISPs (and mobile providers, for that matter) is a never-ending hell of time-sucking and abysmal customer service. Communications as a business has some unfortunate features that drive its pathologies. The overhead of the infrastructure is very high and the marginal cost for adding a customer is relatively low. When there's more than one option, there's very little practical difference to distinguish the competitors from each other. Whether it's wireless or wired, I suspect we're doomed to be subjected to this kind of bullshit until the businesses in question are treated and regulated as the basic utilities that they have become. I don't know anyone who's frustrated with their electrical or gas service.
I have no idea if they would be interested, but I would be happy to help write any such blog post, so as to make sure the technology is accurately represented.
No wonder Homeopathy et.al are making a comeback.
Show HN: Commits.io – Create a poster from your code to hang in the office
Before I got Google Fiber I was definitely happier with my water and electric than my service provider. Now I am probably actually still happier, but I don't have too many complaints about Google Fiber. I can't think of the last time I had an issue with my water! It's got 100% uptime.
This is exactly the approach we took.
I have a lot less issues with all of my utilities combined than I have with comcast...
Depends on where you live, I suppose. I have zero problems with my ConEd power and whoever supplies my water, and I find the pricing pretty reasonable. My power supplier even offers different energy sources to use other than the standard one, which honestly blows my mind.

And then I call into Time Warner spend more time trying to get them to understand what I'm talking about than I've ever spent on the phone with my other utilities.
On the other hand, Rust is not ready -- either from a stability or library perspective -- in 2015, most likely. What are you recommending the C/C++ programmers go to?
I'm actually very happy with my power, water and sewer. The only utility I currently hate is garbage which I blame mostly on WM.
When I call the water company, I don't talk to some guy in India who has never heard of my state, let alone my city. When the power and water go out, the service isn't great but compared to my internet provider it would be a huge improvement. YMMV.
Maybe not 100%. But whatever percent it is, it is a higher percent than the one I attribute to Comcast.
I think you are greatly underestimating the impact of two things: one, the explanation based on science is often subtle and also often requires a significant amount of intuition for probabilities and statistics; and yet, two, there are people out there who loudly yell easy answers that prey on our biases.

My point: I find it difficult to talk about "earned trust" when not also acknowledging that the truth is often confusing yet boring, and there are people who actively espouse a simple, exciting, yet false alternative.
It's probably not news, but doesn't really give any advice on how to focus. I've worked with many folks who think they are focusing on 'one thing', but that 'one thing' happens to be ... "change the world" level focus. "Our target market is women" is just... impractical.

Was working with a client trying to get a narrowed focus of that 'one thing' to latch on to, vs the "this tool will do ABCXYZ for all working people". We got to the point where, when imagining potential users, there were more people who were not a fit than who were a fit, and things picked up after there. Suddenly there was one problem that was being solved for one particular type of person in one industry, and it became easier to focus everything else around that.
> The Rust people also mistake "no segmentation faults"
> for "no crashes".

I was a witness to one of the first public demonstrations of Servo to the Mozilla community at large (Mozilla Summit 2013). At one point during the demonstration Servo suffered a runtime panic, and the presenter (a Servo dev) self-deprecatingly apologized for the crash. A Gecko engineer in the audience raised his hand and asked if it was a segfault. The answer was that it was not, to which the Gecko engineer replied, "well then it's not actually a crash". So yes, now we're arguing semantics, but in a systems programming context a segfault is most usually what one means by "crash".
Setting aside the ultimate politics and ramifications of this, it is interesting (and kind of scary) to watch the fight between a non-elected bureaucracy and our elected house of representatives to regulate the internet.

Congress seems to be completely incapable of doing more than grandstanding, while the bureaucrats may wind up dramatically increasing their own power with a single stroke of their unelected pens.

It's no wonder we have many times more regulations than laws in this country... If I got to 'regulate' who I had power over on a regular basis, there are a lot of people who would suddenly find themselves inexplicably under Title Darren. Human nature.
And Common Lisp, despite this page not having it listed.
this is less clipart and more icons, but I loved http://findicons.com for making personal apps as most icons on there are free for commercial uses.
Windows 10 free for Raspberry Pi 2
Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are paying to get around AdBlock
Yes, this was the alternative we discussed. We opted to go with the simpler (and very common) signup process, which does admittedly leak some information.
This Game Kills Fascists
Intel Acquires Lantiq, a Leader in Home Networking Technology
Provide meaning with motion
For Scratch in Firefox:

UnknownError
"Error opening database: undefined" vm.js:358

:(

Edit: Also Etoys, sadly.
The major critique quoted here comes from David Farber of Carnegie-Mellon, who worries that classifying Internet access under Title II will allow it to be taxed.

If that's the worst thing you can think of, we're in good shape.
Good point! I would prefer Wallet Ninja over a bottle opener.
Or an okay ride with an operating fund.
If you use this approach, the idea is then that you use a generic login failure message. This prevents leaking of any account information, but provides a different (poorer, IMO) user experience.
The core target is unchanged - kids in the UK. The exact functionality level isn't nearly as critical as the standardisation of the system and its community support. Updating it keeps it competitive so people don't fret about being stuck on old technology.

What a Pi brings over a PC is ownership, stability, and freedom from the usual risks of breaking a PC. You can fiddle with any of the software on a Pi and always get it back by replacing the SD card. PCs are vulnerable to tinkering and inadvisibly installed software.

This conversation reminds me of http://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ip... : "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
Wait, doesn't calling the Internet a utility mean all data will be metered by the MB from now on? Or does that not apply here? If it does, wouldn't that give carriers exactly what they wanted - the ability to charge video providers much more than they would say a news website?

The idea behind the whole net neutrality movement was to have "all you can eat plans" where all data is treated the same. What if now we get the "all data is treated the same" part, but not the "all you can eat" one?

Another issue: government spying. I know the ISP's/carriers have given the government virtually everything they've asked for, including direct access to the cables for the plain-text data + the recent cookie tracking inserted into people's traffic, but some of them have refused to do much of it, like Sonic, and I think Google takes a similar approach, fighting for users' rights, even if Verizon and AT&T do not. So what does it mean now that the government classifies all Internet under Title 2. What can we expect in terms of surveillance? And does it make it much easier to force all ISP's to comply with certain surveillance requests?
I'm not 100% happy with my utility companies, but I'm 500% more satisfied with them than any cable company I've ever had.
Wait a second, every single negative you've described here can also be applied to other utilities who have been regulated under title II for as long as it's existed. They've yet to find a way to 'regulate' human decency and good customer service...
Louis CK’s second digital-only comedy special outsells his first
The current science does suggest eating too much fat is still bad.

EX: "The American Heart Association’s Nutrition Committee strongly advises these fat guidelines for healthy Americans over age 2:
•Eating between 25 and 35 percent of your total daily calories as fats from foods like fish, nuts, and vegetable oils."

http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/Conditions/Cholesterol/Prevent...

Note both the lower and upper bound. Eating say 75% of your daily calories as fat is generally a bad idea for most people. But so is limiting yourself to 1%.

PS: This is one of those cases where oversimplification can be harmful. But, while looking at people with extremely high fat diets demonstrated a problem the translation from limit to eliminate is what most people heard.
GCC developers say that things are better now. I really don't know; I haven't checked.

But the simple fact remains that they did intentionally create hard to maintain code and spent several years rejecting patches that would clean up the monstrosity as a defense against people using GCC code in nonfree programs.

It's hard to trust their judgment now.
> The problem is, most scientists say "We have evidence today to suggest ..." and most average-joe's hear "This is the absolute truth and everything else is wrong".

Well, the problem is perhaps more precisely that scientists say "We have evidence to suggest...", and then marketers and propagandists say "It is proven that...", and that "Average Joes" mostly never hear what scientists say, only what the marketers and propagandists say.
Well, the NSF, in order to assist with this effort, is now making 'outreach' a 20% graded portion of all grants. This is a HUGE step in the right direction, I think, galvanized by the shutdown 2 years ago. Finally, the eggheads saw that Sarah Palin decrying fruit fly research was not something to laugh at, but to be scared by.

That said, I am taking a grant writing course here in grad school, and have been specifically told that the 20% outreach portion is 'complete bull.' The grants are still graded on the feasibility portion and not much else. The PIs teaching the class were, to me at least (take it with a grain of salt), disdainful that they had to ever go out and justify their research to the general public whatsoever. I got the impression that they felt it was a gimmick to appease Washington. Their general reaction to the public, at least in one meeting, was of disinterest verging on contempt. Again, this was my read, and may be totally offbase.
Sometimes, yes. :-)

http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es7/
Yes:

const description = ({name: {first, last}, occupation}) => `${first} is a ${occupation}`;

Edit: just noticed that `last` is not used, so we can remove it from the destructuring:

const description = ({name: {first}, occupation}) => `${first} is a ${occupation}`;
Almost all non-native English speakers conflate language and culture to a degree that they would interpret your statement as an inherent impossibility.

For example, some notions of nationhood are described in terms like "speakers of the Japanese language".
This is a good article.

It doesn't dampen my enthusiasm for learning a second language and getting immersed in a different culture. To me, it's so clearly rewarding that I don't need to worry too much about whether it benefits me.

However, now that I have kids and read the various upper middle class liberal-ish publications, I've learned so much about what my kids need to be doing. They need to

learn an instrument, learn to read music, lean not to rely too much on reading music, develop executive function through certain sports and physical activities such as dance, skateboarding, tennis, or form-based martial arts, play team sports, study math in a less abstract way, learn the abstractions of math, learn to program, learn visual arts in a tactile way, play in nature, learn to swim, engage in at least 5,000 words of abstract dialog and language, and… well crap, I forgot some I think. Oh, now I remember - my kids should also not be over scheduled. got it? good.

Something tells me that if you take, uh, a couple of these things, you're probably good. Kind of like how doing pushups also builds your triceps. You don't actually have to do 50 different exercises, one for each known muscle.

Languages? Hell yeah, languages. They're great. Go for it. You could also do some of those other things.
Hah, I'm tempted to go through the Ocaml 99 problems (which was inspired by the Prolog version) using ES6 [1]. Turns out, with recursion and a head and tail function, you can do virtually anything with lists.

I hope the popular JS engines optimize the hell out of the gathering operator, and adds TCO (it's on the ES6 spec, evidently). Then we won't even need to cross our fingers when we describe JS as a functional language to our peers.

And with the increasing emphasis on immutability, as preached by the React crowd, with cross seeding from the Clojurescript-React connections, JS grows even closer to being a Scheme [2].

If ES7 would lock down 'use strict' mode against even more of JS's weak-typing bloopers, things would be even better yet. I don't see why they shouldn't. They whole reason for 'use strict' is to give people who need backwards compatibility an out.

Incidentally, I'm also having great success using ES6 arrow functions at work, thanks to 6to5 [3]. I do a lot of d3 work, and arrow functions have made using d3, particularly the ubiquitous d3 accessor functions, so much nicer. Highly recommended.

For the first time since Node, I'm actually getting excited about Javascript's prospects. Now, if only they'd add types, and sum types...

1. http://ocaml.org/learn/tutorials/99problems.html

2. No, I don't actually believe that JS is a Scheme in disguise.

3. https://github.com/6to5/6to5
> I get what they're trying to accomplish, we all want faster more reliable service, but as comparison is anyone 100% happy with their utility (power, water, etc)?

I am. My water is clean and I've never had an outage. My power is reasonably cheap and quite reliable. The state doesn't allow either one to raise rates exorbitantly from year to year, either, and despite that both have made major upgrades to their facilities in the last few years.
Don't even get me started on the passwords to unlock HDD's, the ones you set on the BIOS... One day I will write how I unlocked the Toshiba(TSSTCorp) HDD I had forgotten the password for on my laptop.
I had to buy a new HDD, because I didn't have a spare one at the time, but I did it in less than 5 minutes, unscrewing and screwing the laptop covers and HDD's included. They weren't even the same brand. I bought a Samsung to unlock the Hitachi.
One of the interesting side-effects of utilities is you have a big group of trades that exist only to service that utility once it's inside your home.

Nobody really complains about the water company, but they sure do complain about rip-off artist plumbers.
Why is America turning to shit?
Fwiw, the reason we have more regulations than laws is because Congress likes to enact laws dictating things in a somewhat general manner and delegates authority for implementing those concepts to experts. Naturally, the specific regulations are more numerous than the general guidance.

While there may be too many regulations, it's a red herring to claim that simply because there are more, this is a sign of dysfunction.
The thing wrong with writing passwords down is that writing passwords down makes 2FA into 1FA. A password, when stored outside of someone's head, is a token, not a password.

If you really do 2FA, though, you should actually relax your password requirements. The most important attribute of a password used in a 2FA scheme is memorability, to make sure the user doesn't write it down (and thereby remove a factor.) Even a dictionary word works, as long as it's not one that's written down on e.g. the user's employee profile, like their mother's maiden name. Generating one or two dictionary words would be fine.

Keep in mind, the majority of 2FA security is in the token. As long as you verify the token first, the only power the password needs is to distinguish the device owner from someone who stole the device, or has snuck onto it. It doesn't need to protect against automated attackers; that's what the token (plus rate-limiting) is for.
Are you talking about the metal aluminum cases? Some of the most durable laptops i've had.
If I understand you correctly, you're saying that it's not the media's fault, because the media just blindly repeats whatever they're told. This is exactly why it's the media's fault!

If a journalist doesn't have the skills to understand what they're reporting on, then they shouldn't be reporting on it. We wouldn't put up with a report on Afghanistan that says the place is full of Arabs because the reporter was told that by some nutcase and couldn't be bothered to check the CIA World Fact Book before he went on the air, but we're constantly exposed to the scientific equivalent.

The world is an inherently confusing place. Media's job is to filter out the noise and present us with the signal. Instead, they just amplify it all, and we all know that amplifying a noisy signal doesn't really help.
"Science isn't broken, but it seems that way because the incentives that drive it are wrong."

Which sounds pretty similar to "science is broken", from an outsider's perspective.
That has nothing to do with whether or not it's a utility. They're clearly already capable of doing so.
That sounds fair. What if you sued them for some unrelated piece of software, can they use this against your use of React?
I also have generally positive experiences with power company employees. On the other hand:

i. I can't fire my power company, nor can I ever really expect to gain that ability.

ii. As nice and hardworking as the power company employees are, there's still only one main power run for the 1/8th of Oak Park that I live in, and any time a tree goes down in the alley along that run, or a squirrel detonates a transformer along it, I lose power for 6-8 hours. My block has a truly awful electric service uptime.

It's not poor customer service I worry about. It's a total lack of infrastructure investment.