skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The article linked to above, plus several other sources I've come across suggest you are incorrect.

They are wrong. Which is not unusual, news outlets get technical information wrong all the bloody time. Hell, they get things wrong more often than they get them right.

> I don't pretend to understand it, but there is some technique that makes your phone into a remote listening device even when off.

Nope.

> Also -- that's the whole point -- otherwise Snowden would just say "Please turn your phones off".

Snowden is a dramatic source, not an accurate one. I'm glad he blew the whistle because it brings the NSA into the media's focus, but technical accuracy is clearly not his strong suit.
Why do you ask - how do you create your own luck?
Just get your buddies to install http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/ and be done with the "secure communication" question.
They sell these devices for $20 or so called "multimeters" that let you measure this.

Also there's the pretty fucking obvious fact that the battery suddenly lasts for months instead of hours.
This is amazing, I've been waiting for this.
source.android.com
Isn't this only the case for a CDMA network? Thought GSM didn't have this characteristic.
Global automatically declared variables is a well-known bad feature of some non-modern languages that gives nothing but an opportunity to make hardly detectable mistakes because of misprints.

Arbitrary nonsensical type casts must be prohibited. The compiler/interpreter/IDE must infer types and help the programmer to catch their mistakes as early as possible.

As a general rule of language design, if something looks unintentional or ambiguous to a human, it should look so to a compiler/interpreter. The more coherent the programming environment is to your conscience, the easier the programming is.
Did you actually file a trademark application or just register the domain? If the latter then you do have a claim to the mark but it sort of depends how far you went to associate the mark with the subreddit. If you did file a trademark application then it should be pretty open-and-shut and you might be entitled to economic damages too (although it sounds like you'd be happy with a C&D to protect your brand).

Yes, talk to a trademark lawyer. If you don't know one call your state bar and they'll give you a free referral. Many lawyers will give you a free or discounted consultation. Have your paperwork organized before you go in so the lawyer can review it quickly, s/he will know what to look for. If your trademark was properly filed the infringement is egregious (and if your suspicion about the ID of the infringer is correct, I'd say that it is) a lawyer might take the case on contingency. Don't waste time, though, which can be grounds for dismissal of a claim if an infringement is allowed to go on for too long.

Good luck, it sounds like you've been proactive about staking your claim to the mark, so you should have a good chance to defend it.
As I understand it, the US method of interpretation of legislation is to take the opinions of government agencies more or less at face value. After all, they're the experts, so to speak. This is distinct from the Supreme Court's power to interpret the Constitution.

To me it seems like an abrogation of the independent role of the judicial arm. In Australia, for example, the courts jealously defend their rights and powers to interpret legislation to divine the intent of Parliament. Each government agency has no more standing or influence than anyone else.

IANAL, TINLA.
Your objection applied to the backscatter X-ray machines that are no longer in use. It doesn't apply to the millimeter wave machines, which do not expose passengers to any ionizing radiation.
I just started using Browserify with browserify-middleware and coffeeify, and it's fantastic. No build tool needed (even in production if you setup caching)
Quick question: why did you not register the twitter account yourself when registering the domain/trademark
A growing desire for impermanence
Or you appeal to a higher court.

Law is not static. Congress or Parliament makes its legislation, ambiguity arises in corner cases, Courts are asked to sort it out. Courts try to divine the intention of Congress or Parliament. If Congress or Parliament disagree with that interpretation then yes: it's up to them to change the law. Otherwise, by failure to further Act, they conceptually support the Court's interpretation of their intent.
Arch Linux recently merged /bin, /sbin, and /usr/sbin to /usr/bin [1]. The filesystem hierarchy is quite flat and well defined [2], kind of like your example.

[1]: https://www.archlinux.org/news/binaries-move-to-usrbin-requi...
[2]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_filesystem_hierarc...
Happy Wednesday: 5 Things to Do for the Weekend
3D Printing in UAE: The Future is Here | ABAAD
Or learn to unsober without chemicals!
Not everything is Ruby. Pretty much all web frameworks have an ORM for querying databases, namely Django (Python.) You really didn't have much to say except throwing Ruby around. What is with Ruby and fanboys?
No, it stops at around ~220 after which the car just falls into the void.

I got to around 200 without hacking after about 300 generations but then the terrain just gets too much for any of the little guys.

So if you want to beef them up a little, type this in javascript console:

motorSpeed = 50;
wheelMaxRadius = 2.0;
chassisMaxAxis = 2.5;

and hit New Population
I would say that storing session keys is vanishingly unlikely and eliminates the benefit of PFS. Google probably spends millions of dollars a year in PFS additional handshake costs. Google then storing the session keys would be a little like the Dutch building an expensive dike and then knocking a big hole in it.

If you want to store data like "user X searched for Porsche 911 GTS 0-60 statistics, so let's show him some 991 Cabriolet ads the next time we can," you don't need to store the session keys.
The thing that brings us security is money. Money is powe and power is safety. That's how it affects national security.
Start-Up Social Contract?
No, they're not required to lie. AT&T and Verizon never did when asked about NSA surveillance: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589012-38/nsa-surveillan...
How is locking/encryption actually implemented on the iPhone? If you use a 4 digit pin that seems incredibly easy to brute force, unless perhaps the actual encryption key is protected in hardware (and the "wipe after 10 failed attempts" policy is also enforced in hardware)
Reading the poignant description of Pansy’s death, I recalled a quote that captures my feelings quite accurately:

This shouldn't ought to exist.
Also coined the term 4GL.

Truly a legend.
Maybe phones are not so sensitive to condensation. At least here in Finland phones seem to work fine, despite outside temperatures being similar or below to what is found in a fridge most of the year. People move phones in and out of buildings all the time with large temperature differences between. I don't think I have heard anyone breaking a phone because of condensation here.
First off, the vast majority of folks snatched up in these stings end up pleading guilty. It's simple logic, a certainty of spending 20 years in prison is vastly better than the chance of serving a life sentence or being executed.

However, from the strictest legal perspective it's questionable how much the entrapment defense could be used in these cases. From a practical perspective much of this is clearcut entrapment. However, from a legal perspective you have folks who very clearly make strong statements saying they are willing to commit acts of terror and then when presented with the opportunity (in an elaborate masquerade put on by federal agents) they follow through. I can't imagine many lawyers salivating at the prospect of defending that.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I believe the machines do take nude pictures but only show the analyzed image to the operator. Additionally, it's a question whether the machines make sense in regards to a cost-benefit analysis. Finally, privacy is still important and we shouldn't use tactics that are unnecessary. Funneling some percentage of users through the machines while allowing most to pass through metal detectors may be an effective strategy that doesn't involve analyzing nude photographs of every passenger.
Title blatantly false.

It identified improprieties in only about two-tenths of 1 percent of transactions in fiscal years 2010 and 2011, when IRS workers made 273,000 credit card purchases worth about $108 million.

"The majority of IRS cardholders appear to use their purchase cards properly," the report said, adding that "we did not find a significant amount of improper purchases in our limited testing."
The russian doll cache looks awesome, but I'm a bit worried about this bit in dhh's explanatory article :

> The beauty of that system is that you just don’t care. Memcached will automatically evict the oldest keys first when it runs out of space

Well, I do care : I use redis as cache backend. I guess it will not be as simple as that.
Shocking aint it? They are like employees on every corporation with expense accounts. Some or many will abuse it.
I am fully aware of it, but its development seems to have stalled, if you look around.
Planet Labs Raises $13M To Build World’s Largest Fleet Of Satellites
Slicing up a brain and scanning it with a microscope is something we can do fairly well now. Given that the EU just put a billion euros towards a brain modeling project, I'd say the odds aren't so bad. I'd bet on it happening by the end of the century.
A classic example of failure to read the article properly, resulting in a wholly misleading headline (at the time of writing it's 'IRS spent $108M of taxpayer's money on porn, romance novels, personal items').

The Treasury's inspector general for tax administration — the same agency that brought the hammer down on the IRS for singling out conservative groups for special scrutiny — found that IRS workers on the whole stick to the rules when they use government credit cards.

It identified improprieties in only about two-tenths of 1 percent of transactions in fiscal years 2010 and 2011, when IRS workers made 273,000 credit card purchases worth about $108 million.

"The majority of IRS cardholders appear to use their purchase cards properly," the report said, adding that "we did not find a significant amount of improper purchases in our limited testing."

The article goes on to discuss examples of improper spending amounting to a few thousand dollars in the most egregious case, as well as some less egregious examples of poor spending controls that were not necessarily fraudulent. A far cry from the headline $108 million claim. I wonder what the OP has to say about this.
"On the News"
>Correct me if I'm wrong: ABS doesn't cut off pressure to the brakes but instead relieves extra pressure. At no point can the ABS module ever fully cut off brake pressure that's being hydraulically applied by the driver. Incorrect?

if relief valves are kept open (instead of open/close/open/close/... like during normal ABS operation) i don't think there will be any effective braking force.
HTML5 Compass and Straightedge Construction (with puzzles)
This is one of the problems that TDD tries to solve.

To make changes to a small piece of code, you don't want to have to go through a huge iteration of running up your server, going to your browser, moving around the app to get into the required state and then trying out the bit of functionality. No, you just write a test for that bit of code and run it. No browser needed.

The cycle he describes is what you do at the very end. Once.
Maybe write it while you're drugged, and edit it while you're sober.
Good point, it wasn't a minor change. I meant to specify working computers.
I suspect the landing page text was not written by a native English-speaker. I'd suggest an edit and giving it a professional once-over.
When it comes to shipping delays, and only shipping delays, it does not matter in the slightest when the product was made. What matters is figuring out how to get devices shipped efficiently and legally. Which they utterly failed to do.

And I wish you would have helped a competent android game device company instead of Ouya, but what's done is done.
Will Microsoft support the full OpenGL on Windows, too, now? Or will they just run WebGL through Google's ANGLE project?

At least Google had the "excuse" to use it because they couldn't put OpenGL on Windows themselves, so they had to translate DirectX to OpenGL to make WebGL work.

What's Microsoft's excuse? They should support OpenGL and allow Google and Mozilla to use the OpenGL API's directly, too. Then we'll all get faster, and possibly richer WebGL.
I also noticed that it seems the text on the site was not written by a native English-speaker. Editing is needed.
http://dilbert.com/strips
I'm really sorry, but it won't. Not in its current form.

Microsoft, intel, Sky(in the UK) and Google have been trying to promote this since the late 90's and they've failed.

There is limited scope to have a few widgets on a dashboard. Thats about it.

Think about it, when you sit down to watch TV, you want to be absorbed in the programme. You don't want to be distracted by silly popups asking you to "fill in this for to get x" or "wipe the screen to interact with this advert"

We have lots of smart TVs in britian, and most of them are just used as TVs. They interfaces suck balls (I'm looking at you samsung with voice activations)

There is a trend for "second screen" interfaces. Where a smartphone/tablet can receive content relevant to whats on TV. That is far more likley to take off. Its still equally useless and annoying for all but america's got talent and the like.

If the TV content is good, then there is no need for second screen/twitter popups (Dangerous catch I'm looking at you, seriously, fishing is shit, and no amount of popups is going to make it more dramatic.)

The one thing I am glad of in the UK is the BBC. American TV is so utterly broken its unbelievable. As a demonstration of this: go and find a UK edit of top gear, then compare it to the US.

Top gear is full of content, but in the US it appears that this is bad, so they cut out half the stuff and replace it with plot spoilers and recaps every five minutes. The BBC did an edit of the first series of myth busters, they chopped it down to 25 minutes, just by getting rid of the stupid recaps. There is so much filler in american TV.

TV is about content, and content discovery. Distractions are bad. unless they are more interesting than the TV you are watching (assuming the proliferation of antique hunting/storage unit buying programmes won't be too long)
Bootkit alone is probably worth $40k -
https://github.com/hzeroo/Carberp/tree/master/source%20-%20a...

The code looks better than a lot of commercial kernel code of comparable complexity, and it is complex. From readme -

--

Bootkit is a driver for loading other drivers at the OS boot time. Driver is loaded before the initialization of NT kernel (i.e. before the start of the PatchGuard) and it can patch arbitrary kernel code. The driver gets launched before every other drivers, including the boot-time ones, and it can monitor and control their loading. No digital signature is required.

Supported Windows versions - from XP to W8 inclusively.

Supported platforms - x86 and amd64.

Boot-loader works with all types of NTFS partitions.

The code is metamorphic, it consists of several blocks that are randomly rearranged with each build. The IPL (initial loader) code is encrypted and it is incrementally decrypted during the execution. Considered together, this means that each build of the bootkit is binary unique. The driver is also encrypted when stored on the disk and it is decrypted by IPL upon loading.

--

All in all, this is quite a leak. Very few people can code something like this and it's a unique chance to peek at and learn from their work.
Show HN: HQ Tutorials for Programmers
A fantastic find. If you read the Federalist Papers, it quickly becomes clear that the founders were not so much wide-eyed idealists as many Constitution-thumpers would have it, but a fairly cynical bunch who were as worried about the inability of people to rule themselves as they were about being ruled poorly from afar. Reading the FP made me quite a fan of Alexander Hamilton, hence my sometimes-grumpy statist position.
or: WebGL way: wait for textures and other stuff to download -> play
What do you people think intelligence agencies do? I'm surprised how far some people are taking the feigned ignorance/outrage. The NSA is reading the traffic from the biggest web communities in the world? Major shocker there. And now we're trying to make a scandal of an intelligence agency discreetly taking an object that may contain data that compromises national security? Things like that are why clandestine services exist in the first place: making sure we have a way into major communication channels when necessary, and making sure sensitive information is kept from prying eyes. These are basic functions for meaningful intelligence. Do we think the CIA just sits around in Langley all day?

I don't get it, is all.
From what I've seen, Twitter takes down "imposter" twitter accounts if they are imitating the real one when the real one steps up. Don't have a reference link on hand but recall this for celebs & iirc companies.
I whipped together a quick and dirty tool to auto-refresh a web page when specified files are altered in the file-system: https://github.com/lukifer/Freshrr

This may not fully solve the problem, but it does eliminate a couple superfluous workflow steps. Chrome's inspector even tends to remember DOM context (not sure about Firebug or Safari's inspector).
Sure, but those greeting cards typically don't have quad core CPUs in them, either.

You'd have to expand the claim to not only include hidden reserve power, but also hidden reserve memory, CPU, and audio system. Not to mention somehow convincing phone OEMs to actually spend the money adding this system to their motherboards and building it - there's no way in hell you are randomly sneaking that in at the factory without the OEMs knowledge. So now you also have to somehow keep the OEMs quiet about it.

In a word, "bull-fucking-shit".
KickBorn : is it better than SIRI
Yeah, I also think there should be a more fundamental discussion about where the web is heading. Instead of fixing the tools perhaps one should think about a new foundation for everything. Not sure HTML etc. is it.
Not enough people know this, but when you say "etc" out loud in reference to the directory, it is supposed to sound like "etsy".

I expect there will be people who reply to this comment to argue it should be "E-T-C" or "Et Cetera". You can ignore those people; they probably say "exclamation mark" instead of "bang".
Wow, this is really cool. I like that the construction is stored in the hash for easy sharing. Thanks for posting!
Valetnina studio
Not so far I have found new cool tool to work with PostgreSQL - Valentina Studio. Its free edition can do things more than many commercial tools!!
I very recommend check it. http://www.valentina-db.com/en/valentina-studio-overview
Have a read of

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-su...

and

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/01/the-trouble-with-popul...

If you only click one link here, click the second link.
Yes give the regime more eyes, why don't you.
Do you have a link that describes the exact difference? I'm still skeptical/squicked about these machines by reflex, but I'm willing to re-examine the issue.
My father was making dinner and got the cheese sauce confused with the dessert custard. We ate cauliflower custard. The custard wasn't sweet as not much sugar had been added. I realised about 75% the way through that something was wrong, the other 2 finished, but were slightly confused by the taste and discussed it at the end, after the big reveal. Context is very important. And every so often I still ponder how the hell I ate it with cauliflower.
Hi Jason. It's nice to see that you've taken the time to comment on this submission and answer any questions we have for you.

You acknowledge that it's inappropriate to joke about payment and firing employees, but you continue to do it. I don't see using the Michael Scott-esque excuse of "come visit our offices" as appropriate. Here's my question for you. Do you feel, honestly and completely, that you have not created a toxic work environment in the slightest with your behavior? How are Fab's offices' different than any other startup's?
Probably the same as if you were renting an apartment to a criminal, and you gave him the keys and all the copies.
As a customer of the original and deliberately offensive online T-Shirt store. Who certainly never had a problem with his wares causing this level of offense until one particular case.
I cant help but think the problem here wasn't so much the offensive shirt or the content. It was that he failed to realize that putting a t-shirt that has little old ladies chuckling and moms happily wearing it, next to a tshirt that say something that only >1% would wear with pride and more than >25% may take offense at, is inviting disaster.

I doubt people even saw the shirt directly, I bet it came up as a related product while they were buying something else on his store, and the suggestion that they may want to buy this shirt based on them buying another of his shirts was likely one of the primary causes of offense "I see you like <cute cat joke shirt> I sold you. Can I recommend you snatch a copy of this handsome <culturaly satirical rape joke> as well?"

That sort of thing tends to offend people. But I dont see why he didnt apply a flamethrower of purity all over the place. New Corp-Registration, new domain, new amazon seller account, new EVERYTHING, but this time, some sanity checks in that script. A few careful letters/calls to various services to make sure they know hes legit & what hes doing is means they are keeping a valuable customer. and then a wash of shiny new design and brand all over it. Meet the New company same as the old company.
Apple TV with games, that will be the big part. It will be a new console and one that is more open. It will win if they do it right, they will own handheld and console/screen platforms

Controlling or flicking apps to the Apple TV from your device/pad and then playing. Or using an app like that in school, business presentations etc. AirPlay was just the first step.

Further on that leads to remote controlling very large screens, movie theater waiting games, street big screens, big screens at concerts/sports venues. I think they are underestimating it... Screens everywhere with apps/games tightly tied to remote control devices on your phone.

Apple TV will use native and common languages not just scripting like Roku although there will be many scripting libraries that will pop up. I'd love to work on some of this and can't wait.

Side note: I think Microsoft being closed and XBone is further missing a huge opportunity here... they are the only other one that has the full device setup like Apple (hardware, software, devices, pull) but they fumbled it over and over. Including the older Win7 being on C# only and non native for one -- xbox being closed. It's too late for them. Apple TV can accidentally disrupt the entire game console market and TV app market introducing all sorts of things and standards for controlling screens.
It's sometimes worth doing something you know will fail, just to find out exactly how it will fail.
Straight-edge and Compass Construction Kit
My opinions:

1. You can't trust them to not save the images and use or accidentally leak the images later, some scanners in courthouses were found to be saving images.

2. It's not reasonable to require knowledge of everything one carries on one's person.

3. Experts seem to think they (scanners) are easily defeatable, in which case metal detectors and chemical sniffers are equally capable.

4. The owners of the scanning company are involved with Homeland Security so we are basically rewarding someone for having a gigantic conflict of interest.