skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(Disclaimer: I haven't read the article in full yet, only the part mentioning Cage.) I think their point is different.

Cage’s silence is indeed imperfect (as in, you can hear the sound). Their point is that even a perfect silence is ‘Coloured.’ Quoting the article:

“He was asserting that the bits in his copy of 433.mp3 [silence created by a particular method] had a different Colour from those in a copy of 433.mp3 I might make by means of the /dev/zero procedure, even though the two files would contain exactly the same bits.”

This sounded quite weird and slightly crazy at first to me (and then author mentioned the experiment was done as a joke anyway), but I started to see it like a neat example of how factors such as knowing how the recording was made shape our listening experience.

I'm yet to finish the article, and want to thank StavrosK for posting the link.
Arch's fonts can be prettified a lot with Ubuntu patches from AUR: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_Configuration#Ubun...

(I'm another Arch + KDE user - both at home and at work)
See also RFC 6562
Done :-) $65. I only wish they still had that awesome NSA tshirt! https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/10/effs-new-nsa-spying-sh...
Hotel review site Oyster.com fires staff and hopes for asset sale
Exactly, it always remembers me of this http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2013-05-22/

Honesty should be encouraged specially in big environments, since it finds the pains on the middle management that normally does not show up anywhere.
While this is good from a UX perspective, don't rely on tools like this to make sure that you include all information on an invoice that you're legally required to include.

For instance, in the UK (which appears to be where this company is based), all invoices for VAT registered companies must carry their VAT Registration Number. However with this tool, even if you select to include VAT in the settings (which you must do if you're VAT registered), there is no box or prompt to include your VAT reg no.

I.E., never rely on 3rd party services to make sure you are complying with the law. It's your backside on the line if you or they get it wrong.
Does anyone know if the CCC made the code Binney gave them available?

Also, William Binney gave a keynote talk at HOPE 9 that talks about this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqN59beaFMI
The thing that allows me to rest assured at night is the sheer level of incompetence of our officials and agencies. I dread the day that the infrastructure that now exists and goes far deeper and broader than everyone realizes is taken control of by someone with authoritarian tendencies for efficiency and accountability.

It's the difference between your buddy cracking your phone and pulling some prank; and someone else cracking your phone and using the information to bleed you dry, torment you, and mess with your life for decades.
Privacy is Dead - Get Over It
> is there any reason to believe that it wouldn't work?

Yes. The law generally isn't a binary automaton that can be "tricked" by a bit of clever catch-22 logic.

Your canary is a one-bit communications channel. Removing it or ceasing to update it constitutes flipping the bit. That, obviously, is communication.
How to Write a Book: Tools
If you haven't seen it yet, you should check out millionshort.com . I think the idea is that it skims off the top layer of scum from search results, hopefully revealing good results that didn't SEO.
Given that they don't seem to have any automatic tests or similar for their APIs (check out their Google group and you'll see that stuff have been broken for a long time for all users without attention. When stuff has been broken in the past, Instagram people will ask "is this still a problem?", like they have no way of checking their own APIs...), I wouldn't expect them to be that crafty.
"...more and more people are dropping cable..."

Exactly -- this is why it was baffling that they spent half the intro event showing features that only work with a separate cable box hooked up to the Xbox, so that you control your cable box via Kinect voice commands. I can completely understand why someone who didn't watch the intro would be reluctant to believe it was mostly about cable television, but it really was.
Yes. And it's not just learning new stuff. It's important to just keep learning stuff.

It's shocking how many of my team mates haven't even heard about Scheme, let alone tried to learn it. And yet learning that language (I'm still working on it) is revolutionising the quality of my code. There's a lot of important stuff that was developed years ago that's just as important as stuff that's coming out today.
That web-site is idiotic. Why does running a certain OS give the NSA/PRISM more or less access to your data?

They are either getting this stuff at the data-centre OR getting it by splitting the fibre optic lines between your ISP and the data-centre.

In either case, how does switching from Chrome to Firefox, Windows to Linux, or even worse switching your DNS provider help that? How does it even remotely mitigate it at all?

Almost nothing on that list is liable to make a damn bit of difference. I mean, sure, TOR, but TOR was created by the American government and ANYONE can run an exit node -- so you're really depending on SSL to keep you secure, which is no better or worse than a non-TOR solution.

You're replacing Google Maps/Apple Maps with OpenStreet Maps. How does THAT make you more secure? With instant messaging you're confusing services and clients (i.e. how does Pidgin work if you're boycotting all of the major services? Insecure IRC?). Ditto with VoIP.

In general that list is all kinds of stupid. I am actually dumber for having read it. It takes an astonishing amount of ignorance in almost all areas of IT to make something like that.
This recent article comes to mind:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/health/for-scientists-an-e...

> The scientists who were recruited to appear at a conference called Entomology-2013 thought they had been selected to make a presentation to the leading professional association of scientists who study insects.
>
> But they found out the hard way that they were wrong. The prestigious, academically sanctioned conference they had in mind has a slightly different name: Entomology 2013 (without the hyphen).

And the institution of medicine has long been plagued with accusations of fake studies, underwritten by drug companies:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/opinion/useless-pharmaceut...

> LAST month, the Archives of Internal Medicine published a scathing reassessment of a 12-year-old research study of Neurontin, a seizure drug made by Pfizer. The study, which had included more than 2,700 subjects and was carried out by Parke-Davis (now part of Pfizer), was notable for how poorly it was conducted. The investigators were inexperienced and untrained, and the design of the study was so flawed it generated few if any useful conclusions. Even more alarming, 11 patients in the study died and 73 more experienced “serious adverse events.” Yet there have been few headlines, no demands for sanctions or apologies, no national bioethics commissions pledging to investigate. Why not?
>
> One reason is that the study was not quite what it seemed. It looked like a clinical trial, but as litigation documents have shown, it was actually a marketing device known as a “seeding trial.” The purpose of seeding trials is not to advance research but to make doctors familiar with a new drug.
Alternatively, deploy to a non-default serving version of the app. Then, when you push/deploy, you can go to the non-default version, check it's right, then promote it to default.

This flow isn't as smooth as it could be, certainly, but we're hoping it could be useful for small teams or new users. And we'd love to hear your ideas about how to make this even more useful, this is an area under very active development (thus the Preview label)
Yeah, but he got that specific top secret clearance from his work as an employee of the CIA. As far as I know, all CIA positions require a polygraph.
Great work! Unfortunately I wouldn't be able to use it since I would need there are two taxes to calculate in my jurisdiction.
Also, I rename VAT to something else, it stays VAT on the PDF?
Wordpress's admin panel is totally responsive. It's quite well done and impressive. It's lovely to be able to fire it up on my phone and delete spam comments without pinching and zooming in on controls.
Naveen's "Personal API" - Let's get a version of this for everyone
Review my startup (background job monitoring as a service)
Clojure.core: Batteries Almost Included
> What's the problem?

The problem is that processing centers are overloaded. As a result, more and more boxes and parcels pile up. Sometimes it gets even more ridiculous, like recently in Moscow, when some boxes caught fire.

Besides, the whole processing system is so ineffective, that you could send a box from China to Far Eastern Russia (relatively small distance), which would first land to be processed in Moscow (great distance) and then be sent back to Far East.

Also, there is a queueing problem in the goddamn post offices, I won't even get started on that, it is so infuriating.
I have SSN in my country (not USA). It seems generic advice, worded in a USA undertandable way.
I'd say without documentation any code loses quality.

I'm not talking about giving a manual for every piece of code you write, but any code that will be used by others (specially in big companies) should be well documented.

If good code is not documented, it will probably cause the same amount of trouble for people using it, than a bad piece of code.

People often forget that their code normally ends up outliving them.
Hi, I'm particularly looking for feedback about how to explain the product better (aka creating a better sales pitch). Somehow I find it very hard to explain a simple product :).
Do not forget, however, that (for development) you can easily skip the Proguard step if you install the scala libraries on your device directly. Also, setting SBT up is pretty much a one-time thing. Afterwards, you only need to do a few tweaks when starting a new project.

I've used Scala for a couple Android apps in the past... it was great fun to do so! Still, AndroidAnnotations not working with Scala code requires you to rewrite some of their functionality... but you can do that rather easily with Scala's traits etc.
What's laughable is that if he had such a device, it's almost certain he would have a 3rd party capable of deploying in the event of, say, a highly publicized police raid of his home to arrest him.

Of course, the counter to that would be to contact whoever hosts his data ( it's doubtful it's in his basement ) and have them pull the plug before the raid.

Of course, if you do that, there's little point in raiding his house in the first place as the "doomsday device" would be neutralized. A simple summons would likely have been sufficient. "Hi, we've taken your servers from the co-lo, come in for questioning by tomorrow at blah blah blah".

What if he runs? Who gives a shit? It was a copyright infringement case. If he runs, you then lock his assets, put him on a watch list and let him crawl back out at his leisure, letting his servers rot in an evidence locker somewhere.

I'm not sure how they justify the car removal at all. I suppose they didn't, since the warrant was deemed to be overreaching.

This was just ridiculous.
It would be interesting to see a comparative ROI study of several large, publicly-funded, projects similar to the HGP. Such data would be useful in debates about policy, one would think.
Video on 2-way sync between Backbone.Collection and Kendo UI DataSource
Thats's really not fair to Gemmell. If you read the augmented paper article he links (from a year ago), you'll find him very positive about this stuff in Metro and much more sympathetic to the design motivations behind it (and Android).

I agree that the snarky comment you quoted isn't that helpful, but it's clearly an aside, tucked away in parenthesis, not his main thoughts on other platforms' aesthetics.

Fwiw, most of what I imagine you mean by the 'Apple-sphere' (Gruber, Gemmell, Marco, etc) have been generally positive about Microsoft's new design ethos. Criticisms have tended to focus on its implementation, not the design itself.
Cheers. Unfortunately while we have a web role we have two worker roles running long-background processes to deal with Exchange streaming subscriptions (this isn't really a website, it's an API). This is more than I found when attempting to search for a solution to a quicker deploy, however.
Are you serious? SPJ's work has been incredibly instrumental in bringing functional features (such as LINQ) to C#

See: http://www.infoq.com/interviews/simon-peyton-jones-about-mai...

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...
Not to diminish Shannon's genius at all, but he wasn't the first to make logic circuits. http://projecteuclid.org/DPubS/Repository/1.0/Disseminate?vi... On page 917 you can see Charles Sanders Pierce and Alan Marquand made some in the 1880's.
"App that runs on both the Galaxy S Software and the HTC One Software is much easier to build that one that runs on the Apple iPhone and the Blackberry Q10" what does it signifies??
Great list of tips. I helped a friend self pub his first novel about 3 years ago. Amazing experience, I organized the cover (lucky to kow an extremely talented graphic designer who worked for a small percentage of sales) and I did all the internal layout using indesign (the OP was right on how much of a technical nightmare it is to get up and running with InD!)

My inspiration and guide for working with the interior of the book, believe it or not, was don knuth's TAOCP. That is one of the most beautifully typeset books I've ever read (ha, I mean have tried to read over the last 12 years). It was a lot harder than I had imagined, and took a lot of by hand tweaking to make each and every page look just right. But it was worth it as the printed version of the book looks great, without the self-published look I've noticed from people who I believe may have just downloaded a template for Word to layout the book.

I don't know about the various comments here about createspace isbn's. That's what we went with, and small bookstores and Barnes and Noble stock the paperback version. (Although I don't know if B&N have it in their stores, but you can buy the paperback version online through them)

The hardest part we found was the marketing. My friend started a blog, and is active on twitter, pinterest and Facebook. The book is a novel so he can't show domain knowledge via the blog, but his blog is entertaining and does lead to sales as the book contains comedy, but isn't a comedic work.

The biggest problem was trying to reach out to traditional media - not even a rejection email from various reviewers we tried to reach out to, even though we focused on papers where he is from and also where the book is set (Philly and Pitsburgh). This could of course be because of the fact that it's self published. But when is next book becomes a big hit we will remember the great websites and independent magazines that did review the book so they'll get first dibs on the author. But I will definetly go through this list with a fine toothed comb when I have a chance and check out the marketing tracking tips.

Regarding piracy, we believed in the old adage that I think O'Reilly came up with - 'It's not piracy that kills authors, it's obscurity.' But I couldn't convince him to go the whole hog like Paulo Coello and upload his book himself to pirate book sites, and I can understand as we worked on the book for about 4 years (by we I mean him doing all the work and me cracking a whip to keep him motivated and writing, then proofreading and editing through 4 drafts)

Happy to say he's sold a few copies, and it keeps plugging along. This summer I get to do it all again as he has almost finished the first draft of his second novel.

If you want to check it out, the novel is called 'Senseless' and the author is Damien Galeone (http://damiengaleone.com). The book is available on both Amazon and B&N (paper, kindle and nook) Or you can email me if you want a copy of the book in PDF, if you'd like to check out the internal formatting (this is marketing, not piracy and I just called the author he said he's fine to hand out some copies:)my email is in my profile.
On the second stage there's a link to the generated PDF, you could download that and send, instead of having them do it for you.
Why in the basement? Is it illegal?

Sorry, I'm flabbergasted at the legal/illegal discussion over massive spying on non-US citizens.
JDK 8 (Almost) Feature Complete
Exactly. While the article makes very good points about what you want from a general-purpose Git deployment script, deploying to App Engine is not quite the same, since there is no Git client on the server pulling changes directly, so you avoid the problems addressed by all four points.

App Engine creates new app instances when you deploy, so there's no need to care about deleted files, tracked/untracked files on the server, and so on.
I know I'm biased on that, but if the internals of Bottle are clean it's doing something wrong :) WSGI/HTTP are incredible complex and in fact, too complex to fit into a single Python file.

There is a good reason for why Werkzeug (which Flask is based on) is 15000 lines of code.
Nice writeup explaining an overview of Foundation, Modernizer, etc..

I like what you did with your responsive tables. They look good.

Also, is this really a "complex" web app. Doesn't really seem like there's a ton of fields to fill out or data to present. I was hoping someone was finally doing a writup on a data-dense app with many/complex fields of data entry with some best practices (this is the article I'm waiting for, though you have a good start).

BTW, I'm a fan of Foundation, so I was excited to see how others are using it.
How To Find CopyrightedAnd Royalty Free ImagesUsing Google AdvanceSearch
Using a SWAT raid to arrest a subject in cases where the police also want to seize evidence isn't at all uncommon in the US these days. The ostensible idea is that speed and ferocity is needed to capture evidence before criminals can destroy it. In practice I think the situation is more that police departments feel they need need SWAT teams because of terrorism, etc. But once they have them they start looking for chances to use them so the members don't get bored. The police in the US are required to knock on the door and announce themselves before conducting a raid which would interfere with the police starting the suspects and getting them before they could, say, flush their drugs down the toilet. Thankfully for the police there's no requirement for how loudly they have to knock, so I don't think I've ever heard of a case where the suspect or neighbors heard them do this. There are some states where over half of police searches are done by tactical squads bursting in behind a battering ram.
Vidinterest.com – a social video platform
Vidinterest enables you to add unlimited videos from Youtube, Vimeo and Dailymotion, have notifications like facebook and you can follow people or their playlist like Twitter. Further in the owners own words,’Vidinterest is to videos what Pinterest is to images’.
I was wondering about it some more, and tried to find where I could had read it. Sadly, I can't find it so take the statement with a bit of salt. Might just been a comment someone made regarding the officer who asked the nanny if she had any weapons or bombs. (http://gizmodo.com/5882967/watch-how-the-special-forces-bust...)

Or it maybe my memory is a bit faulty and what I remember is regarding the search warrant used by the police. (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/06/mega-victory-kim-...) The article describe how police officers didn't know what they were looking for when executing the warrant. As the judge put it, the people executing the warrant "were not the investigating officers and had limited knowledge of the operation," despite being briefed before the raid went down.

If I do find the article, I will post it. Maybe its was in the court document.
The problem is that the meaning of "software as such" has been almost completely eroded over the past decades by the EPO and some national courts (including, in particular, the X. Civil Senate of the German Federal Court of Justice).

"Software as such" used to be excluded because inventions were required to be technical, which meant that a patent had to teach a methodical use of controllable forces of nature that attained a goal based on cause and effect. The criterion of "being technical" predated "software as such", but the latter term was indeed intended to distinguish between pure software and combined software/hardware solutions, where the software was integral to the overall solution, reflecting previous exclusions of business methods, mathematics, etc. under the same criterion.

What happened was that the "use of controllable forces of nature" got watered down incrementally until now practically anything that isn't defined in terms of a Turing Machine satisfies the criterion (sadly, I'm not really exaggerating much here). For example, anything that is designed to operate in finite (not even practically limited, just not infinite) memory can be argued to be related to managing resources and thus be technical. Any algorithm that is more efficient than another (uses less memory, is more cache-friendly, requires less I/O, etc.) is potentially technical.

As a result, tying your algorithm to a device as an integral part of a combined hardware/software system is not really a necessity any longer. That does not mean that anything goes, but there are way too many patents relating to what developers (but not the EPO) think of as pure software solutions that are patented and which can trip you up.

This is precisely what the German parliament is referring to when it complains that "in practice -- in particular by the European Patent Office (EPO) -- patents were granted for computer programs where the patent grant for teachings relating to pure data processing received only a formal disguise as a 'technical process' or 'technical device' and claims explicitly included also the computer programs implementing these processes or devices".
Want to be a true innovator? Teach a kid to code (TED Talk)
NASA funds grants to companies working on healthcare products
The vast majority of Microsoft's profits come from Office. Windows makes a little bit, and everything else loses money.
I think one big hold up usually is payment for invoicing...and a payment solution that is fee-free.
Agreed; he should have done that before he pulled the trigger, along with the identity destruction. It's kind of too late now... and I think either just lying low in Hong Kong or going to some obscure place in Russia or living in the mountains might be his best options.
cool, now i get another place to hangout lol
You think it’s OK to liken the arrest of a repeat offender to the genocide of millions of innocent men, women, and children?

In the video, I didn’t see physical force used. Neither did I read of anything like it in any of the reports of the arrest. What part of the operation is violent to you?

Schmitz was found with a sawed off shotgun, and the police had to cut him out of his panic room, so he could obviously be dangerous.
> too often, non-designers underestimate the work and design considerations involved.

The story of my life! In my entire career as a web developer, the hardest non-technical task I've ever faced is convincing management that we need a designer. I guess they think all they do is come up with some colors or something, because there is never any value given to having someone on-hand that actually knows what they're doing. So frustrating.