skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: PRISM-free laptops?
I'm in the market for a high-end laptop running Linux, but after several days of searching, I haven't found anything that fits my criteria.

The ideal laptop will have:

- No PRISM affiliation (No Windows or Mac pre-installed)
- Strong basics (great keyboard, touchpad, 6+ hours of battery life,
HD+ resolution)
- Good support for Arch Linux or Debian out of the box
or with easy setup
- Nvidia GPU
- Haswell i5 or i7
- 256GB SSD or SSD+HD combo
- 8GB+ RAM
- 13-15" screen, lightweight
- Great customer service
- No optical drive

Edit: Preferably with a removable battery and without a built-in webcam/microphone.
Also, a frog is smart enough to jump out of the water irl.
The article reads as if it was something from The Onion. It's funny, then you realize it's real, and it become scary.

I got a very similar vibe from "Journey Beyond Tomorrow" by Robert Sheckley. It's half SF, half satire, and very witty. The book chilled me a few times because I realized things he makes fun are happening around the world, just on a smaller scale (for example, people committing crimes in order to be sent to jail. Free food and shelter). When reading the book, I had to make breaks not because I was tired, but because it was like overdosing laughing gas.
BigPixel - pixel art for games
The Good American syndrome.
Well, to be fair, if you say, he's flying from X to Y, depending on the conditions there's only one (or a couple of) possible answer
How is customer acceptance going? Me, I'd love such a thing, but ... well, you may be ahead of your time, but I suppose at least one of your unique selling propositions is that you aren't like the other "cloud" vendors, and the more the others screw over their customers like in this example the stronger that proposition will be.

A friend of mine who has a fist full of patents on basic hard drive technology, including several in every hard drive you own, has a maxim that goes something like this: "When you buy a hard drive you should start planning for its death and the loss of all your data on it." The popularity of various backup services, especially in the face of strict data cap regimes outside of Verizon, suggests that plenty have learned this lesson, which I would assume also helps your case.

Anyway, it sounds like you're doing a very good thing, I wish you the best of luck!
That seems a little unfair. Presumably somebody on the IE team recognised the potential improvement here and wrote code to implement it. Isn’t that sort of attention to detail worthy of praise?

This demo is symptomatic of a general and irritating trend with modern Chrome and Firefox: the development teams seem to be very interested in doing enough to tick a box claiming they support a certain feature, but the quality of implementation can still be poor, sometimes to the point of being unusable as in this case. SVG is a common culprit, but for example typography in Chrome is another repeat offender.

It seems absurd that on a fairly high-spec PC I’m using to write this, Firefox running this simple SVG demo consumes more system resources than Maya doing production-quality 3D rendering. But something seems to have gone wrong with Firefox specifically a few months ago, because simply scrolling up and down a page now seems to be enough to ramp a workstation GPU up to full speed, and consequently just browsing a few pages using Firefox for half an hour can have the GPU fans running fast enough to be loud and the UPS showing a noticeably increase in power consumption for the workstation. Unfortunately, I’m not sure what could possibly explain this or exactly when it started happening, so it’s difficult to file any sort of useful bug report. :-(
>To me, that some capability could be used that way is insufficient reason to restrict the state from the capability.

Forgive me for thinking that sounds a little naive. That argument could be used to support the repeal of the entire bill of rights and the separation of powers.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. The whole idea of a constitution is to place restrictions on government power in order to limit as much as possible the amount of damage that can occur when the government is corrupt or incompetent. There are comparatively huge advantages to a government run by a competent Benevolent Dictator. The problem is that in practice dictators tend to be not so benevolent.
Build A Projection Microscope with a Syringe, Laser Pointer & Drop of Water
Weave - Web-based Analysis and Visualization Environment
>"It was dusk, the headlights were on, and I was going down a long hill to the bridges. I had a view of miles of highway behind me. In the other lane I could see maybe five of the traffic stop-waves. But in the lane behind me, for miles, TOTALLY UNIFORM DISTRIBUTION. I hadn't realized it, but by driving at the average speed, my car had been "eating" traffic waves. Everyone ahead of me was caught in the stop/go cycle, while everyone behind me was forced to go at a nice smooth 35MPH or so. My single tiny car had erased miles and miles of stop-and-go traffic. Just one single "lubricant atom" had a profound effect on the turbulent particle flow within the "tube.""

When I try this, most other people have no idea what I'm doing and/or are stupidly greedy and go "OMG A GAP" and rush into it. I'll also typically have people behind me honking / flashing their headlights at me, as they're equally clueless. I've had one dude and his wife, in a Harley Davidson edition F150 actually roll down their window and scream at me for "not knowing how to drive".

I drive a 6spd stick too, so the stop/go is even more painful. I try to be that "lubricating atom" both for my sanity and to ease the jam, but the collective inability of other drivers to think beyond "OMG MAKE AS MUCH PROGRESS AS SOON AS I CAN" greatly inhibits my efforts.

TL;DR traffic jams are caused because people are greedy and short-sighted in their greed. It's not really different from all of the other big problems with humanity.
Why should it be the author's duty to guess at what level of "verification" is enough to satisfy you?
If you're worried about this then I wouldn't trust any "pre-installed" OS on these machines, whether it's Linux or not. Get a machine and install Linux on your own, and it's probably best to use open source drivers for it.
U.S. Seemingly Unaware of Irony in Accusing Snowden of Spying
"I wonder about the future where the main OS of a notebook/PC is a VM OS (something like Xen), where we could choose to boot up multiple OSes and communication/sharing between these OS are still possible, and the VM OS doesn't consume too much memory and CPU."

Windows 8 ships with the Hyper-V hypervisor, and provided one's computer has a recent CPU, begins to fulfill the author's vision.
> If you are so damn well intellectual, you should be out there working with professors on research projects and whatever to show that you are cut out for graduate school.

Out where? Do you mean in between your class load? (I'm not too familiar with US graduate schools)... I thought your GPA was exactly what they looked for?
I was stationed at Pearl Harbor fairly far back in the previous century. There was a group of protesters just outside one of the gates, doing nothing but handing out copies of the Constitution to people leaving the base.

They were arrested for trespassing, as they were standing on usgov property. But they were really arrested because they were making trouble.

No, I don't remember their affiliation or what they were trying to accomplish. Maybe they actually were just troublemakers, which has never been against the law but which will always attract a smackdown.
The problem with driverless cars is that not everyone will switch to driverless cars overnight, so the driverless cars will have to deal with drivers. Ever had your GPS tell you to get in the wrong lane? I'd love to see how well a Google self-driving car gets on trying to get over 4 lanes in a mile in gridlock traffic. I live in the bay area, and you only ever see the self-driving cars out when traffic is very light. It'll probably be a "better cruise control" long before we have cars that we can get into, program a destination, and sit back while the car takes us there. It's a nice dream, but it seems 10+ years from being viable.
If they're supporting him, escorting him, and providing legal help, I'd say they're probably entitled to.
How I got 1Tb of free space on copy.com -- unsecure referral system
These requirements for pairing and that everyone working in sensitive intelligence work will now have to spy and tattle on their fellow workers is interesting in that it includes the Peace Corps in the directive. Peace Corps being added to the list of organizations that have to spy on each other for disclosure of classified information is interesting since in 1996 the white house announced that the CIA had not been using the Peace Corp for spying for over 20 years. Currently the Peace Corps requires applicants to promise they have never worked for the CIA. Not the NSA though, other intelligence agencies, or subcontractors of the CIA. Just directly for the CIA.

http://www.peacecorps.gov/jobs/workingpc/eligibility/

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Peace_Corps

http://clinton6.nara.gov/1996/07/1996-07-17-press-briefing-b...

Peace Corps being a front for US military and intelligence operations has been called a myth, but including them in this directive about classified information is going to smash the claim this is really a myth.
Given that he's been so incredibly honest and open so far, I doubt it's misinformation or misdirection. If he did try to mislead regarding his travel plans, no matter the reason or strategy, it could undermine his credibility in terms of other things he says. He seems intentionally very candid.

We'll see though.
What kind of API do you see as valuable for something like that, disconnecting the ownership and control of data from stewardship? Can you see a design for something that would applicable to other products, whether it was built on S3 or a new shared data source, distributed solution, opaque data protection, etc. Would Firebase supporting API keys that can be delegated by the data owner, rather than the application provider, be a solution on the transactional/database side?

I started thinking more about this following Fred Wilson's post on how this is happening in the investment community, as well as his vision for the future of VC (as I understand it).

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/06/decoupling-advisory-from-cus...

As I mentioned on comments there, I'm working on a concept in a different area but with the same fundamental pattern, which I see emerging as we desire more ownership and control of our assets, and permanency of data and other resources. I'm also working on a blog post about this.
This is going to be a movie someday, just hope it doesn't end with tragedy.
This is a very chilling article. One element of the fallout of Snowden's escapade will be that private industry will be required to participate in and be a part of the same security policies; and this will be true of companies of all sizes and in all industries.

Right now you think of responsible positions dealing directly with mission critical information as being those where a security clearance is required. But if this trend continues it will soon be hard to find ANY job that pays reasonable wages and does not require a security clearance. Hotel maids, busboys, janitors on up the scale.

And let's be clear; this would be welcomed by many employers because it provides legitimacy to a whole panoply of abusive practices.

It will also have other subtle chilling effects on our ability to innovate as a country. Does your startup make technology with security implications or applications? Are you going to turn down a meeting from In-Q-Tel? If you take a contract to supply data management tools to the DOE, and one of the conditions is that people on the project must have some specific level of background check? You can pass a background check now; but what if they interview someone who hates you? Or worse, if the person who is conducting and grading the background check wants to fail you; with career ending consequences if they succeed...

This is a very ugly thing that is loose and growing now; it will touch each and every one of us who is actively involved in the economic life of America.
Would it be illegal to house Snowden for, let's say 24 hours, if you don't live in the US?
You also get many US drivers who refuse to let anyone in and just tailgate the car in front of them, so they can be "first" (in their minds).
Assata Shakur? The terrorist? Of course she did not "find a safe haven here in the U.S." while she and her Black Liberation Army were shooting people and blowing up buildings. The police were trying to put her in jail.
Senate Staffers Told To Pretend Top Secret Documents Are Not Widely Available On Web

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/06/14/senate-st...
After watching the time elapse video it is only turning when the museum is open and people are moving about. At night it doesn't move at all. So most likely it is some form of vibration.

The reasoning that "it has been there for decades and hasn't turned before" doesn't really hold water for me. Anyone who has owned a home know buildings shift and settle all the time as well as mounts, shelves, and everything else losing a bit of structural integrity over time. It only takes a screw or two to get a wee bit loose. At least that is my simpleton view of it.
It's just a smart advertising.
Uh, someone should learn the difference between "clandestine" and "covert".

The USA is most definitely capable of undertaking operations in "denied areas."

edit: typo.
No browser maker does anything to optimize SVG because few use it.

You said something like that multiple times in your post, but IE seems to handle a lot of SVG work much better than Firefox or Chrome, and has done since at least version 9.
Entrance exam is a big thing in China, it will determine one's future, and we all take it quite seriously. Cheating is reported every year, but not in large cities, and this is the first time that someone will 'fight' as their children will not being able to cheat. Comparing to the total number of students who take the exam, 9,120,000 this year, cheating is really really quite small, from my experience, I never heard of cheating around me for entrance exam; and we also feel very ridiculous for such thing could happen here in China.
I am in similar situation, but I have less powerful computer. So I made minimal debian setup in virtualbox, mounted my work folders as shared. When I need it I start the machine in headless mode. After few seconds I got ssh access.

EDIT: I just realized that I was doing the same thing as vagrant is doing, without actually knowing about it beforehand.
He sold me on Hong Kong and now he's leaving. This doesn't look good for our protagonist!
Plus why didn't they charter a plane? I'm sure Russia has quite a few rusty Tupolevs standing around and pilots that can probably even fly blindfolded the route to Havana.

But maybe the idea is some form of human-shield and protection against unhappy "accidents" by relying on regular passenger flights.
Item one is baffling. You use the Internet - whatever you do is cached by numerous parties, and the NSA will be one of those parties, no matter what the OS is. It sucks that machines come with an OS pre-installed, that you have to pay for that OS, and that the OS often has really lousy additions to it. Buying a clean copy of the OS is often more expensive. But, whatever machine you buy, it's normally possible to get a different OS on their. Be careful about some of the more obscure tablets and mini pcs which might have an odd ARM processor with minimal support.

I'd be interested to see what people recommend though. It sounds like a nice machine.

There's probably a market for a good developer / professional machine. Chromebook Pixel is lovely, but only has 4 GB RAM. People say that Lenovo Thinkpad T Series lost touch with the market. MacBook Pro has a lot of respect, but they have some weirdnesses too.
Think about it. The reason the UK government made a show of preemptively denying Snowden entry to the UK is to avoid the insane dilemma it would have caused them. The US would have exerted pressure to extradite, and the hugely-skewed-in-US-favour US-UK extradition treaty would have made it almost certain an extradition attempt would have succeeded. On the other hand, the electorate would have been up in arms over it, and it would have been a huge political issue that the opposition would have seized upon; not exactly something a coalition government needs.
>"but there's no way to get rid of them unless all the cars on the highway are autonomous and self correcting."
Sure there is; teach everyone how to do race starts. I always get on it pretty hard coming away from a jam and hope that the person behind me does the same. It rarely ever happens, but I've had some people follow my lead. If people accelerated faster off the front, it'd move the wave back faster. How this might collide with a second wave is not something I've really considered.
That explains why we care about the person, but why do we need to know on what continent he is? I don't see the value.
Nice to see a fellow Malaysian on the front page of HN ;)

Gotta give a huge recommendation for Vagrant. Spinning up a VM is dead simple, and synchronisation between VMs is more or less automatic. Not sure how well it fares in Windows though.
You can now rent Photoshop
Wallstreet is calling, it's for you.
I'm not opposed to this, but buying a machine with Windows pre-installed means that Microsoft gets paid. I want to avoid that.
The Changing Face of Web Development
A few reports have been speculating that his next destination will be Cuba, for obvious reasons.

edit: Per reports, Cuba will be a layover before Venezuela, his final destination.
Sexy, Slim Wingpanel
I think even Apache PDFBox is a brilliant library if you do a lot of pdf document manipulation.
It could be misdirection: Buy a ticket to Venezuela on Aeroflot expecting it to leak and quietly buy a Moscow-somewhere ticket on a different airline.
Birgitta Jonsdottir on why Iceland is not a good destination for Snowden
Remember that having a global humanitarian organisation that is seen to be an arm of the US government or military can make the organisation useless. People in far off countries which are/can be targets of US military attacks are highly unlikely to cooperate with an organisation that they think is going to spy on them and report back.
Hierarchival Temporal Memory - Cortical Learning Algorithms
Regarding web apps and their keyboard shortcuts(2011)
I am interested in other peoples ideas regarding the role of keyboard short cuts in web apps and in-general peoples work on making web apps feel as natural as 'native' apps.
That sample set would still be statistically insignificant.
It's about boycotting companies that are eagerly cooperating with the government to spy on hundreds of millions of innocent Americans.

Chromebook Pixel is made by Google—again, PRISM.
> Campbell Price, a curator at the museum on Oxford Road, said he believes there may be a spiritual explanation to the spinning statue.

> “In Ancient Egypt they believed that if the mummy is destroyed then the statuette can act as an alternative vessel for the spirit. Maybe that is what is causing the movement.”

FFS.

> “But it has been on those surfaces since we have had it and it has never moved before. And why would it go around in a perfect circle?”

Off the top of my head: floor joists have moved causing more vibration now than in the past.

About it moving in a circle: that's what physics does. It's lovely. Here's a diagram of a ruler placed on the fingers of two hands, where you move the hands together. The ruler slides, and the hands meet in the middle. (Good Grief I need to learn how to express a simple idea.)

(http://imgur.com/ZQ6RQkj)
You could try to find one used. Microsoft still gets paid but at least not by you. Also no customer service I guess...

Also it occurs to me that you could possibly buy a laptop without a hard drive, then a blank hard drive, boot linux from a thumb drive and install that way. You would still have to luck out on matching the hardware specs and everything though.

Also also it occurs to me that that might be a viable service right now, for someone who has money to burn.
They put up dynamic (digital) speed limit signs in Seattle (where this article is based) in the last year or do, and I've been wondering how effective they are. After reading this article I feel like this is the reason.

There is one speed limit over each lane when it's slower than the regular posted limit, which to me seems like if you see your lane slower than the one over from it, you'll merge, causing next lane to go slower.

Reading the article, and the comment above,I can now see the purpose of the dynamic signs. But unless drivers adapt a mentality that's best for the traffic and not themselves, this doesn't seem like it would work.
may be permanent: https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/issues/8199#issuecommen...
I think you missed the more glaring extensive path over the UK.
U.S. to Pursue Snowden After He Departs Hong Kong
It is immensely depressing that a museum (a place of learning and wonder) is using such tactics (appealing to the worst kind of ignorance) to drum up trade.
The entire Snowden hoax is a media event, a PR campaign to cover up the fact that he spied on the US for foreign powers. It's the most effective case of spin and damage control that I've ever seen.
"What is being done to Mr Snowden and to Mr Julian Assange - for making or facilitating disclosures in the public interest - is an assault against the people."

What exactly is being "done" to Julian Assange? The only reason he's stuck in the embassy is because of rape accusations.
One awesome benefit of VMs are snapshots. Experiment as much as you like, then revert to an earlier state and start anew.
uhm... like, because we want to see him go to a country where he will be safe, for example?
Do we really have to prepare for the Fourth Box? [2011]
Playing devil's advocate here, and watched a bunch of spy movies...

What if Snowden is still a CIA agent (he was a CIA agent for years before NSA) and this is actually a snowjob/whitewash by the government to deflect attention or essentially control the message about news they knew would be released (diffusing that/controlling that message) and black-ops about China, Russia, Cuba + Venezuela how they treat/process possible 'traitors' or spies?

I hope that is not the case and he is sincere, it would be great if the US could just pardon him and address our Constitutional issues. But if they pardon him doesn't the above seem like an outside possibility?

Or am I reading too much Tom Clancy and watching too many spy movies?

It does seem most whistleblowers are swept under the rug but here you have one that is garnering lots of news and attracting lots of attention across multiple weeks/weekends to things that were previously labeled 'conspiracy' or only seen in movies (yet have been in the news quietly before, since 9/11). Now it is international news everywhere. He is almost the perfect leaker, making more waves than all combined.
The Pacific can be pretty stormy and also lonely this time of year.

Plus, a plane with Snowden and a few "incidentals" is a easier to justify politically than Snowden and a hundred civilians from various countries. I mean, wouldn't that be what terrorists do?
No way to know this today, right?
Any pointers to cladestine operations in russia since 1990 available? Those could help to debunk the claims that certain kind of those "cladestine every think is possible" ops are just marketing.
>nginx/1.1.19

meh, even the al-qaeda website runs a more up-to-date web server...
Plants do math