skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't agree with your statement that the surveillance programs are not evil because their goal is to save lives. Essentially nobody is intentionally evil. There's a reason we say "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions", and it's not because we're all civil engineering aficionados.

Evil can and does arise from people trying to do their best to make the world a better place. To say that the program isn't evil because it's trying to save lives is incredibly dangerous.

At the risk of triggering a Godwin, let's all recall that Hitler rose to power "trying to defend the country from terrorism". We probably don't have any nascent Hitlers, but we certainly have people who will abuse power if they get it, and ignoring people with good intentions will make them impossible to detect.
Just bought a copy. Was always a little bit tentative about reading Rails 3 way since 4 ways right around the corner. Glad to have it and you can't beat the price!
We had Byte magazine which had Dick Pountain's articles of sexy hardware with which fantasize too...
Directly in the USA or world wide several hundred thousand I would imagine.

or don't people like the young woman who wanted an education and was shot in the head for her pains?

or the poor civilians caught up in the brutal and horrific wars in Africa where warlords use terror as a tool to control the population.
August of last year.
The term "startup" originated during the dot-com bubble.

Wow, you get some bullshit ideas about business if you get your mba at wikipedia.
Hackers knock out Korean government websites on anniversary of war
> Why is everyone convinced he won't have a fair trial?

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/manning-treatment-i...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp#C...

> Is a result where he ends up in jail an unfair result?

NO. If we had set a high bar for wanting a free and fair trial (which we haven't) then the case would be decided in an open manner which could very well end in jail time, community service or some equivalent. I fully support that process.
What's so fascinating about this, to me, is that Snowden is in the airport without a Russian visa. So is he in Russia, or not? Do the laws of Russia apply within the airport, or not? Whose laws do apply? What happens if you commit a crime in the airport? And if someone is stuck in the airport, with no way to get in or out (a.k.a. 'The Terminal'), or who are unwilling to leave, do they just stay there forever? Are there hundreds or thousands of refugees in the Moscow airport as we speak, unwilling to leave, with no way for Russia to get rid of them? Are there a bunch of terrorists hanging out in the airport, snubbing their noses at the countries that want them?
You can include 9/11 in the window, it doesn't make any quantitative difference. Terrorism is a negligible threat no matter how you slice it.

9/11 was less than a month's worth of American traffic fatalities. Why don't reckless drivers get even 1/100th of the attention?
This what's known as a Glomar response: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_response

That developed in law thanks to the press uncovering a secret, massive sunken-sub-raising boat built by Howard Hughes for the CIA to retrieve a lost Soviet sub (yes, the very thing that The Hunt for Red October was based on).
Additionally, incumbent mobile A/B testing service http://www.leanplum.com -- I've used them for a while now and it's a pretty robust system with good support. Worth checking out IMO.
The Three Projections of Doctor Futamura (compiler-compilers)
If we're using our own system as a kind of model for projecting ideas about Gliese 667c, I'd be pretty optimistic about the chances.

The problem is that we cannot do that without succumbing to selection bias. We don't know how many things had to go just right to give rise to life, let alone a technological civilization, we just know that it has happened (at least) once in the whole universe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
You're more than likely using the Android Marketplace, with a Google account, with credit card details associated. What don't you trust?

In general, apps that "phone home" suck, but let's not lump GA or crash reporting (like BugSense, etc) in that same group.
I think to add to OP's point. This is a smart move for any company whether large or small. Large one's do layoffs as well as small ones. You probably should be more aware when you join a startup that has a burn vs generates cash but the symptoms discussed here are the same ones that Cisco goes through prior to a big layoff as well as a 10 person startup.
Firefox 22 proves the Web is the platform for 3D games and video calls
headline source: https://twitter.com/firefox/status/349544064120655872
I work at Factual, which I'd estimate has about 20 Clojure engineers. We've found folks generally enjoy working with the language--both newly hired programmers who already use Clojure, and internal converts. Code structure for maintainability is always a concern, but because Clojure doesn't impose as much rigid OO hierarchy as other languages, refactoring is a little simpler, I think.

It decimates your hiring pool--but the programmers who are fluent in Clojure or other Lisps tend to be skilled. I also think Clojure is more concise and more productive than, say, Java--which reduces the volume of code, and lets you do more with fewer people. Keeping the team small reduces the number of meetings and managers, and keeping the codebase small makes it easier to understand and maintain.

YMMV, naturally--but I wouldn't consider these concerns as insurmountable obstacles to using the language in production.
Type Inference for Everyone in iOS 7 (Yes, I'm Breaking Apple's NDA)
When you say Prolog, I think of the standard without CLP. Also if you want to do anything other then solving logical problem you will be better served with clojure/core.logic or anouther 'mainstream' language with a good logic implmentation.
Wyden and Udall discuss the point where the NSA is misleading, but the point where they lie is covered in a "classified attachment": http://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/blog/post/wyden-and-udall-t...
It runs Epic Citadel :) and BananaBread demo.
Most U.S state websites are still appalling
Yes. IMO that list is core and shouldn't be hidden away. Maybe a good compromise would be to allow it to be expanded, and not block the underlying text when expanded. i.e. an option to tuck it off to the side an leave it in place.
Your stance seems to be that, since he committed the actions he's accused of, and since those actions happen to be illegal, that he therefore should end up in jail. Is that really your stance? It's not a very nuanced one.

I'm curious, would you have begrudged a slave for escaping from his slave-owner, given that that action was clearly illegal?
I know yours is just a pithy joke, but I think a lot of this community has extreme NSA-fatigue, including myself. It's not enough that 50-90% of the stories on the front page are all related to the NSA scandal, but it also has to infest completely unrelated posts like this one.

I'd like to pretend that we're still a forum about technology and startups, as opposed to an ever so slightly higher-level form of /r/politics.
I think you are confusing "rational" with "fitting my aesthetic ideal of how things should be".
TAO: The power of the graph
I don't think this distinction is anywhere near as trivial. VC-funded companies have meaningfully different qualities than those that are just trying to build up their revenues. The author failed to internalize this distinction, and it later made him unhappy.
Very interesting, thanks for the writeup.

On a related note, I'm curious how many here find user ratings of new movies coincide with their own. Personally, I've been sticking to critic reviews because the authors usually have a much larger base for comparison and developed tastes than the casual movie goer like me, and because user-submitted ratings like IMDb can be highly inflated as waves of unusually high ratings pour in in the first few weeks of the release ("Best romantic comedy EVR, 10/10!"). Once the dust settles, the reviews tend to sober up a bit and even out at a value that I tend to agree with more.
I think he meant OO and MVC aren't going to disappear. They're useful concepts, and functional isn't going to make them obsolete.
Simply awesome.

The people who research, design and implement these "hacks" deserve infinitely more credit and acknowledgement than all of us.

It really annoys me that the superficial celebrity turds on legs get so much attention and the people making real differences to the world go unknown and unacknowledged.
I think magic is not the right word here (and I see that you do not endorse it yourself, merely attributing it to him, a distinction others are ignoring.) Instead of magic, I would call it bad or unfamiliar style caused by a habit of doing everything in a single expression with large unnamed sub-expressions. This is much easier to do in functional languages because of how well functional idioms compose with each other. Martin Odersky gave an example of this in Scala in his style talk at Scaladays. Sometimes it seems simplest to express things in one expression:

jp.getRawClasspath.filter(
_.getEntryKind == IClasspathEntry.CPE_SOURCE).
iterator.flatMap(entry =>
flatten(ResourcesPlugin.getWorkspace.
getRoot.findMember(entry.getPath)))

But giving informative names to the subexpressions can make things clearer for the next programmer to come along:

val sources = jp.getRawClasspath.filter(
_.getEntryKind == IClasspathEntry.CPE_SOURCE)
def workspaceRoot = ResourcesPlugin.getWorkspace.getRoot
def filesOfEntry(entry: Set[File]) =
flatten(workspaceRoot.findMember(entry.getPath)
sources.iterator flatMap filesOfEntry

When to use named vals instead of subexpressions is a matter of style and judgment. From my limited and dated experience, the "one big expression" style is more common and more culturally accepted in Common Lisp than in other languages I've used. You could even call it the norm. In less expressive imperative OO languages, programmers are used to using a plethora of named variables, simply because they usually can't avoid it. In languages like Scala and Clojure, there's bound to be some culture clash when people who are used to more or fewer explicit names have to read each others' code.
ha! can a guy get a "hello fucking echo chamber!" up in here?

m3mnoch.
I wonder if this was an intended consequence of cutting IRS funding or whether those doing the cutting literally didn't think about it beyond "fuck'em!".

And now I'm wondering which scenario is more dissapointing.
A ban on Justin Bieber | Witty Sparks
I think it's more of "The information you requested, were it to exist, would be highly classified (due to its type), and therefore we can neither confirm nor deny its existence."
What is her new book? I am assuming you mean the next book after POODR?
It depends on your app.

Suppose you have some kind of permissions model based around the department that a certain employee belongs to. Say, HR people can look at people's salaries.

If you allow mass assignment to department_id, someone can edit the form in the user page and assign themselves to ANY department and boom!, they're in.

You can fix this by having some sort of validation, but I find I prefer to have it in the controller.

Before:

@model.update_attributes(params[:model]) # trololol

After

dept = params[:model].delete[:department_id]
@model.update_attributes(params[:model])
if current_user.can(:foo)
@model.department = Department.find(dept)
end

If I've got this wrong, please let me know. I'm pretty sure the above is basically the whole point of using attr_accessible (aside from the fact that they now force you to use it; was not the case <3.2 iirc)
I have the exact same problem. I was in contact with Ouya support but haven't gotten a response from them in two weeks now.

They told me it arrived, but it didn't, and the DHL tracking number never worked so I'm not sure how they determined that.
Use ShowKit to walk your clients through their in-progress iOS apps
Moving out of 'shouting' distance for me in my office actually helped me considerably. That little bit of extra distance filtered out many trivial interruptions. Maybe your teammates and managers are good about it, but I feel like many are not. That combined with the noise machines open offices can be it can get pretty bad. Also some people can get bad with the shoulder surfing.

To create that 'we're in the same room' experience, you need to leave G+ hangouts on the entire time. You can't just initiate calls and then end them and do it several times a day.
I paid for the kickstarter in order to pre-order the product.
Freakonomics -  How to Get Motorbiking Parents to Put Helmets on Their Kids?
I think gp was saying: to reply to your letter is to confirm the existence of the body, the NSA itself, who received and replied to your request.

Now we know they exist!!!
I'm still kind of pissed off that useful questions are closed on Stackoverflow because it doesn't 'fit the Q&A style of the site.'

http://i.imgur.com/VcqqSN9.jpg

You see questions with 400 upvotes closed by some user who has been on the site for 6 months and is autistic about earning internet points.
I think there is a life cycle. A user starts fresh and new, and then tentatively puts forth a comment or submission. If the comment or submission isn't immediately lauded, I think the user my temporarily become snarky and/or bitter. Then I think they come around again and more maturely interact.

Maybe you have to have wait 30 days after registration before you can comment? Or comments within 30 days of registration have special "new user" formatting?
This is still a growth focused definition: "repeatable and scalable" is really saying "growable".
Yes, totally agree. I was very happy to learn they were producing a series for HBO simply for the fact that more people would become aware of them.
IOS 7 Beta 2 Released
Thanks for sharing your story. If you need someone to chat with: http://www.startupsanonymo.us/
As an American, it's pretty sad. As if the rest of the world wasn't getting sick of us already. Let's stick our noses into everyone else's business all the time, start a bunch of wars for the obvious benefit of our corporations, crash the world economy (btw we're doing more derivatives trading again so expect another crash lolol), and now spying on every person in the world, US citizen or not.

On top of it, instead of our media telling us "WAKE THE FUCK UP AND LOOK AT WHAT YOUR GOVERNMENT IS DOING!!" they are saying "Gee, where will Snowden go next lol?!?! Ohh he's in Moscow now, neat!!!!"

I think the endorphin rush people get from receiving a Facebook message on their portable distraction device outweighs the negative feelings of the government spying on every aspect of our lives. People don't know what's happening two feet away from them, much less in their government or the world (besides what big media tells them).

We're sliding fast down a slippery slope while chuckling and playing Farmville on the way down.
Here is a redacted form just stating that:

"Open Source Software

These organizations are requesting either 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(6) exemption in order to collaboratively develop new software. The members of these organizations are usually the for-profit business or for-profit support technicians of the software.

There is no specific guidance at this point. If you see a case, elevate it to your manager."
http://democrats.waysandmeans.house.gov/sites/democrats.ways...
Personalized coupons as a vehicle for perfect price discrimination
Thanks. I appreciate this.

Could you define T&M in this context? How does it differ from code sprints?

> If (ii), then the follow-up move for future deals with the same buyer is to clearly show why their final T&M billables could have been cheaper if they'd gone with FP.

I understand (i) and (iii), but why is showing them FP is better than T&M a good idea? Isn't T&M more profitable for me?

> ... that sentence implies a pattern of failed FP deals and lack of scope.

That's accurate unfortunately. There's always scope, but for sub-£2k jobs (and worse for sub-£1k) there's a trade-off between time spent tying down the scope and time doing the job. If I spend an hour on it, that's 5-10% of the overall budget gone.
I like the idea of this. Yes, it doesn't encrypt the message from sender to you, but then you require the cooperation of the sender for that.

I think I will do this. I was thinking of downloading all my gmail to my local anyways and then deleting them since emails over 180 days old don't require a warrant to read right?

Thank you for creating this.
You're awesome. Just upgraded to the latest! Thanks!
> As an app developer, this data allows me to measurably improve my apps.

I don't give a flying f#ck about that, sorry. This is my device and I don't like my device connecting god knows where at a whim.

As I said, if you were to tell your app users upfront that you will be tracking their usage, anonymous or not, and gave them an option to opt out, very few would not opt out. This is the exact same inherent need for privacy that is fueling current NSA debacle. It may be irrational, but it pretty damn real. People don't like to be tracked or watched.
InfoSec's Jerk Problem
Religion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphans_of_the_Sky
That is a good point. Why is a successful person with resources not allowed to openly admit they are in need of personal growth? Is such an admission more legitimate from the mouth of a less successful person?
38% of Americans think that Snowden shouldn't be prosecuted. While not 50%, it's reasonably high. That, combined with jury selection and sequestration, ought to do the trick--but if OJ Simpson can get away with murder, anything's possible in the U.S.
A portrait of you from a single hair
Clojure actually embraces many of the great lessons of OO, you'll find them in the form of first class namespaces, a standard library built on abstractions not concrete types, a multimethod facility which supports derivation, and protocols which support local and future extensions in much safer nicer fashion than what the current popular OO languages provide.

To your other points - Clojure does data great - much nicer than OO languages I've used. As far organizing UIs better Clojure programmers adopt many of the same patterns that are currently en vogue. However I think there are some more interesting new techniques just around the corner and we will be hearing about them soon enough.
That's pretty much a question of what the divide between zombies and vampires really is. They are, in essence, very similar, especially compiling variants of the myths. They are undead in some way feeding off of humans in a manner that, some percentage of the time or by some means, turns the human into one of them. Pre-Dracula vampires are generally hideous in manners that could be confused with some versions of zombies.

The book is pretty explicit about them being vampires including distinctly vampiric traits (nocturnal, traditional vampire weaknesses, killing them with stakes through the heart.

The film of the same title, however, rides the line pretty close, coming closer to vampires with the original ending. Their weakness to sunlight and their intelligence are clearly more vampiric, but it doesn't really do much more than that.

Either way, though, Matheson's influence on zombie fiction certainly makes the vampires look more zombie-ish from a modern perspective and can probably be uncontroversially explained at least as a stepping stone from between vampires and zombies.
FTC Complaint Assistant
It's possible they're pushing the story now as a scare tactic, but the source of this information is a document from the DoJ authorizing the NSA to collect and store U.S. data in certain cases, leaked by Snowden.
I read that as "you can't sleep/eat because the fact that you're not working on your idea bothers you so much". A bit like how you might have been totally nervous the first time you asked someone out on a date, so much so that you were unable to eat or sleep. However, once you're in a committed relationship with the person that nervousness goes away.

Of course, that's just my reading and I don't know how that stacks up with what Microsoft intended to communicate or what others will read into it.
memory overhead (both for the machine and human), modifying core classes unnecessarily, complexity of third party software, setting defaults to on that aren't applicable to 90% of apps (see turbolinks which breaks the way the web and browsers work).

I'll admit to being on a hard-core minimalist, simplicity, explicit coding kick recently, so I'm already biased against behemoth frameworks. Rails is wonderful if you need that level of complexity/features. I don't think most apps do and we're "forcing" everyone to write basecamp when that is overengineering for most apps.
If your in a busy wifi environment, such as a hotel, apartment/townhouse complex or similar, all of the other wifi traffic can significantly degrade the connection. Not everyone lives in a suburban house with only 3 wifi networks on their laptop and an ability to completely control their environment.

Video conferencing is really sensitive to congestion, latency and packet loss, not so much throughput. Missing a word here and there can make it fairly frustrating, and with wifi you are bound to have that happen a few times an hour even with good wifi connections on both sides.
I may be ignorant, but doesn't it take a lot of statistical analysis to do attacks like this? The point being not that the NSA cannot do it, but that they have to be specifically targeting you to pull it off. Unless they know what's going through the wire, how will they know to target you?
It wasn't really, it was just one example of a lot I could have given.

This isn't true. There has been quite a bit of research and when Germans say they didn't know anything they were just making excuses after they lost the war.

"not knowing anything" and "not being aware of mactual details of the industrialized killing they were part of" are worlds part.

I have recently listened to an interview with Hannah Arendt, who was against the Nazis from the get go, and frustrated with her friends of whom many just went along to get along. I don't remember the exact year right now, but between 1940 and 1942 she and her partner first heard of the death camps.

Yes, the concentration camps were known, the persecution of Jews was obviously known, and when it wasn't, it was willfully ignored because the antisemitism got lapped right up. The industrialized killing and the scale of it, that was not known, and certainly not to everybody. At least not to Hannah Arendt, and she did pay attention.

[see caveat at end of paragraph] Then there is the fact that the murdering of mentally disabled children 1942 was an internal secret even to the Nazis, not to mention the public. They only dared to do it under the cover of war. [I'll try to find a source for this -- but I remember it from school ages ago, so if I don't find one, you can ignore this paragraph, it's not like my post rests on it. Edit: maybe I misremembered it: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005200 though maybe not completely -- "Conservative estimates suggest that at least 5,000 physically and mentally disabled German children perished as a result of the child "euthanasia" program during the war years." (note "during the war years", it's not like they wouldn't have loved to kill them on day one)]

But hey, I'm all ears. If you can point me to research refuting that I would be very keen to hear it, being German and not into Nazis and all that.
Because I haven't yet messed around with parsing just the message body out for encryption to then do an imaplib append with it.

That said, I think this is worth doing, so it's currently in progress. I just don't have a ton of time at the moment, pull requests eagerly accepted though. :)