skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Appfog acquired by CenturyLink
We are announcing that CenturyLink has acquired AppFog, joining teams with their Savvis IaaS cloud offering! CenturyLink is the world's 3rd largest telco. They provide fiber-based networks to businesses around the world. A year ago, CenturyLink acquired Savvis and entered the IaaS cloud space. Savvis has a global presence with more than 50 data centers across North America, EMEA and Asia. Now they have doubled down on cloud and entered the PaaS space by buying AppFog. Go to http://www.appfog.com/savvis/faq<p>AppFog will continue business as usual with substantially more investments into our product, support, operations and community. We will continue to have free as well as paid offerings without any change to the service as you know and love it. We will add more infrastructure options, increase our support operations and accelerated launches of new features. We will soon be adding high-speed Savvis infrastructure options for deploying applications.<p>CenturyLink is a great partner to accelerate our business efforts. Fiber Networks + IaaS + PaaS = Awesome. As you need to scale to infrastructure larger than AppFog currently supports, Savvis will be able to provide dedicated virtual machines on demand with great performance and reliability.<p>Most importantly, CenturyLink shares the core values of support, honesty and dedication that have made AppFog community so great over these years.<p>I am incredibly excited to continue this journey with you. I know many of you have been waiting for a long time for AppFog to get a few key features out the door, thank you for your patience! I believe this is the catalyst to making that happen, we are doubling down our investment to making AppFog the world's leading PaaS. Thanks again for continuing to be an AppFog user! This acquisition marks only the beginning of this journey, and we have some very exciting developments underway.
With the warning on the subreddit: Caution: you can be killed by a 9V battery
Peter Thiel?
This maybe sound cynical, but I am impressed they actually found a Republican who hasn't been in politics for like 15+ years to run with this charade.

So no one can blame him for all those years of supporting the patriot act and the likes.

Well played.
Hit the "link" link, then you can reply.
Exactly, the only real solution I see is to break up the government into many small governments, with small budgets, and controlled by the people.

Not the other way round.
Isn't there is a difference between whistle-blowing what you believe to be misdeeds by your government against its citizens, and disclosing what are essentially military secrets to foreign governments? I haven't been following the story as closely as many, but it seems that he has crossed into more turbulent waters.
Oh you can fuck right off with that. It wasn't illegal to have a linking site in the UK yet that poor bastard was extradited for breaking US law, not having been there. If the US wants to do that kind of shit, then hell yes if they break laws of other countries they should get extradited there to face charges. I'm so sick of American exceptionalism.
That's a fork, not sure it counts as using mysql unless they largely follow upstream...
http://siliconflorist.com/2013/06/14/portland-appfog-acquire...

https://www.appfog.com/savvis/faq/

http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/13/centurylink-acquring-appfog...
Nixon shouldn't have had to turn over his tapes?

Let me guess, you feel that situation was somehow different. For reasons other than each president's political affiliation?
How to hire the top 1% of outsourced contractors
Er, not if it's the password to the private key.
I was an active member of CS in 2004-2005. Never surfed, hosted only once. It was a fine site, so I was sad to read that it had degraded.
You might be too young to remember why laws like FISA exist. The government really has abused its wiretapping capabilities for political ends in the past. So the fear is not irrational at all. You seem to care about a lot of political issues. Do you think the government is always going to be on your side?
It just goes to show how much is wrong with the current system, that he could have such a serious impact. It shows how fundamentally misguided the foundations of this system are -- the very philosophy on which they act is wrong.
Ask HN: Can Dropbox be used as an email host and is it a good idea?
And this, in the context of Dropbox having Mailbox app now, is noteworthy. Don't you think?
You can't 'reset the password' on gigabytes of already encrypted data. Lose the key, you've effectively lost the data.
I don't actually, mostly because I have been in school since I learned about it and haven't made any money since then to put in an account. Realistically, my understanding is that they are essentially using Vanguard ETFs. Their trick is that they actively manage your portfolio. If you are willing to spend the time to constantly rebalance your holdings (and have a good knowledge of ETF betas so you choose them correctly from the outset), then it is definitely better for you to do it yourself. The fact is that most people don't do this -- I know I won't. Not rebalancing can have a MAJOR negative effect long term on your portfolio, so I would rather be guaranteed to give up a small percent of returns than have exposure to future economic/market downturns as I get older.
Hardly surprising. Explanation here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpI6ikj1G-s
Surely Silicon Valley can round up a few billionaires?

Heck, take advantage of Citizens United and get Google, Facebook, etc, to chip in. If, as has been extensively speculated in other threads in the last few days, NSA surveillance is a dire threat to the global competitiveness of U.S.-based online companies, they have a legitimate business interest in funding such groups.

Heck, CBS's entire market cap is only $30 billion, which Google could buy with cash on hand. How much for just the news divisions? I bet you could get a major presence in US media with just a $5-10 billion acquisition.
Citizens of Rio and Sao Paulo revolt against government reforms.
AppFog (PHPFog) acquired by CenturyLink
$30k to build this? this could be done in a few hour hackathon, no?
Does it have an NSA backdoor?
HN is not the right venue for general political conversations.
>Could you elaborate on that a little more?

The Libertarian movement is an extreme right wing movement. They're correct with their international policy, and I agree with them on their stance on e.g. abortion and gay marriage (i.e. get rid of the religious concept of "marriage" in government). But they also have a lot of dangerous right wing stuff like massive deregulation, gold standard, etc.

Having said that, I've voted Paul pretty much every time I had the chance because while I think his right wing stuff is dangerous and crazy, I don't think that stuff would get through. If we had actual representative government (i.e. the party make up of congress really reflected closely with the populations ideals instead of the red/blue setup we have now) it would work fine because we could get through all those things that your party and my party agree on.
I am not so sure:
First Technology, doesn't improve with exponential progression by definition. This is just an empirical observation. Processors' frequency has stalled already. You can still increase the number of cores/processors/machines, but the amount of computation you can process surely doesn't scale linearly with the number of processing units (because of various overheads).

Secondly, because the number of people and the data they have to store also increase exponentially. Maybe they can decrypt someone's data but they cannot decrypt everyone's data. So if we all use encryption, they are pretty much lost because they won't know what to decrypt.

So I would say that encryption is pretty safe, but very impractical.

edit: To kimlelly, ok if AI is "short term" then I cannot disagree :) But, then is there a solution at all?
"I’ve decided to keep that black tape on my computer camera"
That hackathon idea sounds great, and even makes me wonder if it should be rolled into the curriculum of the university, perhaps as an assignment of some sort to an applicable computer education course.
(I am not an american)

OK, so obama approves all this today. Don't you guys think he has the common sense to think that he will be a target tomorrow himself when he is no longer president? His wife and kids and their families?

Such things are definitely to worry about in dictatorial countries but nothing to be 'paranoid' about in democracies. While I don't condone the government for monitoring data, I will have to 'respect' their decision if they think it's the way to go about providing security. After all, they were elected by the people and people have to trust them for their brains.

The whole prism thing is completely blown up because media has nothing else to talk about right now. It's just waiting for another news to happen and everyone will move on.
Google Buys Waze For Over 1 Billion
Very interesting idea! Knee-jerk thoughts:

Ball seems a bit too big
Colors seem a little off, assuming this is a first pass and that the polish will come later though
Maybe add the ability to ratchet up the difficulty? Really make them work for it
Evil Mode - Throw up a scary photo with novelty_scream.wav when the player wins and display their gift card code. For the sadists out there. Maybe set up a request for reaction videos on Youtube later on. Just spitballing.

Cool idea over all, hope to see it fleshed out a bit more!
The NSA committing warrantless wiretapping against US citizens at a large scale is a completely different beast from the NSA hacking Chinese computers. Especially given how China more or less publicly hacks away at the rest of the world, it would be very surprising if the opposite wasn't also true.

Also, there exists no human rights against having your computer hacked by a foreign government. It might be illegal in 10 different ways (actually, I don't even think it is, given the relative novelty of the crime and the slowness of international law), but it's not a human rights issue.
How does Michigan consistently have such crazy research going on?
Isn't that sidestepping the morality of hacking foreign civilian infrastructure? I appreciate that national security is important, but should a nation state be permitted to break into whatever it wants without consequence?
Golang 10x faster than Ruby for web APIs
Well to give you a frame of reference the Boeing 787 completed its maiden flight on December 15th 2009 and actually flew commercially on October 26, 2011.

On the other had the Boeing 747 had better luck. From its wikipedia page:

First flight	February 9, 1969
Introduction	January 22, 1970 with Pan Am
At E3, sexism still an issue
The logic is complex but useful to understand. Stockman is making a point. His point is that arbitrarily collecting this data is bad. He is perhaps guessing that there will be phone calls between the IRS and the Whitehouse, even if the President didn't know anything about it the staff would be chatting. That linkage, as ephemeral as it is, will make them look bad, it will take time to defend it will cost them votes. It would be better if this capability didn't exist at all.

So the logic is that while the program is 'secret' to only part of the Government then that part can use it to carry out their agenda unchecked, but when the whole government can use it, well it becomes more of a liability than an asset. Part of the beauty of the system we've set up is that it allows the government to fight with itself and keep itself (more) honest. Stockman is working that angle.

So in the ideal case, the Obama administration will realize just how dangerous this system is when it can be used to
smear/threaten/harass non-criminals [1]. And they will come up with some rationale for shutting it down.

[1] "Gee, isn't the electronic subscriber number [ESN] of your Chief of Staff repeatedly going over to that place where we just busted a prostitution ring? Were they part of that investigation?" kinds of things.
Duke Nukem deal goes sour as 3D Realms sues Gearbox
And the UTC would be wrong.
Lulu is stealing the user information from 500M+ Facebook users
And somehow received funding for being so good at it.
I feel like this will be true of most expanded social networks, unless the founders value curation and quality over quantity. Some solutions that I can think off may be:

1. Make it invite-only? I don't use CS but I think it had this feature the last time I heard about it. Wonder why it doesn't address the complaints of blank profiles, etc.

2. A group of moderators amongst local users who can verify or address endorse people from their area.

I don't know if either of these will help address some problems which seem to be heavily localised to specific areas though (NYC / San Diego, from what I've read in the post and this thread.)
What is with HN?!

Just because you disagree with someone doesn't mean you can exaggerate your point. China doesn't "own trillions of US national debt" like you suggest. Plus that debt is "given willingly, and gladly" to them because they purchase it. We are after all a capitalist system. If China is willing to pay more for US debt than Japan (who holds somewhere between 80% and 90% of the amount that China holds last time I check), than they should have the right to purchase it. Just because they are Chinese doesn't mean they don't deserve the same basic free market opportunities.

Perhaps we should be more concerned with the issue at hand instead of tangentially mentioning an issue we don't know a whole lot about in the hopes that no one will point out our mistakes.

My 2 cents.
I wish I had some numbers but I can't look them up right now. How many American's are currently not even voting?

OK, just to cite one example: The population of North Carolina as of 2012 was 9,752,073. 23.7% are under 18 and therefore ineligible to vote. That leaves approximately 7,440,831 eligible voters[1] (I'm ignoring convicted felons and other edge cases for now).

According to the State Board of Elections, there are currently 6,438,531 registered voters. 2,764,322 Democrats, 1,984,251 Republicans, 20,901 Libertarians and 1,669,057 unaffiliated.[2] So that gives us around 1,002,300 potential voters who aren't even registered. So around 13% of the eligible voters aren't even registered and obviously don't vote.

Now that's just one state, and that doesn't even attempt to account for people who are registered, but don't bother to vote, or vote infrequently. But it does suggest that there's a not-insignificant number of people who are sitting on the sidelines during elections.

Edit: Also, as one might expect, there's a Wikipedia page on this topic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_Sta...

[1]: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/37000.html

[2]: http://www.ncsbe.gov/
real currency has the same issue as well.

this is dealt with currency futures and forwards.
Science Prizes:  The new Nobels
When a journalist uses the word "alleges" it's only by accident that it doesn't mean "we know we're reporting a fabrication but it'll get page views".
I think you misunderstand what a PhD student is. A PhD candidate is supposed to generate real science, not just train to become someone who does. By that same logic, a senior researcher (American citizen or not) should not be paid by taxpayer money unless she were to promise not to leave the US in the future.
Green your dad this Father's Day
This would never happen. As far as I know, the US has never had a violent change of power except for the Civil War and former Presidents and their spouses are protected for life by the secret service. When the guy you want to target is very well known and knows the country's deepest darkest secrets, there's nothing you can do.

Everyone else, however, well... we won't be so lucky.

Edit: And no, it is they who must trust us. We must never trust them and we must always be vigilant, always looking over their shoulder, ready to squash their wretched political careers at the slightest infraction against democracy.
Haven't seen such a check-mate in government affair in a long time.

Unfortunately NSA does not have to answer to anyone, including congressman requests. Its their data, per se, and they are not compelled to share with anyone. Sure they will have to set aside large chunk for upcoming lawsuits (that will be paid from your taxes anyways), but other than that ist not a big deal.

NSA stands beyond anyone's power to subpoena. Think Eric Holter being requested to investigate... Eric Holter. Good luck with that.
> I wonder if the test pilots wore parachutes.

They did, and the test article has a special escape hatch installed (good photo here):

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/06/test-pilots-discuss-a35...
> Don't you guys think he has the common sense to think that he will be a target tomorrow himself when he is no longer president? His wife and kids and their families?

That depends on whether or not we think that he and his family will be beholden to the same rules as everyone else.

Many of us would argue that that is a faulty assumption.
What I mean by "exponential progression by definition" is this:

We use technology to produce better technology.

That's the cycle that will go on as long as we exist.

It's by definition of exponential acceleration. In a few years, we will be creating technology based on real artificial intelligence.
Right, but these phones have the wrong UTC, if I understand correctly. That's why they are in the write-up. Wrong local/display time is pretty hard to detect, unless you have coordinate data.

Given that, two factor where the second factor is a local authenticator program is not exactly a common thing.
SQL – Quick Start with Explorer Sections of NuoDB
Do that law prevent surveliance initiated by the state, and does it put liability at those who use the services rather than putting liability at those who offers the service?

Ie, can someone use that law to sue a doctor who happens to use gmail/microsoft/icloud for communicate with his patients?
The newer, lighter planes are using a lot of plastic and are worse at isolating passengers and crew from the radiation at high altitudes.
That's mostly ignorance, and as you said a lack of understanding. The people that really understand know that this is the tried and true statement for any invasion of privacy. Wire tapping has been around for quite a while now, and it would be safe to assume most mobsters are not on the phone discussing business right now.
Military secrets about illegal activities against foreign governments.
"The real reason we don't have easy end-user cryptography is that these companies would lose access to mine your data"

Jeremy Kun recently wrote a good article summarizing some recent advances in encryption that make your statement somewhat less-than-entirely-accurate (scan for "differential privacy"):

http://jeremykun.com/2013/06/10/why-theoretical-computer-sci...
I don't have a full understanding of it, but I think a Motion to Quash basically asks the court to say "This information was collected illegally or outside the investigative scope, and you may not use it as evidence (and thus must destroy it)"
Intelligence-community-proof is somewhat of a fallacy. You can make it more expensive for the NSA to get your email, because then you're forcing them (or another arm of the government) to penetrate your client and extract the key there.

And, all you have done is make damn sure they keep your metadata records. Somewhere I read that sending encrypted email is an automatic flag, in the same category as using words that incite violence.

So to truly make it effective, encrypted email has to be the norm, not the exception.
Trading Privacy for Convenience
Yes, it is encrypted on the server. That hash is just a key to get your message. Its not the message itself.
Accept-Language header is not reliable esp for non-English speaking countries. Many computers/browsers are by default EN, esp if the O/S doesn't support local language.

For example, Indonesians speak and read Bahasa all the time, but most browsers there report EN.
A Dog Walker to Make You Feel Almost Like You Are There
You honestly think the US Dollar will change in value by 700% in a few months?
Funny. This is the one to which I had the most negative response. Zipcodes are terrible for inferring anything geographically interesting. A single zipcode is just a collection of USPS postal routes; nothing more, nothing less. They don't have to be contained within a single city, or even a single state, nor do they have to be contiguous, and they can overlap with one another. New ones are also added all the time, and no publicly available databases of them handle any of these problems well. Most applications that try to use them for anything end up running across edge cases that show users incorrect data, often without ever realizing it. It's especially unfortunate because so many startup-y people live in urban areas where zipcodes cover small, regular geographic areas, and have no idea they're potentially creating terrible user experiences for people who live elsewhere.

For a particular case study of sorts, see: http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/01/19/dont-use-zipco...
Java is just not made for quick prototyping. In production, the URL will come from somewhere, not written by hand, so it would need to be checked anyway. Sadly there's no quick-prototyping mode in Java where you can say, just call this URL string an don't bother checking.
Another example is the inability to just read a local file into a string with a simple API call. It's this way, again, because in production the program has to reason about paths and file systems and can't make assumptions about the validity (or size) of the file you just want to load and play with.

In production code, no matter the language, you have to guard against these issues. The nice thing about typed objects (immutable, anyway), is that once constructed and validated, they do not require tedious validation at every method and client they are passed into. That actually results in less boilerplate, and less test writing.

So just remember, Java always assumes your code is production-bound and requires upfront planning and checking. That's why it's unpleasant to prototype with.
A lot of folks from the GIS community. As mentioned in the blog post, people will already storing this data on GitHub, now it's simply presented in a nicer fashion :)

And as you mentioned, sometimes just providing the tools empowers the community to do to do amazing things.
addendum:

I am happy with the SCOTUS decision though from a pragmatic point of view, because there is a prokaryotic gene I'd like to "steal", that's under patent application right now
of course prokaryotic genes have no introns, so I just got a field day on it.
Don't panic, but we've passed peak Apple. And Google. And Facebook.
This discussion has propelled us internally to completely review all our networking infrastructure, both of us and for our customers. We will definitely be letting everyone one know when we feel 'compliant' for privacy, and where we can't be, and allow for users to opt-out or permanently delete any history we may keep. I think it's been great for us to make this happen and I hope other businesses also look to this as an opportunity.

On that note - it should also be an opportunity for any experts here who do security reviews to get some exposure.
Fanboys in free software
Ask HN: Best way to hire freelance website designer?
It's absolutely shocking timing, they should be ashamed of themselves. What's concerning is if they don't put it into a bill but rather chop it up and just push it through piecemeal on ministerial initiative.