skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ubuntu is mostly open source/free software. Ubuntu integrates Amazon search as part of its local search, and that code is open source. (I'll assume also that it uses encryption; if it doesn't, it could easily be changed with no affect on my logic.) Stallman says that Ubuntu 12.10 is spyware.

Ergo, "open source and an encrypt-everything mentality" is not sufficient to protect us.

People can use fully secure software and encrypted connections to talk with friends via Facebook ... which stores the data and can reveal it to unexpected third parties.

In both case, people just don't care.

What will "protect us" is to convince people that these are things to worry about, with repercussions to the CIA or others who should try.

BTW, an encrypt-everything mentality can make things worse, depending on where the encryption occurs. If you see traffic between your web browser and a server somewhere, how can you verify that it's sending only the data that you expect it to carry? Perhaps a security hole has been exploited, and it's helping someone spy on you.

If all of the data in encrypted in the browser process, then it's hard for you to verify the data traffic going over the network, because it's encrypted. It would be better if you could insert your own inspectors in the data stream.

This can be done with a web browser via a proxy, where the proxy handles the encryption. Few people do that. Do you? How do you know HN isn't spying on you right now through your browser?
>rather, all the good methods of compression are being hoarded by patent trolls

Nah, that is simply untrue. Theora was designed in the late _90s_ and targets a different computational envelope than AVC— it's pretty darn good compared to MPEG-2 (or even MPEG4 part-2/DivX) which are more contemporary.

Today there is a much large computational budget available, plus new experience and understanding.
Comparing html and xml is silly. They are basically the same.

Platform independence was the point.

If people use the app daily, it's worth going native for the better performance.

Your example about 60m vs 2m is intentionally engineered to be an exception and I said there are exceptions.
3 of my favorites were JavaScript books:

Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja by John Resig (2012) is a very hands-on look at writing a Javascript library: http://j.mp/RgOcXO

High Performance JavaScript by Nicholas C. Zakas (2010) is one of the most thorough treatments of performance and JS I have read: http://j.mp/V0R0X3

Professional JavaScript for Web Developers (2012 3rd edition) is an incredibly in-depth reference of JavaScript as it relates to the DOM. The third edition was heavily updated: http://j.mp/V3eGKC
That's exactly what the blogger has requested. He hasn't asked for any personal details.
"Entrepreneurship is not a full human education, and living is never just succeeding, and the humanities are always pertinent. In pain or in sorrow, who needs a quant? There are enormities of experience, horrors, crimes, disasters, tragedies, which revive the appetite for wisdom, and for the old sources, however imprecise, of wisdom—a massacre of schoolchildren, for example."

I used to think that school/college was just an assembly line. You enter as a child and are filled with facts and formula until you are a productive member of society. Boy was I wrong. School is about forming relationships, exploring your interests, and developing an identity. I did well in k-12 without applying myself and being the class clown, so I never took the whole institution too seriously. However, after dropping out of college to start a company, which didn't go as I thought it would, I realized a few more semesters would not have killed me. I really just wanted to say to the world 'I made it without that piece of paper, defied the odds, and did what I set out to do.' I've been humbled quite a bit as I've seen college graduates make tenfold the money I do, have more social encounters, and still somehow pursue their side projects.

I'm a first generation American without a father figure, so my whole life I've tried to be a man even though I was only a boy. That definitely has had an impact on my world perspective. Today, as my prefrontal cortex has almost fully developed at age 23, the 'angry young lad' in me has begun to calm down into a simple, passionate member of civilization. I've decided to go back to school (Gwinnett Tech) and finish my CIS degree. I hope it can provide a steady income while I attempt my second startup. I have learned to avoid extremes and see the world in a more balanced way. As the old saying goes, you live and you learn. That is definitely true. All in all, I have learned a lot that could never be taught in a classroom but I find myself in need of something to fall back on for those rainy days that no one ever wants or expects.

I think Dale Stephens is a nice guy but seriously missing the point. His followers mostly think just like him too and need some "authority figure" to justify their experience to themselves. I hope he learns that the future of education is a hybrid of in-person and internet models, as it should be.
Why not target both?
Your point is not a bad one, but you clearly didn't read a word of the essay.
Scraping dynamic websites using Capybara + PhantomJS
It's the ns timing given that's off by an order of 10 actually. RTT to Netherlands and back definitely isn't 1.5 s
In Israel the first "devbootcamp" is being held in Python.
http://10x.org.il
The Iliad, I had high expectations but it was even better than I expected.
One month with a Chevy Volt; so far, so very, very good
> This is about the IDF keeping secret/private the details surrounding the deaths of 126 soldiers.

No, this is about labelling them 'killed in action'.

> jacquesm, you're quite a valuable asset to this community but this is a reddit-level comment.

I don't think you're the arbiter about what is and is not a valuable asset to the community, I interpret your words as 'when I agree with you you are an asset, but when we disagree your comments are reddit level' (whatever reddit level is, for all I know it could be a compliment).

I speak my mind without wondering whether you will agree with me or not, chances are that you'll find that at times I will say things you will disagree with, possibly even strongly.

Chances are also that in those cases 50% of the times you're right and I'm wrong and vv. So before calling names you might want to consider the possibility that we simply disagree, and moreover that you could be wrong.

Propaganda is when armies / governments do not report the truth because the truth is not as useful to them as fiction. Reporting these as KIA is better for the IDF, they have absolutely no problem labelling suicides for their enemies as such. If there was any truth to this not being propaganda then you'd expect the IDF to be equally circumspect when it comes to other deaths.

Making the opposition look bad ('look, 126 people killed in action') is useful to them. That's the simplest explanation. Stigma attached to the suicides is a private affair, and does not come out from aggregate data.

If they wanted to be even handed about it they could label the deaths as 'cause withheld, but non-combatant', or 'accidental'.

You will also note that the blogger exposing this has not released any private information, all he's asking for is some basic honesty in aggregate numbers.
I read a number of good books but hands down my favorite that I read in 2012 was Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.

This is from Amazon:
At once wildly original and stuffed with irresistible nostalgia, READY PLAYER ONE is a spectacularly genre-busting, ambitious, and charming debut—part quest novel, part love story, and part virtual space opera set in a universe where spell-slinging mages battle giant Japanese robots, entire planets are inspired by Blade Runner, and flying DeLoreans achieve light speed.

It’s the year 2044, and the real world is an ugly place.

Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes his grim surroundings by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia that lets you be anything you want to be, a place where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets.

And like most of humanity, Wade dreams of being the one to discover the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this virtual world. For somewhere inside this giant networked playground, OASIS creator James Halliday has hidden a series of fiendish puzzles that will yield massive fortune—and remarkable power—to whoever can unlock them.

For years, millions have struggled fruitlessly to attain this prize, knowing only that Halliday’s riddles are based in the pop culture he loved—that of the late twentieth century. And for years, millions have found in this quest another means of escape, retreating into happy, obsessive study of Halliday’s icons. Like many of his contemporaries, Wade is as comfortable debating the finer points of John Hughes’s oeuvre, playing Pac-Man, or reciting Devo lyrics as he is scrounging power to run his OASIS rig.

And then Wade stumbles upon the first puzzle.

Suddenly the whole world is watching, and thousands of competitors join the hunt—among them certain powerful players who are willing to commit very real murder to beat Wade to this prize. Now the only way for Wade to survive and preserve everything he knows is to win. But to do so, he may have to leave behind his oh-so-perfect virtual existence and face up to life—and love—in the real world he’s always been so desperate to escape.

A world at stake.
A quest for the ultimate prize.
Are you ready?
wise words. thanx for sharing.
While this example looks pretty good now with just that limited functionality, if you continued to use this pattern across a complex UI, your Setup() function is going to be 1000 lines long and likely incomprehensible.

I like the idea, but I'm pretty sure there are nicer ways to set that up than an arcane looking IObservable block inside a Setup() function. I guess it's just for demonstration though, and in a real UI he would have those off in their respective controllers and setup in their own methods.
"Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace, if you have 90 hours or so to kill
"On Numbers & Games" is a fun maths book
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4962975
Thanks to rake and brew etc, Thinking sphinx, sunspot and elastic search/tire are all pretty easy with rails if you want default indexes on English language docs. It all gets complex quickly when you start layering on multiple search strategies and indexes, n-gram search, convert ISO latin to ASCII, etc, not to mention the S word "scaling" and anything near realtime index updates

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9160305/elastic-search-vs...

http://adventuresincoding.com/2012/05/full-text-search-in-ra...

http://www.slideshare.net/dkeener/rails-and-the-apache-solr-...
What implication on my RoR programming is supposed to be from knowing that mutex lock/unlock time is 17ns? Especially, if the web site is hosted on Amazon? Should really every programmer know it?
Lucene search with Rails is easy and very common. Sunspot[http://sunspot.github.com/] is just one example.
Also: The Age of Gold by HW Brands- a really fun history of the California gold rush.
Two highlights from an earlier blog post (http://bellm.org/blog/2012/11/24/the-best-books-i-read-in-20...):

How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming, Mike Brown

A funny and very humanizing picture of a scientist at work: A great account of the quest to discover planets beyond Pluto, and of the upheaval that followed.

Moonwalking with Einstein, Joshua Foer

Can a normal person become a memory champion? Joshua Foer covers a lot of ground in this well-written book, including extensive historical background as well as considerations of neuroscience, deliberate practice and expertise, savantism, and immersive journalism.
Ruby and it's community.
(Disclaimer again: I work for Booking.com in IT)

> I would advice against agoda and booking.com as they
> forward your credit card info to the hotel as security.

They don't forward your credit card as security. They forward it for the hotel to charge you for the entirety of your booking.

Companies like Expedia follow the merchant model, they buy up hotels rooms in bulk in advance and then re-sell them directly to customers. When you buy from a merchant your credit card isn't shared with the hotel as there's no need to do so.

Other companies like Booking.com and Agoda follow the agency model. They find customers for the hotels, forward their payment details along to the hotel, the hotel charges the customer, and then pays the agency a percentage of the booking as an agency fee[1].

Both models have their pros and cons. The merchant model works brilliantly in the US where large chains are the norm. It works less well in Europe where the vast number of hotels are small properties.

> Imagine the surprise when you are at the hotel counter
> and the staff shows you a printout of your credit card
> info(nothing obscured; everything in plain text).

It's fair enough that this makes you uncomfortable. But the hotel with that printout has a contract with the credit card company like any other merchant and is responsible for treating it responsibly.

I think you'd also be very surprised at the number of other merchants you might deal with where this is the case. Having a printout with a credit card number is not at all unusual in a lot of businesses.
Seinfeld & Startups
This does not correspond with my experience with online travel agencies. Whenever I've had any sort of irregularity to deal with, there were now two entities to communicate with instead of one. And sometimes the travel agency doesn't pass on the lenient policies of the principal.
I agree, this is what got me hooked on Android in the first place. Now that I understand the Android SDK and have made a few apps, any problem (even something pretty low-level) on my phone can be fixed if I'm willing to take the time to code up a solution.
The folks working on H.265 have already been producing material (http://phenix.int-evry.fr/jct/doc_end_user/documents/10_Stoc...) to counter the belief that you must have hardware accelerators for video decoding.

And they have a point: the _screen_, radio, etc. (http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/rtcweb/current/msg03785...) of most mobile devices is already using something like 90+% of the power, so even in the impossible case that hardware accelerators make decode itself use no power they can't make that much of a battery life difference, so long as the device was fast enough to decode in the first place. And this trend will only continue as devices becomes faster and process shrinks lower the computing per joule.

But it's amusing to see some of the same people arguing that hardware accelerators were _must have_ are now arguing the opposite now that its their latest format which is suffering for the lack of them.
AngularJS does this super well :)
1. Probability

Bayesian statistics and its applications. A lot of things I want to understand like Probabilistic Graphical Models, Cryptography, and Computer Vision seem to be based in fundamental bayesian statistics I never really grokked that well.

2. EE and Computer architecture.

I never studied any EE. The more I program, the more tempted I am to get closer to the metal. It's a little weird that I tell computers what to do, but I don't really understand exactly what they do with those commands. Nowadays computers are so fast, we don't NEED to know. We're network latency bound all the time. But not knowing still feels like a big gap.

3. Visualization.

There are some crazy cool alternative visualizations out there. The remainder of the decade is going to be about visualizing data for humans as we wait for the day computers can truly understand and reason about it. I want to understand the state of the art in explaining data rather than just throwing pie, line and bar charts around and calling it visualization.

All of these are interesting to me because they're core concepts. I've learned a good bit about Node, Ember, D3, CSS3, and advanced Python in my free time over the last few months, but they're just tools of the moment. I'm getting older and I want practical CS knowledge where the state of the art doesn't change fundamentally every two years. I can pick up and put down the tools.
Well, keep at it, I think you may have redeemed yourself but on the off-chance that that hasn't happened yet you can always build up a store of good karma for a rainy day.

Thanks man. Sincerely.
I think it should be fixed now. Thanks!
As long as there is a better one - yes. Why not? There are elasticsearch-clients that pretty much plug into activerecord and elasticsearch is pretty darn good.
Oh, yeah - absolutely. The servlet API was very much of its time, and for several years it seemed to be a good solution. I think it's only in retrospect that it became more clear that there were key challenges that everyone faced in building a web application that the servlet API, and J2EE more broadly, didn't solve. For me that was the thing Rails demonstrated: a full stack solution for building web applications that actually tackled the real problems (like routing requests from URLs to controller methods). And I think the major changes to J2EE since have been in large part a reaction to Rails showing what problems a web framework should actually try to solve.
Deferred processing is fine, until it isn't. For instance it's fine for things that don't have a lot of non-local changes, such as addition, subtration, multiplication, etc. as in brightness, contrast, compositing and so on.

It breaks down however when you do have processing that produces nonlocal changes, such as convolution, blurring, sharpening, distortion, etc. as in soft filter, gaussian blur filter, distort filter and so on.

You can run these at screen resolution only, but the result you will get can vary wildly from what the ultimate render will be.
There are other things going on here which are a little off the radar in the public. Military launch costs have been rather high but the bigger issue has been the cost and management of military satellites. The procurement of next generation spy satellites has been nothing short of a debacle, as they've gone hugely over budget and behind schedule and there are some indications that they've missed the mark in terms of capabilities and reliability as well. All of this is, of course, shrouded in secrecy so there's much we don't know but there's enough publicly available data to be able to divine that the whole thing has been a GDCF for at least the last decade.

This in turn puts more pressure on the launch providers as any failures, delays, or cost increases there just adds salt to the wound. Which partially explains the enthusiasm the DoD is showing for putting military hardware on SpaceX rockets. Also, the ability to take advantage of the Falcon Heavy's increased payload may give some breathing room to the spacecraft manufacturers, since there are few problems in spacecraft design which can't be made easier by merely adding more mass. And the ability to launch cheaper and potentially more often could enable a more iterative style of satellite development, and also a more competitive one (launching full-up prototype satellites prior to awarding a multi-satellite contract, for example). Which could put satellite procurement on a more reasonable footing for the future.
Wouldn't you want to use Solr (which wraps Lucene under a nice API) if you're using PHP? It's what I've always done.

I don't see the bad news at all, if you wan't to implement proper search you need something like that.
A full backup of about 600GB happens in --I think-- about three or four hours. That's the problem with remote backup, the same full image would require a third of a year on a typical DSL connection available in the US today. Actually, it could take twice as long, two thirds of a year, because you would have to interrupt your backup in order to get your bandwidth back for use during business hours. So, if it takes you nearly a whole year to backup this much data the whole thing is just-about useless as implemented. Your incremental backups are likely to take days and you can't even consider the idea of doing full images every thirty or sixty days.

The thing is, you don't need independent full backups within a single online backup provider, and they would probably deduplicate your backups anyway. Incremental backups work just fine, and will always get your data backed up that night unless you are the kind of person that generates many gigabytes of content in a single day.

I use Dropbox for team communications. I almost think of it as a really neat way to "FTP" stuff around.

Yeah, I can understand that. I was considering replying to one of your other posts with the comparison, but I didn't want to start too many thread at once. The problem is that when you use dropbox as a better FTP, you lose out on a lot of the benefits of syncing. No longer can you go to a different computer and pick up right where you were, if you didn't happen to copy in the files again since the last change. If you're sharing files with a coworker you no longer have any idea where the most recent version is. You don't have a full list of file versions. And your FTP-method of dropbox doesn't really have anything to do with backups. You could move files into the dropbox folder and then set it to be backed up every five minutes if you wanted to.
"Learn cocos2d 2 - Game Development for iOS" by Steffen Itterheim and Andreas Low

http://www.apress.com/9781430244165

Still reading it (up to Chap 11 of 15).

Covers creating 2D games for iOS using the cocos2d 2.x framework, and Kobold2d 2.x framework. All code is in Objective-C, and it's expected you know Obj-C to understand the content. If you've done any OS X or iOS development already you'll have no problems following along. The frameworks are really simple to learn and use.

It does promote some inexpensive pay-for tools to aid in development, but always offers a free alternative if available. TexturePacker, Tiled (qt) (free), GlyphDesigner, and ParticleDesigner.
You're all partialy wrong. The author wants to test if there is an incrase of mass murders, so he wants to test if the large number of mass murders that occured in 2012 is likely to be due by chance or not. he wants to know if 2012 is an exceptional year or not regarding the average. We dont care what the average is, we want to know if this observed number of mass murder is not likely to be observed regarding the average. His pvalue is small but not small enough to conclude that the distribution of observed mass murders does not fit the model.
Very nice.

It would be nice if the source code of the page were not shown in a frame below though. That screen space is served better to show the rest of the actual diagram. You can already see the source code of a page with your browser, why waste screenspace and annoying extra scrollbars on that?