skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Couldn't agree more. I have public keys available and I understand the concepts at a high to medium level but if it's taken me as long as it has to get a grasp on it (And I still would need to do a number of google searches if I received an encrypted email) how can I expect all of my friends to ever get it? They want something that "Just Works" and so they gladly use (as do I) Facebook, iMessage, SMS, and Email. All unencrypted (Well iMessage is encrypted but I know they could easily view any messages they want). They still have password-reuse issues all over the place (my hands aren't clean either).

It's not that I don't care about privacy, I very much do, and my friends care as well (to a slightly lesser extent I would say and I'm willing to accept more to get to that point than they are). It's just that I am completely overwhelmed, only 1-2 of my friends even understand encryption at a high level and none of them expose private keys for communication. Even other developers I worked with got annoyed with OTR with adium/pidgin to the point I had to turn it off. It's not that I want to throw in the towel, I desperately want a solution, but even easy to use (what I'm looking for) "secure" communication tools get torn to shreds here on HN and so I haven't even considered trying to get them all to switch tools (even I thought it was possible, which I don't).

I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm not going to stop talking to my friends and my friends more or less refuse (due to complexity) to use encryption so what is the purpose of me even trying? The end result would be what? Maybe 1-2 people with which I can talk securely? Now I have to have 2 workflows and even if I have super-secure unique PW's, FDE (Full Disk Encryption, which I do use), and take steps to secure all MY data all of my friends are essentially leaking my data. So if the NSA/FBI/China/Hacker/etc want my communications they can just go after the weakest link, the people I talk to. It's very disheartening to say the very least.

I've considered blogging about this a number of times but didn't want to get destroyed here on HN (if I even posted it here, I probably wouldn't due to backlash) for being defeatist or get told how I am the problem. I am not a cryptographer and therefore am not qualified to even attempt to build secure software (if I even thought I was capable of coding up such a project). Even the tools that are easy to use that DO use tried and true encryption (Like PGP gmail/chrome extension, that's all well and good but what if I'm on mobile? Or on a friends computer? It's just too restrictive) are locked to a an OS/Browser/Device. I really do understand I'm asking for quite a lot (Cross-platform AND cross-device) but without those "features" there is no way I could get my peers to switch.

I'd love to have someone reply with how wrong I am how there is X tool/product/service that satisfies my requirements but I've searched high and low so I don't expect such a reply...
Really? Google is still the company behind Chromebooks, Docs, Gmail, and other attempts to replace desktop apps with Web stuff.
Python 3.4.3 Released
True. Does this have anything to do with the way programming is taught, most of the times starting with imperative then with OOP ?
Even More Diet for Fat Models to Have More OO Code
> BUT: I doubt this pointer event thing is a good example for their reluctance because it's really just a nice-to-have feature for the Surface and the Note series which is for my taste a too small target to justify a standard.

This is inaccurate. The pointer events standard allows you to avoid the 300ms delay mobile / touch screen browsers have and is useful across all devices. Without it you have to continue using hacks to prevent the delay.
The untapped industry of Vehicle Provenance
17 visualisation tools to make your data beautiful
> How do you know? It's was unprefixed already ~3 months ago, so why should it happen with the next release?

It was unprefixed ~6 months ago.

Their latest Safari release tracks WebKit release 600 which contains all changes until July 2014[1]. The latest WebKit release is 601, which contains all changes until September 2014[2], including the flexbox unprefixing. Safari normally update WebKit to the latest release in a non-maintenance update (e.g. Safari 8.1) so it should be available with the next release.

Another thing to note is that their Web Inspector (which is built with HTML+CSS+JS) already uses the unprefixed flexbox in trunk, so if they want to ship the updated Inspector, they will eventually have to ship the feature anyway.

[1]: http://trac.webkit.org/export/180623/tags/Safari-600.1.1/Cha...

[2]: http://trac.webkit.org/export/180623/tags/Safari-601.1.1/Sou...
you are mixing two problems:

1) libraries are often too complex for the avg dev: well, crypto is complex and there is rarely a one-size-fits-all solution. however, there are high level APIs that address your issues in openpgp.js (https://github.com/openpgpjs/openpgpjs). problem is that a lot of people try to roll their own crypto if the library does not offer those high level #box() and #unbox() functions. and THAT is a real problem down the road.

2) lack of empathy is really a big problem, which I've articulated here: https://blog.whiteout.io/2015/01/29/why-alice-has-a-problem-...
But how is that different from typing "2+3" or "what is the speed of light?" or "what is the temperature in San francisco CA?" in the Google search bar? I think it is all about convenience.
It seems worth noticing that this is more political than technological argument. Google choose not to implement Pointer Events and used Apple as a scapegoat.

I'm not happy with Apple's decision, but I'm even less happy with Google using Apple as some kind of feature implementation oracle.
Currently, it sees a board of 3x3 states, as in:

_ _ G

G B B

_ _ G

A next step would be to use real computer vision over a 3D camera in the environment aligned to R2D@ and a deep neural network to interpret pixels instead of states. DeepMind has a paper describing this approach: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.5602.pdf
Article doesn't mention that T-Mobile will let you buy that $650 phone in installments if your credit is good.

So you can still get that new handset and pay for it in your monthly bill, but now you have the option to pay the remainder off at any time and switch it out/sell it/change carriers/etc.
ultimately prove to be less-than-spectacular developers

There's no sure-fire way to know exactly who you're hiring unless you know the person (and even then!).

But: many of these companies are using the wrong criteria, out of bad habit or sheer laziness. You get "brain teaser" questions ("how would you tell which light bulb had been on in the past 10 minutes?"), coding tests, even demands to know which lsof flag does foobar (but that's why God invented man pages!). In my estimation, the only real way to get inside someone's head is to get them talking about what they've worked on, hear their war stories, and talk in depth about how they've solved problems and built things.
A Comparison of Programming Languages (in Economics)
People are getting really bogged down in specific standards, but you don't need to talk about pointer events or flexbox or indexeddb or whatever, you can look at this at a macro level.

Here's the ES6 support table: http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/

Safari and IE were laggards, but future IE is going to be very solid while future Safari is still going to be terrible.

Here's the HTML5 support table: https://html5test.com/results/desktop.html

Safari and IE are laggards, and both continue to lag.

Safari used to be a Chrome/Firefox-level "modern" browser, while IE was the consistent laggard, with its slow release cycles and bad standards support. The most optimistic thing you can say about Safari now is that it's on IE's level; and realistically, it's even worse than IE -- certainly the IE team is a lot more transparent about future plans than the Safari team is.
Warning: I only glanced through the code real quickly, so I haven't checked to see if this has unintended side effects to the game logic, or to make sure it's a complete solution.

It looks like there's a variable that controls how quickly the board itself is updated:

var boardGameUpdateInterval = 10;

And a function deciding how quickly the visual representation gets updated:

var render = function () {
setTimeout( function() {
requestAnimationFrame(render);
}, 1000 / 15);

if (gameTicks % boardGameUpdateInterval == 0) {
updateBoard();
}

animateBoard();

gameTicks++;
renderer.render(scene, camera);
};

They're global variables so it's pretty easy to just drop into the developer console and overwrite them.

I just changed the denominator of the setTimeout to 30 instead of 15, and the boardGameUpdateInterval to 5 instead of 10. Of course, you don't have to change the render speed to get the logic speedup, but I figured I'd do both.

This appears to have sped the simulation speed up by a factor of two.

ymmv
Ask HN: What are your experiences with Robot Framework?
My team is finally getting serious about end-end testing our application, we are evaluating some different alternatives. Can anyone share their experiences using Robot Framework to build complex integration tests? What are some pros/cons of using it compared to a building tests using a general purpose language?
A lot of the work I do involves legacy Ruby software. Fortunately there has always been (well, since Ruby got popular) Rubygems which is equivalent to gopkg.in - I have been burned a couple of times though when authors have removed old libraries. For the last few years Bundler (http://bundler.io/) which uses Rubygems has been the standard way to lock versions of libraries, and before that vendoring was widely used.

When you pick up the maintenance of an old application you have to reinstall the dependencies from scratch if you aren't using vendoring or Bundler. Each method has their advantages and disadvantages, but both are much better than praying that the library author hasn't introduced a breaking change in a release since the library was last used.

Although it isn't the same when you are deploying Go applications, development has exactly the same issues as Ruby without locking the dependencies.
I'm heavy in the Gremlin camp as it can be used across graph db technologies. Any thoughts on how it compares to Cypher? I haven't played with Cyper since I do most of my querying via Rexster.
The Go tool does do installation and upgrading. There's not really any configuring, and it'd be hard to do removal in any reasonable manner given how GOPATH works. What the Go tool does not do is isolate you from breaking changes upstream. For that you need someone you trust (which could be the package author or a copy of the code in gopkg.in), or be willing to fix breaking changes (which I do quite often).
I cant help but feel that this is a clusterfuck in disguise.
> but is Chrome Android better/as reliable as Safari?

Absolutely, not sure what would make you think otherwise. Older versions (a year or two ago) used to have some minor inconveniences ocasionally, such as scrolling lag after using it for a while, but that was ironed out long ago. Chrome for Android is my main mobile browser and by and large the "app" I spend the most time with while on the go, and currently I have zero complains. It's fast, it's responsive and it gets the job done without getting on the way.
Show HN: Coursebirdie – Watch free online business, design and technology classes
Users don't need to know about TwoFish, as far as I'm aware. It's just the basic Unix principle of separating policy from mechanism - they can choose the cipher if they want, otherwise the software selects a sane default.
> The difference is, if I type WAW to LHR into Google, I get flight listings with prices and availability.

Yes, and I think that's a Good Thing. Google rightly knows that when I type "WAW to LHR", I want to know about the flight, not about where to find out about that flight.
Given that this is Paris then it's probably going to turn out to be performance art and the flight path of the drones is going to draw something.
Agree, most of the corporate "OOP" code I have seen, at the best of the cases, handle modularity. Everything else is kludge.
Google's stated mission is to "organize world's information". This fits it perfectly.
How is this from Google...

"If we had Apple on board with PE, we’d still be on board too."

... anything else but a lame excuse? It's deeply unfortunate that Apple won't budge on this because I think PE is a step in the right direction, but Google using Apple as a crutch is just as ridiculous.
Want to Succeed in Job Interviews? Pronounce Names Correctly
This is an awesome platform, if only you could purchase through this!
It's not "Chromebook" it's Chrome App (aka extension). So it runs in any (non-mobile) Chrome browser.
Im using Tornado now for a personal project and I find that the async decorators makes things a breeze. Go seems really attractive when it comes to concurrency/async things. I'll probably move there if I ever do make a move.
Here is the paper the conclusions are coming from: http://economics.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/comparison_languages.... I linked to this blog post instead because it gives a better summary of the paper for people who don't want to read the whole thing.

The author of the blog post raised a few points that I thought were interesting and that I'll provide my own answers to here. Feel free to comment if you disagree with me.

> Why would anyone prefer Python, given that there is a much faster, free alternative in Julia, which is just as easy a language to program in?

I've used Julia a bit and the lack of libraries was frustrating. It is getting better now, but you'll still have to write a lot of stuff from scratch if you decide to use it.

> What justification is there for preferring R to Matlab, other than cost?

R makes it very easy to perform exploratory analysis on a dataset. Matlab might be similar, but I don't have experience with it.

> Why does anyone bother with Java? If speed is the critical issue, there are faster alternatives. If you like the relative simplicity of the syntax, Julia is cleaner, simpler and just as fast in execution.

I agree with this. I've never enjoyed programming in Java, but some people seem to like the large number of libraries available.
Lego Large Hadron Collider
SocialRank is launching Instagram follower analytics
> That $199 iPhone? It really costs $650!

It's been really nice to see unsubsidized wireless become more of a thing in the US. I can't even begin to describe the confusion my family members have when I tell them that their iPhone actually cost $600-700. Their response is, "oh, no, it was only $200." It's astonishing how misunderstood this is... like saying you financed a car purchase and it only cost you the downpayment.
> You really don't need a package manager for Go.

"You really don't need X for Go" is becoming the Go community catchphrase. And they're right: I won't need anything for Go because I wouldn't use a language whose community actively resists improvement.

I could respect that Go doesn't have a package manager, generics, etc., if the Go community took more of a "if you want it, develop it" approach. But instead, the core development team has made it unclear whether they would even accept some of these features. I get that compilation performance is a high priority, but they've missed the big picture, that developer time also matters.

The following exemplifies the problem:

> Note that because Go is a compiled language, the only time versioning comes into play is a development time.

Oh, that won't affect me at all; development time is only like 90% of the life of a project.
> Maybe something about security-obssessed lay people using GPG to send the most trivial of emails?

Crypto is far more effective when everyone uses it for everything:

https://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html

PGP certainly isn't ideal for the "everyone" part, but scoffing at people for using PGP by default harms the "everything" aspect.
Most simply, value is a non-fixed inherent property that can change depending on the asset / liability and the entities involved. A valuation is an actual estimated value given some conditions.

Simple example: Celery has no value to me, because I find its taste disgusting. However, I happily pay for bundles of cilantro, which in turn have no value to others that find its taste disgusting.

In the case of a publicly traded company, the conditions are "if all shares were immediately liquidated at the current price". In the case of a company buying that publicly traded company, an actual value can be arrived at, due to having a fixed set of assets, liabilities, and participating entities. And, as you pointed out, those two numbers rarely match up.
> 1400 lines of python that tries to pretend that an interactive program is a library is definitely a problem though.

Yeah, +1 for this. The lack of a proper GPG library is very strange.

I'm in the process of writing a Python program that interfaces with GPG right now, and I was surprised to learn there isn't an official GPG library. The closest thing seems to be GPGMadeEasy [1], which is an official library wrapper for the interactive program.

Since I need low-level key manipulation (writing out a key with known values), what I've ended up doing is using the BouncyCastle Java library[2] via a separate Java command line program my Python program can call out to. It works, but it's painful.

So, yeah -- what would be the cost/benefit of the project lmm proposes to create a real, portable GPG library? It makes a lot of sense to me.

[1] https://www.gnupg.org/%28it%29/related_software/gpgme/index....
[2] http://bouncycastle.org/
Drones drones drones. What drones? Did someone flew a Predator, or was it just a Phantom bought from the "Accessories for GoPro cameras" shelf of the local RadioShack equivalent? There is an important difference between the two, and I don't really like how media and people in general conflate together the whole spectrum of UAVs and RC copters.
I don't particularly like the idea of harassing possibly innocent students. Innocent students might be under pressure with no proof of innocence, since they assumed to be guilty. They might do a cost/benefit analysis and admit guilt.

Also if cheating is really such a concern, why not just handle it in a similar way to the american GRE's or SAT's ?
they have openly said that people who use encryption are of interest to them, or at least their communications are. however this is easily solved if there is wide enough adoption. If I encrypt the shopping list that I send to my other half, or I encrypt the text messages i send siblings or any text communication to anyone, and there are 100's of 1000's who do the same it becomes impossible to store/monitor and decrypt all that information. it would essentially overwhelm them with data, which even if they managed to decrypt (through the theft of private keys or a serious brute force attack) would be of no value other than to prove the task a waste of time.
Somebody is filming the Paris landmarks for a movie or art project.
I find that funny by itself.

You ran a search for a news Aggregator and couldn't find it?

That's not a good sign it is very relevant right?
They have conflicting interest with a better web: Apple Store.
They phased out that partnership with orange a couple of years back, now it's 3G or nothing
Time Bandit: Pebble’s new weapon in its battle with Apple and Android watches
Tool-assisted speedrun
Infographic – Property Management System in Switzerland
Google seems to play both sides - they embrace the web, but also the "app" and marketplace model. With Chrome OS, Chrome Browser running Chrome Apps - is that sill the "open web"?
Handling Data on Drupal: Service Layers to the Rescue
30 Best Newsletter and Email Marketing Services
This is inaccurate. Nowadays, the 300ms goes already away if you set the meta viewport tag with width=device-width etc [1]

[1] http://updates.html5rocks.com/2013/12/300ms-tap-delay-gone-a...
I've definitely run into consumer devices which allowed me to upload an SSL cert somewhere in the advanced settings but mostly I was thinking about the people on the bug commenting that their enterprise network, server management, etc. gear had bad certs. Even in the late 90s you could do this because .mil/.gov and many corporate purchasing contracts tended to require it.
That's true on desktop, but on iPad, for example, Google cover Gmail and Google Maps with native app spam banners.
I've gone as far as ~1000 food ~100 poisson blocks to make sure it's on the right track. Speeding this up is a good idea, I'll make some time to add this and post an update. You can ping me on twitter @javierluraschi.
Maybe I missed it, but how did she qualify for the citizenship mentioned in the 2nd to last paragraph?
Managing home repairs with an issue tracker
The media and authorities' reactions do not make this action irresponsible.

Is it unlawful? Apparently, yes.

Is it immoral? That depends on the purpose, but it is not intrinsically so.
> If you think it "runs", it simply because all those customer who get "invalid character" error has gone over to a competitor and didn't bother to tell you.

Silly, that's not how sales of $500K-$1M products work.
I would classify godep as a package manager in the same vein as bundler, pip, npm, etc., and in my experience it is absolutely essential if you still want your Go code to compile a month after you wrote it.

I think the bit about source versus binary deployment is a bit of a red herring. It's not like any true Scotsman is deploying by running pip update in production either. As a developer you want to have code that compiles at all times. Having a binary you can't reproduce or change isn't going to be much comfort.

If you're going to use third party libraries there is no reliable way to judge the stability of either the libraries you use directly or all your transitive dependencies. Pull in enough dependencies and the chance of a conflict approaches one. Some of your dependencies will get updated and some of them won't, and soon enough you'll have a hard time finding any combination of versions that will compile.

Dependency management is not optional, but unfortunately Go makes it easy to hurt yourself by providing climbing holds without a safety harness. It isn't obvious to new programmers that they should use godep before they come back to an older project and it won't compile anymore.
Event based response in JavaScript
Pretty sure that Att also offers this.
Bill Gates and Other Business Leaders Urge U.S. To Increase Energy Research
ScatCat – Yo and Raspberry Pi Cat Deterrent System
OS X is also missing, isn't OS X a relevant platform?

Of course both are relevant, they just went for the most popular platforms first, plus FF OS, which probably was a kind of low handing fruit due to its HTML5 apps.
> Right now Moxie is working on bringing encryption to the masses.

And in the meantime? That's one of the main arguments against his attitude. The PGP-encrypted email senders he's complaining about realistically had two options:

1) Send email PGP-encrypted
2) Send email unencrypted

Additionally, neither he nor (I would assume) the sender is part of "the masses".
Apple faces $533m iTunes patent payout
Tutorial for an Automated Insightly to SugarCRM Migration
The parent makes a solid point, and you're employing this logical fallacy, which is why I am down voting you.:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_ridicule