skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hate this phrase, "trying to own the living room."

We think people want living room devices, but really they just need a living room computer.

A few months ago I went this way. No overengineered media center, just a tower next to the HDTV. Full-sized wireless keyboard and mouse. High-DPI to read text.

The experience immediately killed the 10 foot interface for me. All the 10' UIs out there feel slow, clunky, hobbled when compared to "just use a computer from your couch."

I understand that people are trying to simplify the experience, like Apple did with mp3s. Maybe you don't need to simplify here, though, because people already know how to use computers, they just don't see them in other rooms.

They just need a little nudge, a little help to see that it doesn't mean tiny text and wires across the living room floor.
What are you talking about? They are quotes, not "scare quotes" (see how I just quoted you?).
There's a straightforward way to make sure your email is always encrypted in transit: encrypt it before you send. No promises about making sure your email can always be read by the recipient, though...
Well, time to get better AQUAINTed.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/nsa-police.html
So have you written your own personalized emails then?
One thing that I prefer about DDG is that it doesn't try to guess what language I want to search in other than by my input. It is ridiculous that google forces me to go through worse results based solely on my location, it shouldn't matter where you are from.
Yes, finally! Finally!!

Genes shouldn't be allowed to be patented at all!!

Hail to all those Genetic-Engineers, I'm proud whenever I discover that you've leaped forward in deciphering nature, but stop patenting the shit out of it!

Whoa..
A secret watch list? Holy shit, I wonder if they constantly surveil people on that list. Oh wait.
Google = Boys
Microsoft = Men

Of course boys have grander creativity but men realize evident truths easier.
100k people who spent two seconds clicking on a link online are not representative of 300 million population of the US.
True, but your comment gave no indication of context, your knowledge level of clojure, awareness of logic programming, or an actual question. So, I had no basis to give a response that answered the question you did not ask. I honestly thought you were just trolling.
>means that NSA grabs data directly from the "dropbox" set up and operated by the company.

the "direct collection" is a part of "FAA702 operations". The FAA702 is unrestricted collection of data of "non-USPER"sons, and in particular no individualized FISC orders required.

Now there is a choice - either Google combs their data, decides who is FAA 702 "eligible" and of interest to NSA and dumps the "non-USPER" data it has identified to the "dropbox" or the NSA does the combing/identifications itself (and if NSA does the combing - where it does it? on NSA servers attached to Google datacenters or does it transfer all data to NSA datacenter and combs it there?). What do you think NSA has chosen?
What planet do you live on? In the USA 8-5 or 6 is the norm.
Microsoft has always struck me as a company that makes some really cool technology, then tries to find a way to make it relevant to the rest of us. For them, it seems the consumer is an afterthought and the technology is key.

Windows 8 was an impressive attempt to merge mobile and desktop OSes so that mobile users are no longer second-class citizens and have access to everything desktop users do. The problem? Mobile needed fixing, not desktop. In the push for engineering parsimony, they made the desktop experience worse simply so that it could be shared with mobile.

Kinect is a wicked piece of tech. It's just seriously, seriously cool. But what does it do? How does Kinect make gaming better? Outside of that one boxing game, I just don't see it. It makes everything demonstrably worse, like QTEs that work as cinematic finishing moves for bosses in God of War, but are completely pointless in 95% of the games they're included in. Kinect has the same problem: it's a really cool solution in search of a problem.

Perhaps the best example of this is Clippy, where MS used Bayesian algos to analyze text and offer suggestions. Again, a really cool little bit of datamining/ML, in 1997, no less, and running on the computational equivalent of a potato. Clippy is a really cool program. But it was completely pointless. It solved a problem no one had in a way that pissed off everyone.

And really, that's Microsoft in a nutshell.
Yes, but all you had to do was rename the `exe` to a `rar` & extract the VHD. Which worked on VirtualBox. The criticism is weak.
Pardon him from what? He hasn't been charged with a crime.

The temporary outrage of the internet over something they don't even have a grasp on is why no one takes these petitions seriously.
Something BIG is going on at Google!!

They close one product after another, to free all resources for something. But what?
This is rather old news - but it seems it's new to some.

I put together some setup notes for Linux with Virtual Box (Ubuntu in my case) in a Gist, as I found some of the Microsoft setup notes were lacking:

https://gist.github.com/magnetikonline/5274656
Direct link doesn't work you need to come from google to access that article:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd...
Meet The Media Manager Of The Future -- And It's Not Made By Apple
Maybe that's all Stallman's queries
I used this to make a screensaver out of it: https://github.com/liquidx/webviewscreensaver
We are very familiar with openvz, as dotcloud was based on it before switching to lxc :) See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5817455
The sad problem is, if you want to build a product for large corporates, a lot of folks are still stuck on old XP workstations with the default software installed (IE7 if you're lucky), and likely will be well beyond the MS support window. This is just part of doing business in that sector, but I think we can all agree that having to build for IE6/7 compatibility stifles a lot of innovation.
Meet the Robotics Company Apple Just Anointed
Clearly he's referring to cable company as in Cable TV company, not company that runs a cable in to your house while on division sells internet and another a TV package.
This looks cool, though I couldn't get it to work - The install ran fine, but VirtualBox doesn't show any VMs :s
As someone who works in Redmond, the details of Microsoft's gigantic food court thing aren't exactly private.
Well even ignoring the PRISM part and Google and all that, look on the slide again: "Collection of communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past"

We already know about Room_641A[1]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
hahah, wow I wound't ever come up with that. But it actually sounds plausible. Hat's off Putin, international Trolling debut.
While I haven't heard explicitly about Amazon being part of PRISM, the duckduckgo ips all point to amazon's EC2 platform.
I don't see the analogy with Iran-Contra.
Indeed - but the political changes (if we get them at all) will take time - time probably measured in years or political terms.

The "merely technical" solutions are going to be important in the meantime. Duckduckgo, encfs, Tarsnap, GPG, Tor, ForceSSL - things like that will (probably) help in the meantime (especially if we can help convince "regular users" to use them), as will encouraging places like DDG to implement TLS cyphers that use forward secrecy.
If you have access to a windows box, here's a better solution: Install IE10 and use the dev tools (F12). there you can set browser emulation to IE 7,8,9,10.

doesn't include ie6, but not many people still use it: http://www.ie6countdown.com/
While I see your opinion, I think it is largely confused. That button you pressed is greyed out, as it has already been pressed.

Actually, part of the issue is that the original poster provided a deep link into the site, which maintained the user's state, viewing the download flow.

The big blue button asking you to "Select desired testing OS" was not obvious?
That doesn't really work. The game is still supposed to be $60 at launch, that's when games make the most money, they really are worth that much (and more) as evidenced by the many people who pay that much for them, even on DRM-laden platforms like Steam.

The point is to let the price fall faster after launch. Xbox can't exactly promise "Our games' prices will fall faster than the other guys" because the market will determine that -- in aggregate they will, but there's a reason Skyrim is still $30 on Steam.

Microsoft wants a world where you have account-locked games tied to disks, because it gives them the benefits of Steam-like DRM but also the game conveniently on a disk to take to a friend's so he doesn't have to download it, and to let the poor schmuck in rural Nebraska with 25 kb/s to play the game some time in the next week.

Honestly, Sony can take the same pricing strategies as Microsoft on their digital downloads -- Microsoft just wants to have more convenient digital downloads, while Sony just wants more convenient disks.

My guess is that long-term Microsoft will prove to be on the right side of history (the success of Steam is evidence). Sony can probably do just fine for now, they can always transition in later generations when the downsides are no longer breaking news stories.
Yup it certainly is... too bad that the build is not usable without extensive knowledge of how to integrate it into IE. Something which a very limited subset of people know.
You got me wrong - I am no fanboy. I was merely pointing out that shouting the not-a-guy comment in all-caps before going on to say "...you like to bet against" is sensationalism. Edit: For example, you would probably find the following print slightly less amusing: "ROCKYMCNUTS LOVES MUSK fanboys' attempts to defend him" :).
E-Cigarettes Are in Vogue and at a Crossroads
My wife works in biotech and the stories I hear about the the physical grunt work puzzles me that virtually none of it is automated.

It doesn't happen because the existing robotics solutions effectively require dedicated personnel which management isn't too keen on.

If we could have smaller, more "mac-like" robotics I would expect them to sell like crazy into markets such as that.
Yes, if you mean his blogging. That's kind of the point.
Technically, he can be pardoned preemptively by the POTUS, like Nixon was.

The power thus conferred is unlimited, with the exception [of impeachments]. It extends to every offence known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken, or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment.
The traffic is routed through NY to make it easier for the NSA.
I know this may not be perfectly on topic, but it is the model we use for consulting. Maybe you can gain some insight: but check out our latest post http://blog.tenorent.com/
Is Anyone Clicking on Your Twitter Links? Now You Can Find Out
Is Apple About to Copy Samsung?
Don't forget Gigablast, Procog, Yioop and Samuru which also have their own crawled index.
Also my understanding was that it often was a matter of pederasty rather than "love" like when people talk about "marriage equality" nowadays or what not.
Those kind of apps don't have the same purchase cycle as entertainment items like games, movies or books. They don't grow less valuable the more hours you spend using them (in fact, they generally become more valuable the more you've invested in learning them.)

Folks either want to rent entertainment , or buy it knowing they can resell it, because they know that the act of consumption will devalue that item for them but it will retain greater value for others who have not yet consumed its entertainment.
> I hate this phrase, "trying to own the living room."

Why? I find it refreshingly honest.
( And I absolutely agree with the rest, next to my TV is also a desktop with a wireless keyboard. )
I understand that FAT32 has a role in portable storage. What I fail to understand is the relation between USB drives and serving VM images.
I wouldn't have been surprised if this was an Onion article headline. I hope Kim Jong Un also comes out voicing his support for PRISM/drones, and the circle will be complete.

It's quite sad actually, I can't even enjoy the Onion anymore because it's gotten to a point where their absurdist humor and the world we live in are not all that different. It's gone from being funny satire to a leading indicator of where we're heading as a society. Pretty scary and disturbing if you think about it...
Why not just go straight to free-to-play model? CoD for $0 for the first level, but $5 each level after that. I'd try a lot more games out if I didn't have to pay $60 up front, and it would encourage developers to make better games rather than the current AAA tentpole model where they depend on the pre-release hype.
OTOH, if they can get a CA - any CA - to cooperate, they can MITM anyone without having to break SSL.
Used console games typically sell for $5 less than new games. They're not servicing the low end of the market.
Proposal: NSA and partners improving their visual communication
Sneakernet moving of files to non-network connected devices.
It's actually bash syntax (the curly brace part):

$ echo a{b,c}{d,e}
Secret Surveillance Court May Reveal Some Secrets
Only for targeted traffic though. They can't record, go back, and break it.
link to ruling
https://www.eff.org/document/fisc-opinion-and-order-granting...
And here's the problem. Email needs to be able to be read by the recipient, so until a significant portion of email recipients can handle encrypted mail - the NSA doesn't need to attack my encrypted email storage, because enough of my correspondence ends up in cleartext in gmail/hotmail/yahoo et al.

This is a hard one to solve. GPGmail seems to get broken with every Mac Mail.app release. Vast numbers of people rely on webmail - which'd need server-side or in-browser GPG decryption. My Mom's not going to use command like gpg tools. How the hell do we bootstrap our way up to ubiquitous encrypted email?
I have no idea what the demographics are these days, but certainly I, and most of my friends, are least concerned about price, and most concerned that most game are not that fun, and the damn console keeps doing less and less of what I want each year. My PS3 is the only thing I can think of that has gotten less capable with each update.

People say the kindle is different, but if my books became unavailable, I'd grab them from other sources, no questions and no qualms. If you want to sell me something, then sell me something, don't quibble about it after the fact.
How do go about determining whether or not you're pwned?

Asking for a friend.
I wasn't quite sure what to make of "If a man accidentally conceives a child with a woman...". I'm aware that in some cases a sperm donor has been forced to pay child support and I suppose there could be ways a man could unknowingly father a child but the article seem to imply cases where the father willing had sex but for some reason thought there wouldn't be a pregnancy.

There's just not a subtle way to put except that when a man has sex with a woman there is always the possibility of pregnancy. Condoms break, the pill is not 100% effective, vasectomies sometimes fail.

That's not to say there aren't problems with how paternity is treated in our current legal system. I just don't think downplaying the responsibilities men face is a good strategy here.
And yet most of HN took it as gospel truth and shouted down anyone expressing skepticism. Tptacek's post is chiding the credulity of HN as much as the weak editorial oversight at the Grauniad (which is capable of fact verification, and has historically been good at it).
The biased comparison still says secondary indexes are in development. Might want to update that.
I know this is paranoid, but I keep coming back to this post that hit HN a few days ago: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html

When you combine that with the beam splitter logo, things get a bit scary.
It might be used internally for additional ranking signals. But the privacy policy states it can never be tied back to you as an individual so nothing to worry about.

From memory the main reason they do this is to allow downstream websites to determine if a user was referred to them by DuckDuckGo without the actual search term. IE you know they came from DDG but with no leakage.

I run searchcode.com (which provides a lot of the code doco and sample results) and since this was done I can now determine how much referral traffic actually comes from DDG but have no idea what you were searching for when you click through.
I would argue those scenarios aren't really all that important to check against. If someone is going to sell their game it doesn't really matter much if they sell it and play for 2 more weeks, or play for 2 more weeks then sell it. People will find their way online eventually and those that don't will be a very small minority.
Well it's a stretch I admit, but they probably really did think it was a "neat idea," which was a phrase that Oliver North used (quoted in the link) to describe his opinion of the arms for hostage deal that he was being investigated for.

A more direct if mundane line is that Oliver North worked for/with John Poindexter. Poindexter was allowed to resign in disgrace, North was fired. Poindexter later worked for DARPA, where he proposed Total Information Awareness, which was widely viewed with suspicion and back-burnered, and then came back bit by bit as cynically predicted at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Poindexter
Say it with me one more time: do not use fast hash functions for passwords.
In general I find the patentability of medicines a very abused practice. Pharma industry is one of the most corrupted, and especially when it comes to patents. So your example serves do disprove your point.
So why not sha1(sha1(secret) + sha1(message))? Or is that essentially an MAC?
Not without someone noticing. Some sites have pinned certs in Chrome, which would stop this, and even without that you would expect some knowledgeable techie at Facebook or Github or something to be using their home laptop and say, "Wait a sec, this isn't my company's public cert!"

Not having seen any blog posts screaming, "OMG, my site is being hijacked wholesale," I can only assume that the NSA isn't doing this (or has managed to squelch by legal order every single person privy to the real cert at MITM'ed sites, which is absurd and would beg the question, why not obtain the private key from these people in a similar way?).
Your lesson should have been made loud and clear by Google App Engine.
>>Alternately, is there an easy way to benchmark RDS i/o from EC2 and DO, both running Linux which can help in making this decision.

I found the benchmarks in http://serverbear.com/ very reliable
Troubleshooting Wires in Wireless Networks
The Fragility of The Security State
> 1) Find some idiot talking about how he'd like to blow something up on his phone

That could be me after a day of working with certain legacy systems.
Take a look at a pull request on bitbucket. Like this one:

https://bitbucket.org/birkenfeld/sphinx/pull-request/146/res...

Click 'Side-by-Side Diff'. Github has a lot going for it, but bitbucket is the clear UX win as far as reviewing pull requests goes.
I wonder how much research academia has put into dataflow concurrency.

Me too! Anybody here know about this?
I agree. I find that unified diffs work well 90% of the time but when it doesn't it can be crippling. I've attached some screenshots at

http://screenshots.gitsense.com/index.html

that illustrates where side by side becomes a requirement for me. Yeah I can make sense of things with a unified view but the side by side really makes things more obvious.

Note you can find this diff at github at https://github.com/joyent/node/pull/5615/files#L0L80
Courts by necessity rule on lots of different things that they aren't experts in. If we have specialized courts for scientific issues, should we have specialized courts for accounting issues, securities issues, etc? Have you ever seen the accounting systems in a modern corporation? It can get highly technical and complicated.

Courts have experts to explain to them the legally significant aspects of different issues, and it works reasonably well.

In my experience, courts, at least federal appellate courts and the Supreme Court, don't usually get decisions wrong because they don't understand the problem domain. Instead, courts don't share the value systems of people within those fields. And that irritates practitioners on philosophical grounds.

Consider internet technology. People who work on internet technology tend to have a value system that emphasizes certain characteristics ("the internet perceives censorship as damage and routes around it."). But you don't have to believe in free and universal access to information, etc, to understand how TCP uses sequence numbers to create a reliable protocol out of unreliable IP.

I feel the same is true with things like gene patents. The objections do not seem to me to be based on pointing out how the Supreme Court doesn't understand this or that bit of science. The objections are philosophical: "you can't patent nature."
A $1 purchase will get you into the Top 500 Grossing Android apps in Brazil?
Stupid question: Is it necessary to play something through a pair of noise canceling headphones if you just want to "cancel noise" with them?
I, for one, quite like Gamestop, and I can't wait until I can buy YOUR used PS4 games for $5.99 or less.

Thank you, Gamestop.

Signed,
Patient Gamers Everywhere
His published work too, for the Guardian.
They always seem to love clever acronyms that are tangentially related to whatever it deals with, like USAPATRIOT Act is actually about how to not be a good US patriot.
I can help but think about the following point when looking at this. Do people really care whether access was direct or indirect if their own personal records have all been captured and/or seen/analyzed? It sure wouldn't matter to me how they pried their way in - it would matter to me that they had done it though.
Whilst I have no insider knowledge, I highly doubt GitHub has any desire to expand outside of the development community.
Oooh, and there was also the part where North "deleted" his emails and thought they were, you know, actually gone? He lied to Congress and then the emails were recovered from "backup tape". http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/white_house_email/index.html

I'd totally forgotten the Poindexter connection.
They're straightforward, but not easy.

Like I wrote in the post above, one path is to get a Harvard MBA, then work at McKinsey as a management consultant, and eventually use the massive and extremely powerful alumni network of McKinsey to move to a company in a senior executive role. It's also fairly common for consultants to just get offers directly from clients they've helped.

You have to be an absolute workaholic to do it, but it's reliable if followed closely. You can substitute Wharton or a select few other places for Harvard, but overall the name of the business school you went to is by far the most important factor of your entire life-long education when it comes to this path. It doesn't matter even remotely whether you learned anything; you just need the brand name on the resume and you need to practice case interviews. It's one of the most superficial selection processes in the world. It's so extraordinarily superficial that most people wouldn't believe it's true.
Thanks for pointing this out. I'm looking into updating our ciphers very soon.
The same program has been running in many Google lobbies for years now.
Windows 8.1 made for Business
I have a friend who wrote a game for the Nokia n8; he had something like a couple hundred purchases and made it through to the semi-final for a (I might misremember) $10k prize.
IE10's dev tools emulation is not perfect, and has its own set of quirks. Especially as it relates to the JS runtime[1].

[1] http://alexjmackey.wordpress.com/2012/10/19/how-accurate-ie-...