skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Troubleshooting Javascript & Backbone - part 1
In this series of articles I try to tackle several of the most common and most annoying issues you might encounter working with JavaScript. I present a very simple Backbone application that starts to show some strange behaviour. To find out what's going on, and the best way to handle it, I'll have a look at the way JavaScript passes around variables, the prototypical inheritance, the prototype chain and several other JavaScript intricacies.
Lesson I learned from this: I never want to create a web browser. Reminds me of Paul Irish's blog post[1] about how few things a web browser engine give you and how much these browser vendors have to implement themselves.

1 - http://www.paulirish.com/2013/webkit-for-developers/
A grid isn't essentially a table, and only the twisted history of web design could ever make someone say that. Imagine a discussion about book layout or poster design that made reference to grids and someone saying "oh so it's basically a table of data!".

And since it isn't a table of data, the grid is more semantically correct. Not because the grid has any semantics itself, but because you're not misusing other semantics.
This is true, in a way.

Tables were great in that they were a solid grid system, and a responsive one ( if you didn't try too hard to make them break your layout ).

But tables are for displaying tabular data, and they have some unwanted fat (th elements and the like) in regard to using them for a layout.

Now we are at grid systems. So much better!

But what we really want is native CSS support for complex layouts ( maybe in a couple of years... )
14-Year-Old Prodigy Programmer Dreams In Code
Very cool. I'd actually be more interested to know which mobile browsers these answers apply to, considering pretty much the only time I care about how many requests I'm making (within reason, of course) is when my users are potentially paying per request. I believe some mobile plans charge per request with a minimum of 1KB per request or something like that.
The biggest implication - it makes opposition impossible. In a few years there will be nobody to defend the average person rights. "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely"
Correct title: How well do you know edge cases with asset loading html, javascript, and css in the 4 major desktop browsers?
What you missed is that "nuhhuh, you do, too, here are some things you didn't think about" is not always the adequate response to "I have nothing to hide, or at least I can't think of anything". There's also the matter of public policy, accountability of government, misuse of neutral data by your adversaries, discrimination, and a whole lot more.
Again, I don't doubt, but one has to ask whether the value of that data is in fact all that substantial to anyone of malicious intent - there would, I would think, be far, far easier ways to obtain that data and again, the volume of it here would likely preclude attempts to remove it wholesale - if someone wanted localised data, why not get it from the same (likely more vulnerable) source the NSA did?

Also once again, I would guess that those with intent to cause disruption, fear or harm (even dissent) would probably have an easier time of things a dozen other ways. In building secure systems, it's always worthwhile to gauge the value of some data to an attacker and the cost to them of obtaining it.
NYC Union Square Rally Tomorrow for Edward Snowden
See you there at noon!
Erin Brockovich arrested while boating in Nevada
There are certainly problems with the for-profit prison industry. For example:

1. Is it reasonable to expect a corporation that wants to expand its "clientele" to rehabilitate prisoners into law-abiding citizens rather than repeat offenders?

2. Is it really a surprise that the prison industry has managed to reform the law to drum up business in a country where Mickey Mouse will never enter the public domain?
Whoa horsey. Slow down a bit. I'm as pissed as you are, but you're spreading too wide of a net.

Yes, Congress has oversight authority over all of this, but in practice what they've done is assign huge powers to agencies and then just hold PR committee meetings every now and then when they think they can get votes.

As far as I know, the only legislators fully briefed on all of this were the majority/minority leaders. Perhaps the chairmen of the intelligence committees. Perhaps not. Definitely not the entire committee, and definitely not every senator who can appear in front of a microphone.

The real problem here is that Congress has abdicated its power over to agencies ran by the president. This is true in many areas. If things screw up, they can have hearings and look like heroes. If things go well, they can either ignore them or make hay. In either case, nobody really cares what the agencies are doing. It's impossible. There simply too much detail for the legislature to manage. So the rule is: never do anything that will make you appear on TV. This is what the NSA violated.

I'd just be careful you don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Congress has the power, and could use it, to straighten this entire thing out. It's not just all PR stunts. Or how about putting it this way: yes, it's PR stunts, but with enough attention on these stunts, maybe the rest of them will grow the balls necessary to actually do their jobs.

This is a good sign. I hope we see many more "PR stunts" like it.
NSA WHISTLEBLOWER REVEALED: 29-Year-Old Edward Snowden Says He Is The Leaker
+1.
span12 and span6 makes much more sense as a class name, than a col-lg-3 or a col-sm-6.
If they are stealing from the foundation, and if differentiating large and small grid was the cause for changing identifiers, then I'm against it.
Other than that, I'm liking it already.
This is just dumb. It's on the same level as "why not make the whole plane out of black-box stuff".
It's also visually buggy in Safari.
Same with Chrome. Beware this link.
My Privacy Plan
Yay for a trust automaton, another level of complexity that won't solve anything.
NSA leaker comes forward, warns of agency's 'existential threat'
No, it scales fine on chrome.
erm he pointed out his level of access to illustrate that what he did wasn't to harm the US but to inform the people. He is saying look I could have done anything with the access I had, literally anything, but what I choose to do was take some specific info I felt would be relevant to the public and disclose it in a way that didnt put operatives at risk or put people in harms way. Its the whistle blower equivelant of "I have nuclear tech, and instead of building a bomb, I built a power plant".
Is Snowden Snowden?

"He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all."
It's pretty easy to figure the salary:

1) He's not on the GS schedule because he's a contractor
2) His clearance level
3) He works for one of the big 5 consulting firms that is considerably higher on the list if you rank by government/CIA/NSA engagements.

As a federal employee, you don't get a multiplying factor for having higher clearance. You merely get to have the job. You actually get a higher boost from living in an area with a locality adjustment due to cost of living adjustments.
Yes. Violating peoples privacy for greed and profit alone.

But that would exclude a lot more companies, many of which employ a lot of regular HN-users. Anything can be rationalized for a paycheck.

And although I've managed to steer clear so far, I'm not claiming to be any better.
Some shrug at NSA snooping: Privacy's already dead
It's not (just) about acquiring new technology or users. It's about blocking competitors (Apple, Facebook, Microsoft) from getting as good as them, or better, at maps and navigation.
I disagree. While you are right that turning someone from a pacifist into a violent terrorist can be done by "breaking" them, I think the point of the article is to show what lengths the US government will go to destroy those who disagree with it, whether they are citizens or not.

I think anyone who perused the article for more than 30 seconds sees that these people were not "converted."

The fact that they have been labelled violent terrorists for a peaceful protest is much more worrisome and impactful than throwing them in prison and watching their ideals erode away.

This is our country right now: a peaceful person can be labelled a violent terrorist. I think the title fits.
But how could a 29-year-old sysadmin have access to all this. Isn't it crazy? It sounds crazy to me.
Minor nit-pick: total war is exactly about killing civilians. It is about the total mobilization of your nation's resources and assets--military and otherwise--in support of a violent enforcement of your political policies. Civilians are fair game, because they are assumed to be working in direct support of your opponents war-making capabilities.

That said, I submit that we were never engaged with an opponent capable of conducting meaningful total war against our nation, and as such any loss of civilian life is unjustifiable.
Really interesting - nice job @jaffathecake! Good luck in finishing it :)
WWDC 2013 Expectations
Thinly veiled opinion piece on ipv6. Like it or not, ipv6 is happening.
Agreed, Rand Paul has had access to this information for years. He's just playing on people's emotions to get more support now that it's all public.
You might not realize it, but there's an imminent phone number shortage.

Citation needed.
It may as well read:

Sign here to admit you are treasonous terrorist-loving scum who should be under constant surveillance by the NSA for the protection of all fine, upstanding, compliant 'merican citizens.
Ask HN: Will you join me and change your GitHub avatar to Edward Snowden?
Let's show our support for Edward Snowden. Can you please join me in a show of solidarity by changing your GitHub profile's avatar to be the image of Edward? Let's remind the government who makes their software (note that their secret intelligence apps leveraged many FOSS projects).

http://i.imgur.com/I619C93.png
I'm not sure they even started with OSM. I remember in the very early days I could select the 'bulldozer' icon and add new roads to the maps. People used to ask why the maps weren't as good as OSMs, but the maps got better very quickly because - I suppose - everybody's journeys were added to the maps.
It just flat out failed to work in Opera :(
Did you see "the beautiful mind" movie? Your reasoning is much like of that character - he was trying so hard to find connections between things that he was succeeding regardless of what he looked at.
We all do what we can.
I heard my neighbor making bomb threats against the goverment (not me, my neighbor) although I am mad at my government..
And compared to central Europe, how secure is the US?
> More recently he also claimed that PRISM wasn't a previous-disclosed data collection program. It hadn't been previously disclosed before; and it is collecting data.

The grammar here is slightly confusing. Do you believe PRISM is collecting data in a previously undisclosed way? If so, why?
Maybe a little more science for science's sake, and less science that starts with "how many patients and how much money will it make us" and we'd have a much better chance at beating cancer.

We're allowing gene sequence patents FFS.

Which is why I left academic science in the 90's and became an engineer - my brain is still stimulated but my blood pressure is way (WAY) lower.
How about this, which is much simpler:

gdb --pid=$(cat /var/run/sshd.pid)
SpellHub, continuously spell-checking of your project's source code
Isn't it a bit soon for this? We don't even know if he's released anything of substantial value. As I understand it Glenn Greenwald is retaining the "best" for later.
Note: I’m not the author of this project.
Let's just say this: have you at least pirated a song or a movie, smoked marijuana and bragged about it online, or done anything at all that you know could be seen as a crime, or even stuff that you think is "moral" but probably illegal?

Okay. Then in a surveillance state you better not ever try to piss off the national leaders, or even the local ones (depends how far this gets), and you better not complain to your friends and neighbors either.

Because that's how they'll get you. Not with the last part - but with the first one. You'll just be another "pot smoker" or "pirate" and they'll demonize you as a dirty criminal who deserves prison.
Whether or not we can effectively realize change while restricting ourselves as Gandhi advocated remains to be seen. I think it is premature to assume that it is sufficient (and certainly premature to chastise those who feel strongly about this recent news).

Just one example of something that goes beyond Gandhi's approval (which may or may not be necessary in this particular case) is targeted industrial sabotage. Carefully calculated and restrained violence against property and information systems, not against people. Gandhi thought that sabotage put his effort back; perhaps he is correct. However it is hard to deny the valuable role sabotage has played in other conflicts.

This recent comment resonated with me:

"I'm French. France was occupied by Nazi Germany (as every American I ever speak to likes to remind me).
Resistants were ordinary French people who blew up trains in order to make the life of Germans in France as difficult as possible -- and of course German propaganda called them terrorists. I'm not putting this word in quotes, because of course that's what they were. They were trying to terrify the occupiers. It was a good thing." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5846266

Now plainly I am not advocating that we should start blowing up bridges, or that blowing up bridges might become necessary in some foreseeable immediate future. We are not occupied by a foreign force that is sending our neighbors to death camps. I reference this merely to make the point that the reach of Gandhi's tactics do have a limit.

Edit: Not sure why you deleted your comment. It was a very fair question.
What would they discover that wouldn't have disqualified him from holding the security clearance he did? They would have to assert that their screening procedures are deeply flawed.
The claim that I heard is that it messes with your biochemistry in some weird way. But I don't know details, and can't verify that.
Text of 1997 US-HK Extradition Treaty. 人在香港，大家都在关注他的安全，引渡条约都翻出来研究。
They apparently already think that about us, so why not put it on the line.

When we say "put your John Hancock" on it, there's a reason...
Because it's Hacker News, not Bourgeois News. And I know this site is tied to an ideology that reimagines the "DIY" (for want of a better term) aspect of the hacker tradition as a kind of pro-capitalist (or at least "DIY capitalist") thing, but I don't think most hackers are capitalists, even on this site. For me, anti-authoritarianism has always been a central tenet of the hacker tradition, which for me goes hand-in-hand with anti-capitalism. I acknowledge that most hackers are not explicitly/consciously anti-capitalist.
"Too many people think drinking and boating go together," he said. "We don't have a problem if people drink. Just have a designated operator."

Seems pretty much common sense to me - why is that so hard to comply with?

Oh that's right - she's famous so the rules don't apply.
I'll be honest, I got a little teary-eyed while watching the video and feel sense of immediate call-to-action driven by responsibility to not let his actions go to waste. I'm thinking about what can be done by a Canadian like myself. Other than support for the EFF and such, there must be a more local way for us, the citizens of our respective countries to not let his actions to have been done in vain.
Yeah, CNN has been doing a series of these. I wonder why.
Página de perfil externa de ◄Horrorƒ†зøø►²²
I apparently do now that I check. But I like seeing posts from the hellbanned
This is a good collection of corner cases. I knew more of them than I didn't by a good margin, but there were plenty that made me scratch my head and no small number that I got wrong too.
>Except nothing has changed. This has been going on for enough time that if the average Internet user hasn't been effected by it yet then they don't have much to worry about in the near future

That's from the things you CAN see (I don't see ordinary people being harmed directly by this program). What about the things you can't directly see or measure?

Some issues that come to mind:

1) This kind of privacy abuse opens wide open the Overton window about surveillance. Today it's the secret services. Tomorrow the general government (from IRS to the FDA). The day after tomorrow insurance companies, corporations, etc.

2) This kind of privacy abuse harms directly people that the government, men in power, lobbies with heavy clout, etc, consider dangerous. Dissidents, activists, whistleblowers, investigative journalists, hackers, etc. To draw an historical analogy, people like MLK, Aaron Swartz, Mother Jones, Howard Zinn, Phil Zimmerman, EFF, Timothy Leary, I.F. Stone, and thousands more. People that make society better, or push certain aspects of it forward.

Those people ARE constantly monitored by the government, are harassed regularly, are being blackmailed or even made to shut up or disappear, are threatened with legal action for bogus charges, etc. It's difficult to measure the harm on a society's future caused by enabling the government to keep tabs and better control these kind of people.

3) It shows a huge moral, political and judicial decline that Nixon got punished and yelled at, by the media, for Watergate (eavesdropping on the opposite party), and in 2013 American accepts it's government eavesdropping, keeping tabs, etc, on virtually ALL Americans.
Interesting. Fortunately you didn't hit what demographers call "lowest low", a rate of 1.3, and as you say, you're climbing back from your nadir of 1.50, now bouncing at or a bit above 1.90 per Wikipedia. I have heard of various things the government has done to encourage child bearing; congratulations on deferring and very possibly avoiding societal death.
I take it you never socialise out or travel? I spend really little as well, not much more than you and a lot of it is transport (I simply cannot remain always in London, it's depressing not to ever change a bit).

In my day-to-day I spend probably a similar amount, but there are expenditures every now and then, over the years.

Anyway, well done. I lived a similar lifestyle long ago, but it wasn't in London. Good luck with the startup!

PS: the council tax cut is not a generalisable condition and while you're in London, you're pretty far away from the centre. I guess most people living within zones 1 and 2 under £40K must be heavily on benefits, or I simply cannot fathom how do they live.
Android vs. Apple. Market Share vs Profit Share, Part 255
I would never make it out of the house. It would be like contemplating your hand while in an altered state of consciousness.

My wife would find me after a week, looking at the p-trap under the kitchen sink, saying,"whoaaaaa..."

Then she would run fast and far, because she knows I don't forget these things and I love to share the info with anyone who will listen.
"Take" - I'm more worried some BioTech will patent my own genome.
Another important take-away from learning HTML is that, as glacially as it may seem to develop, it is indeed constantly under development, not just by the bodies agreeing on new features and standards, but also by the browser vendors who implement them gradually.

How many use rel="canonical", rel="next", hreflan="x-default", role="navigation", and dir="ltr", for instance? And how many knew that you can target languages in CSS?

It's very important never to be complacent about the HTML you know - or think you know.

Oftentimes, people just seem to think CSS and HTML are the support wheels you need to master before moving on to the things that actually matter farther back on the front-end.
Well, wonder no more! The UI was thrown together for a Chromebook Pixel-based kiosk, so that's all I needed to support for the deadline I had.

Was planning on making it cross browser & responsive before making noise about it myself, which is why I've never mentioned it on Twitter etc.
with php in windows, this is apparently the best I can generate: http://i.imgur.com/4nCOI9B.jpg.

using this:https://gist.github.com/kennethrapp/198e419d1b620cddbc7d which should work a lot better in linux, but I haven't tested it with the image thing yet so who knows?
If they had broke into and attempted to destroy a nuclear weapons facility, then would sympathize a bit more with the charges. A handful of pacifists cutting fences, making signs, and singing songs is not terrorism, much less violent terrorism.

How long until robbing a bank is terrorism? It could presumably hinder national defense, so it must be terrorism. How about killing someone? Is that terrorism? Smoking marijuana? Jaywalking?

How far will we go, allowing ourselves to say "that person deserves it," before we're next on the list? If pacifists trespassing is terrorism, I'd say anyone living in the US should be pretty fucking worried right about now.
Microsoft admits Patriot Act can access EU-based cloud data (2011)
Ask HN: Can we still trust SHA-1 and SHA-2 created by NSA?
I don't understand why people accuse politicians of using politics. Isn't that like accusing a farmer of plowing a field?
If his leak was not of particular value, then he is more deserving of punishment?

This would have a chilling effect on leaking, to say the least. Miscalculating the public's capacity to care should not increase your sentence.
I run an online dice roller for pen&paper roleplaying gamers, it does use mt_rand() and the results are from what I can tell random enough (no discernable periodicities, no preferred numbers, averages and median are where you expect them, and so on).

However, every so often I get a bug report professing some bias of the RNG. Turns out, people want the numbers to be not random but uniformly distributed even over small sample sizes of about 10 to 20 dice rolls. If the same number comes up three times in ten D20 rolls, they assume it must be a bug. The same happens with physical dice, by the way, I've seen players discard "unlucky" dice like that.
I think it's clear he meant that he is a hero to/for Americans, without anything further being implied in the positive or negative.

There's absolutely nothing unique about inserting the nationality of a hero that relates to Americans. I see it done regularly by citizens of other countries. In my observation, national pride is nearly universal.
30 Ways To Promote Your Blog And Drive Traffic To Your Blog Posts
Why people post so many annoying personal status updates
It's very brave of him to give up anonymity, but I think he's effectively committed suicide. I will not be surprised if someone comes forward to accuse him of rape, or he's bundled into the back of a plane and taken somewhere unpleasant, or gets killed in a convenient accident.

I don't get why he did it either. Gave it up that is. Depending on how many people had access to that cross section of docs - and considering how ineffective companies and govs usually are at segmenting info I imagine that's quite broad - he could reasonably have hoped to avoid retaliation.
Time vs. Productivity
30 Creative Ways To Raise Money And Start Your Own Business
No, because by the time they have to post a response, the dust will have settled.
Re 2 read again:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-n...

"His understanding of the internet and his talent for computer programming enabled him to rise fairly quickly for someone who lacked even a high school diploma."

High school.