skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It shouldn't fly. That's why in my original post NSA was listed dead last as a probable data source, far below normal federal law enforcement means (such as administrative subpoenas). Even those were far less likely than simpler explanations.

As far as fingerprints, I agree the interface available to IAFIS database end-users may be restrictive. However, due to the highly aggregated nature of the data, and the fact it's maintained for law enforcement by law enforcement (namely the FBI), people expect it to be available to a myriad of government agencies (which it is).

With Facebook private messages, you expect only Facebook employees (or partners) to have access, or in special cases government via warrant or subpoena. Major tech companies took a fairly large PR hit following the news of NSA having wholesale access to their systems, precisely because of these expectations.

If the headline was instead "FBI grants NSA full unrestricted IAFIS access." nobody would bat an eye, because it's expected. The FBI is heavily involved in national security affairs themselves.

My point was, the sensitivity of the collection method is a major factor in determining the classification level of the data. The PRISM leak is a prime example of this.
Started with C, then javascript, then php. Now Im learning python but always go back to php.
Yep. There's a well-written article about an early DDoS extortion attempt where the victim fought instead of paying, developing some novel protection technology in the proces: http://www.csoonline.com/article/print/220336
Did Apple Just Ally With Microsoft Against Google?
I think Marco is saying this is good from an independent ios developers perspective, not necessarily from a users perspective. As somebody who makes his living as an independent app developer, I'm sure he's thrilled about this. Its undeniably an opportunity for independent developers who don't have to maintain an existing app. Whether its good for users or the ecosystem in general is a totally different discussion.
Fabric FTW
> those not so old iPhones that are stuck on iOS 6 forever.

Of all the devices supported by iOS 6, only the iPhone 3G S and the 4th gen iPod touch won’t get the upgrade. The iPads that could run iOS 6 will also be able to run iOS 7.

The iPhone 4 has been out for 3 years and will be able to run iOS 7 when it is released later this year. How many 3 year old Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone models do you know of that can run the newest version of the OS?

(This post was edited to reflect that the 4th gen iPod touch won’t get the upgrade to iOS 7. The ‘iPod touch 16GB’ was listed on iOS 7’s page, I understood that to mean the 4th gen model, which also came in 16GB capacity.)
"Fun" and "concentration camp" are two words that should never be used in the same context.

Not everyone is deathly afraid of dark humour. Stand-up comedy in particular is full of it, yet people still seem to think of it as 'fun'.

The arguing semantics thing was just that, which is why it was marked as an addendum with the 'also'.
Awesome. I just started with cloudfront a few weeks ago and to my understanding the root domain thing has been asked about for years. I was kind of bummed that I had to start using www because I have a pretty short domain.
Microsoft: This Is How We Design Today
Background downloads will change apps, sure. But does that really constitute a "complete re-think of how applications work"? It's the same feature, just implementable in a better way.

And people are in shock after years of iOS looking pretty much the same. When everyone actually looks at things objectively, they'll realise that their apps need to look a little different, behave a little different, but overall be pretty much the same apps they were before.
Ok, so the justifications for the ends under discussion is accepted because "That's the way things are, ergo that's the way the majority of people have decided that they ought to be by participation". They live in countries with totalitarian democratic governments, they work in soul crushing corporate jobs, therefore those ends are "desirable" without direct justification beyond that?

That seems like confusing is and ought in the exact opposite of the way that humans tend to do it normally?
And if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.
PHP Programmers: The Wordpress Joomla Trap
It's hard to understand the translation, but I understood it to imply that the client was not being challenged by the U.S. criminal system. The client was norweigian-chilean, accused of threatening norwegian dignitaries. I'd assume the client was in norway being charged by the norwegians.
I agree with you, but I think that an occasional design shakeup hits people on a different level, subconsciously. A new look affects the feel of an application, which can actually affect how people view the substantial portions of an app.
Just came across dokku this week
https://github.com/progrium/dokku

Couldn't give it a try yet, but seems rather interesting
There's already built-in redundancy. Wherever you pushed to Github from has a complete copy of the current state of your repository. Github is effectively just a publicly accessible mirror, but you can always push to a different remote elsewhere, push directly to your production instance, or even host your repo in an s3 bucket, all while Github is down.
Brooks deserved a response like this. Just looking at the very top comments voted up on the NYT:

> This column reads like ... Nixon's Enemies List.

> This is something right out of Nixon's secret tapes ranting about that Daniel Ellsberg fellow.

> Mr. Brooks, this is one of your more bizarre commentaries.

> Brook's article is nothing more than a shallow and poorly thought through character assassination

> What a bizarre column.

> Brooks column is the most awful piece of smear journalism I have ever read.

To be honest, I'm almost surprised the NYT ran it. I've read a lot of his columns, never thought much of them, they just seemed fairly "normal". But this one is truly just bizarre, just bizarre. I really want to know what on earth he was thinking?
The one thing about conspiracies I always consider is the number of complicit persons involved.

Take, for instance, "9/11 was an inside job". People were really taken off planes somewhere, then the planes where remote controlled, a missile hit the pentagon not a plane, demolition charges were set in the buildings, etc...

The man power needed to pull that off greatly exceeds the number of people willing to kill their own countrymen for money, political zeal, or fear.
Apple adding 'kill switch' to iPhones
Rubinstein on HP's purchase of Palm: 'Talk about a waste'
True genius lies in the unification and outright rejection of those tradeoffs.

I believe it is possible. I don't think anyone has quite come up with how, yet.

It's the simplicity on the other side of complexity. It's the next frontier. We may yet reach it.
theres the (lack of) security when the client advertises the expected cert cn outside of the secure session. bu the real reason is simply client support. last i looked about 50% of requests looked like they came from clients that didnt support sni. suppose a ridiculously optimistic estimate of 90% support. is it acceptable for 10% of your clients to have security warnings when visiting your site? that's an unacceptable customer experience, personally.
Ah, just on time... Another, "If you don't think like we do, you're insane" article from the greatest evidence of modern journalistic decline we have before us, The New York Times.

Begin the shift towards painting opponents of PRISM as conspiracy theorists. Oh, and I read in the NYTimes that conspiracy theorists are really suffering from personality disorders. It's in the DSM6!
https://github.com/wr0ngway/rubber
Your last line is the only really negative thing in the entire thread.
I've been telling people for a fair while that I wish Github issues were stored as part of the git repos themselves, not so much for availability reasons as that it'd be awesome if the state of bugs got branched and merged along with everything else, so that a bug could be fixed in a branch, but not yet in master, and would get fixed in master when the branch got merged. But I guess availability would be a nice additional perk.
Or rms, perhaps?
Cripplingly demonstrative.
Examples of Mobile Applications with Circular Vibe
This is bang on. The tech details matter - a lot. Thought I'd add to the discussion by linking/quoting from this piece from wired UK
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-06/11/prism-powerpo...

"To us geeks, the tech methods, of course, are the most interesting part. Snowden evidently wanted the entire presentation published, at least at one point in his discussions with the Post's Gellman. On 24 May, "Snowden asked for a guarantee that the Washington Post would publish -- within 72 hours -- the full text of [the] PowerPoint presentation," Gellman wrote on 9 June, in a fascinating account of his interactions with the whistleblower. "I told him we would not make any guarantee about what we published or when."
"It's not fascism when we do it!"
Fragmentation implies "fragments". iOS 6 has a 93% install base. An ever-shrinking 7% isn't much of a fragment to worry about. iOS 7, due to it's new shiny factor, will likely see an even faster adoption than iOS 6.
Find the kth smallest number in an array
I agree that Dots is great, but it's a game--the UI is by nature specifically tailored to the application.

If I'm using a news reader or productivity app, I hate having to spend time learning a novel interface. The more conventional the UI, the more easily and quickly I can use it. Unless uniqueness adds a tangible benefit, it's just a pain in the butt.
What I can't understand is how anyone can respect the NY Times with stuff like this being published. This guy is one of the paper's star writers and he writes this kind of thing.

It's one thing to be conservative and wish to defend atrocities committed by governments, but it's completely another to do so using the kinds of techniques Brooks employs.

I'd go so far as to say that the NY Times is complicit in the moral wrongs that it spreads propaganda to help cover up.
Jenkins + Powershell in our Microsoft stack.
Request Tracker or RT for short is great [1]. Has a nice web interface and email support. You'll have to do some research into #2 and #3 though.

[1] http://bestpractical.com/rt/
I use capistrano for deployment, I mainly like it because I can set up a VPS on any service and have it clone the repo from git, config is almost identical between applications depending on the complexities of each and it can be heavily modified for the clients needs as well.

Definitely worth a look
Lol. It's not like you're going to tell the cogs what the machine is up to.

>The one thing about conspiracies I always consider is the number of complicit persons involved.

Yeah, this is like the ground level of thought on these topics. Let's not turn our backs red.
The iPads and iPod touches that could run iOS 6 will also be able to run iOS 7.

My fourth generation iPod Touch runs iOS 6 but does not qualify for iOS 7. Fifth gen only.
The author uses "packet" a few times to my surprise. Was the server-client protocol packet based? UDP?
Flashlight is built into the iOS 7 control panel. Innovation FTW ;)
>The iPads and iPod touches that could run iOS 6 will also be able to run iOS 7.

Not quite, at least as far as the iPod Touch goes. iOS 7 will only run on the 5th generation iPod Touch (see http://www.apple.com/ios/ios7/features/ - bottom of the page), the version with the 4-inch screen.

Apple was selling the 4th generation device up until May 30 of this year. In other words, there's people who bought this thing two weeks ago who will not be able to upgrade to iOS 7.
I'd like to think of myself as thinking rationality, but I think my unerring faith in Hanlon's Razor causes me to be reflexively skeptical of all conspiracies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
Python 2's standard library also doesn't support SNI. Nor does Android 2.x browser.
[trying to say without spoilers]

the inaccurate/ridiculous part is that he couldn't do what he did because every one of them had another agent(s) on them precisely to prevent such occurences. they spied on and controlled each other just like they did on citizens. other than that - great movie, and depiction of the strong influence such agencies had on personal lives (to make someone or destroy someone) is accurate.

you can also check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_%282012_film%29 with a bit similar theme.
Physics effects? Momentum, acceleration, doing work, wave-particle duality? What's that supposed to mean?
do note that it's per cert. you could, for example, use a wildcard cert and serve multiple distributions & fqdns off a single cert.

ps: check out the insane pricing for dedicated certs & https on some other CDNs. $600/mo doesnt look too excessive in comparison.
1st HN Nagoya Meetup -- June 22nd
We're announcing the 1st (Inaugural) Hacker news Nagoya event hosted at Adea's newly opened event space in Maru-no-uchi, Nagoya.

We've been long-time attendees of the Tokyo and Kansai meetups, and are looking forward to bringing the same excitement to Nagoya. Because this is the first Nagoya event, we're limiting to 40 people, so register quickly. Please feel free to bring all your friends who read Hacker News and who are into the business and technology scene.

Looking forward to seeing everyone there!

http://hnnagoya.doorkeeper.jp/events/4225
Fact: Nobody has ever conspired to do anything, ever.
So ridiculous! Why are they cracking down on this? Are young French and German girls really posing such a risk to US employment rates? I have offered the same thing while asking if I could stay with relatives in other US cities (I'm American). Next, are they going to go around accusing 16 year old American girls of tax evasion since their bank accounts "fit the profile" for someone who's done babysitting?

Sorry, but the living standards are high enough and tuition costs low enough in France and Germany that I'm not really sure why any French/German college-aged kids would be sneaking into this country for real jobs.
You have to be fast to pick up nickels in front of a steamroller.

There is some money in porting something between the old and the new playing field, but the incumbents will eventually update.
That's because you are framing the issue as something it's not. It's not fragmentation in the same sense as Android. 93% of apple devices are on the latest iOS version. Right around 30% of Android devices run the latest major release. The number is actually quite a bit lower if you start to consider point releases. Even worse is the fragmentation caused by different vendors and chipset manufacturers writing different libraries and drivers. See libstagefright, which has major differences across different devices even if it's the same version of the OS, for example different native pixel formats are supported by different vendors so writing any kind of a custom protocol video streaming app on Android is a stone cold bitch to get working across devices at 60 fps and that's only targeting 4.0+. It gets way worse when you include older versions that may or may not have libStageFright (most 3.0+ have it but a few don't). I'm familiar with video and audio the most but other areas have the same issue.

Contrast that to iOS, sure different API's get added but at least the same versions of the os behave the same across devices. Sure for a very short time iOS will be split between versions but that will be exceedingly short and you'll never have the true fragmentation problems that Android has in iOS.
You're welcome: http://bugseverywhere.org/
Exactly. You should have seen the Leopard nightlies. The top bar translucency was off for a while and it was basically non-functional. The dock would crash regularly, etc.
Twıtter.com redirects to Turkey's ruling party's website
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the author. Marco talked down on Android for years because of its fragmentation. It's just hypocritical that it's only good if it happens on iOS.

In one of the Google IO talks, Google has been encouraging developers to develop only on 4.0 and above. To quote, "go to where the puck is going" and "develop the best app possible for every phone".
what is the best tool for java web applications that are built as a war file deployed on tomcat?
Teachers: Why so many kids are flunking final exams in Montgomery County, MD
Mostly Cap and Git, but Ansible (http://www.ansibleworks.com/) caught my eye recently for experimentation. Looks very promising.
He's doing his part to help diffuse the situation. It's his show of loyalty to the powers that be. He's thought of as influential and this kind of thing is expected of him.

He won't be held accountable for this piece. He's done his duty and would never submit to any kind of rational questioning of his motives or his beliefs. I guess what it boils down to is that he's an actor.
If I'm just showing off work to clients and pushing things to a staging/dev server, a lot of the time I'll use grunt-rsync or grunt-sftp to push everything up at the end of my `$ grunt produce` task. For site deployments, I prefer Capistrano since it's dead simple.
And of course, war has no impact on politics and tightly interwoven economies...
I guess if that's how you see it

So despite a very well known SNL actor's ADMITTING that what they did was focused and political. Despite his extraordinarily relevant insight stating that they still do it that way... that's just how I see it?

At some point you have to wonder if your theories are falsifiable or if they're just dogma.
Your example illustrates what Marco is saying. A big player that needs to support all those different versions of different platforms may take more time updating their iOS app to adapt the latest standards. An indie developer, who has more agility and can choose to only support iOS 7, now has a possible advantage, if s/he chooses to take advantage of it.
> I've been saying this for a while but I think what is happening, and what many developers haven't noticed yet, is that we have exhausted the utility of software for software's sake...

> Software was interesting on its own a decade ago, but the industry has grown up, its time to do things now.

Smartphones are important because they allow people to use computers in a manner that wasn't feasible in the past because of the size of computing devices.

However, smartphones have not produced any important innovations from a software point of view. They are not innovative because they don't need to be; they are simply the logical consequent of the advances in the miniaturization of hardware.

The market saturation you describe is not the result of a glut of innovation, but rather is just a consequence of developers porting existing desktop functionality onto a smartphone. You can take pictures and use voice recognition software to ask where nearby restaurants if you carry around a desktop or a laptop; you just probably wouldn't want to.

Actually, smartphones are a good example of how non-innovative and illogical the computing world can be.
Underneath the touch-based interfaces, they run on a kernel written in a memory-unsafe, non-garbage collected, insecure, and inexpressive language that was designed to target the PDP-11. Because the operating system is so flawed and incompetent that it can't be trusted to prevent rogue processes from stepping on others, you end up with a lack of a useable file system and awful communication between apps. Of course, the joke is that these restrictions are almost worthless because you can almost always bypass the system security and jailbreak the device; then maybe you can do something useful with your phone without.

Its part of a larger trend in the computing world to ignore history and reinvent wheels, and call it innovation. Case in point: web apps, which, unless you are replacing a legacy application, are a terrible idea. Not only will they always face latency issues, but they also use awful languages designed to serve and manipulate text and are at least twice as slow as native code. Software on smartphones is interesting in the same way that a "Hello world!" program is interesting to C programmer; the programmer is so surprised that he has fought an unfriendly, unintuitive system full of kludges and managed to output text to the screen without the program crashing and dumping core that he doesn't notice how trivial the output is.

Of course, what we have today is better than nothing. In a way, the massive and unnecessarily resource intensive process that we have now is uplifting because it shows the determination of the human spirit; just imagine what we could accomplish if we invested in the right things.
My preferred approach is to bundle the code into an apt package (or packages) and then use fabric.
From here on in this is the only privacy model I will consider trustworthy for a cloud service;

You have the encryption key, the data on our servers is completely useless without that encryption key. We are physically unable to be compelled to comply with any orders to violate your privacy from anyone.

The only example of a cloud service I can think of that matches this off the top of my head is spideroak and tarsnap, perhaps also the new torrent sync? I'm not entirely certain how that works but I do recall a client side crypto key being involved in there somewhere?
It feels nothing like Android. The easing and physics are very different. I'm sure they'll fix some of the the visual design.
Germany most snooped EU country by US
Currently Chef. It's great for getting a machine in order, but it's proven to be a real bear for actually managing deployment of server processes.

We're working on a deployment manager based on Substack's fleet.

https://github.com/substack/fleet
https://github.com/PinionTech/rear-admiral
"Confirmation bias - the tendency to pay more attention to evidence that supports what you already believe - is a well-documented and common human failing."

... Search bubbling doesn't help.

"Not only does more exposure to these alternative narratives help engender belief in conspiracies, he says, but the Internet's tendency toward tribalism helps reinforce misguided beliefs."

... In other words, just read the New York Times (or BoingBoing, since it's Maggie Koerth-Baker) and ignore everything else.

Edit: Oh, and the Alex Jones reference at the end is a nice ad hominem too - as long as we're counting logical fallacies - since nothing he has ever cited could possibly be accurate because: blow-hard, and conspiracy. Also: creationism, because: complicated!
The reality of Mobile Device evolution is that four-mobile-phone-years is roughly equivalent to ten-desktop-years or six-laptop-years.

And, let's be clear - it's only a prohibitively long time if you wish to continue to get the new feature release platforms - indeed, it's only Today, June 11, 2013, that the original iPhone, released in 2007, is now being obsoleted by Apple [1], a full five years after it was discontinued.

[1] http://www.macrumors.com/2013/04/29/original-iphone-will-soo...
Hmm.. correct me if I'm wrong, but does Stack Overflow message folks in real time to get an answer? I kind of feel SO is more of a super good forum.
Signed! Thank goodness organizations are stepping up to avert the slow creep of total surveillance.
There are changes, for instance, about how multitasking works, that an application can take advantage of. If one app doesn't take advantage of it, and another does, I may use one over the other more often. For instance, there was an app that used Push Notification and the Icon Badge to show the current temperature, and for a time I used that over The Weather Channel's app. Small things like this creates opportunities, this is what Marco was saying.