skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Title should be "EVERYONE, everything you do ONLINE is monitored." Also, webcams don't switch themselves on. This is ridiculous.

First off, the government doesn't give a rat's ass about you. You are not even a number on a list. You are a number in a number. You are incredibly obscure and tiny; you are the molecule to their galaxy. So are they monitoring you in the 1984 sense? No. You are not the type of person the government cares about monitoring. You are not a special and unique snowflake. Get it through your heads. Nobody cares that you have a realdoll or a foot fetish. Nobody cares that you actually like the Backstreet Boys. In fact, nobody cares that you are radically anti-government...but even if you are, use Tor!! It's that easy.

Secondly, what people don't seem to realize that the internet isn't some place where you get stuff for free. You ask for things and generally get them, but you exchange information in order to do so. People want to have their cake and eat it too. If you want complete privacy, unplug your computer and don't use a cell phone. You don't have to be a government agent to tap into a radio frequency or sniff TCP traffic. Anybody can do this! If you really cared about communicating anonymously, you'd use SSL and Tor for everything. Nobody can decrypt SSL, and if you use Tor, it's very difficult to tell where a specific piece of information came from.

I don't get why people have this idea in their heads that everything they do online is or should be private. This is a public network. Use at your own risk. Anyone who really wants to can look at anything they want. If you really have something you need to hide, then encrypt and obscure your communications. Problem solved.

Also, this is more of a problem for people in the middle-east than Americans, if you asked me.

(written by an American)
I wanted to expand a little more on the app store itself. I pop it open every couple of days, looking for new tools, but new software seems to take a while to show up. Until there is a huge base of software like there is for iOs, sales are going to be slow. I also feel that in general, the pricing is a touch too high. I want to buy apps that will inexpensively solve an immediate need. I will pay a dollar to save a minute. The need doesnt have to be huge, but the app does have to nail it. The authors app is in this category, along with an app I purchased to quickly resize icons, and another to create buttons.

In general, the store doesn't provide enough detail for high-end app sales. Going to the apps website kind of defeats the point. I'm not willing to bet too much money on something I'm evaluating from a few screenshots.

Of course, there may be demand, but the fact that the author is selling an app to developers, who can download and compile the app for free, may skew the numbers.
Actually no, under the GPL they don't have to put the source code on the web. They just have to make it accessible when you request it. If no one requests it then they really don't have to put anything on the web. From a community karma perspective it is good to put up the source when new binaries go out.
The other contributers whose copyrighted code they are distributing illegally.
Researchers Hack Police Vehicle Video Streams
Write as little code as possible. The easiest code to maintain is the code you never had to write.
Without looking I think Google is probably the #1 contributor at this point, with Apple being #2.
So... it turns out that if you are not a valued employee (by your employer) and if you browse porn thumbnails at work, you can get fired. Huh - who knew?
I'm not the parent, but I do find it interesting that the title is about being covered, and not what was covered. Updating the HN title to match as "Optimizing Web Biz" would probably get fewer upvotes however.

The most valuable parts of this discussion are Paras' comments about how he was helped out by the HN community... that would make for a great story on its own.
The day of a software salesman
All the time. Hell, to this day idiots pester anyone who gets the number 867-5309.
Let's pretend, for a minute, that you did not want Google to have your surfing habits. How many sites would you have to avoid in order to prevent them from getting any whiff of your information?

I believe that "any site which uses adwords, google analytics or links youtube videos, or ..." is a good definition of insufficient.
Hi Pvodsevhcm, Thanks for your feedback. This actually wasn't my headline when I first put this link on HN. I guess the moderators changed the headline. I originally posted to HN with the headline: Attn. East Coast Hackers: Stanford May Soon Be Coming To NYC. Or something close to this wording.
If you hold copyrights on your software, it's not radical to ask people to refrain from republishing it without a license. That's the central goal of copyright law, and not a new idea invented by the FSF.
Qt Creator IDE 2.2 Released
They probably want to use this service to try streighten their position in areas where Google is comparatively weaker.
Therefore, Korea, Japan.

If I'm right, we shouldn't expect Europe to be their priority (for example), because Google is already very strong there, no real competition. Expect to be closer to the bottom of the list.
Companies who control enough net infrastructure or have visibility into enough sites can do a reasonably good job of tracking you without using cookies.

One way is to fingerprint a browser. EFF has a nice demo of this using HTTP headers. If you're operating at the packet level, you don't even need that.

So in that sense it's not a matter of avoiding certain sites or managing cookies properly, because the tracking is pervasive.

Current ftc discussions seem like they center around cookies, and personally identifiable information (PII), and do nothing to address other forms of tracking. That will favor large corporations and eviscerate startups in the adtech space.

The key thing that legitimate players in advertising want to do is understand which ads work well and which don't. Targeting users based on which sites they visit and based on offline demographic and shopping is very trendy right now, but it's not as necessary for keeping ads ROI-positive for advertisers in my opinion.

None of it really involves identifying individuals or PII, at least in the sense that people would be creeped out by. Hopefully there'll be a reasonable outcome to this which will allow this kind of legitimate use, since it finances so much of the net now.
Is this really "mind-blowing"? I can upgrade my personal home fiber to 400/400Mbits for 6000NOK (1100USD) per month here in Oslo. Expensive yeah, but not too unreasonable.
I found the most interesting part of this article the following quote: "... and would make them more vulnerable to security threats." Allowing users to opt out of tracking increases their security threat? I'd like to see more detail on this.
"The truth was I knew better than most people, but not all."
There were multiple issues. There was a straight up bug, which was fixed. But the perf delta remains.
Then support public funds plus a ban on all private funds for elections. For example, look at the recent senate campaign in CA, Boxer vs Fiorina. Boxer spent $28MM and Fiorina $22MM [1]. The math is you must raise $2.8e7 / (52 * 6) = $89,743 PER WEEK for your entire term to finance your next campaign. There's simply no way that comes without strings.

[1] http://flapsblog.com/2010/12/03/ca-sen-barbara-boxer-outspen...
حظك اليوم 7-5-2011
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http://www.almstba.com/vb/showthread.php?t=19769
http://www.almstba.com/vb/showthread.php?t=19769
One doesn't have to start with a lawsuit. One starts with a nice polite letter, on actual paper, to Apple's legal department reminding them of their LGPL obligations and pointing out that they're past deadline and perhaps they should poke the relevant engineering team?

Then if that gets no satisfaction you have your lawyer send the same letter. Then a nastier letter. Only then do you begin to think about preparing a lawsuit, which is expensive and probably overkill.

What you don't do is put up a passive-aggressive blog post. This post doesn't even tell us how many letters have been sent, or by whom, or to whom, or when. Have we even asked the support folks or the engineers, let alone Apple legal?

I can barely find the stomach to blame Apple's engineering team for prioritizing strict and timely license compliance somewhere below: Making their boss Steve Jobs happy, releasing features that paying customers care about, and sleeping. Fortunately, it is not my job to blame them. It is the job of Apple's legal department to blame them. Has anyone asked Apple's legal department?
it's hard to hide from akamai :)
When presenting, and wanting discussion, I have always found that the linear format fails hard. Is there any presentation tools that allow you to present slides in a flow-chart/logic tree format? Linearly, if my assumed best track isn't the result of discussion, the rest of the slides are worthless. I want a functional choose your own adventure presentation.

I think a powerpoint medium can work well in discussion if it is allowed deviations.
Sites such as a banking site, track user location to help determine whether it's actually you logging in, or some account phisher overseas.

Allowing users to opt-out of such tracking would make those sites less secure.
He must be from Northern Europe. Scandinavian countries have the best deals with internet connections.

As for the numbers, I think 12Mbs is quite an overestimation of reality: http://www.speedtests.net/world/europe/

In the UK the fastest one can go is with Virgin 50MB. Too bad then they force you to use their own cable modem which is a piece of shit.
i ended my spree of lurking and made an account just so i could come in and second this. it's absolutely absurd to say that the government can spy on you via your webcam. most webcams (all?) don't even harbor their own direct connections to the internet so in order to access something like that, the government would have to assume full control of your machine, then install a streaming service and pray your router was configured to allow such connections.

while this is far from the only problem with the article (like cell phones that have been "completely turned off" being remotely tapped), i don't think most of its other flaws are even worth addressing. i just hope that the author secured his tin foil hat... you never know who's listening to your braiiiiiiiiiin waaaaaaaaaaaaaaves.

edit: i'd like to thank the author for his reply and comment on the other poster's reply. it was me who flew the tin foil hat flag, and for that i apologize to the author. surely there is some grounding for his statements and it is not my place to cast my own prejudices over his opinion. all i really aimed to get across was the fact that some of these things cannot be true for, if they were, as orthecreedence mentioned, the implications would be far beyond the surveillance capabilities. i think it's clear that the government has a strong hold over internet communications, but there are both ways around it (encryption -- they can't be breaking rsa unless they've got some fancy quantum computers we haven't been told about) and, as was stated, many reasons not to care. i just think you need to be more careful before you go inspiring fear in the hearts of others.

also, i looked into the resources you linked regarding the cell phones. the affidavits linked by the article were incredibly vague and gave no real technical evidence to your claims. the cnet article admits to speculation, seeing as how they had no concrete evidence past the suppositions of various people involved in security and law enforcement. while i can't rule out the possibility of this "remote handset activation", i'd hesitate to say it were possible.
There are no Windows machines on the development network for my program at Lockheed. I can't speak for the entire enterprise, but every engineer has a Windows box for e-mail and general internet access and a UNIX box on a different network for real work.
I was thinking the same thing, but replace your finally block with,

Util.dispose(x,y);

...and let that handle all the possible issues.
Wow. I am pretty sure anyone with this kind of attitude would not work on any project together with guys from Apple.
Getting Users For Your New Startup
Would you mind fleshing out the "and less potential for error in node.js itself" part of your comment? I don't really understand what you mean.

I get the impression that error handling in node is handled the same way as managing control flow - you're directly managing the continuation of every potentially blocking / failing event.

Erlang's "let it crash" / distributed hierarchy of supervisors error-handling style is IMHO one of its most interesting characteristics; I can't see how it could be grafted on node.
Yes. You are missing the question why it is so influential, then. HBR is, every month, read by some of the most powerful people in the world. Why?
You'd be surprised how much of a productivity bottleneck "slow" internet can be.
From the post:

> It’s not about performance specs, it about user experience and how people use their computers — most people just don’t do that many CPU intensive tasks on anything but an occasional basis.

That is me. I care about the fact that my 13" Air is thinner and lighter than the 13" MBP, which makes a noticeable difference over any kind of day no matter the ergonomically designed bag or purse I might be using. I care that my 13" Air can run everything I need at acceptable or better performance, be it Xcode 4 or raiding with 24 other people in WoW. I don't care that I can't get the best performance possible or that there is no ethernet port or optical drive as those are edge cases at best and workarounds exist. It does what I want and feels incredible in every way that matters to me at the same time, and the MBP can't. It's as simple as that.
Folks,

Thanks for all the answers, I am already installing some of the apps mentioned here! You guys rocks!
Anything related to Apple is always a good source for some sensationalist piece.
From the github page, the intention is that it's an introductory educational programming tool, that provides a concrete visual syntax that's easier for kids to get to grips with than the usual textual one.
I significantly edited the blog post & submitted it again. I hope this doesn't make me look like a spammer. The option to delete ones submissions seems to be gone.. ?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2521763
Or Angry Birds. It only became a success after the devs got a publisher with contacts to Apple.

> "we went to Apple with Chillingo and said, 'We've got something here.'"

> On February 11, 2010, Apple agreed to feature Angry Birds on the front page of the UK App Store as game of the week. In preparation, Rovio made a YouTube trailer, only the second ever for an iPhone game, which has now had over 17 million views.

http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/04/features/how...
http://www.speedtests.net/world/
~7 in the USA and ~5 in Europe according to speedtests.net
I can't believe they didn't mention Khan Academy.
Do you work for Tonido? If you do, please provide a disclaimer. What you are doing is borderline spamming. See his comments for yourself [0]

If I'm wrong, I apologize profusely in advance.

EDIT: Parent does work for Tonido [1]. This is spamming.

0: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=codemechanic

1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=643833
Even if you're browsing in private mode on Comodo Dragon?

http://www.comodo.com/home/browsers-toolbars/browser.php
Apple forked Webkit from KHTML. Google contributes to Webkit. Should the original KHTML and the contributors from Google be deprived of the rights that the LGPL gives them, simply because Apple "owns" the project?

If Apple wants to own Webkit, then answer is simple: require a copyright assignment letter with each patch. Then they can relicense the code whenever they want.
The point in the article is that it is ahead of other apps in Dev Tools from established companies who should be selling more than 10 copies a day.
I'm still waiting for that "open" FaceTime specification.
What is interesting, the method overcomes storytelling. The same set of facts can be worded very differently, and, usually, it is heavily influenced by the presenter's feelings.
It looks really useful as an add-on to a level editor for a game. Custom scripts that designers can create!
sounds like Wile E. Coyote is running ACMEleaks, waiting for the roadrunner

conglomerates and altruism don't tend to mix
The Air also has an SD card slot, and I never knew that was a make-or-break feature on a laptop.

Here's the one spec that makes a noticeable difference to me every single day, the one that was even bigger of a deal than upgrading to an SSD for the first time (and living through double digit SSD failures in the span of less than two years):

MacBook Air 13" Weight: 2.9 pounds (1.32 kg)

MacBook Pro 13" Weight: 4.5 pounds (2.04 kg)
Yeah but the gold have been dug for awhile now, plus there are competitors with just as easy access to the market and his is only a little different from the competition.
Calling this a tax cut is mis-leading because it's never been collected on IPO companies.
Honest question: what's the difference between Ruby and Python/C# here?
Capitalizing on a Tweet Surplus
link died. any mirrors?
One man's sugar is a other man's carbohydrates.

The argument for try...finally, using, lisp's (with-open-file...), etc. is that it makes it clear that there is 'invisible' code at the end of the block.

I suspect that is the reason for the 'scope' sugar in D. Its advantage is that it is more light-weight; its disadvantage that it does not stand out more. I guess it depends on what you think your audience can handle which is better for your case. I do not think there are many programmers that need java's very explicit try-finally because they cannot grasp e.g. what D provides, but I also have been surprised at times by the, let's say, intelligence, of programmers I met.
I have a gigabit network at home and I can get up to 80MB/s, usually over 65MB/s sustained. I tried jumbo frames but due to the variety of different devices, I couldn't get everything working on the same MTU, so I had to drop back to 1500. Still get good speeds.
New iPhone app identifies trees from photos of their leaves
According to this, Virgin offer 100MB :

http://www.broadband-tv-phone.com/virgin-media-cable-broadba...

100MB is also available in Ireland, through UPC:

http://www.upc.ie/broadband/hundred/ (monthly cost here is roughly double the UK price. Typical! Despite the recession, it's still rip-off republic.)
This is impressive, but it loses a little luster when you realize their proximity to the testing server.

SpeedTest's SF server is hosted by MonkeyBrains.net. A quick traceroute shows their servers are just one step away from Cogent's SF backbone. I suspect whoever ran this test has fewer than four steps between them and the testing server, and the slowest link between them is the gigabit ethernet port to their desk.
Interesting reaction. When Intel was going to include a unique serial number in every CPU, I recall a lot of people getting into an uproar over the privacy implications.
Wait, how is someone stating facts sensationalist?
You wont get the nice upgrades. I always get the mac app store version because you can't convert from one to the other.
There's no reason to disagree. I wasn't advocating hourly not to exceed - just offering it as an alternative.

Doing it faster with straight hourly does not offer any more benefits than hourly not to exceed - the benefit of doing it faster in both is improved cash flow if a milestone payment model is used.

Hourly not to exceed provides a solid feedback loop on estimates and allows the development of better estimating skills. Like "buying a job" with a low flat fee, it may provide soft business benefits depending on circumstance.
How about "A fully hotswappable JVM - never restart again"?

Also, VMs in the Smalltalk family have been doing this for a long time.
I work at Texas Instruments, and the fab I'm in does a 32nm process. The problem is the methods used to make microchips vs mechanical working parts would be vastly different.

If you were to make a gear at 22nm then blow it up to say 5 inches wide, it would be the most terribly machined gear you ever saw. Heck it might look like a roughly notched rock. Precision has to be refined at this level to make complicated nano technology

You have to understand just how these chips are made. You start with a wafer, send it to thin films cover it in a uv resistant coating affectionately named photo resist, send it to photo lithography, expose it to uv light through a precision laser etched crystal reticle to overlay a schematic design for the bottom layer of the chip, then you ash the wafer to remove all the parts of the photo resist that the UV light did or didn't soften/harden (there are positive and negative photo resist types) then send it to implant and implant materials such as boron, phosphorus and other materials that will change the electrical properties of the wafer where implanted, then UV expose again, ash it, now yo have the bottom the wafer is annealed to bring the implanted particles to the top. Sometimes there is etching before any of this happens. Then you build the wires above the silicon connecting all the parts, and sometimes growing silicon in upper layers just to add more parts to the circuitry. All through the use of etching(plasma, acid and others), photographically, ashing among other things and there are many many quality checks along the way just to make sure everything is going well. (no reason to waste a month of process time on a chip that won't work because of something that happened at the beginning of the processing. Basically everything is done in layers. It can take months for chips to go from silicon to shippable chips. I suppose you might be able to build mechanical object with photo-lithography and I'm sure it has been done, but until processes are refined to where the objects don't look as rough under a microscope as they do, then I don't think it is very feasible.

Edit: On another note, now that we're able to make 22nm chips, by using the same process we should be able to produce larger nano objects with greater precision, like say 100-200nm. But as for 22nm precision, it's going to take a while to get machine shop quality parts when scaled to large size at the 22nm size.
I guess it depends on how you're using it - I don't really notice the weight in my backpack, and I don't walk around with my laptop otherwise.

Also from the post:

While at the same time forgoing things that you will notice
every time you use the computer (screen resolution and the
performance of an SSD).

If the performance of the SSD is a main feature, why would it not also be an important feature if you could quadruple the MBA SSD speed with the MBP + latest SSD?
While in all likelihood it's a legal and bureaucratic issue causing delay, I can see how this is considered bad form.

However, I've made an attempt at understanding the source release obligations under the GPL and all I get from it is: When you release to the public, you've got to release the source. But at no point have I found a "it has to be released immediately."

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePos...

The only clause I can see Apple potentially hiding under is Section 3.B of the GPL.
ie. as long as they have the door open for written requests all is well.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html

Can someone please clarify for me how the "well intended" spirit of the license works versus the real world legalities and requirements ?
Disqus Brings Mentions To Comment Threads
From today's nytimes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/world/americas/06bogota.ht...
I think most people have cable, which sometimes gives pretty good throughput.

I value customer service over raw speed, so I have Speakeasy DSL. It's not the fastest, but it is always up.