skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sadly, up until today TSA is not allowing airports to opt out of the system, even though the law was specifically set up to allow them to do so. The new FAA bill -- which also calls for the FAA to set rules for thousands of law enforcement drones to monitor civilians sometime in the next decade or so -- changes this. (random Google link: http://www.securitydirectornews.com/?p=article&id=sd2012...) A bunch have already applied -- and been turned down.

Hopefully this will change.

ADD: Hate to be Mr. Cyncial Guy, but I think it's important to look at the problems with the system that led to the creation of the TSA. After 9-11, the Republicans wanted to do something big to put boots on the ground all over the nation, to be the party of security (theater). The Democrats wanted tens of thousands of new federal union workers to help shore up their re-election base. Both sides also wanted to be able to run generally on "doing something about terrorism". So a compromise was reached, everybody got something they wanted, and here we are.

Hopefully many airports will manage to opt out. I am not holding my breath for it, though. My money says we'll see those tens of thousands of drones a long time before we see substantial competition for airport security. As the other commenter pointed out, even if you opt out TSA still gets to tell you exactly what to do. Litigation exposure alone will keep most airports from signing up.
That would be helpful for many Sci-Fi and Fantasy novels as well. Especially the ones where people get bent out of shape if pronounce something wrong.

Full disclosure: I read Tolkien for years before I discovered that elvish names with C such as Celeborn or pronounced with a K sound.
>who has proven to be a mostly trustworthy exchange, despite their past security flaws which allowed data loss.

Nothing, and I mean nothing about how MTgox handled their problems should inspire confidence or lead you to conclude they are trustworthy. They were caught in lies and shoved their fingers in their ears to lost of typical and easy security suggestions and as far as I know, went forward with an inanely stupid hashing policy for "better" security than bcrypt.
If Apple doesn't respond, Congress can begin an investigation into Apple and/or write a law regulating the matter.
Well "messy" makes it harder for me to read and I prefer neat code. Do you have any recommendations on sites that compress js files? I've noticed several sites, but not sure if one is better than another. Thank you for your input. It is appreciated.
When you're willing to put your kids on a non-TSA flight.
Lots of good geeks and networking possibilities here. One big difference between FL and MA (besides the weather) is that in MA we're generally up-front about it when we dislike people. I much prefer it. Saves wasting time on people who don't want anything to do with you, and make it much clearer who the people that DO want something to do with you are. Obviously, your mileage may vary with this.

Of course, living in Boston is crazy expensive too...
"The antennae-gate was a REAL problem, that Apple changed it's design for (in the 4S)"

Really? It looks the same.
> If they forgot to add "read contacts" in their application manifest, then the code that tried to read the contacts would ALWAYS fail. Even on the simulator, which is rooted.

I meant the Android OS developers (which is what happened with iOS here), not the 3rd party developers.
Maintainability is immeasurably boosted by referential transparency; most of the time you can look at a single function in isolation and understand everything that's going on rather than having it be affected by other pieces of the codebase. I find it's much easier to work on a large codebase in Clojure vs Ruby just because it encourages a clean separation of concerns.

Of course in Clojure a 30k LOC project is considered very large. It's an open question whether this is due to Clojure's expressiveness vs the fact that it might not have been around long enough to spawn any massive projects.

Debuggability is helped a fair bit by having access to the repl in production contexts, but for the most part needing an actual stepping debugger is very rare, precisely because of referential transparency.

Bringing other folks up to speed is definitely the biggest problem. People who have experience with other FP languages usually don't know much about the JVM runtime and ecosystem, while people with Java backgrounds have a lot to learn about immutability and lisp.
Why stop at the penny? Isn't it about time we rid ourselves of all these filthy, wretched little buttons? Let's leave the 19th century behind us and begin gradually phasing out the whole anachronistic lot: pennies, nickels, quarters and (in Canada) loonies and toonies.
Meg Whitman On Android: Google Can't Be Trusted
14 years ago: the day Teller gave me the secret to my career in magic.
I agree about the structure. The thing about most technical, or how to call them, non-literary? books is that clearly you are not expected to read everything. In a sense, you start with the given structure but make the book your own as you go along. You skim, see that you already know about this, that you are not interested in that, and are _very_ interested in that. What I'd like to see is a format that makes it easy and gives us new possibilities to make a book our own. What I didn't see is your second point. Perhaps I imagined it too easy, maybe it is actually a tough nut to crack. After all, the format must accomodate all sorts of books and styles. And the IP issue, oh my...
Wow. I've been doing low-level work where I have to intimately understand computer architecture and optimization work where every nanosecond counts for as long as I can remember, but I've never put it into perspective. This is awesome.
There's plenty of precedent for it in other countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_debate_in_the_United_Stat...
Anonymous plans to take down the 13 root DNS servers that power the Internet?
Again, the high barrier is the entire point.

With the current regulations, if the transfer company goes belly up, the state, who would be forced to cover any transfers that were not completed, is not 100% liable for the damages. Customers still get their money moved. The company goes under, but the state isn't left footing the entire bill(like they normally would if the company filed chapter 7).

Let's do a thought experiment between the impact of circa 2005 Paypal versus Youtube(pre-Google) going under. Youtube goes down, people lose cat videos. It doesn't really effect anyone's checkbooks, except for the employees and investors of Youtube.

Paypal goes under. Accounts that were in the process of getting credited suddenly are never going to get their money. Payments stop, which screws over basically every single user that should have been paid their money. Everyone involved with Paypal, from consumers to investors, is out money, and the states have to step in to make sure that all the accounts are closed out and finalized.

There is a seriously high amount of risk for everyone involved. Having a high capital barrier helps to ensure that the risk to the consumer is much less, because they won't be completely screwed out of their money if the company goes under at the wrong time. Also, the taxpayers won't be left footing the bill.

Also, I haven't even touched on fraud or money laundering cases. Having these kinds of barriers to entry helps stop most of these kinds of crimes, because it's just too much risk.
Impressive job. I'll have to spend a couple dozen hours there.
Nice analogy :-). If only SSD's had the storage capacity of a typical hard drive...

By the way, get an Intel or a Samsung when your Vertex fails...
The arrows between the space keys are an interesting idea, but all those keys between the letters? Yuck.

Also, it's hard to write code that uses arrays when there aren't any "[" or "]" keys.
Stripping out comments and whitespace is unlikely to speed up execution (technically, I suppose it will speed up parsing, but I wouldn't have thought skipping comments and whitespace makes up a noticeable portion of the runtime of most scripts). It will probably speed up download time, although the savings might not be as large as you would expect because JavaScript can and should be compressed by the server using gzip. Most authorities on making pages load faster seem to recommend minifying JavaScript and combining files where possible.

Consolidating the files reduces the number of HTTP requests the browser has to make, which can make the page load faster because each request has some overhead. On the other hand, JavaScript libraries can be loaded from a CDN like http://code.google.com/apis/libraries/ , and if you do that users may already have a copy in their cache, whereas if you load one combined script including a library and your own code from your own site, users won't get that caching benefit.

Finally, debugging minified JavaScript is a serious pain, so don't minify any JavaScript in active development, just when you are ready to move to production.
1. "We developed this system for comedians to do exactly what Louis CK did. You pay based on usage (no large upfront capital risk), it's ready now, and here's a demo so you can see how nice it is."

VS

2. "We could totally develop this site for you. It'll probably cost around $30k and take a 6-8 weeks. Trust us."

In both cases it's going to require salesmanship but I'd feel a lot more confident about selling #1. And of course once you've had a few successful clients #1 get's even easier -- you just point to them.
Lots and lots of countries don't have that, and it's no problem. The smallest coin we have in Denmark is the 0.5 Kroner one, worth roughly 10 cents. If you have to pay 1.24 Kroner, you pay 1 and if you have to pay 0.75 Kroner, you pay 1. You win some and you loose some - evens out in the long run.
Completely inaccurate? Are you speaking from experience or pretty much making this up based on what you think happens?

I read through the paperwork for the scholarship that was provided to my brother by the university so I understand how it works. He's spent the past year visiting schools and talking to various people about this. People have visited the house and his school to go over it all. I've been hearing all about it the whole time. This is exciting for the whole family. It's not like a letter showed up in the mail out of the blue one day saying he could go to school for free. I understand the year to year thing and how it works with injuries. In practice, it is uncommon to lose a scholarship unless you are a screwball.

I also realize that it takes time to play a college sport. Four or more hours of practice every day is nothing new. My brother has been doing it for the past four years at a school that demands a high academic level. He also has his own personal coaches that he works with. Half of the games he played in required travel-- quite a few of them three or four hours each way on a bus. This is all piled on top of hours of homework that always got done. Hell, his days are longer than mine and I have a full time job and a toddler. Granted, he never had to stay overnight anywhere, but playing football was still a huge time commitment. He made many sacrifices to do it.

My brother loves playing football and also places a high value on education and future career opportunities. I think it's every college football player's dream to play in the NFL, but he is realistic about the possibility and planning to make his money doing a regular job like everyone else.

There are plenty of kids that make this work. There are also many that don't. For some of them it's too difficult. Others didn't care much about school in the first place.

In the end, I'm just not buying the argument that the whole system is a scam designed to make a ton of money off the hard work of these kids that get nothing. Both sides benefit. One side gets the money. The other gets the opportunity of a lifetime. Besides, no one is forcing these kids to accept scholarships, and if they are playing at the kind of level to even be considered for one they know damn well how hard it is.
My understanding is that (in the U.S.,) the defendant generally doesn't recover any expenses. But I'm not a lawyer and all that. I guess they can counter sue, and courts generally don't tolerate people filing tons of frivolous lawsuits.
No; session fixation requires that the attacker gain access to a session id and pass that on to the user. Rails doesn't use session ids by default. All session data is stored in the client cookie, and is verified with a cryptographic hash. If you can steal the cookie, you win, but that's much harder than session fixation.
But if nobody finds out about the special and he doesn't make money, wouldn't that also mean people don't know about the failure?
I see the value of UX, and I haven't decided how important it is to me yet.

I do feel like the conversations in tech circles seem to be overselling its benefits. I get skeptical when hearing bold, blanket assertions like "A UX person is one of the critical components of a startup today. You need a [hacker, hustler,UX person]".

I don't disagree that some startups need a UX person, but that flavor of claim strikes me as overreaching, and possibly just UX guys talking up their book. /not saying this is necessarily the case, but I can't tell that its not/

Specifically regarding the Hipmunk case, since its often cited as an example of how newcomers superior UX/UI can oust established players: Why are non-Hipmunk sites still in business, or even more, why are they still the dominant players in the market?

Its undeniable that there are examples of "bad UX companies" succeeding and "great UX companies" failing. What experiments can be/have been done to isolate the impact of just UX as a contributor for startup failure/success?

(I don't consider "split testing UX on a given site" sufficient. This generally finds local maxima and incremental improvements to the business. It generally makes you succeed more or less, but I want to hear about why the UX guy is a critical pillar to the existence of a company (and then, most companies))
"You don't want"
I find it doubly interesting since bootstrap isn't even very good code (albeit slowly improving). Completeness, documentation and brand name really trump technical excellence here.

Either way, it's great to have one of these frameworks finally pick up steam, that's been long overdue!
Nice analogy. From a technical standpoint, however, access patterns often make a bigger difference than the type of your storage device. The difference between sequential access on disk and sequential access on SSD isn't nearly as big as random access on disk compared to sequential access on disk.
You certainly can; however, you'll stop after a while when you realize it actually works.
I really liked this. This is the first instance of a time scale for computing that really made sense for me. It's a really good mental metaphor that cleared up how computers work in a way to this script kiddie.

Extending that thought to multiple cores/threads. Comparable to a small business in a way? You have one guy who can go tell other people to do certain tasks. They take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. You can set it up so that there is a task list of things for people to do so that you don't have to continually reassign each one, just tell them to pick up the next thing to do. It's much harder and requires more organization, but ultimately, like the division between a small business and a one man show, you get more shit done with multiple people/threads/cores working in parallel than one single unit working by themselves.

Thanks for posting this.
Why do people expect that Apple respond realtime to these kinds of things?

I think people believe that Apple should have considered the privacy implications of allowing Apps unfettered access to user contact data years ago, rather than only reacting when it becomes a PR issue that user-data is being misappropriated by shady App developers who appear to believe that making money is more important than the privacy of their users.

(My personal guess is that they did think about it, after all they introduced Location access permissions with iOS 2.0, but decided that an Android-style permissions matrix would put off end-users. In other words, I suspect that Apple made exactly the same decision that their App developers did: ease-of-use was more important than user privacy.)
"You shouldn't really get upset at CEOs trash-talking their competitors."

There's nothing wrong with that in general, but if you have special, unique access to an important industry figure, who is not going to be around for very long because he's dying, and you're writing what ought to be the canonical biography of the man, you really shouldn't be wasting your time putting false competitor trash-talking on the page, and certainly not without adding "but in fact Gates is wrong about this" and similar qualifiers.
> books that I often recommend to junior developers that are smart but didn't complete a degree and often find their knowledge of basic computer science lacking.

I think you may be confusing "Computer Science" with "Software Engineering".
It probably helped more in 2007 vs. now; modern phones have a bit more horsepower to where they can afford to shrug off a VM. The narrow field of hardware helps significantly in terms of /feeling/ fast if not actually being faster. You'll note that Windows Phones are fairly snappy besides running on effectively year-old hardware and running everything* (including games, WinPhone doesn't support native code) on top of the CLR; since WinPhone only supports two SoCs (the Snapdragon 8x50 and 8x55), MS can pour all their energy into optimizing every last drop of performance out of that chipset.

* There's at least one exception in Trident (the IE rendering engine). Assuming most of the stock apps are CLR-based unless proven otherwise.
Apple tends to err on the side of the user for refund requests, so most likely. You might have a hard time arguing that you didn't understand that the app would need those permissions, though, as any app that requires either location or address book permissions is likely to be fairly obvious.
"This is all not to men­tion that hey’re [sic] pro­tect­ing us from some­thing that, sta­tis­ti­cally speak­ing, never actu­ally happens."

I understand the sentiment here, but low relative frequency for a risk with catastrophic consequences, e.g. your house flooding or a terrorist attack, isn't valid justification for not taking precautions.

I blend back in with the author's rhetoric in calling out the TSA for engaging in expensive security theatre instead of working towards more meaningful uses of funds.
That only applies when there is no competition. Look at cars and firearms, for example. Pretty crucial items when they are needed but design is still at the forefront when it comes to making a choice.
Verelo.com - The next chapter in service monitoring
At the current pace of the bootstrap ecosystem I wouldn't be surprised to see that announced here on HN within the next couple weeks...
Stack Exchange: Planning for failure
Is there any evidence that private screening companies are any less skeevy than actual TSA? I'd be shocked if there was and appreciable difference between the two. They still have to follow all the same screening procedures that the TSA does.
Funny that's one of the cases where I'd envisioned using such a feature. I wrote a private logging mechanism into my apps to capture the data I write to log seperatly so my support request option can include some just-for-this-app logs without a scary permission req but I'd much rather do it the way you suggest.

Another situation I've got is I'd like to use the the permission to act as your Google account to optionally grab some user detail from <some Google service>, but I don't want to scare off users with this permission.

The other feature on my permission wish list is some permission specific options like internet access to [urlmask1,urlmask2,...] or log read access to logs from my app only, errors and warnings.
hmm..and people here on HN say they aren't a digital terrorist group.....
You nailed it - I feel the first definition you gave of Big Data is not really interesting. That's just the technology solution. The real interesting stuff is the 3rd: finding patterns among large data sets. But we've been doing this all along. Isn't this what biotech, cancer research, and govt census projects are all about?
> Obama could close this election right now by simply getting rid of the pornoscanners and the groping

this is not even remotely close to true. most americans care much more about things like the economy and jobs than things like civil liberties
does this mean, that even if we typed the IP address of a site, we would get an error? i'm not sure how all the protocols work, so any clarification would be great.
People are willing to take their kids on non TSA cruises, to non TSA malls, and to non TSA public schools.

These are all larger and easier targets than an airplane, so where is the rationale for worry?
A Usability Testing Starter Kit
Louis C.K., MegaUpload & BAD Governing
No, you could still get to the site with just an IP address, if you have it.
US could save $4.4B by dumping paper $1 bill for coin
Is someone begging you to drop your IDE for the UNIX toolchain?

IDEs have their use, Vim and Emacs have their uses, too. I'm perfectly satisfied by Vim (with omnicomplete and tags) for my JavaScript/HTML/CSS coding but I have to turn to Eclipse for AS3.

The "right" tool for the job.
I was thinking it might have been to prevent people using max queries per second even if it is unsustainable. Although an average should cover that.
I can comfortably reach the upper right corner of my phone. Maybe I have larger hands than I think I do, or maybe I hold my phone differently than most people. But I still don't see how that blog post linked to in the parent comment is at all accurate.
Just because it snags my overliteral nerd brain: this wasn't the most important moment of Louis CK's career. Louis CK is a giant of modern standup comedy.
This isn't an attack for the downvote. But if you're the type of customer that flips out over getting your temp password in the mail to a blank account, I don't want you. As the troubles are only starting...
Heaven forbid something helpful to the community and makes it easier to get something useful to a level of eye pleasing is a wrong thing.
As pilom mentioned, no one will be reading your compressed (also known as "minified") code. Your day-to-day programming will be in a non-compressed form of JS. When your code is release-ready, you go through the aforementioned deployment process.

I tend to use YUIcompressor, but I don't think any of them differ much.
A couple of comments.

One side effect of your post (for me) is now I am following your RSS feed. So there might also be a long term effect of having more people follow your blog.

The cross section of Proggit and Hackernews has overlap. If more people are reading Proggit first, then Hnews then they probably won't click through again. So maybe more people read Proggit before Hnews?

Also, what happens when you normalize the traffic by the size of the Hnews and Proggit "populations"?
No, I don't think so. Those books were chosen not because they're good at teaching you C but rather because they're good at introducing you to concepts like memory layout, data structures and algorithms.