skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rand Paul asked a stupid question†† of Eric Holder, one of the top lawyers in the USG, and received a predictably stupid answer. That question, distilled: "is there any conceivable situation in which drones could be used to attack US citizens on US soil'. How could the answer to that question be anything but yes? All you have to do is imagine a far-fetched scenario in which an al Qaeda terrorist who happens to be a US citizen is going to kill hundreds of Americans, imminently, but for an intervention that will only be effective via drone strike.

A simpler way to frame this that hundreds of people have now pointed out, which has the helpful property of extracting the scary alien new "drones"† from the equation: the authority Holder is claiming for the administration is the same as the one that would allow them to down a jetliner hurtling towards the Sears Tower: an intervention only available to the military.

There were good questions available to Rand Paul before he decided to prematurely declare victory over common sense. Two I can come up with:

* Does the administration claim the right to use military resources to attack US citizens on US soil if compelling evidence exists that they are al Qaeda terrorist when no specific evidence exists that such a person plans to imminently attack the US? Can the US use an airstrike against an al Qaeda terrorist who is a US citizen simply to keep them from "getting away"?

* Does the administration claim the right to use airstrikes against al Qaeda terrorists of any nationality when a reasonable person could infer a likelihood that such a strike would cause harm to Americans in the vicinity of the strike?

There are more good questions, I'm sure. "Could there ever be a case when..." is literally the "ticking time bomb" question; the dumbest of all questions.

† Scared kids in combat boots with M16s have done far more damage to innocent lives, both at home and abroad, than drones will ever do; drones are often a way of affecting concern for the lives of people 'like us' while ignoring the safety of civilians and servicemembers on the ground.

†† "What stupid question?" This one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5335285
I guess it's this: if you have a guess G at the square root of N, compute N/G. If G is too large, N/G will be too small and vice versa (well, as long as your initial guess is larger than zero)

Also, G' = (G+N/G)/2 will be a better guess than G.

Iterate.

If that's not it, pick one from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_computing_square_roo...
What does your DNA "sound" like?
The song list is generated by who you follow. As they share songs, it creates your playlist. If you're signed out, it's the most recent songs.
The exact same happens with GMail.

I use the keyboard shortcut "L" to label my mails. But because my mouse is usually somewhere around the location of the labels submenu before it even renders, I'll often apply the wrong label: the one at the mouse's position rather than the first one in the list. On a side note, starting to type actually hides the mouse cursor, so it took me some time to figure out why the 4th label was applied and not the 1st one.
I disagree. Better advice would be, if you want to be a journalist, "have a solid back-up plan" or "pursue it on the side". Even before the internet, it was a tough profession to be successful in. Now it is even tougher, but there are still individuals who manage to eek out lucrative and rewarding careers.

This advice applies to any profession that has significant excess supply vs demand. Athletes, photographers, artists, actors, musicians etc... Even if an individual never makes it big (and most don't) these activities can be rewarding hobbies as long as expectations are managed properly.
Honestly, fuck anyone who does this for a job posting.
DJB's NaCL is an academic project that dates at least back to 2008.
No. It's a decent shell, but the terminal is still that horrifically slow 80x30 PoS.
Should be the first [tab] instead.
That's nice and all, but a 60 Watt bulb is still not bright enough for my taste.
I have never used old 60W bulbs exactly for this reason. I always feel like I'm struggling to see things with those bulbs.
Thanks for the paths. I've made some entries and checked what gets encrypted and seems some items in addition to the password are encrypted.

I'm seeing the 'Username' and 'Note' fields for example, for Login items as encrypted.

I found a summary[1] of why/what gets encrypted under "Individual Entry Contents".

[1]: http://help.agilebits.com/1Password3/agile_keychain_design.h...
Personally, even in your far-fetched scenario, I would prefer a 'no'. It would have to be much further far-fetched for the only answer to that threat to be a drone.

Should we arm some in air drones for such a scenario? All sorts of slippery slope. The answer should just be a no.
Note that many of these fall into a bait-and-switch category. You use the product for free for a while, and then all of a sudden you are spammed to high hell, or functionality is taken away unless you pay.

Paying isn't really that bad of an option sometimes.
>What he did was certainly illegal.

His lawyers didn't seem to think so.
AppHarbor looks nice but seems really limiting. Is it like Heroku where I can't even save files to disk?

Do you know of any good VPS providers that have Windows Server? I'm not new to configuring a server machine, but this is the first time I've actually hosted a webapp on another entities box. (I've always hosted in-house)
Reductio ad absurdum is a perfectly valid form of argument.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum
Remember there's always that cozy alternative to innovate and automate: not starting that business after all.
>>> if I were engaged in some sort of military-style assault upon the US then of course I would expect to encounter armed opposition.

The Senator is talking about preemptive drone attacks against non-combatant American citizens on American soil who are merely accused of some crime.
I found out a few years ago that my sleep cycle is actually 45 minutes, and not 90 as sleepyti.me suggests. Is there a way to make it work in 45-minute steps?
"Anybody"?

The 2001 AUMF is specific: force is authorized against nations, persons, and organizations involved in 9/11, so long as that force is used to prevent future attacks.

The administration cannot use this construction to declare Wikileaks a terrorist organization and drone strike them.

I am interested in which principle of the Constitution you find this situation antithetical to.
I just tried it with my mom. She has a Mac laptop, and lives outside US. I was using a fairly crazy setup, involving VNC on my firewall box (running pfSense), and she had to remember how to connect using Viscosity. Once connected, I would connect to her screen using VNC. When connected through VPN her own access to Internet was severely limited because of VPN routing tables. With ScreenHero she points with her mouse where she has issues, and I can use mine to show her things on the screen. And no need to VPN anymore, yay!
It might help to add Google's DNS to the list of DNS servers, e.g. on my Ubuntu, I sometimes add "nameserver 8.8.8.8" to the end of my "/etc/resolv.conf" file.
Solutions vs Hacks: A Response to the NYT’s “Perils of Perfection”
Yeah, cryptography libraries in general are a pain to use and typically require a lot of seemingly arcane configuration and confusing (to the novice) setup.

I wrote this library recently (primarily to scratch an itch on another project), which really does nothing more than pass sane defaults to PyCrypto and eliminate crypto jargon:

https://github.com/jsdalton/secrets.py

Honestly I think it took more time to wrap my head around the simple use cases than it did to implement this wrapper once I did.
Minor issue: if you accidentally cross the paths of the colors, it fails silently. There's no "you fail" message or anything like that given, and it's not immediately obvious that the only way to try again is to reload the level.
Agreed on not thinking the events are 1 shot. I always try to speak from experience and I can say, over the last 9 months of having a very niche website in production, that there is never just 1 shot.

Keep trying. There is not just 1 customer; there is not just 1 job; there is not just 1 investor.

The more you get your name out there, the more people will recognize who you are and what your capable of.

In regards to my website, there was a time 9 months ago, no one had any idea who we were. Now we go to an event and people come up to us and say "hey, i've heard of you guys. What do you do?"

And they probably will not signup for the website that night no matter how hard I try. But they remember you and next time they may, or 3 months from now, they may.

Don't look at it as 1 shot; look at it you have x minutes in front of this person(s) to prove yourself / your product. Plan for it, and embrace it.
This was the first time I heard him speak, and I thought it was a really funny and informative delivery. Of course, he has a very thick accent, but he can get his thoughts across pretty well. Being German, I'm used to English presentations so horrible they don't just assault your ears, they try to melt your brain. Some of those I might have delivered myself. This keynote was not one of those.

It's always great to actually hear the creator of a project speak, to get a feel for what they're about and what kind of personality they have. I immediately liked Linus Torvalds when I heard him speak, and I was immediately sure that Brendan Eich was not my kind of person to put it mildly.

For this reason, I was quite curious to "meet" the guy behind Ruby, even more so because my image of the Ruby community is one of pure abrasiveness and arrogance. So, Matz is nice and funny. I'm glad I watched that.
(I do product at CropUp).

Excellent thinking!
This is one of the ideas on our list, no concrete plans or timing yet though. It should just be real simple to sell the products you make so that you can spend more time on the things you actually care about like making some cool products.
Use elastic IPs on EC2 from the start
Agreed! It was a mistake when it was passed, and all the bad things people said about it then have proven to be true. Alas that it is so hard to get bad laws repealed - Congress will sign up for these enormous piles of crap in a hurry, but then it's the work of decades to get just a few of the very worst details rolled back. (The patriot act and homeland security act come to mind.)
New York Cops Will Arrest You for Carrying Condoms
White knight article.
Holder himself says the scenario is far fetched. Which is why one wishes Rand Paul would ask better questions that don't admit to far-fetched answers.

But that aside: the irrational fear of drones is a little crazymaking. Not because armed drones are a good thing, but because conventional warfare is so awful. Soldiers deployed in theater are basically teenagers with combat rifles, and, not to put too fine a point on it, they routinely shoot and kill innocent people and there's practically nothing we can do about it because modern warfare is such a complete clusterfuck.

You know you're talking to someone who does not quite grok how bad war is in 2013 when they use words like "battlefield". What battlefield? Since at least 1914, your battlefield is my suburban hometown.
If I was making $6/hour and now all potential employers are prohibited to pay me that much - in the long term I'm more likely to lose that income than "get a few more dollars to spend".
I hope they're still giving early access to tickets for I/ONs this year.

And I, and many others, hope they don't. Google I/O became a "why not" conference to go to for those in the area because the freebies outweighed the cost, and it is ridiculous that Google starts to grandfather that in.
So, basically you want MS to make a Linux distribution?
Layervault didn't design that clock. There is no logic, just the definition. You should look up "common knowledge" and "public domain."

If you recall apple is paying $21m to license the Swiss Railway clock design.

http://appleinsider.com/articles/12/11/10/apple-reportedly-p...
@saint-loup Good catch! That was old code, not noticeable in my usual browser. It's gone now.
I find my math background to be extremely valuable in programming, but this is only sometimes because I use any actual math. Most of the advantage comes from being able to reason about abstractions more effectively. Similar to what you'd expect from a good CS background, which I'm sure most programmers would agree is useful.
Why not try Microsoft Azure?

I'm hosting there and find the support and tools great, and not that expensive as it's use based.
> How did it come to this?

Perhaps some Mark Twain quotes from the late 1800s might change your mind about us having recently "come to this":

"All Congresses and Parliaments have a kindly feeling for idiots, and a compassion for them, on account of personal experience and heredity."

"It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress."

"[I] was reporter in a legislature two sessions and the same in Congress one session, and thus learned to know personally three sample bodies of the smallest minds and the selfishest souls and the cowardliest hearts that God makes."

They don't just apply to Congressmen. They're relevant to pretty much any level of our government. It seems to apply anywhere that people are given power before they deserve it.
Oops, but why I always feel that even Mac mini has a substantial margin compared with its Windows counterparts?
It would be easier to buy the "we'll only use this new, extraordinary power to combat terrorists (or pedophiles, or drug dealers, or whatever the boogeyman of the day is)" excuse if it hadn't turned out to be a lie time, and time again.

Over and over, the government grabs more power for itself, then uses and abuses that power in whatever way it wishes.

What makes this particular case even more eggregious is that there's absolutely no oversight whatsoever. Obama (or whoever we're unlucky enough to be saddled with after him) can just designate anyone he wants a "terrorist", without anyone being able to question his judgement or even ask for justifications. It's assassination power on a whim.

How much more absolute power are you going to be willing to grant the government for the sake of security theater?
Bait and switch model is a pretty old concept (promo offers, free trials, etc in consumer goods).
Not a single mention of the BTC market crash today on HN, interesting.
Your key setup leaves a whole lot to be desired. (There's a very real reason that PBKDF2 exists.) Bad crypto libs like this are the EXACT reason that things like NaCl and KeyCzar were created.

Please don't do things like this.

PS: It's also not clear if you're doing the HMAC check in a time-invariant manner: https://github.com/jsdalton/secrets.py/blob/master/secrets/c...

See: http://codahale.com/a-lesson-in-timing-attacks/
Not curl, but I did something similar for a particularly dramatic death scene in a MUD 15 years or so ago. The hardest part was shutting up all of the normal MUD chatter that the players get (OOC chat and the like).
Try adding "flat" to that search criteria, then how many ways do you get?
Yeah, I noticed that too. They describe free food and massages, then they offer coupons and group buying deals. Didn't even seem remotely the same.
I don't know if it's a matter of the curation or voting patterns, but there were no technical posts on the list. Make of that what you will.
TechOps pre-launch checklist for web apps
Didn't they already have an Android app? I'm pretty sure they had one that didn't do much, so I was using blockchain.info instead. Their app (and site) is fantastic.

EDIT: Actually, can someone tell me the advantage of Coinbase over the Blockchain wallet? The latter syncs to my Dropbox, the app is ridiculously more featureful (even has push notifications on payment receipt), and it's been around longer. I don't understand why we keep hearing about Coinbase but not Blockchain.
50$/month!? :(
There are mountains of computer crimes going on that are well within the current definitions. It's inconceivable that pursuing Aaron in this manner was useful for anything but making an example for the old bosses of intellectual property.
I think the only way an executive or VIP would use Google Glass in primarily social situations would be to have a personal assistant who is wearing one.

If someone is in a highly technical situation, where the primary focus isn't other people, but technology or architecture, then I could see a lot of applications for augmented reality through such a device.

I can envision teams of several to a dozen people in a virtual reality supporting one or two people wearing Google Glass in the field or on a business trip. The fields of vision of the Glass wearers would be shown as "screens" floating in a virtual reality, so that the support staff wouldn't get nauseated from having their vision entrained to the POV of the field Glass wearers.
"Bummer... if this was on Lifehacker two weeks ago, Yahoo! could have avoided having to call all their troops back to the office."
You are right regarding resizability - putty resizes naturally, it's cmd.exe which doesn't allow full screen resizing with a mouse (at least on windows xp).

But, the wrap issue is annoying - you can't do a ps -auxwww , see that the line length is too long, and the resize the window and have your text rewrap. (At least on putty 0.6, the version on my vm instance)

I don't know if they've added tabs to putty (a quick search through http://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/0.62/puttydoc.txt indicates they haven't) - and that's also a feature I use a lot of.

Don't get me wrong - I love putty, and it's one of the first two or three things I put on every windows system. I love that you can use it as a serial console as well - great for consoling into cisco routers - particularly now that Microsoft in it's infinite wisdom has dropped hyper terminal. In fact, Putty is better than terminal.app in that regard - Terminal.app doesn't do console ports!

But, if I am spending many thousands of hours at the console, Terminal.app (or, possibly iTerm) is going to make me happier and more productive than putty. Probably not 2x more productive, or even 50% more productive - but certainly 10%, which is enough for me.
Bitcoin drops 10USD in less than 4 hours
Would appreciate a link to information about executives whose name is on memos ordering the fraudulent practice.

I understand that there is evidence of fraudulent mortgages, and executives involved in risky financial behavior, but I am not aware of something tying the executives to the fraud.
The 5th Amendment is great, but that doesn't mean that Congress can't pass something clarifying how drone strikes fit into that framework and settling the issue before someone gets blown up by a Hellfire missile. I don't see how anything like drone strikes on US soil could be constitutional either, regardless of what the memos and briefings from the Attorney General's office say. But I'd sure like this to be put to bed before someone dies from it, and I think that Congress should be the place to do it. It would be almost impossible to vote against such legislation and would probably help Congress' approval rating because they will be doing something worthwhile.
To put a needle fine point on what market is not being served here: content producers and editors who need all of the CPU, GPU, disk space, pixels, and I/O they can possibly get in a relatively price-insensitive business environment.

Homebrews, file serving, enterprise, SOHO, and those with nostalgia for DIY home desktop are non-factors now. The creators need a no-compromise beast with a flawless Adobe and Avid story.

If Apple won't provide it, they're throwing their crown jewel customers in the trash.
Have you been watching the filibuster? Because in the 20 minutes I have been watching it Rand Paul has explicitly claimed that his concern is not with using drones on a US citizen in the event of imminent harm no less than 5 times. He has given several examples of the exact nature of the military downing a hijacked aircraft. He has several times said all he wants is explicit clarification that drones will not be used against non-combatants, which people piloting a hijacked aircraft would clearly not be.

Given this, how do you reconcile his repeated public statements with your contention that this is his only concern?
What is the oversight that was used when the administration decided to bomb Dresden, or to firebomb Tokyo? How does it differ from the oversight employed against "organizations involved in the attacks on 9/11"?

How many more innocent people were killed in those attacks than will ever be killed by drones? Have you ever watched "Fog Of War"? Tokyo was made of wood and paper.
Do I really have to waste my time explaining that debt accumulates when revenue is less than spending, and so in order to say "the debt is too high, therefore spending is too high", you must first establish that the problem is not low revenue?
I think you can fairly argue that the prosecutors in this case, at the least, didn't do anything atypical. The fact that this sort of behavior is par for the course is a separate issue -- and one that deserves fixing, whether or not the fix involves the prophylactic purging from the system of some high profile participants.

However, the idea that the CFAA is the best we can do in the way of legislation is just laughable. I really can't stand this futile notion that because the law can't be totally perfect, we might as well just give up and allow it to be catastrophically bad. No to that. We can't make it perfect but we can make it a lot better than it is.
What do you mean by "Scared kids"? These soldiers we send into combat are adults and trained professionals. If anything they should be better able to assess a situation in combat with boots on the ground, not flying above the area thousands of meters away firing missiles.

Additionally, there is nothing stupid about what Rand Paul is doing. The American government is based on a system of checks and balances. Rand Paul is doing the job he is paid to do.
Fortunately we aren't like that. But we still need the pressure valve on at the low end to force us all up the value chain.

It's like raising water rates to make you use water more efficiently, do you stop using it? No, you are smarter about how you use it. Human labor is the same thing. I've seen what happens when the bottom is too low...it's not much better than slavery or serfdom.
Firefox OS and More Web API Evolution