skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was mostly helping people with Tor-related stuff and didn't have time to get a sense of the other usability issues out there in thinks like whole disk-encryption and PGP.

There is a very literal UI bug that is also a security problem in the Tor Browser Bundle. If you resize the Firefox window, you increase your browsers uniqueness & thus make you easier to identify. Try this by switching off a toolbar and noticing the difference at panopticlick.eff.org

Getting a piece of software like Pidgin to work through Tor was a challenge for many. The concepts of 'localhost' and sockets and a TCP-stream was challenging to get across. I don't really know the answer to this problem. These are hard issues to solve with software and the best we've got so far, I think, is education. If I had to imagine a piece of software: something like a packet filter that could go into 'incognito mode' set-up a transparent proxy and automatically flag packets that could reduce one's anonymity or reveal one's identity, then recommend steps to take in the relevant applications to get around that. It's not a completely thought through idea but maybe someone will come along and read this and it would spark the solution in their mind.

There are more bugs than people, check out trac.torproject.org and see what you can do. The #tor irc channel on irc.oftc.net & tor-talk@lists.torproject.org are good places to ask questions.
I was under the impression that they used beam splitters to get a copy of the data going over the fiber. It is my understanding that they can only receive data this way, not send it.
More people to quit Facebook after Prism news
> It's not just a case of being too cheap, but also it having negligable effect.

For me this is not remotely true.

It's not an issue of spending N hours in travel. It's an issue of spending N hours cooped up in a tight and uncomfortable seat, unable to sleep and developing deep vein thrombosis, on a bumpy airplane filled with recycled oxygen and passengers with all sorts of airborne illnesses. Inevitably I have a variety of, erm, digestive issues after long flights.

For me it's bad enough that I have a special rule: the number of days I must stay at a remote destination must exceed the number of hours I spend flying to get there. This rule does not apply to trains or cars or buses, nor layovers in airports. Just planes.

Given the choice between spending 5 hours on a plane and 15 hours in an airport, or just 10 hours on a plane, I'd pick the former in a heartbeat.
thanks for the help getting started! you helped me out a ton 2 years ago!
The one route where supersonic probably makes sense is trans-pacific. Still no sonic boom, and would turn travel from "a complete day wasted both directions" to something better. Especially for something like NYC-HKG, if you could solve the sonic boom issue (although most of it is over Canada or oceans; not sure about the inland China part)
This was by far my favorite quote from his answers. Perfect way to cap off that whole paragraph.
If you still don't accept that software is a process not a product you're going to have a bad time. With every technology stack on this planet.
Why it's a good idea to roll your own CSS Framework (and why I did it)
Uses 30% of one core which is the same as scrolling the text here on HN (in Firefox)
I don't think anyone reading your comment is sure of what you mean by vague and substantial. He has explicitly addressed every one of his harshest criticisms thus far in much clearer language than most of us are used to seeing in the media.
> In YOUR opinion.

In Snowden's opinion as well, obviously.

> Why die for them when I can just go somewhere else that already has them?

Because this totally ignores the reality that this other place didn't appear out of thin air. It has people there that care about these ideals, and most likely some that would be willing to die for them.

In some respect, not attempting to change your country to be what you consider a better place and just migrating to a different location is leeching off the world, and those that work hard to make it what they consider a better place. We all do it to a lesser or greater degree, but to just throw your hands up and give up on your current circumstances entirely in favor of a move is beneficial to no one but yourself and those you disagree with.

This is as true for neighborhoods as it is for countries.
PhantomJS is pretty big. IIRC, building it takes quite some time. I think they bundle webkit and the necessary parts of Qt, and you'd have to be out of your mind to build that from source if you can avoid it.

Using official distribution packages would be a better idea, but their freshness can vary, especially on RHEL.
I agree, he said a whole lot of beautiful nothing. He didn't really add any new information to the discussion.

The question I most wanted to see asked was a request to expand on the notion that he had the ability to wiretap anyone up to the president. When this came up he simply went on a philosophical rant about the nature of bureaucratic creep and how our constitutional rights should extend past our borders.
The impression I get is that they collect everything they can. If they want to actually _look_ at what they've collected, they are supposed to ask secret permission from a secret court that gives a secret answer. Of course, we trust that they _always_ ask this secret court.
Try out the Bing Synonyms API for free on the Windows Azure Marketplace
Very neat infographic.
as a person who spent 20+ years fighting lyme disease, which ended up attacking my CNS, i can tell you this is absolutely not a good idea.
No, the Haskell version will operate in constant space provided you don't hold onto the list:

let fibs = 1 : 1 : zipWith (+) fibs (tail fibs) in fibs !! 100

Since the fibs list is visible only to the expression (fibs !! 100), and since the (!!) operator advances through the list discarding elements until it hits the 100th, those elements are free to be garbage collected. Further, since the elements of the list (after the first two) are generated only when consumed, only a few of the cons cells will ever be live at any point in time.
I'm not sure you should draw any meaning at all from this, whether technical or philosophical.
JPEG is an image specific compression format, and works by removing visually insignificant detail. Applying the same system blindly to an unrelated byte-stream and then looking at the before and after isn't meaningful.

Those objections aside, it's a bit silly from a technical point of view - the text was read in as a RAW image format. As I understand it, RAW has to be converted into a bitmap image using a camera specific algorithm, so before he's even started compressing it the data has been munged, the data is then compressed and output as a completely different file format. I'm surprised he got anything recognisable at all.

Putting bitmap type file headers on the text data, then jpeg compressing it, and resaving it as a bitmap (and removing the headers), might produce something slightly more meaningful. I might try it later - curious to find out what Singular Value Decomposition looks like on text.

Actually, could just skip out Photoshop...
cracks knuckles and fires up Python
I read it as something like this: "We really promise not to mess up your account. Really-really. Oh wait, our server has been hacked".
I absolutely love how GitHub is always at the cutting edge. Always improving. Always making it better.

Steve Jobs' "stay hungry. stay foolish" applies perfectly to GitHub's attitude.

Keep up the great work!
Off topic: it is perfectly fine to install things like PyQt / PySide on a headless server. I suppose the problem is because the distro doesn't provide these packages?

Also, PhantomJS works fine in this case because the binary in the tarball is statically compiled. You can find a whole lot of qt stuffs inside PhantomJS source repository. There ain't no such thing as "truly headless".
I think that overall it's a nice, welcome change. The double tab bar was getting a bit odd.

I just think that the alignment of the right vertical icon bar is a bit off, I think it'd be better off-canvas.

The emphasis on speed is great. I hope they'll improve keyboard navigation with this release as well.
Show HN: Binary, a cloud development environment on the iPad
Parallax scrolling has been pretty common for a while, now. Nothing to do with Apple.
Inevitable death is not a "gift", it's a lesson. Santa Claus doesn't off you and your family as a "gift" for Christmas.

I've experienced the deaths of several close loved ones. Death wasn't a gift to them or others. It was a reminder of the importance of living life. It's life that's the gift, not death.
Privacy Statement: We Are Transparent
In a certain sense, thats what Reader's Digest Condensed Books are all about - lossy text compression.

But we let machines do it all the time too. Go from UTF-8 to ASCII-7. You won't loose much in English - orientation of quotation marks, distinction among various types of dashes. Naïve and Café and El Niño and other words borrowed from other languages and commonly spelt with their native character set would also need to be spelt differently.

You could drop down to 5 bits per character, giving you only upper case letters and room for 6 punctuations. Numerals would need to be spelt out, which means you could no longer distinguish among these: 1, One, ONE, one.

You can also find lots of lossy text compression, focused on minimizing characters, on Twitter or in text messages.
There are four time zones from one endpoint to the other including the end points, three time zone transitions between the end points, and two time zones that are between the time zones containing the endpoint.

I'd be hesitant to call any of those numbers wrong when offered as the number of timezones between SF and NY, either three or four probably match the most common uses specifically related to timezones, though two would probably best match the usual use of "number of Xs between Y and Z".
I agree with many of these points, especially about not letting accounts receivable get more than $1-2k, and about having to settle for a fraction of the outstanding $10k in this case, but I do not agree about a lawyer not being willing to take this case or it not being worth it.

Many lawyers will take a small claims case, and at the very least will consult with you (probably 30-60 minutes for free) about it. And while state law will vary, around here most will work for a percentage of the awarded payment.

I knew someone that had a $12k invoice due, went to small claims court ($10k limit), had a lawyer write letters and represent them, and walk away with $8000+. Bear in mind it took 2 years to resolve, though.
I'm going to go ahead and assume that, once this is complete, you will be able to go to one country and buy a phone, then use it to make a call from a second country into a third... and probably still pay less than the average Canadian local cellphone call.
Google Play for Education
aside from all the obvious #<language>, #scikit-learn is really good for general ML and obviously good for more specific questions about scikits.learn machine learning libs
No I am not entering my Github credentials just to look at your book's website.
> Why die for them when I can just go somewhere else that already has them?

Go where? You can't magically arrive somewhere and become a citizen of that place under their protection and rules of law. Also, what if the place that you go to has fewer liberties than the US?

I can't tell if you're being purposefully difficult or are unable to grasp the concept of dying to protect freedoms.
Seizing disks is different from snooping without your knowledge. This also requires a higher level of legal justification.

Passing background checks for my employees and me is a valid requirement and one that I will implement. However, not to be facetious or anything, but Edward Snowden probably had a background check done.

Thanks for the comments.
Rethinking the Boston Marathon Bombings
What you guys think of Windev?
I'm searching for arguments against this software.

Anyone have used it and can say some feedbacks ?
Black gaffer's tape is great for almost all the annoying "hey, I'm here!" LEDs in the office. The blue ones are especially gruesome.
With Prism Cooperation, Tech Giants Look Weak
Oh, they definitely do both, I'm not disputing that.
I'm sorry about your experience, it wasn't my intention to be flippant about the disease, but rather to point out that people's paranoia is often misdirected.
look at the average salary of worker bee at corporation X in China versus worker bee at government agency X in China. my money is on the government jobs paying better, too.
Cheating Ourselves of Sleep
how lame is that? " I do not profess to know what the startup-stage version of the Facebook equivalent is for cryptocurrencies but there are plenty of possibilities. To name a few with interesting prospects: YACoin, Litecoin, PPCoin, Freicoin." BTC is much better than these. The author has 0.0 knowledge of BTC.
Mimic apps that break on screen resolutions other than the tested ones?
Interesting.

Personally I hope for a crypto-currency scheme that inflates with use and avoids the runaway "lets burn electricity as fast as we can" aspect of BTC mining.
> without paying anything

directly.

Whether it's better/cheaper to pay directly or indirectly is a separate issue worthy of its own debate, but either way TNSTAAFL.
I was about to ask, how he would deal with staying, as you can't simply choose a country but must conform to its visa regulations. He might be there as a tourist for now but I would think that cannot do so forever.
i lost my daughter 1 year, 3 months, 29 days, 13hrs ago.

i understand what he's saying.

to frame it in a slightly different way:
there's a gift of understanding that has the potential to be far more powerful than the pain/grief/torment of the death.
Still broken for me using Google Reader.
"we can only consume a few dozens of bytes per second, and so any error is obvious."

That's not the point at all. The English language itself is already heavily compressed, by which I mean the space of all possible words is already densely packed. This is why we can both understand misspelled words with no particularly close neighbors, but are nonetheless sensitive to misspellings in general.

The act of writing something down in language compresses it, significantly changing properties of the space such as comparability of neighbors
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5885919

Still broken for me using Google Reader.
Off-topic but I find the color scheme of your blog very offputting
When we're out of beta, we'll open the book up for people to read without any kind of login. For now, though, we're putting this out there largely to get feedback before publication. Unfortunately, github has fairly coarse-grained permissions, so we need to ask for rather a lot.
My signup page, FWIW: http://dontkillyourcofounder.com/
If I was an NSA analyst who could spy on who ever I wanted, I would not be keen to throw people in jail, but seducing women would be fun; I think there is even a movie about it.
because prior to the new User implementation in 1.5, you couldn't change the length of the username CharField. Long emails wouldn't fit.
Downloading the app now, and wondering why it looks near identical to a slew of other apps. What framework product does it use?
A much as I hate to say it, the exit bag might be the best choice here.
Maybe not using Google -- using DDG (or worse)? The results are an order of magnitude richer with the former.
It usually is inline assembly, but you write it in C first and copy the disassembly as a starting point. We do this in the embedded world a lot because we're constantly switching architectures, and nobody memorizes the instruction set of every architecture :)

The most common reason is using architecture-dependent instructions that the compiler doesn't generate well, or doesn't generate at all. Examples are SIMD (auto-vectorization is nice, but far from perfect) and DSPs that have specific multiple-and-accumulate instructions or flags that change the behavior of the accumulate register.

In a project I'm currently working on, inlining was still inferior to fully native ASM. LLVM generated unnecessary stack loading in the prologue, and the completely unused memory access had something like a 4% speed penalty.
Here's what the CDC says about Lyme Disease.

(http://www.cdc.gov/lyme/)

> If left untreated, infection can spread to joints, the heart, and the nervous system. Lyme disease is diagnosed based on symptoms, physical findings (e.g., rash), and the possibility of exposure to infected ticks; laboratory testing is helpful if used correctly and performed with validated methods. Most cases of Lyme disease can be treated successfully with a few weeks of antibiotics.
The documentation generation tools are a bit of a mess at the moment. We're working actively with OCaml Labs to improve the tools here, and we expect to have the documentation in a much cleaner and easier to use state (and prettier) by publication time.
MailCore - a "batteries included" e-mail library for Mac & iOS
We are not even trying. Evidence based medicine is too busy finding more "treatments" instead of cure.
I never got from this article why you should roll your own CSS framework. The real purpose behind stuff like bootstrap is so that you can quickly prototype a site without having to spend a few days writing a CSS framework. Once the prototype is up you can override the styling.
In some sense everything is a "gift" because all the lessons we learn lead us to some ultimate spiritual goal. That said, I don't think "gift" is the best word and prefer "lesson" instead.

Would you apply the word "gift" to any horrible genocide/natural disaster that has happened? Perhaps you would, but for most people, "Lesson" will resonate better.
I was coming down with symptoms that were flu-like, and had extremely painful muscle tension on my neck. Both of these can be attributed to either lyme disease or meningitis. I operated under the assumption that $200-300 was cheaper than long-term (years) health problems or death.
it's comomn kdownlege in inoitrmfaon thoery ciecrls taht you can reoerdr lttres in wrods and the relsut is pecfretly undeastnrdlabe as lnog as you keep the fsirt and lsat letrtes the smae.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4126...
Are international calling fees within the EU going away as well?
As some comments are arriving below -- lossy compression does not work that way!

Interpreting one set of data as another is a clever trick for puzzles (thematic, for example, to: http://web.mit.edu/puzzle/www/2013/coinheist.com/oceans_11/t... -- but that's only a hint, the solution is still lots of fun!) but is kind of wrong in practice.

Compression is about conveying a similar 'message' while removing the stuff that just doesn't compress well. In signals such as pictures and audio, this is often seen/heard in high frequency detail.

To the layman, the simplest lossy compression of an image is to resize it by a half in each dimension and then stretch the output. (Not unlike retina-display artifacts you may have seen). Assuming you do it right (with an averaging filter) -- you've just removed the upper half of the representable frequencies, it just so happens that most of what the eye cares about isn't in those ranges -- and so the image still looks decent. A little blocky if you stretch it, but still pretty good. JPEG is just a more technically advanced version of similar tricks.

A better analogy of lossy compression on text is actually xkcd's Up Goer Five (http://xkcd.com/1133/) -- using only the "ten hundred" most common words, you can still convey concepts (albeit simplistically) and stay under ten bits a word, or a little less than two ascii characters per. If you were to map the dictionary into "up-goer five" speak, you could compress Shakespeare pretty well. It would lose a lot in the translation -- but so does a heavily-compressed image. If you limit yourself to the first 64k words, you have a much larger vocabulary, still limited, and still fitting within two bytes per word. Though you may have to use more words, a word like "wherefore" still counts for four words worth of compressed space, when replaced by "why". Tradeoffs!

That'd be a curious hack -- sort the words in Romeo and Juliet by word frequency. Rewrite the least common words in terms of the other words. Compress.
I think every time he opens his mouth some shadowy characters in some windowless bunker stateside are ordering another round of illegally imported Cuban cigars and a particularly peaty single malt Scotch.

Given the creativity of conspiracy theories, I'm a little surprised nobody's yet suggested he's actually part of a US false flag operation.
because of max_length=30
Yes I thought of jQuery also. jQuery always returns an array. If it has no elements that means the thing wasn't found.
Airbnb vs. Hotels: A Price Comparison
This looks great. I'm a bit skeptical but very excited to do iOS dev on my iPad mini!
I was just flying for the first time in a decade last week and I saw an oversize tail on another plane while we were taxi-ing around the runway. The proportions struck me as non-obvious. That got me wondering if/how much we've begun to see data-mining/machine-learning algos and computational aero/fluid dynamics influence aircraft design.

E.g., genetic algorithms that vary the tail/wing/nose/etc. size/position and runs virtual designs through a simulator to see if various combinations perform better than others.

My next thought was, "how would you design the fitness function?". I.e., what are the right objective measures you can use to determine that one design is 'better' than another? I.e., How do you determine the optimal balance of speed vs. fuel efficiency vs. comfort/stability/safety vs. production/materials cost etc.?
With the rise of responsive websites, you may want to accept viewport parameters or at least identify which viewport you're screenshotting at.
The theatrics around this entire story make me question his true intentions. His answers today are anything but straightforward, and the majority of them don't actually deal with information he leaked, but rather his opinions on surveillance, politics, and thinly veiled threats to the government. If his intentions are truly to change the state of NSA's surveillance, then given his position, he should be publicizing raw information (such as PowerPoints, documents, and actual events).
US House defence bill blocks Obama's plan to close Guantánamo Bay prison
For a direct comparison of the same repository (Etsy's Skyline) redesigned, see the before and after redesign links below:

- Current/Old https://github.com/etsy/skyline

- New/Redsigned https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1354/660756/cc8cad9c-d714-...

EDIT: typo
> What happens when you need an "else" branch?

Then you use one, but null checks generally aren't cases of if/else conditionals, they're more along the lines of "either I have one or mayday mayday". Sometimes slightly softened into "either I have one or use this default thing"