skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have some definite concerns with this. If producing the key via government coercion is legal, where do we stop? Right now, we have (admittedly) very crude technology that lets us probe the brain and tell with a reasonable certainty if someone is lying. It may be possible to produce a machine in the future that can analyze the mind well enough that it will be possible to tell what words a person is thinking. If that's the case, would it be legal to require the accused to be subject to such a machine to reveal their password? If that is the case, will the government need the accused's testimony at all?

Further along that line of thinking, it may become possible to change what a person is thinking by suppressing or exciting different regions within the brain. At that point, is punishment still legal if the government can simply change what a perpetrator thinks? For example, changing a con artist's mind so they no longer think of using their persuasive skills to con people. On the surface, isn't that what prison and the penal code is about anyway?

I believe we need to concern ourselves greatly about this, because we are now on the cusp of technologies that will make building brain-computer interfaces not only possible, but possibly simple. This will be an amazing boon to the elderly, others who have degenerative problems, and probably everyone else. At that point however, where does an individual's mind stop, and legally-accessible file storage begin?

I believe the slippery slope of both these arguments starts at this point, deciding where the demarcation of self-incrimination is. What we decide as a society over this argument will have a significant affect on how our ultimate future will go.
Sacha Baron Cohen Responds To The Academy For Oscars Snub
Neither of our solutions were "reliable", and also required being run in a loop. (I know this about a1k0n's solution, as he sent me an e-mail asking me about my solution).
I'm glad to see more companies moving away from overly invasive branding. I don't need to see the name of the company in front of everything.

No one would ever say "open Windows Live Photo Gallery". They would say something like "go to Photos" or "open the Photos app" and now this simplified branding will make these things more obvious and easier to find for the average consumer.
And discussions like this, raising awareness and exchanging ideas, are a part of getting the problem fixed.
Furthermore, I think the point is not that Boz, by his choice of wording, "attempted to express" anything like the view Youssef gave; he did it without intending to! (Any decent reader knows not to trust an author to know themselves the significance of what they say!)
Sometimes when I start to feel very smart and proud of my life accomplishments, I start feeling paranoid that I am actually inside a simulation like The Matrix whose sole purpose is to keep me from realizing that I am the dullest fool among my actual peers in the real world. I imagine that the mind-blowing "AHA" moments in my life are the most embarrassingly obvious conclusions to my real-world pers who are all far, far more intelligent than me, and that my entire life is nothing but bumbling around and rediscovering their most basic common knowledge.
What are they going to do, read the encrypted data off the flash drive the hard way?
Programming With Only Functions
I think the term "hypermedia" will catch on just like REST did. People will begin to slap on the hypermedia label to their APIs whether or not they are true hypermedia APIs. Developing hypermedia APIs will be the new craze until some other revolutionary terminology is introduced to describe yet another way to correctly develop APIs.
> I don't care on what I am working as long as I have a desk,
> an OK mouse, an OK screen, and OK keyboard, that's it, I am
> happy.

I think with attitude like this it is very difficult to build a GOOD product. "Meh" most likely. But other nerds may consider it to be OK though.
OTOH, I don't think that being nerdy should necesarry mean "not caring how good something is".
Damn, We Should Do An Infographic on That; Charts Trying to Be More
Security researcher hit by Android malware on Facebook
Noah and Sam's setups are the only ones that stuck with me too. Noah's setup is nice because it allows you to code without worrying about switching windows and moving stuff around. It's optimized for speed. Sam's setup is awesome because I feel like I could focus in that room. It's zen, free of clutter, probably free of distractions, perfect to get in the zone.
Ideally I'd combine both... but just a small Macbook on a kitchen table as a setup is pretty uninspiring.
Visual Studio 2011: Lipstick on a Pig is not UX
I'm just thinking that if you're small Google won't recognize that it's actually part of the same page and treat it as two.
An empire that consists of 10,000 planets (as the article assumes) could probably commandeer a few thousand stars for its energy needs.
Random Pro-tip related to dry-erase on monitors:

If someone, perhaps an age-impaired individual, draws on your awesome screen with a permanent marker, you can draw over it with a dry-erase pen to loosen the permanent ink.
Furthermore, the changes are consistent with the fundamental rubric of Metro Design - fierce reduction.
exactly. This is a "Modes" transition diagram. For example, :commands aren't modes as well.
Internet Marketing Companies
Looks more like REST 2.0.
Of course, but there's a difference between creating value for users and selling it to them, and creating value because of all the other users in the system (network effect), and only being able to monetizing users after, say, 50,000 users are active users.
Toronto Startup Sprouter Sprouts a New Tech Publication
I can't say much about Rails, but I will say that after doing a CoffeeScript, Backbone, and require.js with clientside compilation project -- debugging is pain and tears. Even though Chrome supports source maps, CoffeeScript doesn't, and the error messages raised by require.js are of the "you fucking peon" variety referred to in the article.

I like CoffeeScript and AMD, but they aren't ready to be in the same room together. Hopefully, jrburke's almond will let me build a serverside compilation strategy that isn't awful to debug.

On the other hand, Backbone kicks ass, and I wrote a DOM-twiddling Knockout.js inspired data binder called _outback.js_ to make it better. It's up on github (politician/outback) if anyone's interested.
I will grab a screen cap and a link the next time I see it happen. One point to note is that I have only seen it happen when I am not logged in(say if my cache gets reset and I forget to log back in right away). I just tried to find some today and was unable to do so, but it is always interesting when I see a link I swear I read about years ago boasting as a new technology and then notice the link was actually posted two years ago and somehow found its way back into the list.
"If a Death Star takes a couple of decades of build wouldn't be obsolete by the time its finished?"

Most evidence would suggest that in the Star Wars universe, physics and technology have basically been fully explored for thousands or tens of thousands of years. What's left is style and what exactly is done with it. In the extended canon it is revealed that the Death Star isn't even particularly special and that various superweapons of similar capabilities have been developed off and on in the past several thousand years, determined more by the political environment of the time than the tech environment.

As for the rest, wild handwaving. We don't know how the physics of their space travel works, so it's possible that a moon can not simply be turned into a hyperspace-capable ship any easier than it is to simply build one.

Incidentally, while we're on the topic, here's some relatively-well founded handwaving: http://www.theforce.net/swtc/hyperspace.html
Server seems to be buckling, Coral Cache link <http://javlaskitsystem.se.nyud.net/2012/02/whats-the-waiter-...;
Not sure where David works from but the view outside that window is grand.
> 1) Standing is radically more healthy than sitting

People who spend their days on their feet may not agree with you there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varicose_veins
Oh great. It wasn't bad enough that Android lacks a real-time user interface, now all my apps will be in JavaScript and HTML5, making everything even slower and crappier. It's so funny how phones made 10 years ago were more real-time than those today. On top of that I get the bulkiness of a Mozilla product combined with the security vulnerabilities of a Mozilla product.

"Basically, Apple and Google have so much control over the smartphone landscape that carriers have effectively become nothing more than retailers. Worse than that, their infrastructures have been reduced to that of a dumb pipe, where it is Apple and Google who ultimately decide how the network will be used."

THIS IS THE MOST AMAZING THING THAT HAS HAPPENED TO THE MOBILE CARRIER INDUSTRY IN ITS HISTORY. And somehow you find this a bad thing? Jesus christ people can be thick.
Good tip. I didn't know this as well.
It isn't very hollow, the star wars nerd books I have read / seen about it make it out to be a few thousand stories tall skyscraper built in the shape of a sphere in space.

Only the reactor in the center and all the piping for the laser / exhaust is open unused space for the most part. And the docking facilities for spacecraft. Besides that it is office space living quarters etc. It is meant to hold a million troops constantly.
People were already bemoaning the decline in quality when I started reading a year ago, but even then, the type of article that made it to the front page was completely different than what you could find on any other site. We are getting progressively farther from that unique tone as time goes on.

I don't think there is a solution, though. This erosion seems like the inevitable path of any community-driven thing. No one is doing it deliberately, it's just what happens when you average out so many ideas of what “good” is.

I am certainly part of the problem. I haven't contributed anything of value. This comment is actively making the site worse. But this link was such tragically generic drivel, I felt the need to say something.
I would be very interested to see you produce a modern website that way.
Screw Being Scalable
Yeah, there will always be pirates. I don't think you can fairly say "massively pirated" because you don't actually have numbers to back that statement, just like I couldn't say that "most people get the game through Steam". However, I would speculate that using Steam as a distribution channel has helped the author more than whatever online pay-then-download mechanism he would ever come up with. I would further speculate that using a common distribution channel like Steam increases the audience and simply by holding piracy constant and increasing paying user numbers, the percent of piracy would decrease. I'm sure "holding piracy constant" is a bit of stretch, but I wouldn't imagine it would increase as massively relative to the number of paying customers. Again, I don't have numbers, so this is just speculation, but I think they are reasonably sound.

If you look at TPB and say "look at all the piracy!" -- well, you won't find much else, it's TPB. I wouldn't assume then that it's pirates all the way down.

The comparison to NewEgg.com is pretty poor. What you're describing is theft of physical property. There is always a real loss of money (not potential money/profit, but honest-to-God money and resources). Software/music/digital art doesn't have this property. There is no loss of real money/resources used to make the copy. This fact actually DOES make all of the difference. If everyone pirated a game, it would not drain the physical assets of the company that produced it for each copy made. Yes, it's still theft, but it is a lot more justifiable (and sustainable, for better or for worse) than robbing a warehouse.

I pirated a copy of Windows XP 64-bit Edition (for Itanium CPUs). You know why? Because Microsoft won't sell it to me, nor will anyone else. I literally had no other choice. In America, we're blessed with being first, but I have it's really annoying to try to get around bans/censorships/date shifts that make something unavailable in your region. When you have no other choice, it's a lot easier to say "eh, screw it, they won't take my money, fine."

I'm sure plenty of people pirate because they hate paying, but I'd be interested in a large-scale survey as to the reasons. I'm sure they vary by income level, technical knowledge, and region. That would be a lot more useful than pidgeon-holing all pirates as cheap bastards when quite frankly, none of us know the results of such a survey.

---

Pirates will be pirates, yes, but the goal isn't (and never will be) to eliminate all pirates, it is minimize losses (and therefore, maximize revenue). Right now providing really good service, extra value (steam features), and low pricing is the best way we know to coaxing users to voluntarily part with their money without the flak of "WE HATE DRM" that is common with overly draconian measures. Steam's profit margins attest to its successful model.
My 3 year old loves her Ubooooooooly and can't wait to play again.
emacs -nw (for "no window") is super simple.
Because they are not merely a product company anymore but a brand name.
I really love the Zune product (to the point where I'm afraid of being branded a shill whenever I talk about it). Windows Phone is a nice system, but the Zune aspect is what sold me on it versus an iPhone. There's literally nothing that compares, and I'm amazed Apple has fallen so far behind.

Microsoft needs to do some image control to become "cool" again. They've got some amazing products that are right on the bleeding edge (Xbox, Zune/WP7, Windows 8 is kind of out-there and radical for better or worse), but Xbox is the only successfully "cool" brand they have. Because it doesn't have "Windows" attached to it.

If Zune was redefined as a phone (Not Zune Phone, just Zune), it would sell like hotcakes.
FTA: Redis ASCII art logo added at startup. This is where our major efforts went in the latest months.

I knew it!

All kidding aside: Redis is an amazing tool. I'm looking forward to the new version.
I don't believe I'm diving too deeply into these words at all. In fact, I'm not really talking about the words; my point is that they are a symptomatic of a larger problem, that is, Facebook does not seem to adequately understand emotion, love and friendship.
I'm gonna need two...
How many renamings have these things been through already?
Good stuff!

However, another thing I'm not going to get to use whilst working in a Microsoft monoculture :(
Our Chicago JV partner says your office is "right around the corner" from their office at 1000 W Monroe St. So, having used Rails since 0.7, and being a fan of 37Singals work, I naturally got kind of excited at the prospect of stopping by. Is the 37Signals open to visitors (even with no specific purpose)? Just curious :)
I did it myself with vim, looking at the logo. It's a long process ;)
> Logic does not produce consciousness.

Considering we have no falsifiable theory about what does produce consciousness, I don't see how you could possibly claim this.

You can't prove that you are conscious, nor can anybody else. I can perceive my own consciousness but I can't rigorously explain it. We have no way of determining if this alleged "consciousness" is a spectrum or binary. We can't test which life-forms are conscious and which are not. We can observe behaviors in animals that seem to imply consciousness, but is a dog conscious, or an insect, or an amoeba? We don't know.

And furthermore, if you believe in evolution, you have to believe that there was no consciousness and then consciousness at some point was created where there was none before. If logic doesn't produce consciousness, what does produce it? And whatever produced it in cellular tissue millions of years ago, who's to say we couldn't likewise produce it in a die of silicon, which like our brains is highly electrical?
IDE for developing PhoneGap HTML5 Apps
Why didn't you drop Backbone.js and write your own base-classes?
I have never owned or seen (IRL) a Zune. What's so great about it? What makes it better than an iPod?
Every time I've gone for an interview after seeing "rockstar" in the job description, it's gone poorly, and usually because I saw enough in 5 minutes (or less) to know I didn't want to work there.

Half the time the recruiter is so excited about the opportunity to bring "rockstar" candidates to such an awesome company that they seem to forget to actually read my resume, so I'm interviewing for a position that doesn't match my skill set at all.
Which tech company generates the most revenue? (Hint: It's not Apple)
Im always surprised when people ask this question that they haven't read The Cave by Plato.

This has been asked for thousands of years and its a great question. I think the answer which has been posed by many great thinkers and artists is often condensed down to :

The only reality that matters is the one you are in right now. Any higher reality, which you cannot access, essentially does not exist in any meaningful way to you.
In context, that is not true. In the Star Wars universe, planets have planetary shields, which are extremely powerful and able to take a lot of abuse. An asteroid strike is wildly less powerful than what the Death Star can inflict on a planet; ten+ of orders of magnitude, and I mean that fully literally. An asteroid strike may be enough to wipe out an unprotected civilization, but it hardly affects the planet underneath. The Death Star delivered enough energy to the target to undo the entire binding energy of the planet and completely disassemble it, and do it quite quickly. That's the difference between a very large nuclear strike, let's say 10^20J for roundness [1], vs. the binding energy of a planet, call it 10^32J, plus a great deal extra kinetic energy to blow the planet apart at a sufficient speed to satisfy Hollywood's need for instant spectacle.

For that matter, the canon specifications for a single turbolaser strike are on the order of what we'd associate with a very large nuclear event; if a planetary shield can withstand sustained bombardment by multiple Star Destroyers, moving an asteroid around isn't going to matter.

(One could discuss accelerating an asteroid to kinetic kill speeds, but if you can build a Death Star, it is certainly a lot easier to control and deploy.)

In real life, of course, with no plausible mechanism for anything like "shields" to exist, you are of course correct. If you're patient one can completely destroy all life on a planet with distressingly small investments of energy not entirely dissimilar to what we could produce today.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent , I'm spec'ing out a ~20 gigaton strike here.

[2]: http://scienceblogs.com/builtonfacts/2009/02/the_physics_of_...
Woz is famous because he worked with a team.

Alone Woz couldn't have had the sense to sell blue boxes, the gumption to complete Breakout in a crunch, or build a computer that worked with a color TV, or design the elegant Apple II. He would have stayed at HP and been a great mid-level manager. He now lives the life he wants, without having to worry about about money, all because he worked with a team.
Teaching and Being Wrong
The Quarterly - A WordPress Magazine
apparently Microsoft is working more to the win32 port, and now there is a github repository: https://github.com/Microsoft-Interop/redis

I hope to see some good stuff in the next weeks.
Well said. I used no-CD cracks on the entire Diablo series because my CD drive was slow but my HDD was big. I bought all of the games and expansion packs. Also, when running Diablo II on WINE, it was a massive pain in the ass to "umount /dev/hdc; eject" ::change disc:: "mount /dev/hdc /cdrom" every friggen time. I had a 20GB (!) HD, I damn well want to use it!
Hi, sorry for the slow reply. As mentioned express is a good way to go for getting a website up with node.

Since you asked, my project is over here http://jobstractor.com if you want to take a look. My email is on the site so feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions. I'm planning on writing up my experience and a bit about how I've structured things so some questions might help me think through that.
Probably your breakup affecting things. I know how it is, but hang in there. Find a good friend to lean on--I don't know what your support network looks like. When I went through divorce, I had good friends that helped me through, and after a few months, I was back to myself.
I'm curious, why did you chose Lua?
I don't think it's an image problem, really. It's a focus problem.

I'd never buy a piece of Microsoft portable tech, because they always end up killing everything they release within a few years.

If they could just stick with something for a while, I might have some confidence, but between PlaysForSure (hah!), Zune, Kin, etc, they give me no REASON to trust them.
There's this awesome karaoke bar in Philly where you can rent private rooms with their own karaoke machine. the interface is so bad, that I, a software engineer, was unable to get it to work without getting extremely frustrated, calling for help multiple times. so naturally I start thinking about how I could build a business around karaoke machines with nice UX and rent them. But it turns out a karaoke machine is useless without a library of content, and the company that builds them is a subsidiary of a Japanese label thus can negotiate discounts with content owners. It's just not something that's easy to compete with.

Anyway, I go to this karaoke bar about 6 times a year and drop a hundred bucks each time. I don't think they care to invest in UX right now ;)

anyway, if you extrapolate this idea a bit, it makes you wonder - if software is your business's core competency, and you're competing mostly on UX, maybe you are doing it wrong?
xRTML is a client-side javascript framework. http://bit.ly/zhakvV It doesn't just support XML-like tags, it has other APIs too.
First time I heard the term "hypermedia".
The general warning of "correlation not causation" applies here. The studies show some correlation between sitting for hours and various maladies. However, there are so many factors that determine your susceptibility to the health issues you mention that calling out just one factor (sitting) needs to be viewed with some skepticism.

That said, I do use a standing desk for about half of my working hours because I think it is healthier to not sit all day.
This is why everyone should have had a "real" job at least once, even if you've been a programmer since birth. It's a real eye-opener to realise how bad systems work in practice.
Because it secures jobs.
>If a Death Star takes a couple of decades of build wouldn't be obsolete by the time its finished?

Only if there's something better in the meantime. Which there really wasn't in Star Wars. Also it can be built while it's in operation, like a supermarket remaining open during remodeling.

>a planet sized space craft from metal seems silly when there are plenty of large space objects ready to be commandeered and turned into very large space vessels.

Would a planet be able to retain its structural integrity while being carved out to house a million soldiers? Having to build structures on the surface would defeat the purpose of a Death Star.

Also the Death Star has defenses, so it doesn't traditionally need to withstand large impacts.