skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wouldn't an 850GHz signal be lost if an insect flew between sender and receiver? Isn't that going to make it pretty impractical? Honest questions. I could easily be missing something.

High-res radar seems viable, though.
I was always told that the thing that makes you irritable and cloudy-minded before eating breakfast in the morning is 'low blood sugar'. Sounds like it's probably just 'being hungry' :)
As somebody who is not a heavy phone user I only recently switched from using prepaid to contract.
I think there's a few reasons that contracts are popular.

Cost, a new Iphone 4S is ~£400, with a contract you effectively get it for £40 up front. Sure, over the life of the 2 year contract it might work out cheaper to buy it up front but not everybody has £400 up front and they really have their heart set on the iphone. It's basically another form of "buy now , pay later".

Convenience , a monthly paid phone will always work as long as you remember to pay the bill. My days on prepaid phones were a hassle as I remember needing to make calls and having no credit, or being cut off in the middle of a call due to running out of credit. Having to wrestle with the automated payment line in order to make an important call is a real pain.

Culture, There is a perception (in the UK at least) that prepaid phones are for children and drug dealers while serious grown ups will have a monthly contract. I know a few women who would consider a guy who uses a prepaid phone as a "bad sign" if out on a date for example.
How does one go about writing their own commands for a hosted product?
I just spent my Saturday afternoon servicing and repairing my car.

It's a very rewarding activity to research and learn how a complex thing like a car works, and then to apply your smarts to fixing it simply by reading books and the internet.

There is also something very rewarding to completing a job well, and being able to drive knowing you've fixed something yourself.

Other weekends I spend time fixing things around the house, or maybe tending to the garden.

Being an all-rounder is good for the soul and good for relating to other people.

Specialisation is for insects.
21 years for wiretapping? This surely sounds extreme, to the point of being incredible - can somebody with some expertise in legal system evaluate how probably is to get such sentence? Given no priors, no history of violence, no harm to property or any person and no criminal intent - even if he violated the law I don't see how it can even warrant one year in jail, let alone 21. Is US judicial system really that screwed up or is it just imagination of article writers?
The commands will trigger a webhook call to your server, where the actual deployment/testing/whatever command you need takes place.
...and of course even the kernel had to have exceptions for them anyway - it knew they were special because it had to stop userspace from unlink()ing or rename()ing them.
Am not sure that it is even a poor headline as such, as it does it's job descriptively with a commonly understood label, as in, I understood when I saw it that someone was going to find themselves completely outclassed.

Is more of a cultural criticism really, that we often allow ourselves to see so many of these kinds of interactions as some sort of constant social competition, when there are so many other interesting ways of approaching stuff.
I was interested in what webhooks are, but there was no link in the article. Aha! I thought to myself, I'll look it up on the internet, and behold there was webhooks.org, which I assume is its home. Going there I find no description of what it is, a broken link to the blog, and a wiki that does not exist. So I guess it's not ready for primetime?
I believe a more formal definition of realtime is: When missing a deadline constitutes a system failure. Given this definition realtime systems are not bucketed in such a way that they invite a false dichotomy. For instance on one end of the spectrum you would have hard realtime systems (e.g. a pacemakers) where missing a deadline means death of the patient or serious financial loss. On the other end of the spectrum you would have soft realtime systems (e.g. facebook) where missing a deadline of say displaying a web page in under a second would constitute a system failure (revenue/engagement decrease), but still be valuable (people will put up with slow page loads, look at reddit).
Just note that cash can also be anonymous, guaranteed not to hyper inflate, free to transact etc.
Good question. Here is a complete transcript that I have typed up of the 24 second long phone call that is the controversial call in question. (source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEhFwI6IyMU)

Patrol Captain Office, can I help you?

Ah yes, I was calling to see if there was a comment about a video that is surfacing on line of Detective Murphy slamming a 17 year old child on top of a table.

Well, I haven't seen the video. Where is it?

It's on a web site called CopBlock.org.

OK, I'll take a look. (Click.)
This is really one of the worst dysfunctions of mobile telephony today, at least in North America.

The cell phone carriers have an iron grip on the sales channel for cell phones, and that sales channel is the oxygen supply for handset manufacturers. Realistically that means that Samsung needs to sell to Verizon, not Verizon's customers.

Interested in why the HTC One X hasn't sold very well? In spite of equivalent electronics compared to Samsung and far superior build quality? It's because Verizon and AT&T got pissed off at HTC a year ago when HTC announced that they were going to be unlocking their boot loaders.

HTC forgot that they don't sell to cell phone users - they sell to the telephone company.
Hey, he never said you'll succeed, just that nothing will stop you.
Should be Edinburgh in the title, please...
I can't find the direct link, but I remember seeing an article that said the following happens after every Olympics:

1. There is some level of scandal over ticketing

2. The IOC forms a technical committee to look into it

3. The technical committee says that the Olympics is a relatively unique ticketing situation (all the different buckets of tickets, how they change, when they're released, etc.), and that the best solution would be to invest ~$200M in a custom ticketing solution which the IOC would own, and could then lease to the organizing committees and other international event

4. The IOC executive says that it's a sports organization - and not a logistics company - and reminds itself that sales are the responsibility of the host Committee, so they should deal with it and figure it out, and then kills the idea.
Because it's possible for the DHS to hold copyrights if someone else transfers it to them.
I was playing around with hubot and especially the redis-brain part of it. Would love to see a good write-up on how to use the brain. I see you're planning to write about it in Chapter 4, so I'd love it when you would add more info about it there!
Interesting. Although I tend to agree, it's worth considering one possible difference between cutlery and computing devices: cutlery may have very little usage overlap, and computing devices may have considerable usage overlap.

I actually use my notebook and tablet for reading (even the same content!), I actually use all devices for facebook, I actually use my phone and tablet for gaming, and so forth.

For some tasks, one device type is clearly superior to all others (notebook for typing, tablet for sketching). For many tasks though, clear superiority is hard to establish, or is heavily context dependent.

Ultimately, Steve had it right - for the iPad to succeed, it had to be clearly better for some important things. Strong separation of uses is not required.
OK. Your comment history up to this point hasn't been very trollish, so I'll assume you're actually trying to be straightforward here.

You seem to be making the claim that Groklaw is somehow worthy of scrutiny (which implies that they are somehow dangerous, or at least influential, but I'll get to that in a moment). You're also implying that Groklaw does not have a competitor.

In general, you're right that demanding transparency from politically influential organizations shouldn't require a burden of proof. However, I've seen no evidence that Groklaw is either politically influential or influential in matters of law. The principals behind Groklaw may be influential in their own professional rights, but Groklaw itself is not: Groklaw does not have a horse in this race. Do you think that the judge is reading Groklaw and thinking, "Hmm, good point"? Or that the attorneys for either side are doing the same? Or that the jurors are, which is strictly forbidden? I seriously doubt that Groklaw's analyses are having any impact on the case.

You're also wrong that Groklaw doesn't have a competitor, at least where this case is concerned. Groklaw has been publicly at odds with Ars Technica's Joe Mullin, even (in at least one instance that I remember) poking a little fun at him for getting the outcome of this case so wrong.

And, just last year, Groklaw came quite close to voluntarily shutting down (http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Off-the-Beat-Bruc...) entirely because the SCO vs. Linux (et al) cases, which Groklaw was created to discuss, were pretty much all settled. Any suspicions of nefarious purposes on Groklaw's part would have to explain why Groklaw was so willing to just shut down at that point.

I don't disagree that it would be nice if there were more sites doing in-depth legal analyses of technical cases targeted for a layman audience. But, the demand for that is pretty small, and so is the supply: I expect that there aren't very many legal professionals that are at the top of the game at law and technology, and possess the ability and desire to publish in-depth analyses of cases where they aren't making any money.

So now the ball's in your court. Why, specifically, should we be questioning Groklaw's motives?
I use hard copy and do not carry them with me- For most non critical site I use a simple algorithm to get the password on the fly. For sites that support openid, I use 2 factor auth enabled two factor I have created-.
Tales like this are exactly what has inspired us at Scholastica (https://scholasticahq.com/) to make it easy for academic journals to publish Open Access. I'm a member of the team and would encourage anyone interested in OA publishing to take gander at what we're doing. You can find an example of what an OA journal looks like on Scholastica here: https://scholasticahq.com/the-scholastica-example-journal
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Clipboard Goes Mobile With “Private Pinterest”
If you conceive to build a perpetual motion machine then you will have taken the first step. The second (more difficult) step will be to conceive how a perpetual motion machine might actually work, or to come up with a plausible way of re-writing the laws of thermodynamics.

The point of the quote is not some wishy-washy "you can if you believe you can". Rather, it might be phrased better as "If you have the vision to see how something might be achieved and the drive to actually achieve it, nothing can stop you from achieving it".
Thanks! I'm looking for a video series to teach me though. Knowing myself, I know that visual and auditory stimulation is the most efficient way for me to learn.
My AT&T plan ended a couple of weeks ago. I was considering buying a Virgin Mobile iPhone and reselling it when the iPhone 5 came out, but this seems like a better way to bide my time.

Googling for things like "iPhone ATT prepaid" didn't yield good results. The power of a human recommendation is infinitely useful. And backed up by an Ars technica article is double win.

Thanks Zdw...
I'm trying to understand which part of my book you're trying to 'avoid'. Because from what I understand it's just the deploying bit? Which my hubot-factory already did, and it is being improved for a new version with the help of a great company. You've also essentially made script writing even harder than it is for hubot.
According to the guy's comments on Twitter, the hacker didn't have to answer the security questions.
"This article is right about one thing: people do seem to put too much importance on the upfront cost. I see things like the latest gen iPhone is $99 upfront and the previous generation is $49. For $50 you get older hardware that will be obsolete a year earlier... for something that'll probably cost you up to $2000 (or more) over 2 years anyway"

I think it's more of a cash flow thing than anything else. People buy the best thing they can afford based on the cash they have available at that very moment.
And if you conceive to be stopped by something?
Your post should have then been "IFTTT should cater to developers" not "IFTTT needs webhooks." IFTTT's entire thesis is that non-developers should be able to 'program' computers. Just because you want webhooks and they would be cool doesn't mean IFTTT should work on features that go against the entire premise of their product -- and if you think they should, this is the primary argument you should be making, not if they should be adding feature X or Y. Surely if IFTTT's target market shifted from the general public to developers, there would be many things developers would want, and webhooks is only one of them.
Right, but I think this is why it's great. Apt has a lot of disadvantages because it's the only option. By contrast, OSX had fink, and macports, and now homebrew. If Fink had been designated the winner back then, there would have been no competition, and homebrew would never have come out.
"One wonderful thing about do-it-yourself, as a movement, is that it is a powerful way of creating more skilled technicians..."

The DIY "movement" actually existed since at least the beginning of the "radio movement" back in the late 1800s. Not until about the mid-1980s did it start to wane (as disposable lighters and more complex car engines and electronics packages with oddball fasteners came into fashion, and Japanese electronics displaced US-made). Check back into the early years of PC computing (before IBM introduced the PC and emphasis shifted to business) and you'll find a vital and extensive DIY "computer movement" existed. (Read Kilobyte and Byte magazines.)

This may be one benefit of the financial raping of USA ... the (partial, at-least) rebirth of the realization that it's not rocket science, and the satisfactions of DIY electronics far outweigh the conveniences of box stores.
> According to Article 22 of the New Hampshire constitution, "free speech ... [is] to be inviolably preserved". It is difficult to reconcile this "wiretapping" law with the constitution.

Why do you think that free speech implies a right to record what someone else says without their permission?
Yup, I plan on writing a pretty detailed section in chapter 4 about the hubot brain. Redis is just the default backend for persisting the brain.
Totally meaningless number since we have no idea what the Rails app is doing.
"backward wave oscillator"

"quantum cascade laser"

"hot electron bolometric mixer"

"traveling-wave tube"

Computer scientists, take note: start naming your ideas like this and you will get more grant money.
Hi, we are building something similar. We had a Kickstarter a few months back that did not reach our funding goal, but we are still forging ahead. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/daisyworks/internet-your... -- it involves connecting hardware / arduino like sensors / controls to an IFTTT-like system.

Thing is...there are two of us building this part-time with day jobs / families. We have a really good start, but we really lack the time / resources to take it to the next level. If you are interested in this kind of thing, please drop me a note at davis@daisyworks.com -- I would love to recruit some more passionate people to get involved and make it into what you want it to be.
I pay $45 a month for unlimited everything on the AT&T network (Straight Talk). Nobody else can even remotely come close to that.

The absolute cheapest postpaid plan any carrier offers is $40 a month plus bullshit fees and taxes - even if you knock 20% (which is an abnormally high discount - and its especially disingenuous to suggest a 20% discount in a startup forum where people almost certainly aren't affiliated with a company of sufficient size to receive such a discount) off of that, that's $32 + 'fees' and taxes plus the cost of an SMS and/or data plan. Your 'free' features start looking a lot less competitive at that point.
I think this kind of snarky, rediculous pedantry is exactly one of the things that Russell Kirsch doesn't want people doing, even if you only meant it in jest.
There are also much stronger laws (and enforcement practices) around reselling sports tickets in the UK than in the US.
A good social engineering attack knows more about me than I do. They know my first pet, my mother's maiden name, and where all my banking records are. Lots of ways of getting that. Notice - the call was because the guys _phone_ was inoperable. A call back could go to a burner, and Apple would be none the wiser.

Very few, if any, defenses against social engineering, other than (A) Not allowing it, or (B) Requiring a Notarized-registered-letter of identification to start the process.

I'm a fan of using Notaries for password resets. Particularly to my email account, as it's the most valuable thing I own. Double-notarize in the event of two-factor resets. Make it a HUGE burden. Lock me out of email for a week or two if required, but don't give anyone access to my email.
I thought Oracle had agreed to $0 in damages for the rangeCheck copyright infringement ( http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9228298/Oracle_agrees... ) so they could get on with appealing the API copyrightability and the patents. Why are they arguing about it now. Did I miss a step?
Spec work: for looser managers and employees.
Nice SEO juice. Did you manually make that page, or are they auto-generated?
Poor wording. It should be:

> Last night, I needed a way for a webhook to be notified each time I posted a new tweet.

Tweets can come from a variety of sources, so hooking in at the source isn't always possible or even reasonable.
Your server just experienced an unexpected ass kicking
I think I'm going to get my fiancee to tell me once every day - "stop fucking around!"
Really? Is there a study or some other resource I can read more about this at?
I'm trying to avoid people needing to even read the book. It's the difference between rolling your own WebSockets or using Pusher, for example. Some people want things to just work.
They don't think that. They're just grasping at straws. Now that their efforts to show reasonable evidence that Google infringed on something substantial from them failed, they grasp at the last piece of remaining evidence and intend to ride this to the bitter end. And, of course, since it's all billable hours, the longer and stupider the argument becomes, the better. If they need to spend a year in the court arguing about if rangeCheck has enough characters to be copyrightable, it's all win for the lawyers, as the alternative is to admit the defeat and look for another client wanting to lose a copyright case. Why Oracle continues to pay for this circus is less understandable, but I guess they're just too committed to it to just say "OK, we give up, all our claims turned out to be nothing but baloney, thanks for playing". I guess they want even the tiniest bit of win to be able to claim they didn't do it for nothing.
Marakana Android Bootcamp Screencast Series

http://marakana.com or on YouTube.
Thus git checkout -b makes perfect sense.

Does it? Pull and then merge is a common operation; it gets a top-level command. Create a new branch from the one I'm working on and check it out is a common operation; it gets a flag on an existing command. What logical, coherent process decides that in each case?

Branches have only one meaning in git!

Hence the "forces end users to do so". There are two very common ways people use branches: one is as a temporary place to do a quick bugfix, the other is as a long-lived place to do a major rewrite or refactoring. With respect to the history of the codebase, these have very different implications, but semantically are the same type of thing in git.

To pick on Subversion: when you had a long-lived branch in SVN, sooner or later you'd merge it back into the mainline... and then what happens? You want someone to be able to look at the repository and see that something major happened here and easily watch the progress, but you also want a way to say "this is done and merged". This required inventing a convention to indicate that -- in SVN, typically the finished branches would go in an "attic" directory.

In git you face the same problem: making a temporary branch, doing the work, merging and then deleting the branch is what you're supposed to do in git. But for those long-lived major branches, you need to invent a convention (commonly, tagging the merge point) to indicate that they're done.

I mentioned Mercurial because it has two different concepts for these things: the ephemeral deleted-once-it's-done line is a bookmark (which is pretty much exactly equivalent to a git branch, in that it's a named head that moves as you commit), and the long-lived major branch is... a branch. Which has additional semantics to indicate things like being finished.

This means that in Mercurial you don't have to invent and re-invent ad-hoc conventions to handle common development patterns, while in git you do.

Can't gitk do this?

Every time I say I want to see two branches side-by-side without invoking the VCS, someone says "well, here's a tool that invokes the VCS to do that!" Which shows a lack of reading comprehension.

Some folks need to branch differently than others.

Sure, but why isn't there a clearly-documented "most projects will get along fine with this" workflow? Or, rather, why are there dozens of them? We've had VCS tools for long enough that the best practices for common cases are out there.

The github workflow might be a little tricky, but as has been pointed out there are other workflows possible in git.

Oh, there are. But git + GitHub has been relentlessly hyped as an Oatmeal-ish fantasy of unicorns farting rainbows onto a field of lollipops, so that's how people actually end up using it, and so it's valid to mention that it's a more complex workflow for contributors since it is a very common case and becoming more common.
Mountain lions and bears are reasonably common in some areas.
sure, but what were their individual motives? If the CFO had a plan to migrate to SomeOtherCo(R) in two years if he did well enough at Sears, then maybe that was his horizon...
One problem is I have no idea what physical address Apple has for me, but I'm sure I have moved at least three times (as many as five) since I gave them that address.

A better solution is require a notarized physical mail in the event of password changes for high-security accounts. Everything else just goes to your email account.
It's a way to link, or "hook" to a web based service. You provide a URL where you want to receive event information, and when an event happens the server will HTTP POST the relevant information to the URL. This way, you don't have to constantly poll the service asking "did an event happen yet?"; the server will notify you automatically.
I use a prepaid T-Mobile plan that's $30/month for 100 minutes and 5GB of data. I tend to use about 150 minutes a month, so I'm really paying $35ish with overage.
So you came here to advertise your own product in a post about mine?

You're basically deploying a thing that'll send http requests to another server which then executes specific tasks. So you've essentially replaced hubot with a web application on the end users servers.

What is the difference?