skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am a firefighter and hobby/part-time developer. We have more manuals and SOP's than you can shake a stick at. They should be in source control so we can see how strategy and tactics evolve over time, who made the changes, diff's and/or allow "pull requests" from the field to change something for the better, as just one example.

Now, try to explain to your Chief or supervisor about how awesome Git is.. that is easy and I've done it. Then comes the part where you explain how to use it; The problem is the interface on both the CLI and GUI require a TON of "other" domain knowledge to use effectively. Abstract all that away at the same price point of Github and you will win a HUGE market.

We don't have IT budget to pay anyone to do this... nor buy the extremely expensive solutions that already exist. So we rely on email and ad hoc training to make sure everyone can stay abreast. Now, how many businesses not related to software development could benefit from Git or a similar DVCS?
Meet Binary, an iPad app for writing code
A package for Archlinux: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/tmate/
Ben Mezrich appears to write his own 5-star book reviews on Amazon
What if the current firmware has a bug that allows an attacker to steal your keys?
This is a great article. Not good, great. It's a simple and objective look at a very difficult truth: It's so very easy (and, in the author's assessment -- which I agree with -- so very normal) to look at yourself as the exception, and to ignore or simply be ignorant of your own flaws, while eagerly pointing out those of others.

I keep learning more about myself (not the pleasant things, of course) because of this sort of introspection. I had absolutely none of it as a kid. I think few people do, but the more you manage -- and the later in life you manage it -- the harder it is to look back at yourself and not wince.

I'd say, and I think the author makes this point as well, at least in passing, one of the hardest things is forgiving yourself when you step back and realize how you've behaved (particularly after condemning others for the same actions). It's a lot easier to take someone else's actions and say "well, he/she didn't mean it" or "OK, that's just how people are" than to look at yourself, know that yes, you did mean it or intend to do it, and no, you don't really find it acceptable.
> Finally, on Friday, the New York Times reported[1]—using some conveniently leaked documents—that Yahoo had tried to resist the NSA’s attempts to compel it to provide user data but was ultimately unsuccessful and was ordered by the court to comply.

> These companies may have convinced themselves that cooperation was inevitable, or that they needed to do something to help the government catch terrorists, or that by automating the legally legitimate FISA process they could save themselves a lot of trouble and expense, or some combination of all the above. But in reality, they have not only shown themselves to be weak—which will encourage the NSA to pressure them even further because it knows it can win—but also fundamentally untrustworthy, and that could cause them a lot more problems with users than they ever contemplated.

Who is voting up this nonsense? Since when is losing in court equivalent to rolling over for the NSA? Not only does the author refer to the "the legally legitimate FISA process" multiple times (apparently the government is absolved from blame here), he also writes multiple times that we has no idea what PRISM actually is. But why not jump to conclusions anyway!

> So far, the only company that seems to have emerged unscathed is Twitter, which reportedly fought the government’s attempts to enrol the company in the Prism program and succeeded, a tale that has burnished Twitter’s claim to be the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party.”

Except that Twitter has agreed with Google in saying that companies should be allowed to disclose ranges of FISA requests separate from other requests, rather than lumping all requests (federal and local) together[2]. It's not a slam dunk, but it strongly implies that, regardless of what PRISM is, Twitter has received and complied with FISA orders.

This article seems like the author said, "We still don't know what PRSIM is, but I have a deadline, so let's see what I can bang out in 5 minutes." Not only are there no new facts, what speculation is here doesn't even seem well thought through.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/technology/secret-court-ru...

[2] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/15/google-calls-u-s-da...
Programmers as lawyers, "Hey here's a puzzle for you, create and argument using the rules as written by these words, which blocks an activity by this group." Priceless.

I do know that when ADA first passed there was a huge blowup at one of the agencies because the spacing between rows of servers didn't meet the minimum standard for wheelchair access, and they were being told they had to spread out the servers by an additional 6" and subsequently remove one row of them. I expect they came up with some sort of clever workaround.
Before this conversation gets out of hand let's analyze how asinine this is: you're proposing congressional oversight on open-source software.

Let's move beyond that obvious stumbling block and assume their non-existent jurisdiction actually exists: how do you expect this to be enforced? Do we levy fines against any entity (human or otherwise) distributing non-compliant web browsers? Do we install ransomware on people's computers that locks their devices unless only authorized browsers are installed?

When bits pass by my router then I will do with them as I please.
I wonder how this line of reasoning would go over at a murder trial.
Lessons learned from entrepreneurs on the road
Tim Gowers wrote a blog post about this, which I submitted 12 hours ago to thundering silence:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5892107
No love for IE at all by the looks of things.
I think I missed the whole RSS thing - what exactly is the benefit to RSS readers - is it really so much better than visiting a few sites and reading the articles there? What sort of feeds do people read, and why was Google Reader so much better supposedly?
> you're proposing congressional oversight on open-source software.

If you build a house for free, does that mean it's exempt from building codes?
I wonder if the author ever emails one of the two friends about the other. It's unfair if only one side of the private emails gets opened, but the other stays hidden. Also, given that presumably you're still friends after this incident, who cares? A single email is a ridiculously small facet of a person to base an opinion off of.

And if you weren't friends but just colleagues, who cares? You've just learned an important bit of information: your colleagues don't approve of your expenditures. This will help you plan your future. Take it and learn. More information is hardly ever bad.
I don't really do postal mail any more. After you've printed it, could you scan it in and email it to me instead? :)
Simpler UI Testing with CasperJS
Yes, one of their listings was on VRBO.

The way things went down was that the owner bought the house at the low point in the housing market and had it as a traditional rental - as a college town we have a fairly stable rental market. Last summer, (according to the neighbors nearby), the stable renter was booted and the house started being rented for game days and other weekends. Around New Years, we had dinner with some of the people more impacted - I live diagonally across an intervening block.

My neighbors were bothered by it, but didn't know enough about zoning regulations to know that the use was flat out illegal. The closest neighbor felt constrained by norms of neighborliness despite the fact that the owner did not live there and was running a hotel. However, zoning regulations are something I have dealt with regularly for many years.

A couple of months ago, I had a bit of a close call while walking the dog as one of the transients returned from Taco-Bell in their Expedition. It was then that I realized that the renters were as complicit in the activity as the Owner...so I spoke to the renters as they parked and advised them that their activity was a violation of zoning and unwanted by the neighbors. Hmmm...that's probably better than trying to change the Owner's ethics, and I can be as much of an asshole as the next man when I wish.

The next Saturday morning I was walking my dog as that week's renters arrived. I spoke with them about the same subject. Turns out one of the renters was a swinging dick lawyer from upstate. He figured to run me down the road by threatening to call the police.

And that's when it hit me, what could be better evidence of the activity than a police report with the renter explaining their agreement with the Owner? I told him calling the police was a capitol idea, and advised him of the address when he could not tell the dispatcher where he was. Sure, it cost me forty-five minutes with our City's finest, but it didn't leave the City Manager any more excuses for ignoring the problem.

So Zoning eventually got around to sending the Owner a letter, despite which we continued to get transients - the economic considerations didn't change and Zoning enforcement trying to be nice was taken as a sign of weakness.

It took a bit more followup (complaints), and the genteel neighbor realizing that the Owner didn't intend to reciprocate the neighborly behavior.

So the hearing is in municipal court next week and several of we neighbors are available to testify about the activity.
How can the world not be a limited resource? Have you thought this through?
Even chrome frame has been retired because IE6 usage is so low.
That landing page picture looks horrid. You need to replace that with one that's higher resolution.
Did you not report the various illegal activities being perpetrated to the police so that they could address them?
This is the impression that I took away from his remarks, too. However, this prompts a question: is it feasible to capture everything, store those data, and filter after the fact? How much traffic are we discussing, how much storage over what period, etc.? The costs to capture and store everything for any significant length of time seem astronomical; am I wrong? And if it's not everything, how useful is it?
you mean perhaps the least untruthful definition of wittingly?
Maybe, I am consistently surprised by the number of people who don't have adblock installed.

But surely it must me much higher in the technology segment.
This brings to mind why people who are socially inept tend to fall behind further in interpersonal skill, unless they make concerted efforts to improve themselves. When you start developing the ability to read people, it's painful because you realize that most people passively dislike you.

It gets a little better when you realize that most of the low-level passive dislike is impersonal. Passive dislike of others (perceived as intruders, a "crowd", etc.) is the norm, and taking offense to human traits that evolved in times of scarcity and fear makes no sense. When you're socially inept and perceive others as unfairly exaggerating your faults, it feels like persecution. Reality is that people just exaggerate everyone's faults because it's how humans are.

Learning what people really are is painful and demoralizing if you're socially average or above, but it's devastating for people who are socially inept.
If Apple won't let you easy/chip to test on their browser, then just don't do it. Place a big red "please upgrade to modern browser" banner and be done with that. Of course, if client wants to sponsor testing, he can do it at his own will.
Scientists build cat-like robots that could be used for search-and-rescue
The headline gets your attention, but after reading the article, it makes perfect sense that water soaking up minerals from a rock for a billion years would taste pretty bad.

A very interesting find for the sake of scientific inquiry though.
I am painfully aware of how much energy I expend trying to prop myself up above others. Whether I am delicately explaining how I would have done it differently or just fidgeting with my clothes to make myself look better in that place's light, I end up feeling like I'm acting fake. Maybe I am.

Regardless, I think there's little we can do about it. Anytime I overcome the urge to make myself look better to the strangers around me, it is done through no small amount of conscious effort. It is so much easier to just give in to my genetic encoding and try to appear more fit than to make my existence easier.
What Is Tech Doing Now to Drive Us to Non-Distraction?
We judge others by their actions, ourselves by our intentions.
Great Drupal articles, tutorials, modules, and news in issue 90 of TheWeeklyDrop
...why not just not do the video at all? Playing a blocked ad for longer doesn't seem to make any sense.

Well, it's actually a fairly clever solution. If the person wants to block ads Hulu won't stop them, it will just make the commercial time take 3x as long ("commercial time" meaning silence in this scenario, since no ad is served, which is actually quite jarring in videos when you have silence for 6 minutes followed by the video continuing). The people who allow ads get to watch the original shorter commercials, meaning they don't have to wait nearly as long.

They could probably block people who block ads and just refuse to serve the video, but that could prevent people from legitimately watching the show if their adblock-checker went haywire. Plus, users would be probably more pissed if you outright blocked them rather than if you made their experience annoying.
It may be a convenience that many enjoy, myself included, but I'd argue that plenty of Netflix subscribers would have subscribed anyway even if ads were shown from the start. Personally, I signed up for the convenience of movies, so ads weren't even a consideration. I doubt I'm alone in that respect.

In addition, you can easily get the same ad-free content on iTunes, but I never see it compared as a replacement for Netflix. It's just not as convenient.
Sadly neither Mint nor Simple are available in the UK.
Compass Rails could use some help:
https://github.com/Compass/compass-rails

There's also some issues with Ruby 2.0 support in it and in Compass itself, if memory serves...
Or, reader is harder to build than they thought.
No matter whether you love or hate the new UI, github is going to actively iterate on this design and improve it.

I can't tell you how many times I have had a github tab open and then popped open another and my layout has slightly changed (like shrinking a font or changing colors). They don't stop with UI tweaks until they think things are perfect.

Expect this to continue to evolve even without another major release from them.
One pattern is that they dramatically reduce the hassle involved with following a few dozen low traffic sites.

They also translate the task of actively keeping up with something into passively following along in the reader (which maybe isn't a positive, but it is easier...).
"as soon as you charge for something then 90% of the users drop off"

Maybe you should find less obstructive ways to charge people? If the charges occurred in the background, without anyone having to log in and enter credit card data over and over, it would be a lot easier to get people to do it. If paying 0.1 cents per page were transparent and required no login or special authorizations, I am pretty sure that 90% would drop significantly.

Basically, what you need is digital cash, and you need to link it to something people already pay for (say, their ISP). Imagine if you pay your ISP for service, and as part of that payment, you received a bunch of digital cash tokens that would be sent to websites as you visited them. Yes, you would need some security to ensure that these tokens were not stolen by malicious advertisers, but I do not think that is an insurmountable problem (and it is no different than click fraud). Set a sensible default for the number of tokens that will be held at the begin of a billing period (say, enough for 50,000 page views per month -- probably more than even the most bored 4chan user will visit), and address issues related to large organizations providing their users with access (e.g. universities, libraries, etc.) and you might actually solve the problem.

It is not a perfect solution by any means, but (a) it protects everyone's privacy and (b) removes the need for spam^H^H^H^Hweb advertising.
What I install on my device is nobody's concern except my own.

If people don't want to use my software then they don't have to.
Just block the cookies already, and allow the users to turn them back on on a per-site basis.
Renzo Piano's self-sufficient micro house
Microsoft Offers Surface RT for Students Around the World at $199 for 32GB Model
So, she drank some of the water and is now postulating that it might have life in it?

Uhm... well, I assume this article has been written so long since the event happened that we know she didn't contract some terrible disease that mutated in there.
He didn't say he wasn't a criminal. He said that out of two pieces of information:

* He violated the law (negative)
* He exposed secret domestic surveillance by the government (positive)

They chose to highlight the negative, rather than the positive.

Purportedly went online on Monday? No. That wasn't the right word to use there.

Of course the abusive quotes can be interpreted that way, but there are other words that could be put in quotes because they too came from other sources. They chose to put 'abusive' in quotes but not 'national security initiatives', for example.

His summary is not emotionally charged at all - he shows how the same information can be worded in ways that highlight the positive or negative aspects. And it is clear what CNN did, to an extreme.
Forget PRISM, the recent NSA leaks are plain: Digital privacy doesn’t exist
No doubt, but that's also why the concern that he may be turning himself from 'effective' to 'ineffectual' is so much greater.

I guess the simplest way I can put it is - I wish he'd stop taking his cues from journalists, however high-minded and well-intentioned and start working with a local lawyer specializing in human rights and civil liberties issues, yesterday.
Not to be a conspiracy-theory hipster, but I suggested this before we even knew who he was. I thought the timing was suspicious, how it completely erased the discussion of the completely-confirmed Verizon phone records business, and replaced with a whole load of doubt and speculation. The shittiness of the Powerpoints (supposedly for training but containing all the detail of "Illegal Surveillance for The Layman") and the choice of newspapers (Guardian and Washington Post? The hell? Someone trying to make the Post look good?) didn't encourage. Then this guy turns up with EFF and Tor stickers plastered all over his laptop, claiming he doesn't want to be the center of attention while making himself the center of attention, and the internet collectively creams their jeans.

Personally I think he's too over the top - a perfect caricature. I have met people who work the security services, and they are not the kind of people who put stickers on their laptops, EFF or otherwise. I additionally posit that if you worked for the NSA and really wanted to disclose secrets, and had the kind of access he is supposed to have had, you could have leaked much more specific, damaging things than this. His reluctance to reveal more detailed information about the NSA, even without proof, is fairly damning.

If I were him, and the cat were properly out of the bag now and there were talks of extra-judicial killings, and I was talking a big talk about dying for my country, I wouldn't be running my mouth about democracy. I'd be running my mouth about the damn NSA.

</conspiracy>
> "I’ve often thought that the single most devastating cyberattack a diabolical and anarchic mind could design would not be on the military or financial sector but simply to simultaneously make every e-mail and text ever sent universally public... the fabric of society would instantly evaporate, every marriage, friendship and business partnership dissolved. Civilization ... is held together by a fragile web of tactful phrasing, polite omissions and white lies"

Dr. Doofenshmirtz agrees:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvELB_lHsXQ#t=4m19s
A damning allegation with global economic consequences is easily dismissed as propaganda if it comes from the Chinese government. Not so if it comes from a whistleblower.
Who said anything about "orchestrated", carefully or otherwise?
Obama: If you are a US citizen the NSA can’t listen to your calls
The pattern as presented doesn't actually use the monad instance, just the functor instance, because there's no sequencing of actions involved here, there's just one action (update or not).
Quite the opposite: No permission is given to distribute modified versions, so you're not allowed to do it.
i like it, will combine it with http://miniqr.com/onsnap.r just because
Certainly budget-conscious people too. And some places have great local fish, meat, and produce markets.
Agreed, results are important but you're taking a chance trusting any library Joe Programmer created in a couple of hours. I think it's a form of Cargo cult programming.
What? You don't live in a piece of open source software.

Oh and by the way, you OWN a house.
Strong agree (for both rayiner and tptacek). It's amazing how much abuse has been heaped on them for simply putting things into perspective, for questioning stories, for thinking carefully about what's actually being stated and claimed by various parties.
The astounding lengths languages will go to to avoid implementing sum types.
I said might.

Actual outcomes need to be weighed against counterfactuals, and I think the claim that the alternative would have been worse in Cheney's case - while I dispute it - is better than in the other.
I'd rather stay in AirBnB than in a mediocre hotel in most markets, but a great hotel is still totally worth it to me.

My personal AirBnB stays have been pretty varied. When I stayed in SF in 2008 it was awesome, because I ended up staying with a friend of the founders and then in the actual AirBnB corporate apartment and meeting one of the AirBnB guys.

When I stayed in Japan, it was amazing -- the spare couch of a Thai expat living in Tokyo, who then introduced me to her friends, and we went out to do stuff a few times. An long-term expat from a culture I understood (Thailand) is an even better introduction to Japan than a Japanese national.

But then I stayed in a few other places in Asia where it was a "regular low-end hotel or apartment rental" who relisted on AirBnB. I generally don't stay in hotels like that otherwise, and in comparison to 5 star luxury hotels, it was pretty weak, and IMO for 50% of the price, not worth it.

I actually really like the "large high-end luxury hotel experience" -- being able to arrive at 3am to a fully staffed front desk, having 24h room service, knowing reliably exactly what the place will be like in advance, etc. And, if you have some third-party-paid stays and optimize for frequent stay points, the cost can be pretty reasonable (e.g. 10 x $60/night normal stays redeemed for 2 free $1000/night NYC NYE stays).

I tried to use AirBnB for Hawaii, but couldn't find enough listings at the time; ended up using another similar service (VRBO?) and discovered some terrifying people.

I'll try AirBnB more in markets where it's strong, and probably higher-end properties than I tried in the past, but I don't think it will destroy hotels.
Actually, visiting a local market and cooking at least one meal at "home" sounds like a great break from all the restaurants and cafés.
Is there anyone from the original Digg team still there? I was under the impression the brand got bought by Betaworks but the team went to the Washington Post or something like that.
Thanks for the reply. I'll give CodeAcademy a go over the next few weeks. Stayed tuned.