skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It really isn't that hard to test. Any of a million packet sniffing or network monitoring tools could be used to trivially settle this.

I cannot understand why none of the alarmist articles about Skype (some even by so-called "cypherpunks") has ever even bothered to run such a simple check.

FWIW, I ran my own simple test using netstat when Skype first centralized the supernodes. I walked away satisfied when I still saw primarily P2P activity during voice/video calls to an IP that belonged to the remote party. (It used UPnP port forwarding to traverse the NAT/firewall, if anybody is curious.) But then, I'm the trusting kind and dug no further. And it's been a couple years since. If there truly are "hackers" on here, I encourage them to try their own experiments and share them.
Great story. However, this clearly was not a sacrifice.

It would be a sacrifice if he had made himself miserable for the sake of the dog.

We have a culture that glorifies sacrifice, and we need to stop doing that. Sacrifice is a barbaric, religious notion. Nobody truly gains by others' sacrifices.
make a tag, push the tag, at least.. at the very least :P
Minimal impact on privacy? I wouldn't say NSA having access to all Skype calls a "minimal impact on privacy".
"The statute...require[s] the government to prove that the defendant...communicated or made unavailable to an unauthorized person...in any manner prejudicial to the United States or for the benefit of any foreign government to the detriment of the United States...classified information..."

The middle part (labeled (3) by Popehat), as the blog correctly points out, is the reason this is a big controversy and not a straightforward spy case -- it's not at all clear that his disclosures were meant to benefit foreign powers, or that he was attempting to harm the United States.
Remember kids, if you work hard, sacrifice, and have parents with a spare house in Tahoe they can lend you rent-free indefinitely, you too can make it as a programmer.
Installing json gem for Rails on Windows
This argument side-steps the case at hand (which isn't a nascent civil right). The state has a higher obligation than to simply obey the law -- to promote the well-being of its citizens. And furthermore, it has only the powers enumerated to it by its constitution.
Masonry or stone construction is incompatible with earthquakes

There's more to quality construction than building out of brick (although I think brick houses will ride out an earthquake a lot better than you imagine, as some of the oldest houses around the Bay Area are made out of brick). It's other things like the fact that you build houses with Tyvek instead of insulating them properly, crappy aliminum windows, and so on. People here tend to tear their houses down and start over because a lot of houses are so poorly built that they're not worth repairing, rather than out of any aesthetic impulse.
Your synchronisation project sounds intersting, do you have source code online yet?
Theres many package management systems which sucks at this.

I suppose then that you mean "rpm" or "debs" or the like. Not the "language package management system" as the previous poster mentioned. Because I've yet to see one that truly support more than tar xzf <list of deps>.
Even when they have signing support none of the packages are signed, anyways.
I really wish this trend of pressing left and right arrow keys to change articles/blog-posts would hurry up and die. Maybe I'm just stupidly clumsy, but so many times I'll try and scroll down on one of these pages and get thrown to some random story that doesn't interest me because I hit the wrong arrow key.
That's an option. But it would probably set the world back a decade, maybe two, compared to freeing Mathematica. Even if your Mathematica replacement were ready today, it would take years and years and years to gain enough mindshare to begin overtaking Mathematica. The benefit of freeing Mathematica, then, is that it's already dominant. No need to wait out the ever-so-slow shifting of mindshare.
Of that only 500k are going to private contractors. The majority of them are for military and government employees. Most of those military ones will separate and lose their clearances after 5 years, unless they get another job that renews it.
Typography is now beautiful and something to show off. There is no need for glossy UI elements or textures to hide it. If you look at iOS and early Android, everything they did was to hide the ugliness resulting from low-res screen.

Today, the content itself is beautiful.
Are you skyping people down the hall instead of walking to visit them?

I can see a feasible argument for this when you're talking about routing it through your WAN, but if you're that concerned about internal security then you should roll your own voicechat solution that you can keep on your own self-hosted (non-cloud) internal servers.
Gunn, thanks for the refactoring.
A List of Useful Backend Architectures
only rails and django :D
Linkbait for an Interview.
Non-mobile page: http://phys.org/news/2013-06-sums-night.html
I do like old words, especially when they fit a particular concept in just the right way.

But wow, your comments are really insinuating. "There's just something telling". "People who purposefully". "The lack of nuance in your understanding". I was interested in your point of view, but I'm finding this unpleasant and am going to stop now.
It certainly was the shizzle until AngularJS came out.

Now, these constant HN front pages for every RC that comes out every other week certainly look a lot more like astroturfing than genuine evidence of popularity.
shrugs Everyone has advantages. You being born in the U.S. or having the ability to work in the U.S. is an advantage. Hell, whatever shit that happened to you in your life that made you who you are today, that makes you wake up everyday and decide to work (whilst your fellow man sits drinking a beer and bemoans the lazy Mexican stealing his job) is an advantage.

(Although, I would fucking love a family with a spare house in Tahoe. )
Ozzie here. It's not just being a stranger in a strange land, your country has some dangerous edges. My experience in California:

* The police are like military. I saw a couple of incidents, and concluded that if the police pull you up, it's best to drop to the ground and obey. Pretty scary.

* I didn't realise that nobody walks when I first arrived. It's pretty easy to end up in the wrong neighbourhood if you go for a long walk. Ie, packs of young rugged looking dudes eyeing you off.

* Bums in San Fran. I've never seen first world poverty like that. Very confronting.

* The missus visited LA, turned off one exit too early and ended up in Inglewood. Her descriptions of the neighbourhood were... colourful.

On the plus side, the nightlife was really safe. In Australia I'm used to constant fistfights and violence around clubs/pubs. On the flipside, I got the feeling that everyone was being so polite and respectful because ya never know who's got a gun. That's not really a relaxing feeling.
I've never heard of a 100 microbit specification. I'm not even sure we can work with fractional bits. So how could I be referencing something that nobody talks about and conceptually can't exist?
> If you’ve ever owned a dog, you know just how intelligent they actually are (especially larger breeds)

yes, some larger breeds rate higher on obedience scale, and we, humans, equate that to the intelligence in animals. There is another bias also is that large breeds are more frequently working breeds, thus a lot of specialized effort is invested into training them, and thus more of the obedience results achieved.
I have a friend who is really into WebRTC, and help him with debugging sometimes. Honestly, I've never found a network I use often that it works on. Doesn't work on my AT&T LTE except for presence. Doesn't work at all on my work internet. Video doesn't work on my work guest internet outside our firewall. Doesn't work from my hotel internet. I haven't tried at home, but I'm only home a couple weekends a month, so that's useless anyway.

WebRTC depends on things non-home internet filters out or prevents, so it is useless. The way to get around that? Use central servers and make your traffic look like HTTP. Heck, even STUN protocols admit there are cases where it won't work, but WebRTC fans seem to think they'll always be able to get a P2P connection. The technology is just naive as far as I'm concerned. Something that only works on home internet and a few open networks is worthless.
You are lucky the west is a guilt based culture; this glorification of sacrifice goes even further in shame based cultures.
142 days uptime is pretty cool!
Looking at the page, it looks to me like most of the innovation in the Recast library (at least, the stuff they're proud enough to advertise on the front page) is not the algorithm that does pathfinding on the graph.

Rather, it's about automatically constructing a graph suitable for use in a graph pathfinding algorithm like A* from a 3D polygon mesh.

So this library's less about graph pathfinding algorithms (like the article), and more about parsing 3D scenes.

But thanks anyway, it's good to know this exists!
Basic income as an answer to all out automation
What do you think about http://openpeer.org/ as a possible solution to the signaling problem?
Amazing. I wonder though, what happens to the HIV?

What I got from the video is that they modify the virus so it won't cause disease and rather just modifies the host t-cells to recognize cancer. Does the virus remain in the host system? Can it still spread? If it spreads what happens to the newly infected person: cancer proof, nothing or HIV?
Take a moment to reflect on how bad your code once was
This kind of research is nice to see. Too bad your setup needs a less-powerful system (Arduino) and a more powerful system (RRD host) to operate the charging.

What about using the RasPi's GPIO pins instead of the Arduino? And why wouldn't an SD card be able to manage that many writes? What about a ram drive?
Bitmessage is a peer-to-peer messaging system that doesn't require both participants to be online at the same time to exchange messages:

White paper: https://bitmessage.org/bitmessage.pdf [pdf link]
Apple should just fix their phones. Its ridiculous how fast the screen cracks on an iPhone. I have so many friends (me included) who had a cracked iphone 4/4s/5 in the past few years while my brother drops his Galaxy S2 all the time and the screen is totally fine.
And both of them are now merged!

https://github.com/mmozuras/vim-github-comment/pull/1
https://github.com/mmozuras/vim-github-comment/pull/2
Amazingly, spajus already implemented that (and, I, of course, merged it) :)

https://github.com/mmozuras/vim-github-comment/pull/2
Nope - centralised network firewalls never became popular for consumer users. Microsoft started shipping a default-on host firewall in XP SP2, those let the user get prompted on what apps to allow. Lately corporations have been moving to host firewalls too since the "crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside" intranet mindset is increasingly incompatible with the modern world.
yeah thought the same. There are like 3-4 shops that do this in every city. When my girlfriend recently cracked her iPhone 4 screen i just went on ebay to get a new one for EUR 38 (Germany) and repaired it myself. Works totally fine now, i wouldnt do this on a brand new iphone 5 though ;)
"Given that the author said he had spent time in a great number of states"

After reading some of the items I could not help but think that "spent time in a lot of states" was an exaggeration. That being said the problem with making generalizations about the US is one of my favorite things about the US; remarkable diversity of environment/culture/weather/architecture/etc.

> Everybody talks to everybody, people are very friendly to each other...

Dont get me wrong I like NYC but you cant spend much time in Manhattan and continue to hold this belief.

> It is almost always sunny. You don't need any forecast, it will be sunny and between 20-25 degrees Celsius. Every day. Great!

I live in Syracuse, NY, we compete with Seattle for least amount of sunny days in the continental US. The big difference from Seattle is that instead of rain we usually get 100+ inches of snow in winter. I want to move because of the weather in Syracuse.

> Can somebody explain to me why most of the houses are almost glued together so that I can reach my neighbour's wall?

Never visited the suburbs or any city in the midwest.

> Even local side roads look like our highways. All other roads are in great condition. Traffic is fluent, drivers are more respectful and chilled out.

Road condition: Never drove/rode on a highway in Pennsylvania or West Virginia. Traffic: Never drove in Boston or Manhattan or inside the beltway.
XKCD mentioned this a while ago.

[1] http://xkcd.com/938/
You're not the only one having that nit, so I'll do that :)

https://github.com/mmozuras/vim-github-comment/issues/3

I'm using fugitive myself - so I'll definitely consider interplay opportunities with it :)
I think he could have halved the size of his solar kit and still not have had to worry about power interruptions.

http://pi.qcontinuum.com/cgi-bin/rrd/rrdgraph.volts
I guess this means that the rods and cones in our eyes are capable of processing UV light, but our natural lenses filter it out while implants like this don't? Anyone have a deeper explanation?
Go to a restaurant or bar frequently and tip generously. You will be AMAZED at he great service you receive. May not be worth much for a one time drop in, but for somewhere you frequent it is well worth the cost.
Anyone know how to filter a list of files in a Finder window by a string?
You seem to have a thin skin. The only of those phrases which is "insinuating" anything is the first. You've mentioned something about personal insults but have failed to point one out. Unless you're suggesting I shouldn't point out that you don't fully understand the old word you're using?

That's not an insult so shake it off and don't take it as one. You've got the term wrong. I agree that maybe we could have a great conversation about it, if only you'd address it instead of whining about the phrase "lack of nuance in your understanding." It's not exactly Don Rickles material.
Rated at position #34 (after Scratch) is Scala really important?
I did an English minor while doing my undergraduate physics degree. It's a good thing I took the "heavy" course on literary theory last, because it utterly demoralized me. The sheer volume of books in the library devoted to literary criticism is astounding. It outweighs the entire canon of classics by at least two orders of magnitude, and it's almost all self-aggrandizing gibberish. If you could somehow distill all the original and clear ideas in these books down there wouldn't be enough material to fill a pamphlet! Perhaps I was just unlucky in my choice of books and perhaps I had a bad prof, but after that course I couldn't look at someone doing graduate studies in English and not marvel at their tolerance for bullshit.

The most important lesson in writing is that "nobody wants to waste one second more than they have to reading your drivel, so get to the point". I learned this writing physics papers. I had several English profs who probably still haven't learned this lesson.
That's pretty true, a lot of his points are specific to some cities only. The only good point he makes, while not really making it, is that Americans are very religious, anywhere you go, even in the most civilized cities. Which is the thing I understand the less.
Presumably the way they stop it from being a disease is that they disable the virus's ability to reproduce, somehow. Or otherwise impair its function so that it doesn't behave in the way traditional HIV does.

Hypothetically speaking here, if they put enough of the virus in her system it'd be able to act upon enough of her immune system to get those cancer-killing T cells spread around her entire body and kill enough of the cancer to stop it from coming back. At that point, maybe it's okay if all those T cells die off and her body doesn't know how to kill the leukemia anymore, because it's gone?

Cancer and remission are pretty complex, so I don't know. But that seems plausible to me.

I expect that leaving the virus able to actually spread would be harmful, even if it's been altered to target cancer cells. It would probably alter the immune system in other ways and potentially compromise it?

EDIT: According to another source I just looked at, the cancer-fighting T cells actually do replicate. So I'm not at all sure how they mitigate the downsides to that. Maybe this is a case of it being worth the downsides.
Usually people do not block 465 or 587 (if they do, they really really suck, and you need to VPN through that network anyway). For outgoing mail, you just do STARTTLS directly to your own smarthost over those ports.
The idea is not new:

"""Julius Wagner von Jauregg (1857-1940), Austrian psychiatrist and Nobel Prize winner who discovered that advanced cases of syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease (STD), can be cured by deliberately infecting the patient with malaria. Until the development of the antibiotic penicillin in the 1940s made Wagner von Jauregg`s malaria cure obsolete, he achieved remarkable success in curing patients of a dreaded disease that had been thought to be incurable. For his development of the malaria cure for syphilis, Wagner von Jauregg received the 1927 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine."""

http://www.mediahex.com/Wagner_von_Jauregg_Julius
Not yet. I have a piece or two on my github, but otherwise it hasn't been written yet. I'll be sure to post here when I'm done, but I've never had much luck with that in the past.
For those who don't know what Scratch is:
"Scratch is designed especially for ages 8 to 16, but is used by people of all ages. Millions of people are creating Scratch projects in a wide variety of settings, including homes, schools, museums, libraries, and community centers."
"business" people and "consumer" people aren't different
US tech firms and the debate over H1-B Visas
Even Kinder Surprise is banned in the US!
Seems to be what he is suggesting.

So perhaps a small percentage of people (myself included) have increased sensitivity in the S cones to light around 400nm (or shorter) ... but normally, the natural lens would filter that out - mine is now gone.

http://www.komar.org/faq/colorado-cataract-surgery-crystalen...
So, the "court" hears only one argument, never any counter argument. I guess it is no surprise they always vote in favor of the argument presented rather the the argument never presented.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
What do Americans do when they get pulled over? Open the window and hold your hands on the wheel and dashboard?
The police in New Orleans took a shot at tourists because when they pulled over their car, the person next to the driver reached over and grabbed a (silver colered) photocamera... Policeman thought it was a gun and shot. I feel European people need a 'How To Interact with the Police' course. Made us very jumpy whenever there was a policecar around.
The author's opinions on incurring credit card debt strikes me as naive with a hint of survivorship bias.

> As long as you use the money properly, and investing in yourself is the best possible way to use money, credit cards can give you a new life.

If by using the money properly he meant investing in his business, then, what would have happened if his business instead failed (as most do)?

Incurring high-interest debt like that isn't really advisable unless you have a solid plan B to deal with it in case things go awry (which they probably will).
In a previous discussion on HN, a HN user checked and confirmed that MS servers hit both HTTP and HTTPS links. Unfortunately I can't find that comment at the moment, so here's an Ars article that reports the same behavior:

http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/think-your-skype-mes...
Snowden directly answers this -- he claims NSA analysts can get away with it:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-n... and

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-n...

This is getting overlooked, but a 2009 NYT article claimed an NSA analyst looked through Bill Clinton's email out of curiosity (he was caught). I think this is very revealing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/us/17nsa.html?pagewanted=a...
I also think it is a bit unfair to the Czech Republic to be compared to such a large country.

When he talks about the traffic lights being placed across the intersection, he should come visit Denmark; that's how we do it here! And it's not that far from Czech Republic, and we also like good beer (unlike the Americans who just drink flavoured water).
I recommend Anchorhead (1998). Inspired by Lovecraft, very well written. Puzzles are either simple or very logical, the biggest danger is that you miss an item or don't map properly. Atmosphere is at least as good as in Lovecraft books. And it's free.
I would if it was free, which probably isn't too helpful. I probably wouldn't if it cost money, unless it was integrated into something else I was using and was super easy to get going.
His examples are not bogus. These are real restrictions that limit "freedoms". What about the absurd drinking age? I can count tens if not hundreds of laws that show you how "un-free" people are. What's worse is that adults have actually spent time making them "illegal". It's funny, you think your free but you're always free within the limits. In the US, you are always free to choose between X and Y. Never Z!

I don't necessarily agree with you that an American more freedom of speech than say, a British person. But assuming it is, well, US: 1 (freedom of speech), Europe: 10 (for all the other nonsense illegalities in the US).

P.S: It is quite ironic you are saying the US wins big on freedom of speech in a thread on this article. Not saying that a European state wouldn't do the same to a whistleblower (many wouldn't though; especially Scandinavian countries), but even if they would, the governments didn't put themselves in that situation in the first place.
A government will declare whatever it can get away with as legal in order to advance it's agenda (in this case, not getting involved). Remember the Obama administration claims that all the NSA spying is legal anyway. Doesn't mean it is. Doesn't mean there was no legal basis to arrest him.

If Hong Kong even remotely wanted Snowden arrested, he would have been. They wanted nothing to do with the entire matter and so stalled a little bit to let him go.
I reflect every few months, even though the previous code I wrote isn't "bad", I always find things I would of done differently. It's always good to reflect & refactor :).
It's common practice to use a chat system inside a company, and instead of people shouting or constantly walking to their peers everyone write from their pc instead of visit the others (for most of the little requests).
Sadly the NSA programs are strongly anti-business as it is based on 'trust in me'.

American businesses could and should lobby Congress to fight this and to find ways to protect US stored data, I know I wouldn't trust a Chinese cloud company not to snoop or steal business/corporate ideas and trade secrets.

But if there were assurances for US cloud businesses that this doesn't affect their business ideas accidentally or deliberately then we could set a global example on how to run cloud data storage that is safe and business friendly. There is an opportunity here for Google, Amazon, Apple etc for cloud data.

Lots of damage control to be done here for international clients. As an American I would always trust our systems more but international companies may have a very hard time trusting without the US being a shining example of how to correctly protect business data in clouds here, especially encrypted data that is automatically subject to storage/filtering if international.