skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not to be flip, but I haven't found that MasterCard or Visa are particular great at data analysis. Additionally, I would be surprised if MasterCard could easily figure out the information you suggest from the data they get. I could be completely wrong, but I've seen them have enough trouble figuring out interchange charges -- their core business -- let alone random analytic facts about (so-called) competitors.

To my immediate recollection ISO 8583 (the standard set out for credit card transactions) doesn't have much info on independent sales organizations (a different ISO acronym). This is all to say that the transactions are through a merchant account set up by Stripe for each particular merchant at Wells Fargo Merchant Services, then through First Data and only then hit MasterCard. Again, I'm not certain, but I'm not sure its a question they can easily answer from their data.
So just to be clear...the constitution only applies when permitted by a given piece legislation? Strange.
Are you comparing an XBOX to an Android phone? Android is an OS, not a hardware platform. It can be deployed to arbitrarily powerful hardware, so long as the graphics drivers are written.
FairPlay has been cracked a lot of times, there have been many tools to remove the DRM from FairPlay encrypted songs/videos/books.

App store apps have also been cracked in that their keys have been stripped, on a jail broken phone you can run all those apps without needing a valid key.
> I just wish there was a bit more outrage / discussion on the "Is it actually ok to spy on foreigners like this?"

Well, you can't really fault American media for focusing on Americans (or maybe you can.) But it would be interesting to see that break into the national consciousness.

I'm afraid, though, that if you asked most Americans their answer would be "of course it's OK, as long as we're the best at it."

... I can see how that could be incredibly infuriating.
>huge amount of human potential is being wasted in India.

Just a counterpoint : IITs are state funded, i.e most of the student fees are paid for by the government. Once they complete their education, do they not have a duty to give back to the people ? Remember, brain drain is a serious problem for countries like India.
This is neat! :)
I wonder if this impacted Fastmail as well...
;_;
Wait if the Xbox becomes a PC, then what's the point of the Xbox?

Surely its better in that case to just stick a PC in your living room, hook it up to your TV, and have the full flexibility of Windows! And instead of throwing out the whole thing every few years, just upgrade the GPU once in a while.
A snapshot of his setup would have been nice. Not so much for the gear Nazis, but to keep gear on the radar for readers who decide to try this themselves.
Romani ite domum
You can't. It hard codes 1024 bit parameters, which is highly annoying. There's a patch to allow user-specified DH parameters but it hasn't been merged:

https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=49559

I would just go with elliptic curve Diffie Hellman (which unfortunately requires Apache 2.4) and then disable the non-EC Diffie Hellman ciphers if you're concerned about using 1024 bit DH.

FWIW, nginx is a lot more flexible in configuring the cryptography.
Kickspy is like Netflix for Kickstarter projects
If you weren't already aware you will probably be interested to read about the 5 star party, a new Italian political party that is concerned with direct democracy

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Star_Movement
You can see an example profile here: http://www.kickspy.com/profile/wal7er
Unfortunately, our owners have 'Big Data', and they're getting a lot more of it very soon. In other words, they're aware of tipping points, and the Rubicon, across which our owners put their sway at risk, will never be crossed, so while I agree wholeheartedly with you, I really do fear that all this Internet dissent will never lead to anything more than an interesting read.
Yep, that does look like the same concept, but only at the application level.

Do you think there could be any real-world advantages to doing this at the OS level? On paper it would sound good to me, as it could do this optimization across any application running on the machine.
I'm sure a lot of people will read your post and roll their eyes, but let me assure you that civil strife was the last thing on the minds of most Sarajevans in 1990, just a few years before the bloody civil war broke out in the countryside and the city was besieged. Yes, there were some that were perceptive (just like the above poster), but most said it will never happen here! -- after all, this is a cosmopolitan city that only recently hosted the Olympic Games.

Never underestimate the potential of society to quickly disintegrate under the right conditions. And I'd argue that the US, with 10% of the people suffering greatly, 10% astounded and shocked, and 80% paying no attention whatsoever, while our "leaders" lead us to slaughter, is at high risk for significant civil strife.
Have a look at alphaheavy's protobuf implementation as a starting point.
Certainly, there must be a state for "leaked" classified documents, for which this rule simply wouldn't apply (these leaked documents could literally appear anywhere on the web in theory).
The formulas used to calculate eligibility for various forms of financial aid as a US student include an assumption (up until the age of 25 if I remember correctly) that the parents will be paying a certain amount, based on their income. My parents' expected contribution was not within the realm of their economic reality, especially with 4 kids graduating from high school in 3 years.

My wife went straight from putting her parents' income on her student aid forms to my income, so nearly all of her higher education not paid by her parents is on student loans (because by the time we got married my expected contribution to her education was outside the realm of our financial reality).

These calculations do include the estimated costs of room, board, & books, though, and student loan eligibility is largely based on those numbers. Of course, the room & board costs are often based on living in dorms and eating entirely on campus meal plans, each of which, depending on where you go to school, can be significantly different from the cost of living off-campus.
How about, "The net is estimated to cost $45m and California is broke"?
Give me your bitcoin address and we can have a transfer in minutes for a few satoshis or within an hour or so for free.

(blahblahblah, usd, ponzie scheme, cbx halting transfers, grandmothers)
Then what's the point of threatening something that draconian? Pure habit?
Well that's what you get for running microsoft apps on a mac, now you know what windows users go through with itunes.

For some odd reason each company makes their apps really buggy and annoying on the other's platform... weird.

/s
For those who prefer a more lawyerly take on prosecutorial discretion (or the lack thereof) displayed here, there's an article about this on Popehat:

http://www.popehat.com/2013/06/26/an-exercise-of-prosecutori...
Instead of using margin, wouldn't translate be better?

The image would still just scroll like normal if translate wasn't supported. Plus the processing would be moved to the gpu and if the browser doesn't understand translate then it probably shouldn't be showing parallax pages. Nothing is worse then a jumpy site.
WinX DVD Player Review 
WinX DVD Player is comprehensive and all region free DVD player software for PC users. It easily and smoothly plays all kinds of DVDs, including copy protected DVDs, commercial DVDs, home-made DVDs and all region 1-6 DVDs, which makes you freely enjoy DVD movies at home.
I can't decide whether it's better in this case to cite Betteridge's Law or try to devise some new law for headlines best answered with "unask the question before you hurt someone with it."

Or with "who gives a fuck." No, I've got it: if anyone asks whether something is emasculating, the correct answer is "who gives a fuck." misuba's law. You're welcome.
So posts about what you can screw up are nice, but what would be nicer is posts about how to set up an ideal SSL configuration for various web servers. (Perhaps there's no "perfect" configuration possible, but "strongest given known limitations" would be fine too.)

With all the talk of PFS lately I've been trying to configure Apache to do it, but either I'm dumber than I thought or there's no straightforward how-to online at the moment.

Instead of telling us the various crazy pitfalls and edge cases, just give dummies like me the best possible formula so we can configure things securely and then get on with our lives. The first step towards defeating eavesdropping is making the best possible SSL configuration a copy and paste affair instead of an acronym guessing game.

Edit: If total security isn't really possible right now as this post suggests, maybe a "best" configuration plus mailing list for when it's updated for varios major platforms (ie LTS) would be a good stopgap.
Very nice, really like the interface and story display on the home screen. Seems fast. I don't usually use apps for search, instead going to browser first, but I might try this app for awhile.
More reports on one university so far discovered to have a slush fund, the University of Wisconsin:

UW Slush Fund Exposes Hypocrisy of Liberal Group
http://mediatrackers.org/wisconsin/2013/04/23/uw-slush-fund-...

UW slush fund insults citizens
http://www.beloitdailyneaws.com/opinion/editorial-uw-slush-f...

Outrage grows as University of Wisconsin System admits it 'did not draw attention' to cash
http://www.jsonline.com/news/education/outrage-grows-as-uw-a...

I wonder how many more state-run institutions of higher education will have similar scandals in the next few years.
NBA DRAFT
Only Valve works on a real glibc Linux console though.
Intuition and Logic in Mathematics (1905)
Comes with the 1.5" penis.
Google TV, Nexus Q etc are trying to crack a different nut, and one of the hardest ones out there. The fact that these things are called set-top-boxes in an era where TV's aren't big enough to put anything on top of them is an indicator how long people have been trying to make it work.

XBMC has been most successful because They have focused on providing people what they want. Every company has delivered something that they would like people to have (and ideally pay them lots for content).

Consoles on the other hand seem to be marketed by Black magic, Hype, and dodgy stats. That does seem to be more Microsoft's game than Google's, but they are gaining ground.
New system uses low-power Wi-Fi signal to track moving humans, even behind walls
If he ran 13 red lights he'd be assessed the penalty 13 times for that, too. I'm not sure why the number of charges multiplied by the penalty would be draconian. That's just arithmetic. Luckily, the legal system in the USA is flexible and he will just get a small fine and community service.
I would personally prefer they stopped feeding the Snowden soap opera and focused instead on meaningful policy and governance questions, such as:

* did Congress intend to authorize warrantless surveillance when it passed the legislation being used by the NSA to justify its current policies and wrap them in a cloak of legality?

* which of the leaked materials w/r/t NSA surveillance can and should be considered highly-classified? What is the national security justification for keeping these materials out of public view?

* if Snowden was in a position of administrative privilege that gave him access to highly-sensitive materials without reasonable oversight, why was he employed by a private-sector company? What are the implications of this for FOIA requests, administrative costs, government transparency and checks against potential abuse? (seriously... what on earth is B.A. doing in this story?)

* do the stories released by the NSA to justify warrantless surveillance really justify the actions taken in the light of the law? i.e. is stopping a cab driver from sending 8k to Somalia really the sort of urgent and time-sensitive national security concern that should preclude the government from spending a day or two to get a targeted warrant?

Regardless of whether we agree or disagree on what a reasonable person would conclude on these questions, it seems self-evident that these questions are much more important than most of what the NYT has treated as front-page news on the subject matter.
f(f(n)) = n^2 is actually easy when you consider it restricted to 32-bit signed integers. Since it's impossible to make it work for any abs(n)>65536 (it's too big), you can reserve all those values as intermediate stopover points for the ones it WILL work for.

f(n)

= abs(n) + 65536 if n < 65536

= unsigned32(n & 0xffff) ** 2 if n >= 65536

Cheeky, eh?
The key specs for all this to work are:

* Web Cryptography API[1], edited by Mozilla and Google

* Media Source Extensions[2], edited by Google, Microsoft and Netflix

* Encrypted Media Extensions[3], edited by Google, Microsoft and Netflix

These are not pseudo standards pushed only by Microsoft. ChromeOS already supports two of these specs.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/WebCryptoAPI/

[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/media-source/

[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/
I really, really wish all objectivists had been born (actually) underprivileged.
Farmed Fish Production Overtakes Beef
The 1st amendment has never applied to disagreements between two private parties, but rather between one party and the Unites State government.

So, yes, the constitution applies only when permitted by it's own words.
Universities are older than the printing press, older than telegraphs, older than fast & cheap mass transport, older than radio and television.

To be quite honest I don't see the internet usurping them either.
I'm curious; how many games have you written? I mean, real games which really push the hardware? Non-deterministic GC sweeps are a non-starter, and not being able to tweak out that last bit of performance to boost your frame rate when needed is a massive technical hurdle.

It's just unnecessary. You can write "safe" C and C++, you just have to know what you are doing to begin with. Also, don't forget about the massive amount of native frameworks that have been developed already. Why rewrite an engine which already exists just so you can use Java?
If these numbers are true, I think it points to an academic rip off far larger than the US student loan problem. If the coaching industry is $3.4B annually, and there are only 10,000 slots at the IITs, that's $340,000 per spot. It effectively costs more to attend the nominally state-funded IIT than an Ivy League school.

Of course, most of that cost is not paid by those who get in. If we assume that every one of those half million test takers spent $6800 for coaching, they're being severely ripped off. You'd have to assume that the average IIT entrant spends over 50x as much as the average unsuccessful test-taker before that comes down to even half -- and at that point, the IIT entrants are paying $175k.

Either the article is leaving off the some important details -- perhaps the number quoted for the coaching industry does not just include the IITs -- or this is an economic disaster that no one has yet noticed.
This is problematic in itself, because the "best" configuration changes from time to time.

That said -- perfect, good, enemies etc.
Just seems extremely unfair that the social outcome for getting into an IIT is so different for people of almost identical intellectual capability.

Unless you could quote a proper scientific study, that seems like a highly unsupportable assertion.

Just anecdotally, I know multiple people who chose not to go to IIT despite being inside the cut-off for one reason or another (e.g., not having a high enough rank to get into their preferred line of study) who've gone on to have extremely good careers nonetheless. Although admittedly, I'm struggling to think of any IIT graduates who did not end up with a solid to brilliant career, regardless of their actual academic performance while at IIT. Some to my great surprise! So what I'm saying is... there's not enough data to make a statement like you did.
Seriously, I hate video calls generally... frankly, even if you're not looking down, they're rarely flattering, and in many cases people look downright dreadful. I don't want to stare at someone's ugly mug for 30 minutes when I could just be having a nice conversation (and it's not like I can really look away, because they'll notice).

Not to mention the reverse: with video, all of a sudden, I have to care how I look, what I'm wearing, what's visible in the background, etc. Gah, what a pain.

So while there are definitely positive aspects to video calls, and it's great that they're an option, no way should they be the default, either technically (the default state of the app) or "societally" (i.e., what people expect, with audio-only being taken as a sign of something suspicious).

One reason I don't use Google hangouts more often is simply that: it defaults to video, and requires specific action to turn that off. Don't do that shit.
The people of Troy are still worrying about the efficacy of their city walls when the Greek soldiers have already gotten out of the horse and opened the gates.
Some protocol developer had a sick sense of humor
New Yorker runs Strongbox, so Guardian can run one too.
Theres alot of game engines targeting Android, Unity3d for example where you code in C# or some Javascript dialect, Shiva3d where you use Lua for scripting and several others.
> The key, of course, is that many American students self-select out of applying to Harvard, and indeed don't self-select to submit an application to any "prestige" university.

Self-selecting out is true for IITs also. Let's not forget that IITs are focused purely on engineering stream and a bit on technology management courses. IVY Leagues on the other hand are broader universities covering other streams such as liberal arts, life sciences, law etc.

If you compare the size of student-body which grows up each year (the ones qualifying 10+2 intermediate school) in India, and the fact that only a fraction of it applies and appears for the IIT entrance, you will get a clear comparison on which university has the lowest acceptance rate going by this metric too.

However, let's not blind ourselves with ratios and percentages alone because absolute numbers have a bearing on competitiveness too.

I remember there was a study a few years ago suggesting that countries like India and China are so populous that the number of honor kids they produce is higher than the number of kids we have in west [1]. Also check out this video which shows how IVY leagues form a backup option for most IITians with Vinod Khosla, Narayan Murthy et al.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK3rX1sg5kg

Not saying that universities like Harvard do not have a high enough benchmark or a lesser quality admission process, but if we were to compare quality of entrance exam/criteria of only the engineering streams of Ivy Leagues/others universities with what the IITs have, then the latter would be right on top.

[Disclosure: I am an IITian, so apologies for the conflict of interest w.r.t to my statements above.]

[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/06/26/are-your-kids-smar...
Check easily whether a gem is ready for Rails 4 or not
Is my gem ready for Rails 4?
what do you mean by present evolution?
I think that's the case with most Indians and our education system is to blame for that. The entire schooling system is very competitive. If you're not aiming to be an engineer or a doctor, then you're wasting your life. Slogging day-in day-out becomes a part of our life. The result is a bunch of people who may not be very smart (not much practical knowledge) but can more than make it up with hard work. While this is a sure way to success, you lose a lot along the way. There is absolutely no work-life balance. Sports is seen as a recreational activity, not a profession. India is pretty much missing on the Olympics or any global sports chart because of that [except where Cricket is involved. We take that seriously:)].
Do you think that's an appropriate headline for the breaking front-page story about the scandal for an ostensibly objective news organization?
Which is, if anything, more egregious because the author is pandering to readers' prejudices even though he knows better, and does absolutely nothing to correct the inevitable misapprehensions.
EME, MSE, and Web Crypto are very new specifications. They’re just starting to be rolled out in browsers. They’re not going to be rolled out everywhere overnight.

H.264 video codec is on pretty much every major browser now, including Firefox. This wasn’t the case when browsers first supported the video element. It is a similar situation to EME and friends today. Including the potential licensing fee (I assume vendors have to licence the DRM module to plug into EME or get it from the underlying OS in the same way to how they have to licence H.264, but I'm not sure about this area)
This white hat hacker cracks quantum encryption for fun and profit
Is the United States becoming less free, or has the US always been like this and I'm just noticing now?
This is assuming you're talking about "twitch" gaming. There's a huge market out there for games that can be written as inefficiently as necessary, since the casual audience is just looking for a diversion from whatever they're doing IRL.

It seems like hard-core gamers and game developers forget that pretty frequently.
Just FYI

- In India each state has it's own Under-Grad entrance test

- Lot of high school students just don't try for IIT Entrance Exam

- Would approximate that there are least 4-5 million students who enter poll of undergrad just for engineering

- That $3.4 B number in not just for the entrance exam it includes High-School curriculum and in many cases boarding

- Would guess the national average for two years for IIT focused cost is about $1,500 including boarding
I don‘t see why not. Two of the editors of the HTML5.1 spec are Microsoft representatives: http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/
How are you construing an unconstitutional surveillance program as a political question?

I don't see how any of the Court Cases listed on the wikipedia article are relevant. These all seem to relate to truly political things, like which branch has what authority, or how districts are apportioned. The article only cites 5 areas the courts have clear precedent on - wars, treaties, gerrymandering, impeachment, as well as the Guarantee clause. The Guarantee clause relates to Article 4 though, not Amendment 4.

If we are construing this NSA wire-tapping as a war power, then we're in trouble, because we have now effectively agreed the written words of the Patriot Act have no meaning, and the constitution will never be applied uniformly to the executive.
Agree, pretty much entirely.

Corporatism is the greatest enemy of those who believe in freedom, and by extension in freedom of voluntary association.

But I don't think consumerism needs to be "conscientious" in the sense that consumers act altruistically. It's in my self-interest that my privacy is protected, for example.