skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess a lot of it comes down to quality of instruction. One of my most eye opening experiences as an English major was when I turned an essay about a religious text (honestly I forget which one). The essay used a writing style that intentionally aped Nietzche's "Twilight of the Idols" to eviscerate the idea of religiosity. It was the type of essay I was used to getting an A on, because I was showing off all of my pedestrian literary and rhetorical flourishes to please an already-converted audience.

I got a fail on the paper and a summons to the professor's office. He raked me over the coals for failing to do the most important thing--respect the material. After all, what was I trying to achieve? Ultimately, nothing--I was just spewing my anger at religion, in the same way that stereotypical fundamentalists spew their anger at infidels. Like a hurt animal, I was using my best offensive skill--a young adroitness with language--to make a childish swipe at something beyond my understanding.

In other words, he called me out for my empty intellectual exercises. I was hurt and broken. Then I mended myself, and I thank him forever for doing that.
I'm glad they got rid of the useless devices page. The previous version only listed some of the supported devices and most of them were several years old. The new link takes you directly to the wiki, which provides lots of helpful information.
If it does turn out to be an attack, the perpetrator must be extremely well endowed in the gonad department. Although you can never be sure with government websites, you'd expect that the NSA's servers would be fairly well hardened. So successfully defeating them seems to imply someone who will understand that they're poking a nest of the smartest and most well-connected hornets in the world.
Seeing ultraviolet, exploring color
I've always thought that tipping was just a way for restaurants to lower both the wages and the advertised price of a meal. I would rather have a service fee, because, when you are not ordering a multi-course meal, I don't know what the servers actually do.
Sorry, buying illicit drugs is a crime in this country, seizure of assets and materials used in the transaction is part of that. This part of the "war on drugs" I am ok with -- especially living in a community currently ravaged by meth ad heroin issues.

That said, I'm not a fan of the general blanket seizure laws associated with the WoD.
Ultraviolet Color Glow after Cataract Surgery with Crystalens
The capacitive technology that powers multitouch screens requires (or works much better with) glass, I believe. Also, LCD technology itself requires glass. The less and thinner the layers, the closer it feels like your finger gets to the image, and the better the UX is. There are iPhone cases that essentially do what you are suggesting with a plastic overlay.
I've tried a couple times to have a repair through icracked but never got a reply from them. Always got a message that said 3-5 techs were notified, but I guess they didn't want to repair my cracked iPhone.
Out of curiosity, what's wrong with Unison?
!important, bad !dea
I suffer from visual snow and also have floaters. You learn to ignore the static after a while but it is always there if you focus - looking at plain surfaces (e.g. blue sky) makes it very obvious. And as you said, it drastically affects my vision in darkness (think of grainy CCTV footage). I haven't done drugs and don't suffer from migraines which are thought to be correlated. Apparently it is also correlated with Tinnitus but I haven't been able to self-diagnose that.

For the longest time, I wondered if people saw a "static" overlay like I do. Talked to my optometrist about it last time and he wasn't aware of this condition. Googled it later and there is some research starting on the subject: http://www.eyeonvision.org/
Here is a NASA article about why they don't have the redirection : http://blogs.nasa.gov/cm/blog/nasadotgov/posts/post_13068608...
This incident doesn't tell us anything new, unless the DEA seized these bitcoins by cracking ECDSA or wallet encryption, which is pretty unlikely.
No, you're right - it's a serious limitation. Ultimately just a trade-off to consider. As with anything, neither is obviously superior.
You can always just serve a redirect to www.example.com. Doesn't have to be a high-powered redundant server or anything (just secure).
How is destroying bitcoins not an effective way of ensuring that nobody has those bitcoins? How is that not effective?

You seem to be under the impression that I think the authorities would not realize what happened, or would not strike out at you for doing it. I am suggesting neither of those things. They can be as angry as they want to be, but that will not un-transfer those bitcoins. Hell, they can beat you with a wrench for the rest of your natural life but that will not get the bitcoins back.

You plainly do not understand what I am suggesting. "That would be organized crime and authorities are good at recognizing organized crime" is not a coherent response. Speak plainly, what specifically do you think the flaw is?
In my halcyon Amiga days of yore, I learned about this from a magazine article (INFO? Amiga World?) about a University (Georgia Tech?) installing a labful of 3000UXes. Owning just a well-expanded 2000 and without the funds to buy AMIX, I discovered NetBSD, though I needed to trade out a 40 MHz 68EC030 (without MMU) on my accelerator card for the MMU-enabled version. I remember it took the better part of a week, and constant retries, to get the full install sets and kernel. I ran that rig all the way to 1999, junior year of college at UIUC. Good times.

I still run NetBSD on a personal machine (and a toaster).
To my eye there is a major problem with the piece. Studying English Literature is not just learning how to write. Not is it the only way to learn how to write. One might, for example, argue that philosophy is a superior training in how to construct a coherent argument. It is supposedly also learning how to read. And IMHO this has been profoundly corrupted by the poisonous influence of a series of 'schools' informed by half digested Continental philosophers. Such philosophers are muddy enough for other philosophers and associated wannabes, but such obscurantism has been a horrific influence on the humanities. Reading through the filter of one or other of these corrupting lenses diminishes pleasure in the the text. No wonder people don't enjoy reading any more.
Dreamfall Chapters dev responds to George Lucas' view of gamers
Oh I doubt the NSA cares much about their website. It's such an obvious soft target. They would have to be complete imbeciles to have anything of any remote value to hackers connected to that server.
According to Google "NSA powers" in their case are restricted to FISA orders, so I'm not sure how a random worker at a government contractor can produce these. Snowden was a sysadmin for a contractor and that is how he got his hands on their internal documents.

Is no one else paying attention to anything beyond the "slides" in this story?!
It seems like you're having a bad day, so I've given you an upvote.
Too much power
"There ought to be an overriding self, she thinks, who, when she gets out of hand, could slam the door and insist on no more changes until she can consider the matter carefully and discuss it with some of the others. Instead she has only this self, the one she is, and it seems to believe itself to be overriding and final but is merely a memory of someone her future self once knew."

- Deb Olin Unferth, "One She Once Was"

Full Text:

http://professorfloyd.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/onesheonce...

One of my favorite short stories.
But your comment already takes for granted that there's no purpose in studying literature other than a career in academia (presumably because education is only about careers to begin with). I'd say the battle for the things worth caring about here was lost long before that assumption became not-even-worth-bothering-to-make-explicit. And sure, the economics are pathetic and the profession is rife with horseshit.

The reason I studied literature for a while was that I wanted to learn what literature could teach me, because I wanted to connect with a noble tradition, and things like that. At the time, if anyone had asked me "what are you going to 'do' with that? what about the economics?" (and I know this, because they did), I would have said that economics aren't everything. Are they?

Edit: come to think of it, that battle was probably already lost when people tried to pretend that there was a viable middle-class career path in any of it to begin with. Traditionally, this stuff was produced by the leisure classes, entertainment professionals, and poor bohemians. I'm not sure the marriage with academia turned out to be a very good or a very long-lasting thing. I'm quite sure that tying this cultural tradition to any short-term notion of economic utility is pointless; might as well shoot it in the head.
You appear to have missed my joke. This clearly is a HN that largely believes that CS degrees are unnecessary.
I bet the answer is HTTPS Everywhere. The only bad thing about it is the mixed content blocking, but I still think everyone should use it.

There was a link to schneier's blog here recently and a few people mentioned that his cert was expired. I am willing to be that everyone who saw the cert warning were httpseverywhere users.

https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Nah, it was my mistake and misunderstanding.
Can you give some examples of filters and ng-directives that you had to rewrite? I found that most of them can easily be translated with underscore functions.
http://www.nsa.gov is up.

I have noticed lately that an awful lot of the government domains no longer have a webserver answering for the root domain and or do not have an a record at the root domain.

$ unbound-host -v navy.mil
navy.mil has no address (secure)
navy.mil has no IPv6 address (secure)
navy.mil mail is handled by 5 mx14.nmci.navy.mil. (secure)
navy.mil mail is handled by 5 mx15.nmci.navy.mil. (secure)
navy.mil mail is handled by 5 mx13.nmci.navy.mil. (secure)
$ unbound-host -v dod.mil
dod.mil has no address (secure)
dod.mil has no IPv6 address (secure)
dod.mil has no mail handler record (secure)
$ unbound-host -v nga.mil
nga.mil has no address (secure)
nga.mil has no IPv6 address (secure)
nga.mil mail is handled by 5 mailnde.nga.mil. (secure)
nga.mil mail is handled by 5 mailarn.nga.mil. (secure)

Updated:

In addition to the "trend" I mentioned they might be doing maintenance. The dnssec records for nsa.gov are borked at the moment:

http://dnssec-debugger.verisignlabs.com/nsa.gov

dnsviz at sandia is super slow lately, which sucks. But you can compare verisign's answer to sandia's if you want:

http://dnsviz.net/d/nsa.gov/dnssec/

http://dnsviz.net/d/www.nsa.gov/dnssec/
Perhaps he's using HTTPS Everywhere.
The Very Best Love Advice on Yahoo Answers
I haven't seen his work, but I suppose we should clarify the distinction between infographic and data visualization.
The 5-paragraph essay gets a lot of hate, much of it deserved as it gets overused, but I've found it a very helpful tool to get students to organize their thoughts. I used to help tutor East Asian ESL students and getting them to understand how to make an argument and then support it with evidence was difficult, but once they grokked how it worked, vastly improved their communications.

Were I a regular English teacher, I don't think I'd let a student coast in 5-paragraph beyond a semester.

> The issue is that "English" is a non-subject. In early education, it's about literacy: being able to read and write at all. As you advance, it becomes about logic: being able to coherently express your substantiated view. And then, at the end, it becomes about literature: using deeper historical contexts to analyze a work deeply and interestingly.

A very good point. We used to call "English" education by the subject you were learning "reading" "writing" "grammar" "spelling" "punctuation" "letters", "creative writing", "technical writing", "literary analysis" etc. But in some grand scheme to simplify things I guess we just use "English" now, which is frankly lame.
So I take it you support American cyber aggression?

Locate and disrupt state-sponsored hacking with more state-sponsored hacking?

If you're okay with your government hacking other sovereign nations, that may explain why you have a strange line in the sand that whistleblowing is only for domestic purposes. Others may not be so charitable.
I would say centralised is easier but usually worse instead of better. Most people use some centralised middleman out of convenience. Decentralisation is universally better IMO because there is no single point of failure and no choke point to nickel-and-dime users to death.

> some teams can't continue to work even though git is decentralized.

I think you mean some teams won't continue to work because they don't know how to use git. If the de facto center goes down, a team is still able to use git to share changes with each other.

And IPv4/6 is decentralised, DNS makes it convenient for regular people to use. I would say DNS is decentralised as well, just the allocation of domain names comes from a few sources.
Director of Engineering (eCommerce) - Join us now
We're LE TOTE (letote.com), an eCommerce platform disrupting the market through our model. We have a passion for fashion, and want to change the way women think about their closets.

We're looking to bring on a Director-level person for full stack engineering. We work mostly with PHP, Javascript, CSS and HTML.

Why you should seriously consider LE TOTE:

- We're early in defining our technology stack, so you will have a chance to define what we use

- You will play a critical role in determining the company's success
- This position reports to the CEO & President
- An opportunity to really create a big impact on our future.

You should be able write simple, elegant code. We have back-end data needs, front end products to build, and potentially mobile app in 6-9 months. There's lots to do and now we have some capital!

What we're offering:
- Competitive salary + significant equity
- Flexible schedule: Work out of our SF office and have the ability to work from home 1-2 days a week

We are based in San Francisco. You don't have to be, but it's much better if you are in the bay area. Should be able to start soon!

Email: rakesh@letote.com
Systems vs. stories
I didn't post it, but I assume s/he was cutting and pasting from their URL bar, and they use HTTPS Everywhere or similar to encourage their browser to always prefer HTTPS connections (which xkcd provides, but to my ongoing annoyance, Amazon does not).

https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

One could argue this should be a built-in option these days....
The idea that people were more culturally aware, more intellectual, or less materialistic at any time in our past compared to now is naive. If you don't think there were economic or social/political ambitions in the hearts of the young, wealthy men reciting Homer at Oxford a few hundred years ago, or even in those of young, wealthy Athenian boys lucky enough to attend secondary school, then I think you've succumbed to the Golden Age Fallacy (not to imply any sort of deductive or formal fallacy).

Furthermore, the idea that an engineering major is in any way less intellectual than an English major is ridiculous. And if that's not what you meant by the term "Philistine", then I suggest you pay more attention to the spirit of its definition less to the letter. A Philistine was once upon a time a person who had never studied philosophy, but this as only the case because every student once studied philosophy.
I have the impression that the possibility to track bitcoins history make it less anonymous than real money. There is a thin invisible string linking all bitcoin holders together and that can be followed. With honeypots, and help of NSA like methods it is possible to identify the people involved.
As soon as bitcoins are used to buy goods to be delivered.
Don't want to face "mafia" tactics? Don't pirate software.

I admit I've used a few cracked programs for fun and personal use in the past.... but ANYTHING for business/profit use, I buy proper licenses.
My app failed and makes no money
Cling, from CERN, provides a REPL: http://root.cern.ch/drupal/content/cling

There are also clang-based auto-complete and syntax-checking plugins for sublime, emacs, and presumably others.

Another emacs package I've been meaning to try is "disaster", which shows you the assembly that the code under your cursor compiles to: https://github.com/jart/disaster

What c++ is sorely lacking, in my opinion, is a (library) package management system.
Yeah, I just Inspect Element and look for the real <img> tag.
Deep down, I just knew I'd be blown away by both the thoughtfulness and prose in this thread. I was right. Thank you fellow HN'ers!
The daily smart pill that can remember all your passwords
Video Messaging Is Now A Full-Fledged Feature Of Skype
Judicial review is not an enumerated power, but "created out of whole cloth" is misleading. It had precedent in Common Law, and purportedly it was discussed as a possibility before actually being used in Marbury (at which point the country had only been around ~12 years).
>This is just a coincidence

It's not really a coincidence that political influence in the security department at FaceBook is going to be seen as an asset by an organization interested in gaining access to FaceBook's data.
He or she wrote a sincere and earnest comment. Please show yourself out.
I think there is a deep truth here.

Most artists are acute observers of the human condition. They distill the products of such observation into artistic truths and evolve forms to freshly present their insights.

The problem is that there is only so much an acute observer can learn about the human condition and share with us. Have we really experienced many people who have pushed the limits of such acuity materially further than did Shakespeare? I think not. It takes tools to advance beyond casual empiricism. And this is why science has indeed outstripped art as a lens with which to wonder at the world.

For a person who has recognized that his/her time is finite and who wishes to drain as much understanding of the wonder of the world as possible in this short allotment the density of insights to be gained from reading scientific journals is many times greater than that to be had by reading even the most brilliant of novelists. Once you've read Shakespeare, Tolstoy and some more of a greats (a worthy business to be sure) diminishing returns soon sets in. Look to science for brighter lights.
This whole NSA thing should be enough to push things like named data networking/content centric networking, WebRTC and meshnets (http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan) into the mainstream.

I've tried multiple times to engage on this topic. From my experience, the people set of people who are interested in these topics for "freedom" reasons and the set of people who are technically informed enough to contribute even minimally to technical discussions are non-overlapping.
Oh no, not the NSA site! I rely it so much! See, this is why I run my own surveillance.

Really, I'd ask so what? How probable is it that they're just doing regular maintenance at 1am (EDT)? I think likely. But lets pollute what used to be a pretty great front page with baseless speculation over nothing. Even if it was an attack, how utterly meaningless. NSA website does not equal NSA internal network.
In what way is imgur not a gift "to" reddit? It might not have been "exclusively for reddit", but I'm willing to be a huge sum of money that most top subreddits, including the first 4 pages of the frontpage are dominated by imgur links.

imgur was the first image host (before minus) that didn't suck, wasn't anti-user, freely allowed hotlinking and had a minimal page when they didn't hotlink.

It's almost never down and the links don't magically fail or expire after they get lots of traffic like many other hosts.
Money is being exchanged for service whether its bundled into the price charged for food and drink, tacked on as an explicit service fee, or paid separately as a tip.

If paying for service feels equivalent to prostitution to you, well, if you want to avoid "prostitution", you're going to need to forgo a lot of common economic activity.
N.S.A. Leak Puts Focus on System Administrators
What surprised me the most is that URL components can contain encoded slashes (%2f). I tried replacing some of the slashes in my open tabs with %2fs. Some sites treat them as path separators, some don't and some treat them differently depending on which components they appear between.
if you use a computer (phone) MADE IN CHINA, you can't expect any privacy
I have one: press shift and alt while changing volume or brightness and you can change it in fine-grained steps. Not super useful, but kind of neat.
That's what I use now. But it's not automatic and is designed for use between two end points. I want it to be automatic across N end points. (And I intend to use a bittorrent-like protocol to achieve that, rather than an rsync-like protocol that unison uses.)

[EDIT] I forgot one of my most frustrating nits with unison: you need to have the same version on both ends. It's solvable by building the right version yourself, but it's damn annoying.
That is not even close to a solution. Then problem of establishing a connection (sharing connection info with both parties) remains in its entirety. The user still has to manually give the other user signaling information. The suggestion given is instant messaging chat (which requires a server).

Not to mention that a STUN server is still needed for NAT traversal, as the author acknowledges.
Me too, my Bold was so much better. I miss that week of battery life, I'm forever charging this thing. Admittedly the iPhone does more, my bb browser sucked, but the camera was great, the damn thing could get run over by one of those stupid big pick up trucks and still work and the keyboard was a million times better than touch on the iPhone. I switched because I got sick of waiting for bb to bring out something new. Finally they have so maybe it's time.

I think glass seemed cooler so they went with it, maybe the front needs it for their current tech in screens, but making the back on the 4 out of glass was just bad design.
The + as a space in a URL often originates from form data submitted via GET (the wisdom of which is a separate topic for discussion). At least we've gotten to the point now where we've pretty much dispensed with nested hierarchies of framesets, in which the "percent" encoding needed to be done multiple times to different parts of the URL so each target could decode its source and dispatch an appropriately-encoded source to its descendants, yielding %25252520 and other similar monstrosities.
The right time to use the builder pattern in Java
Unfortunately, xkcd (along with NYTimes and probably others) link to CSS/JS resources at http:// URLs, which defeats the security of HTTPS. The next version of Firefox will block mixed content in these cases, and being on the alpha channel, I've had to disable HTTPS Everywhere for these sites.
The "it" in the passage you quote is not an English degree, but the skill to write well: "the ability to distribute [your] thinking in the kinds of sentences that have a merit, even a literary merit, of their own."

The author is not saying everyone should major in English; she is saying that the skills of rhetoric--careful reading, clear writing, tight argumentation--are powerful and shouldn't be lost in the rush to "marketable" majors.