skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"If, by 2015, 64-Bit ARM makes it within striking distance of x86 server processor performance [...]"

There isn't a big enough rolleyes in the universe. ARM's sink-or-swim pitch points will be will be power consumption and density. Competition on performance isn't even a choice.

x86 server buys, today, are often about how much RAM I can get in a rack unit. If Aarch64 servers can get enough RAM tied to a chip, and make memory access fast enough, there's a pitch to be made based on ultra low-power, high-density virt hosts.

If they can't, they remain novelties for "hyperscale" hosting of static content and toy sites.
Forget MOOCs, Let's Use MOOA
For example, you can test the browser fingerprint with the Panopticlick service of the EFF: https://panopticlick.eff.org/ My report:

Browser Characteristic: bits of identifying information
User Agent: 9.43
HTTP_ACCEPT Headers: 19.19
Browser Plugin Details: 21.51+
Time Zone: 7.13
Screen Size and Color Depth: 5.38
System Fonts: 20.51
Are Cookies Enabled?: 0.43
Limited supercookie test: 4.41

I'm a unique snowflake!

Total (assuming independence): 87.99
Word population (log_2): 32.73
In retrospect, CDs and DVDs seem like a complete scam. They didn't offer any significant benefits over vinyl and tape. They were still a physical thing that you had to handle and store, and taking more than a few with you when you went somewhere was a major hassle. And they were far more fragile.
I question whether people need to learn more than 2 or 3 trackers over a career. Bug tracking tools are remarkably well developed. Once you find something that works, start battering bigger fish.
Based on the comments here, a key point of the article was missed. The quality of movies right now is crappy because it is being entirely driven by the international market, where they base things entirely on historical returns of specific actors and/or narrow genres. This shift to focus on international is due to the the loss of the DVD market. It's a lesson in how changing economics can impact the core quality of a product, not just "we're getting disrupted - damn the technology".
How Google & the NSA PRISM partners undermine the free market
For Git hosting there's Gitorious, licensed under the AGPL.
Whoa there. You're projecting your own regrets onto him.
That's all they were intended for.
Nadler denies the CNET story -- OOPS.

https://twitter.com/trevortimm/status/346304794970968064

-- just tweeted by Trevor Timm (Sunday, noon).
Paper: http://web.media.mit.edu/~mehoque/Publications/13.Hoque-etal...

I found the choices of software particularly interesting:

"Prosody Analysis: ... To extract prosodic features, we developed an application
programming interface (API) using the low level signal processing algorithms included in the Praat [praat.org], an open source speech processing toolkit."

"Speech Recognition: For real time speech recognition, we used the Nuance speech recognition software development kit (SDK). ..."
Seems Reddit is leaking...
Null and void seems extreme to me. These sorts of agreements do serve a perfectly good purpose.

While I would not agree that users should be held liable by terms as either criminal or civil infractions of any sort, they certainly work well to advise the user of what services they will be provided, under what circumstances the provider will be justified in removing service, whether or not the customer will be refunded in those situations, etc.

As a declaration of intent of service, potentially usable defensively by the company should a user take umbrage against the service, they are excellent. As anything else, they're pretty worthless.
'Killer robots': UK MP calls for world ban
Damn right.

The worry has to be the data they have on us from the past. We now know to be careful, so presumably those wanting to be careful, will be.

I now don't care what they do from now on. The key thing is that I am now 100% sure the internet and electronic comms are insecure. If I need to be secure, I'll find other ways to communicate, or do all I can to lower the risk, act accordingly, and accept the risk.

But what I do want, as a non terrorist/pedophile/bogyman, is all the data they have that relates to me to be purged.

Wont happen.
That is essentially the manifesto of the Freedombox Project, which has also been around for a few years. For a variety of reasons FreedomBox doesn't seem to have made much real progress on bringing data privacy to the masses, but there is certainly a need for something like it and a different project with different leadership could possibly do a better job.
At first I was going to say, "But yes, what does 'WHM' mean?"...but then I just Googled it up and see that it's some other kind of software, not a business term:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHM#WHM_.28Web_Host_Manager.29

> WebHost Manager (WHM) is a web-based tool used by server administrators and resellers to manage hosting accounts on a web server. WHM listens on ports 2086 and 2087 by default.

I was thinking it meant "warehouse management", with all the "reselling" involved...I also figured the kind of people who might install it are looking for some quick fix (if insecure) software to manage their warehouses...
yup. It's not a conspiracy; it's an ecosystem.

When people start applying the principles of ecosystem and sociobiology to the items they read in the news, things will start making more sense.

Society, culture, class, government, corporations, media, hollywood, memes, educationa curriculum, sunday morning TV political shows, talk radio, etc etc etc--all these things are players in an ecosystem. Just like when you watch a nature documentary and you hear about lions and antelope and mosquitoes and parasites and ecological niches and symbiotic relationships etc. The same principles from the documentary apply to the things that come over your TV, your news websites, your government, from corporations.

It's all the same.

These feelings you have about conspiracies are real. But it's an ecosystem. And we are all part of it.
Fossil (from D. Richard Hipp, SQLite author)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irc#Modern_IRC

If you use it through ssh/SSL it is ok.
I know mozilla has a drastically simplified interface for reporting Firefox bugs. Is that not an option in general bugzilla installations?

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi
As long as we're playing at labels, I am a socialist and you are a goddamned idiot. There is no such thing as a corporatist. You're just using it as a nasty word to accuse your debate opponents of malicious intentions.

Back to the point: people freely give their personal data to Facebook. Facebook now knows that information and can publish it, sell it, whatever. The people have no expectation of privacy which would be necessary for a 4th Amendment defense. Anybody can go to Facebook and just ask for the data, government agents included. It is Facebook's choice to give it away, set a price, or refuse.
The Motivation for Map Reduce
> If we're to criticise journalists, we should hold ourselves to the standards we expect of the them.

In the interests of precision, let me first amend the Guardian non-paraphrase and paraphrase above to 'here's a weaselly statement that doesn't deny what the NSA document claims' and 'here's a denial of what the NSA document claims'. This matters because the article deliberately sets out to report the NSA slides instead of setting out to explicitly report the NSA slides as accurate, and Greenwald later made much of this.

> The article said or implied no such thing, as your direct quote shows, it merely attributed the quote, without comment.

The immediately preceding paragraph is:

> Although the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied knowledge of any such program.

This makes it clear that the next paragraph is, to the Guardian's understanding, Google denying knowledge of any such program.
I wonder how much profit Blu-Ray has actually made in aggregate, given the initial format war and the quickly-following demise of the DVD itself with the advent of streaming/on-demand viewing.

Given the debacle that was my experience with DVDs, I vowed I would never buy a Blu-Ray disk and I never have.
That attitude doesn't work for open source projects, where you need to worry about any barrier to pulling in new contributors.
Right. The thing is, when you wear out an SSD, you get these enormous (multiple seconds) pauses that, if you're doing anything I/O bound slow you down to a crawl. Even opening a heavy web page can trigger them. Buy a fast HDD if you want consistent long term behaviour with FDE.

The reason FDE breaks SSDs is that the implementation in LVM works at the block level. To send TRIM, the filesystem says "this block is empty, tell the controller" but depending on a thousand things, among which are cipher mode, cipher block size and other minutiae, LVM will invalidate the TRIM command. Without TRIM, SSDs deteriorate rather quickly.

Personally, I understand why FDE is needed but I'm of the opinion that selective encryption (with possible plausible deniability measures) is a much neater, if more difficult, approach.
Ruby version switching simplified: chruby
Hi,

The slides shown there are, well, slides. They are meant to support a talk, and that talk addressed your comments, at least partly. It is also worth noting that it was Scala Days, and as such I took it for (almost) granted that the audience is converted to Scala.

The problem is that JavaScript, with its scripting nature, has never been designed to support programming in the large. The lack of type safety is often mentioned as one of the major difficulties of JavaScript. That is why there are other languages targeting JavaScript.

We scale to Rich Internet Applications by using the language Scala, which is a scalable language. I won't try and make a whole point here. Some people have moved from Java to Scala for that very reason.

And, yes, the 16 MB are for the standard library. But minifying was only the first step towards reducing that size. I have at least 4 ideas, which I believe will each divide that size by ~2. That should bring it down under 1 MB.
>This is pointed out in the blog post, but the main reason for wiretapping King wasn't his civil rights advocacy, but his communist leanings.

A black pastor fighting for civil rights had "communist leanings"? LOL. A "commie" was just what the government used to call everyone in favour of change, regardless of what relation he had with communism, or if he had any at all.

If the "Dixie Chicks" had spoken against Bush back in 1960, they would have been labeled "commies" too. In fact, they were called that even in 2004.

>Hoover in particular had spent his entire life fighting communism and saw it as the greatest threat our country had ever faced. Many of our parents or grandparents had nuclear bomb drills in elementary school, ducking and covering under their desks to protect themselves from the communist threat.

Let's not do the old trick of pining it to somebody's whimsy ("one bad apple"). Those ideas were spread in all government, not because of some irrational fear of communism, but because they wanted to protect their and their buddies interests. Anything pro-worker, pro-civil rights, or anti-war, was labelled communist -- in a similar way to today's Fox News commentary.

But the same tactics were employed far before the nuclear bomb, Hoover, or even USSR even existed. Even in the 19th century, workers demands and ethnic groups fighting for equality were met with similar tactics, police brutality and government spying.

>This isn't a story of "Evil US government subverts wiretapping power to go after peaceful protestor". This is a case of the government executing the will of the people at the time.

No, it's not. It's a case of a government that continually crashed the people and their will, to support the interests of the few (industrialists, corporations, etc).

Check the history of the labour movement in the US for more details. I'd also recommend Howard Zinn's "A people's history of the United States".

>Hindsight is 20/20 and looking back their actions seem evil, but in historical context the FBI was doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing: fighting communism with everything they had.

No, history doesn't absolve crimes. If it did then the SS did what they supposed to be doing to: fighting jews with everything they had (Godwin's law be damned). And why should they "fight communism with everything they had"? Wasn't the US supposed to be a free country, with freedom of speech and freedom to adhere to any ideology you wanted to?
One has to wonder how they'll define data-mining for the purposes of (for example) credit fraud or insurance fraud, and whether that qualifies as "closely" scrutinized.

There are a myriad of other questionable uses that could come from their data set of everything that don't require "close" scrutiny.

Just like how quickly DNS-based website blocking expanded beyond simple and straight-froward "think of the children" child-pornography hunting turns into "decency" enforcement, this NSA data warehousing program could quickly turn unpleasant.
That looks a bit complicated... provided you get a public ip and your router supports upnp, why not use something like dyndns instead?
The fact that Google illegally circumvented the "3rd party cookie" policy in Safari suggests that they do care a lot about an individual's data.
You could run the Inferno VM over OSX to use its variant of unixy commands, "os" to run OSX commands, and edit files and run commands from the tiling windows in Acme. That way you'd get the best of both worlds. This works for me in Windows and Linux (only the commands I run with "os" change, the rest of my environment is cross-platform), and I hear it works in OSX.
People with disabled caching might get accused of DDoS(attempting) their servers just by visiting that URL. :o
Schieffer : For one, I don't recall MLK or R.Parks running off & hiding in China
I know this happens, with places pricing themselves out of the market, but it surprises me. Wouldn't they want to lower the cost of owning/renting a unit until the can actually get some buyers? It would still be a loss, but wouldn't it be much less loss, and isn't that better?
GitHub is the only one I've been able to hand to a non-techy client so they can create bugs.

I was using Pivotal Tracker a few years ago for a large-ish project, and really wanted the client to use it.

It didn't strike me as terribly hard for reasonably bright people, but I under-estimated habit and the degree of resentment some members on the client team had about their pet project being changed.

Assorted attempts at education (I made a really nice screencast!) failed; I was still getting e-mail with Excel or Word docs attached.

We finally came to an understanding and started using Google Docs.

BTW, Github issues is not so bad. A key feature for me for any bug tracker is a Web API, something I can talk to using a command-line tool.

I wrote such a thing for Pivotal Tracker (my Pivotal Slacker Ruby script, now abandoned) and later hacked up a program called GHissues to pull items from Github.
As someone who's never worked at Google, this blog post gives me the same kind of curious discomfort I used to have reading michaelochurch comments. Reading ex-Googlers denouncing Google feels a lot like watching a married couple fight. You know there's a history and a relationship there, and one party feels the need to vent at the other, but there's nothing to be gained by witnessing it from the outside.
Well that didn't take long, did it.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589495-38/nsa-admits-lis...

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5886686
Are you kidding? He manipulated the URL without explicit permission. This is a clear violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and moreover, hacking!
Current sociological research pretty heavily points to consumer disillusion and annoyance with the behavior of studios as the reason that they decide to pirate, to not go to theaters, and to pursue alternative forms of entertainment.

Most people are just as "unreasonable" as the grandparent, which is to say that they are highly reasonable and you are the unreasonable one.

I don't know if you remember a film from about forty years ago, where the general public was exhorted to admit that they were, in fact, "mad as hell," and as result, "not gonna take it any more." People are currently mad as hell, and now we're seeing them decide (unsurprisingly) to not take it any more.
Probably never.
The Future of Authority
What would Tim May say?
Google, huh? I was thinking of Palantir as I read that -- and Microsoft. I guess I have too many friends in their 40s and 50s who work at Google.
It's just a roundabout, equivocating way to say 'you're full of it', since that would be rude and against site guidelines.
Wow, this article pissed me off.

First, we're dealing with people who are LOADED. Why should I care if they can't afford to pay Tom Cruise, the director, the producer, and a bunch of other people 20 million dollars each? Oh darn, they'll only get paid 4 million dollars each.

This is a classic case of old, technologically-inept white men whose business model was predicated on gouging the public for decades. The internet is killing DVD sales because of convenience and theatre revenues are down because the public is getting tired of superhero remakes and don't feel that the price of admission is worth 2 hours of watching 3 actors standing in front of a green screen and interacting with a bunch of CG extras, so they download it instead. All of a sudden Hollywood can't continue their price-gouging, and because they're basically Luddites, they fear change and can't adapt.

So they'll inevitably turn to the courts instead of letting their business adapt to the free market that they all espouse to love.

It's basically the situation that the American car companies found themselves in a few years ago. People are getting tired of their shitty products and aren't buying them any more. Instead of making better products that people would be willing to pay for, they curl up in the fetal position and cry.
Page 1: http://www.xconomy.com/national/2013/06/14/dont-panic-but-we...
Scientists plan 5-week move of 15-ton magnet
Proportional representation systems do give small parties disproportionate power, but the US system does that with States anyway. (Australia has a proportional system in the senate which favors small parties in small states.)

But Australia tempers this with preferential voting in the house which is simply better than the US electoral system (because small parties can still sway the outcome without actually getting members into parliament -- e.g. the greens can say they prefer X over Y and then direct their votes to X or Y, but if they actually get a big vote they can still win).

New Zealand has a really nice system which is a little proportional but not too proportional and wastes very few votes without turning some tiny nutcase party into the tie breaker.
>Basically, every communist (Read: Marxist-Leninist/Stalinist/etc) party that existed during the 20th century took its orders from the U.S.S.R.

That's totally wrong. Especially in Hoover's time.

Tons of countries with ruling communist parties had broken ties with USSR or were independent in the first place, if not outright hostile (like China).

And there were also lots of non ruling communist parties, especially in Western Europe and UK, that were anti-USSR, anti-Stalinist, etc.

In the US, the so-called New Left, was decidedly anti-USSR too, (which is one of the reasons for the "New" moniker).

And that's before we add other communist parties, that were in "war" with USSR, like the Trotskyists.
The first 2 things that come to mind:
Whoever can connect, can log.
Even though an authenticated user's host may be masked, in the server logs they might appear in plaintext.
Especially since they're so big it's a continual temptation to force legislation to preserve what they have now. If they were smaller, so that this weren't even an option, they'd have adapted.
More likely they have access to a trusted CA, or wildcard certificates that they can use to apply MitM to specific traffic. Almost the same effect, but no key stealing is necessary. (although that would require redirecting your traffic rather than passive capture)
Sure, I mean helpers for the template/view that make it easier (syntax, data binding, validations) to render a HTML form widget. Instead of defining your form as a unit in app code, you manage the form fields in the view/template. For my money, this is much more intuitive and flexible.

It's common in other web frameworks. At least Codeigniter, Ruby on Rails, and ASP.NET MVC use this approach:

http://ellislab.com/codeigniter/user-guide/helpers/form_help...

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/form_helpers.html

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd410596(v=vs.100).a...
Cop sexually assaults woman then arrests her for protesting
>Do not stereotype teenagers.

So you can do it for him/her?

>Yes, most in my generation are shallow and passive

You seem very smart - maybe a genius. I've noticed that the smarter people are the more likely they are to denigrate their peers who don't hold the same values. And they're less likely to enjoy other parts of life due to the belief that these things are beneath them. It's not a cool attitude and it will not help you be a happy person.
Click on comments next to profile.
I noticed a comment on an NSA story, saw the name, and thought it might be interesting for people to see what one of the founding cypherpunks has to say on many of today's issues. I have no way of knowing if its actually him, but judging from the content of his comments they contain Tim May's signature anti-authoritarianism, technical competence, contempt for the non-wealthy.
That sounds just like CIA actually. Civilian agency, responsible for intelligence gathering and sharing that information with <others> to <do things>. They're not law-enforcement focused, which might be the key difference you're focusing on?
While I applaud the effort, in the end, it is mostly just a game played by lawyers who write ToS.

Terms of Service tries to be legally document, enforceable across borders. Its not related to copyright, so there aren't any treaties to unify each countries laws. Also, because it is not copyright, ToS get put into the all covering service/contract law. Where I live, Sweden, those laws was written in 1900, and is in my view 100% incompatible with ToS or EULA's.

To take one example, they require that the person providing a contract makes sure that the other party is fully informed of the contract, and that the other party is benefited from signing the contract in relation to the terms. Reading the history around it, they basically makes in unlawful to knowingly "trick" people to sign contracts that are one-sided.[1]

On the "trick people to sign" part, I am also slightly considering the fact that companies often know how long time someone spends reading an ToS/EULA. They know when, and how many people can't have human possible read the agreement before pressing OK. When MMORPG clients update a new agreement, people are logging in seconds after its possible. If you knowingly are going into a contract with someone who hasn't read and understood the terms, its hard to claim that the contract was made in good-faith (jfr BrB 9 kap 1 §).

All in all, ToS and EULA's just seems to me as an broken concept.

https://lagen.nu/1915:218 30§ and 36§
huh, seems they changed their name/URL from uri.lv to feedpress.it