skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's written as if dubious access to data by US (and other; see ECHELON) security services is a startling new revelation, whereas in fact it has been a known risk for a couple of decades, and certainly a consideration when using hosted services. Here is a European commissioner raising it as a concern with respect to the Data Protection Directive, over a decade ago, for instance: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-01-368_en.pdf
6 things to do right now instead of creating more content
Maybe someone more versed in the state-of-the-art can help me: has the concept of "speciation" ever been applied to genetic algorithms?

In my instance, there are two predominant "types" of cars that are doing approximately equally well--the "rhinoboat" and the "assdragger". But when these two solutions are combined in the crossover, I think they make an offspring that is terrible.

If the algorithm would mate only the rhinoboats with rhinoboats and assdraggers with assdraggers, I'm convinced we'd end up with some superrhinoboats and superassdraggers, but instead I just get an unhappy compromise.

Maybe make "similarity to self" one of the genotype parameters. A high rating here would mean the phenotype would have a bias against being combined with dissimilar creatures. This allows the propensity towards speciation to develop evolutionarily, too.
Less soundproofing.
Viemu for XCode
Backgrid.js: extra maintainer wanted
I'm still investigating/experimenting myself, but if I understand properly what I've read so far, you can change that to:

SSLCipherSuite HIGH+DH:MEDIUM+DH:!ADH:!MD5

to require PFS. I'm not sure how many browsers that'll break (I have doubts about broad coverage for Safari/Opera/IE).
IE 9 was released only 11 days after WebGL was standardized.
All funded startups are startups, but not all startups are funded.

It is possible to create a business with a very ambitious growth trajectory regardless of whether you have taken VC or angel funding or whether you are bootstrapping. It's just a lot easier to do this if you've taken funding.

In the valley, most plausible ambitious growth trajectory businesses are VC-funded of course; this is not necessarily true elsewhere. As someone who has lived in the valley for many years and before starting a startup outside of the valley, it's easy to understand why: not all funding climates are created equal.

The thing is, your comments come off as extremely dismissive: the implication is that anything not-funded is a "small business", which is the equivalent of a pat on the head and "nice lemonade stand, son" (or, Italian restaurant, if you're DHH).

Finally: say a startup has a high growth trajectory and closes a Series A round. Was it a startup before it closed the round? I'd argue the investors thought so...
But those of us trying to organize funds for FLOSS projects serving the public commons have a harder time raising money. That's a big deal. It's not really new info, though perhaps more confirmed - this is what people were telling us before even the Tea Party piece of this broke.
You still don't understand how this works. Apple can't complete the provisinig process alone - the user unlocking the keybag on the device with their password is an essential part of provisioning a device.

When a new device is added to the keybag, the other devices report the change - this isn't controlled by the server and isn't optional. Apple can control the transport infrastructure, but they cannot enrol new devices into the cryptographic session without the user being involved.
Oh wow (from the wikipedia article):

Australia

The Cybercrime Act 2001 No. 161, Items 12 and 28 grant police with a magistrate's order the wide-ranging power to require "a specified person to provide any information or assistance that is reasonable and necessary to allow the officer to" access computer data that is "evidential material"; this is understood to include mandatory decryption. Failing to comply carries a penalty of 6 months imprisonment. Electronic Frontiers Australia calls the provision "alarming" and "contrary to the common law privilege against self-incrimination."

I wonder how that would work if you own the server, but only the individual users held their private keys?
I think your concerns are mitigated by the attack vectors.

If cracking encryption with N bit length keys someday becomes trivial, it doesn't matter what keys we used in the past: You're right. My meager understanding is that we don't expect this to be the case anytime soon, and worries about moore's law or asics for cracking keys can be mitigated by increasing key size until it's infeasible to brute force.

If your main SSL key is compromised/subpoenaed, at least you still have the PFS keys for individual conversations. Those would need to be subpoenaed (or otherwise made not-secret) as well, and so in theory your data is still safe even if they go after john Q terrorist's data.
How would you determine the fitness of a "visualization" programatically?
You can turn off the "Safe Browsing" features in Chromium; your link [2] explicitly says how to do so.
>As a system it's highly optimized to select candidates who'll "go along to get along".

Yeah, but isn't that a big part of what school teaches, though? It's an important skill, too. If you want to get a good grade on that paper, you've gotta read the professor and figure out what they are expecting, and give it to them. That's an important skill.

I mean, what school doesn't teach is that you can also choose who you want to please; different people want different things, so if you want to be one way, well, you just find a boss/partner/whatever that wants you to do the things you want to do. school doesn't cover that.
I wonder if google will use this data (silently) as yet another signal in its search ranking.
I don't know anything about Fab and didn't read the previous article but I think it unlikely that the CEO of a company can write an accurate blog entry titles 'What It's Really Like To Work At X'

To write such an article a lot of research and talking with staff would have to happen and judging by the jokes in his emails and the tone of the article he hasn't done that and probably should sooner rather than later.
Gaurdian News Site returning Yahoo Geocities page - DNS Hack?
Browsing to gaurdian.co.uk or www.gaurdian.co.uk results in a 404 from GeoCities/Yahoo. Strange.

http://twitpic.com/cz6gud

I have the gaurdian.co.ulk ip address as 212.53.71.146
http://twitpic.com/cz6gnf

Browsing directly there returns a 500 Get Method failure.
http://twitpic.com/cz6grg

Anyone have any idea why this is happening? Can anyone verify or reproduce this situation?
Considering they way it went down [1], Microsoft felt (and may still feel) that the web is an enterprise market. In so, that it was selling developer tools to web shops because the code goes through Microsoft servers to Microsoft clients. IE, a vertical integration to simplify HR decisions. [2]

That ideology carries through to the spec—enterprise products often contain janky features that mean little to developers, but the world to the bosses buying them.

Thankfully Android and iOS are a driving force showing that the web is more a consumer broadcast space than one built simply for the spec that best matches someone's tech opinions.

1. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120507/12295718818/

2. Paraphrasing, but I've personally turned down jobs that were in this vein, specifically writing IE HTML in Visual Studio, because if their browser share is 80% IE, they might as well use the IDE from the company that makes the browser.
Developing Strong Product Teams
WebGL was bleeding-edge when IE 9 was released, and there were still very valid concerns about its security for a while after that. Opera implemented it, but disabled it due to these concerns. After their nightmarish history with security, Microsoft are very focused on hardening Windows — so I wouldn't exactly call it regressive to leave WebGL out of IE 10, which was probably feature-frozen in early 2012.
You put it in a faraday cage.

One of these bags is fine. (http://www.elcomltd.com/metsheildingbags.html)
As a boss, there are at least two things you never joke about: employees getting paid and employees getting fired. It's not worth the risk that there will be one person in the office your humor doesn't land with. And it's not worth the risk that you may not make a payroll and have to do some real layoffs all-too-soon thereafter.
Fair enough. Also, FWIW, I'm not one of the people who downvoted your post above. We may not agree, but I generally don't do the "downvote to express disagreement" thing.
record time-on-page maybe?
Doxing and Anti-Doxing – Part I
Taking a Strong Position Against Strong Positions
I think my wine drinking progression went something like Red Blush ($3bottle, or box wine)->White Wine->Merlot->Cabernet->Pinot Noir.

Not sure what I would recommend to new wine drinkers at this point, maybe dry Riesling. Lots of decent slightly sweet wines that are good chilled for the summer ;)
Even given a tool that's easy enough for a newbie to use but has the power of Adobe Premiere Pro or the Avid suite, you still need a lot of non-tool-specific skills. It's not just about the obtuse interface, but also about knowing what to cut together, when, where and why.
For someone who hadn't done web development in ten years and then wanted to get back into it with Rails, this tutorial (for v3.2) was perfect. As others have noted, it demystifies the whole stack, even including tools such as Sublime Text as related plugins. Hartl is a great instructor.
Well, I don't think there was anything special with the Germans in this regard. E.g. if you were somehow able to reproduce the same conditions starting from hundreds of years beforehand, ravenous propaganda the decades leading up to it, start off the genocide in the U.S. at the same timeframe, I'm not sure Americans would have fared any better. We weren't exactly nice to the Native Americans, for example.

But that wasn't really the question either. Of course the people should have known what was going on, especially by 1943. Even the example of "working the Jews to death" is horrific enough, and what did they really think was happening over on the Eastern Front?
I suppose that's true if you consider "public property" to be equivalent to "private property" that just happens to have the government as its owner. But by that logic, governments could have arbitrary control over all public property, meaning they could do things like ban political dissidents from using roads. In reality though, the mini-framework I presented is too simplistic to extend to public property. The key difference is that public property, unlike traditional personal private property, is funded by taxation, which is why we reflexively reject the idea of the government exercising certain control over public property.
More to the point, they were French!
Isn't the point of corks that the wine can slowly oxidize (age) in the bottle? I also prefer screw caps, but I can't see this being better for all wines.
Yes, nutjobs like the EU's executive and legislative bodies, the BBC and the Guardian. Who would ever take them seriously?

Really, ECHELON in particular has been acknowledged to exist by pretty much everybody since 2000 or so.
>Them to be randomly shooting citizens?

they actually doing it already. There are only a couple of minor details for now, like it is off American soil and supposedly only for ones whom government designated as terrorists. Though i don't see how public would seriously object to shooting terrorists on American soil as well, and with government having complete unchecked power over terrorist designation ... Already, people protesting animal farms are terrorists according to the current laws like AETA in MA.
Theres the Django tutorial but its not quite as comprehensive as Hartl's Rails Tutorial.

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/tutorial01/
Is it funny when CEO makes a joke on getting paid or not?
I am surprised they didnt try to push a webdx based off directx.
FWIW, the author is female.
Genetic A/B Testing!
Nonsense! To start with, "startups are about growth" is Paul Graham's thesis, and it's just one way to define a startup. There are others; see jt2190's comment for a reference to Steve Blank's: "A startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model." I'm sure there are others.

There was a Silicon Valley decades before Internet/Web 2.0/somolo startups started colonizing San Francisco, and back then, there were startups in other non-Internet industries - heck there still are. There are startups in biotech, medical devices etc, that take several years just to develop a commercially viable product. Those startups don't use metrics like "5% week over week". They are, however, scalable businesses that may eventually justify VC investment.

There are lots of reasons to want to grow a business quickly, but a business doesn't automatically cease to be a startup because you have decided you don't "need to build it up fast", whatever that means.

Bootstrapped businesses can be startups, obviously. The cost of starting almost any business has fallen sharply in the past few years. You don't need VC funding to build a startup, fast or slow, unless you're building a capital intensive business or you can't fund your startup otherwise.
The hope is that the "replicable key revealing process" is difficult and time consuming - which is worthwhile for an attacker with sufficient resources if going to the effort to reveal a key results in breaking every encrypted session from that source. PFS means they'd go to all that effort to reveal an ephemeral key for only one session.

It'd be _well_ worth the NSAs time/money to burn 10 million cpu hours brute forcing Google's TLS key if it gave them every encrypted session's cleartext past and future. It's not practical to burn 10 million cpu hours for every SSL session connecting to Google's servers.
I'd just like to add that you should probably include some images in your site. It'd certainly spruce things up a bit. Check out the new Digg (http://digg.com/) for an example of a super slick news aggregator site that's very image-heavy.
IMO, Apple's claim that iMessage is private is irresponsible because it endangers people who take that claim at face value.

By this logic, your claims are irresponsible. Apple's claim is true and you are misleading people into not taking advantage of the privacy they offer.
Indeed. Using "do this or you're fired" to get an employee's attention is disrespectful and manipulative, it's not funny - unless you are Michael Scott.

There have to be more creative ways to assert an important company initiative. Surely there is a more 'Fab' way.
Historically, similar systems have been quite pro-business (or pro-American-business); ECHELON sigint data was used in the 90s to help Boeing win a large contract over Airbus, for instance.
The Retailification of Online Publishing
the dev tools look promising. But I do not understand what are they are trying to achieve by this. I do not see myself, or many people, switching to IE for development when there are no extensions available. I at least want some REST client like Postman. Now It appears they are only catching up on Chrome and Firebug, that will hardly convince anybody.

Do not get me wrong, they are doing good work making IE modern browser, But they can't do it alone, especially with such long release cycle. Maybe making dev branch like Canary or Aurora?
MS have done little to push the IE team around in recent years, thankfully.
This looks very similar to something that was posted on reddit a couple of years ago.

http://boxcar2d.com/
Now this is investigative journalism!
Snowden distributed encrypted copies of NSA docs around the world
I disagree with the "Microsoft platform" bit. The Mono/Xamarin guys have been coming up with a very nice competing/complementary platform. I've built personal and production projects running on Linux using Mono.

While I haven't used, the Xamarin iOS/Android development platforms look quite interesting. I suppose it has the stigma of a somewhat pricy per seat license but its likely worth it if you want to go with a shared codebase for iOS/Android/WP/Win8.

There's also MonoGame[1] which targets developers of MS's former XNA game dev kit.

[1]http://www.monogame.net/about
Actually, the thing genetic algorithms try to do is break out of this local maximum, mutating past a trait correlated with poor performance in hopes of finding a more fit solution.
Additionally, Microsoft was on record saying they believed plugins like Silverlight provided sufficient 3d capabilities, and that WebGL was huge surface area for security vulnerabilities.

They've apparently reversed that stance.
Why do people keep repeating this trope that it's only a matter of time before encryption will be broken?

Use a Diffie-Hellman style protocol to create and exchange a secret key for each session, use AES-256 if you're ultra-paranoid, then forget the session key. It even works today, and there are no known attacks against AES that can reduce the work enough to beat the heat death of the universe.
(A) Yes, they probably knew about this, at least as a potential risk; while the media has gotten very excited about PRISM, it isn't really that different to ECHELON, which has been effectively public knowledge since the late 90s.

(B) Governments aren't the only ones potentially spying on peoples' unencrypted comms.
An anti-static bag should work just as well.
Is there a way to save the current world seed?

I have a layout that is defeating all cars even after 50 generations and counting. Would love to keep on testing against this world.
So far it's at least safe to assume MS support current and previous releases. As this is a feature pack to w8 and not w9 I should be ok so assume ie11 will see w7.

But who knows, MS seem to think ie is some carrot to lure people to them. It could as such be crippled to w8.
Given the accelerated R&D that happened since the 70-ties in computer science, the huge resources that this industry can throw at problems and the fact that quantum computing can theoretically solve many important problems for us, 30 years is a long time.

I'm not saying that it won't happen eventually. I'm only saying that Moore's law is a more imminent threat to current encryption methods and that quantum computing still doesn't solve NP and as long as NP is not P, unbreakable encryption is a reality that quantum computing won't change.
But I actually like .NET.

I have my misgivings about a lot of other MS products, but C# is just plain nice.
Hard to imagine a worse Faraday cage than a refrigerator. The rubber seal would create a nice slot antenna running 3/4 of the way around one side.

The microwave oven would be much, much better.
Clueless Spanish Politicians Want To Join The Government Malware Club
I think your first link may be incorrect? I also tried looking through the tracker but I wasn't able to find a relevant bug associated with this. Would you mind posting the link to the bug?
OFF Pocket: A privacy case for mobile phones
Opera didn't disable it due to security concerns per se — rather more just the general bugginess of Opera's hardware acceleration. I wouldn't consider crash bugs in general security issues. Equally, there is software rendered mode, but it's pointlessly slow to enable.

Note the prior concerns are still just as true today as they were a few years ago — graphics drivers are still relatively easy to find crash bugs in, leading browser vendors to try and hack around and avoid hitting those bugs in all too many cases. :(
To clarify, I was referring to the public statements made by China and the US regarding Snowdon and his revelations (you know, this thread?).

Also I sad, 'look like'.
Yes, I think that is fair to say.
I have an idea I've been kicking around for printed cards ... drop me an email and I can give you details
I agree notebooks are cool. Twilio gave them away at their conference. Very cool.
Ironically, was unable to add this site feed to my GR replacement (Feedly) as entering the feedburner URL nor the atom XML url obtained from the source empowered Feedly to properly add my subscription. A bit tangential, but Feedly, in trying to make adding of feeds easier, actually hinders it in practice
I just put my phone in the refrigerator and called it -- works perfectly. Then I tried the same thing with a microwave oven (following pilsetnieks's suggestions) -- didn't even lose one bar on the signal indicator. It did kill the Wi-Fi reception, so clearly the oven is blocking the 2.4 GHz frequency as it should.

Edit: Also tried a cookie can. (And anti-static bags -- see below.) Faraday cage my ass.

Clarification: I use a Nokia. Maybe the technique works only on iPhones? I've heard they have some reception issues.
I know but that also turns off the malware links protection. I don't mind the malware site/link protection since it only sends in a small part of the URL's hash for matching (similar to how we have in Firefox). Comparatively, the file scanner requires the whole hash of the file, the clear text of the download URL and the IP address which I find far more intrusive to privacy. I am hoping for a future update where they would let us enable/disable them individually.
Sounds great - theres so much talent locked away at Microsoft if only business models werent getting in the way.
Generating every image possible.
Ah, but that's like photo composition. The amateurs don't know photo composition, but they will get it right on accident sometimes, and they will have fun all the same, which is what they really care about.

As clearly evidenced by the proliferation of cameras, most people don't necessarily expect to be able to make amazing gallery-quality photos, but they would like the technology to get out of the way (so to speak) so that they can spend their time shooting.
Thank goodness that "Text - Empty Text Node" has been removed from the DOM explorer!

The new developer tools, especially that UI responsiveness report [1] are hot looking. Looking forward to giving that a spin.

[1] http://microsoft-news.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/UI-Resp...
Is it common practice to force particular IDE to developers? Especially for web developers. I imagine my productivity would decrease quite dramatically for some time.
Get Ready for Invading Asian Tiger Mosquitoes
It's guardian not gaurdian.
I would argue that s-expressions are powerful for reasons other than macros, but I agree that the prefix notation and boatloads of parentheses can initially require a lot of extra effort for no apparent payoff. When I began writing clojure code (in vim) this was a constant source of frustration for me. The paredit.vim plugin [https://github.com/vim-scripts/paredit.vim] made things much easier and led me to give emacs a serious try. Writing lisp in an editor with paredit is a magical feeling. It turns the onion of parentheses into a structure that you can navigate and modify without having to worry about keeping things balanced. For me, this has made the parens effectively disappear from my focus.
Forgive my wording, but I mean that whatever data is visualized is what would be subjected to fitness test, not the visualization itself.

Just like the shapes of the chassis and the size of the wheels in this demo are essentially numeric data visualized into a series of canvases, some hypothetical startup's data could be visualized in a potentially compelling manner. That's presuming, ofc, that the original data is already suitable for genetic manipulation.

What that data/startup would be? I don't know, just casting an idea.
The author mentions it's based on that, but totally rewritten.

"The program uses a simple genetic algorithm to evolve random two-wheeled shapes into cars over generations. Loosely based on BoxCar2D, but written from scratch, only using the same physics engine (box2d).
seedrandom.js written by David Bau. (thanks!)"