skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This thread turned out to be a great source of information right when I needed it! Thanks, everyone!

However, I'm just starting to work on a webapp for a client (learning from scratch, this is my first big project in Rails), and I was wondering which version to start with.
Since I'm starting with no pre-existing codebase, it's very tempting to go with Rails 4.0 as opposed to 3.2, but I'm afraid not all essential gems support it yet. Also, there probably isn't as much information for bugs and problems etc.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
As I understand it, getting a security clearance doesn't especially care about whether you've done anything illegal, it cares about:

1. Whether you're likely to voluntarily leak any secure information.

2. Whether someone who dug up some dirt on you could blackmail you into leaking secure information.

Or as the saying goes, it's fine to have a mistress, but having a mistress that your wife doesn't know about is a problem...
Tracking Unmodified Smartphones Using Wi-Fi Monitors
This excerpt[1] from "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman" comes to mind. Detailing a stage where Feynman lost his passion for physics and regained it by studying things purely for the satisfaction of his curiousity and the enjoyment of the process.

He says, "Feynman, that's pretty interesting, but what's the importance of it?"
"Why are you doing it?"

"Hah!" I say.
"There's no importance whatsoever. I'm just doing it for the fun of it."

[1]: http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~kilcup/262/feynman.html
You know, this happens a lot here -- this exact same thing. Someone makes an elaborate piece of art with CSS, you get some response saying hey CSS wasn't meant for this and to complete the cycle finally you'd have a comment saying "but he's just being a hacker, this is how we get innovation!".

It's great we celebrate hacker culture, -- as we well should, but isn't art via CSS getting a bit hackneyed by now? And are there really people still out there who're unaware that they can do this kind of snazzy stuff with CSS?

Certainly though if for example someone mockingly questioned something like Fabrice Bellard's PC emulator in Javascript for its lack of practical good we would rightfully come down on them. I certainly don't mean to criticize the author here -- he is very obviously an expert at CSS, but I'm not sure if we can put 'fella who built a helicopter' in the same category as CSS art.
Wow, that looks great. With the discount it matches S3's storage pricing, but without bandwidth charges, with a more convenient interface (an ssh-reachable regular filesystem), and full-service support. Plus an interesting attempt at a "warrant canary": http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt
It's not really an either or thing. You can go too far with client side rendering. But progressive enhancement can only bring you so far in delivering an interactive experience - it's typical that his example is a simple tabs implementation - of course that's easy to do without much js.

That's why I like knockoutjs - it makes it easier to sprinkle in the data-bound rich interactive UI to the pieces of your page that need it and leave the rest as normal server side rendered content. It doesn't force you to go whole hog client side.

One key area of performance where js rendered UI helps a lot is in customizing an otherwise uniformly served (and cached) page. 95% of the page is uniform to everybody, so render that server side and cache the heck out of it (varnish or whatever). Then, bind the pieces of the UI after page load and customize them based on the user - their login status, their location, etc.
My experience has been that they are either middle-management types or developers from the company who apply for the position. I personally think the latter kind makes a way better project manager.
iMessage is in no way NSA-proof:

http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/06/can-apple-re...

tl;dr:

* Apple distributes the encryption keys
* Multiple keys can be associated with an account (iPhone, Mac – and the NSA?)
* Apple can retain metadata
* Apple doesn't use certificate pinning
I think you're overestimating how hot of a skill that actually is...
But even if you could make "boatloads" of cash consulting, not everyone desires the road warrior lifestyle that goes along with consulting.
SimpleAI - AI with python: new release is ready
A new release of SimpleAI is ready.

SimpleAI is a python implementation of many of the artificial intelligence algorithms described on the book "Artificial Intelligence, a Modern Approach". It focuses on providing an easy to use, well documented and tested library.

This new version includes:
* Important improvements to the graphical debugger, that allows you to run the search algorithms interactively with a real-time search graph on a web browser. The improvements include the ability to zoom and pan on the graph view, and to play and pause the algorithm in real time.
* Constraints propagation for the constraints satisfaction problems, which in most cases greatly improves the performance of the CSP search methods. The implemented algorithm for the propagation is AC3.
* N-ary to binary constraints converter, which allows you to take full advantage of the AC3 constraints propagation (AC3 only operates on binary constraints).
* Many other small bugfixes and improvements.

Project home: http://github.com/simpleai-team/simpleai
Docs: http://simpleai.readthedocs.org
SimpleAI will be presented in Pydata 2013 http://pydata.org/bos2013/abstracts/#56
Oculus Rift - The Latent Power of Prediction
That's because citizens united was actually a good ruling. People don't lose rights just by forming groups.
No, he's not trolling. Nor is he a government plant or right-wing nutjob. He's just someone posting on HN with a legitimate viewpoint not shared by the majority of people here. Regardless, it is a valid point and shouldn't be dismissed so readily.

No one is doubting the authenticity of the Prism Powerpoint, however only a handful of slides have been released. And as shocking as first hand accounts are, without any evidence to support them, it's extremely hard to verify or trust.
> I can kind of understand "regular folk", but that's not really the git-annex market, either.

I haven't used it yet, but the git-annex assistant is trying to target that niche, with a goal of an easy-as-Dropbox user experience that hides the technical aspects of git-annex under the hood: http://git-annex.branchable.com/assistant/
Some of these photos were 3D. There is a full documentary about it, "NOVA: 3D Spies of WWII": http://video.pbs.org/video/2247408348/
Magic tricks of testing
>> "The most annoying part of Android development is probably Eclipse"

Hopefully Android Studio[1] will be the solution to that problem.

>> "I keep hearing this FUD, but I have no idea where it's coming from. I've never had any problems with the Android documentation."

I don't think the Android documentation is bad but I find iOS documentation much better. It might just be because I'm more used to the iOS docs (5 years experience vs. 1 year on Android).

[1] http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing/studio.html
RAID 0 is generally frowned on in pretty much all circumstances. Is there a specific reason you're using it? (Legitimately curious.)
Possible but unlikely. Steve Jobs was very influencial within Apple. Jobs' opinion was almost certainly a strong factor. Apple had been a leading and popular mobile phone manufacturer for many years before 2012, why wouldn't the NSA be interested in them?
TDD is the way to go (y), great notes
oh awesome
Asm.js is not an alternative to JavaScript, though. It is JavaScript, just a really mangled and ugly subset of it.

cliveowen was clearly talking about "an alternative to Javascript" and "not [...] those things that eventually get translated to Javascript". Anything targeting Asm.js is merely targeting JavaScript.

The "half native speed" claim is quite dubious, at best. Even if it were realistic, that's still quite a horrible decrease in performance relative to native code. It's not as bad as the typically much worse disparity, but it's still not good at all.
There is no smoking gun. These articles, without the documents/slides/files, to back them up, are little more than conjecture.
How would you suggest that decisions be made on questions where the necessary data to make an informed decision must be kept secret? An example would be a country deciding between different weapons systems proposals for its military.

While it limits the effectiveness of our government, informed representative democracy is the least bad system we've found for also limiting its abuses. Our representatives should be informed of everything the government does, because that limits the power of the government. I'd go further and say that on important questions, the public has a right to know as well. If a few individuals or organisations decide what is secret, they can expand the zone of secrecy until everything is secret, and refuse to tell the public why it is secret because, well that's a secret too. That situation has come to pass with programs like Tempora in the UK or PRISM in the US.

Of course the military would like things to remain classified indefinitely, and of course their effective power is limited by exposing information. The most effective military would be one about which absolutely nothing was known, with all weapons secret, and one with absolute power over the civilian population, but we don't accept that in peacetime or for the long term because it would effectively be tyranny. So we limit military power, and military secrecy, and sometimes important weapons (like nuclear missiles) will be made public knowledge, because if they were not too much power would be concentrated in the hands of too few, and we would no longer have anything approaching an informed public.

Taking nuclear weapons as an example, the public needs to know the cost, how many the government makes, the conditions in which they'll be used, and the cost in human lives if they are used. They don't need to know how to make or deploy one. I believe that's an acceptable trade-off. I don't accept that there are important questions where the necessary data must be kept secret even from the people's representatives.

Going back to the original question - total take surveillance by the NSA. The most effective spy organisation would be able to tap every connection, peruse any and all records instantly, censor and control the press, regularly feed disinformation to the public, and control politicians and what they say. Clearly most people in the world think that's unacceptable, because it conflicts with other values which we hold to be more important (privacy, freedom of speech, democratic decision making) - widespread surveillance or widespread secrecy are inimical to democracy, and allowing secret activities to be managed by anyone else than the people, or their direct representatives, allows a dangerous usurpation of power.
Having worked an abuse desk for quite a while, I can tell you a non-trivial number of reports are clueless reporters or people trying to get competitors/enemies/etc. boxes shut off.
Snowden, the real Bourne
Ask HN: How do you think?
I always wonder how people see or think during different kind of activity. Do they visualize pictures, do they say word, do the imagine things? What happens when someone try to solve math problems, what they think about?
For example when I'm reading or writing, I always "say out loud the words" in my head, when writing code, sometimes it's easier for me to think about visual representation of a problem, like diagrams, sets, draw X-es or anything.
My father see a big virtual map in front of him when driving.
How do you think? (Especially during coding or solving problems.)
This is a great essay. But since it's long, I suspect some people won't get to the last few paragraphs, which are IMO the most important:

"The need to do something unscalably laborious to get started is so nearly universal that it might be a good idea to stop thinking of startup ideas as scalars. Instead we should try thinking of them as pairs of what you're going to build, plus the unscalable thing(s) you're going to do initially to get the company going."

As someone in the "Startup Scene" for many years, and especially as a Software Consultant, I've talked with hundreds of people about their startups. And this is probably the number one insight I wish more people had - startups are not just "having an idea" (what people used to think), they're also not just "idea * execution" (which is a great concept but incomplete). Rather, the fundamental building blocks of a startup is "what are you doing" and "how are you getting users". Almost everything else can be missing in the high level discussion, but not those two. It's taken me many years to understand this, and PG just put it in a very succint form.
It's not in the same category as CSS art in the sense they're equivalent accomplishments. I imagine a helicopter failure has a potentially lethal outcome vs. carpal tunnel for repeated CSS hacking.

They are in the same category as... "because I can". Which doesn't seem like something worthy of celebration, but creative expression in unexpected forms should be admired regardless of medium.

> Are there really people still out there who're unaware that they can do this kind of snazzy stuff with CSS?

Have you met our species? We're quite varied.
they usally give you 24hrs to fix it
War between ISP and the Government
Not exactly:

On Tue, Jul 02, 2013 at 08:11:13AM -0500, Robert Lee wrote:
> This is unfortunate. I do hope they are not going out of business.

We've gone through a major crisis, but are still here... just. To say
any more in public at this stage might be unwise from a legal
standpoint.

We currently have no manufacturing capability for ekeys but are
working towards getting things up and running again. There's no
timescale on that yet, I'm afraid.

--
Paul Martin <pm at simtec.co.uk>
Simtec Electronics
http://www.simtec.co.uk/
They are nothing alike. The polygraph is a useful interrogation device. These bomb "detectors" are an outright scam.

Edit: For the downvoters, I'm well aware that polygraphs are much more art than science which is why they're inadmissible in court (in the US). They're not that useful for detecting lies. As I said, they're a useful tool in the interrogation toolbox.
"But even if the law allows you to strike back, it's usually still a good idea to retreat. :-)"

Indeed; the good thing about Stand Your Ground (SYG) laws is that they presume the citizen without fault will make a good decision on that and don't allow the state to second guess him along with everything else it will be questioning (i.e. SYG doesn't touch on biggest question of "is this use of lethal force justified?", which should be the real focus).

I've seen some horrible abuses of duty to retreat from your own home in Massachusetts when the courts were negating as much of every legislative reform as they could; you should never have to decide between abandoning your children to the tender mercies of a thug and going to jail (real case, followed contemporaneously in the Boston Globe in the early '80s).
The picture of Constance Babington Smith at 2:08 has a wee model of a Me 163 rocket-powered fighter by her head!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constance_Babington_Smith

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me_163
Never Delegate Understanding
This is an excellent critique of large-scale education systems. But what we need is a better large-scale education system - telling everyone to think for themselves all the time is fun for us geeks, but most people (teachers/school administrators) just don't have the time or energy.

(even if you do invent a way to get, for want of a better word, lazy teachers to actually teach real knowledge, it may still be impossible to persuade political systems to actually act on this.)

I must also contrast this experience of university with my own. Cambridge mocked answerable questions and wrote-learning. In addition to (semi-optional) lectures, we learned in weekly one-on-(three to five) sessions with professors and grad students who would grade your problem sheet and then talk you through it (normally while firing off hard questions to probe how well you understood the material.) I had three or four of these sessions per week, excluding time towards the end of the degree where we were working on an independent project and that took up some time slots.

Cambridge (+probably Oxford) do this in spite of the prevailing education climate - they are largely autonomous and no British politician would ever try and impose an education system on them. Everyone else, however, suffers.
I like it.

Before clicking I thought perhaps he had used CSS to render Adobe's commercially important multiple-master typeface. That would have shocked me. So forgive me for feeling a little bit let down!
Google does not pay tax in Ireland either, even at low Irish rates. So while it is great that it employs people there and it might anyway, Ireland is integral to its tax evasion strategy, as is the Netherlands.
If any abuse complaint goes 24 hours without a response your server will be powered down. If you are hosting user generated content that will generate a lot of complaints, you need to be responsive.
Why bother with a phone manufacturer when you can have access to all communications directly at the network provider? Much more convenient.
How to create an app using tables per class strategy by inheritance in Hibernate
WHO ranks the French health care system as the best in the world, and the expenditure per capita is less than Switzerland (at least in 2007), so I'm not sure where you're getting your numbers from.

I also suspect you'd have a hard time finding private companies willing to spend $9 billion on a particle accelerator with no foreseeable profits.

I'm generally against subsidising any industry, but letting Google and Amazon get away with dodging tax is effectively the same thing as a subsidy. Speaking as someone who owns a small company, I'd rather the playing field be level.
We don't know. We just went with the more plausible explanation, instead of jumping through hoops to avoid it.

Apple not being a priority for NSA until Oct 2012? Pfft.
When a company does what's asked of it by a government and people are upset with the company something's seriously wrong. A company's main priority is typically to make money within the bounds of the law. A government's should be to improve the quality of life and uphold the moral values of its citizens.

I have a feeling had Apple been first on board rather than last the journalist would argue that Microsoft were evil for not complying with a government request and that Apple clearly had the vision to help the nation's security, but maybe that's just me?
What is the whole "people like you" bit?

He made a valid statement and didn't express much else of his opinions or state of mind.

Unfair to immediately lump somebody into a pre-judged bucket for a single statement.

That's the real bullshit here.
JQuery Special Events API
Gestão de Resíduos em Análise no WASTES 2013
Actually I don't think you can prove he was higher ranking one way or another. It would appear, based on the wide variety of documents he stole, that they were in fact hacked – with Snowden abusing his privileges on NSA computers. No single person would have access to that much compartmentalized information without being at NSA HQ.
The black market for mobile phones.
A little.

It's undemocratic to explain the behavior of officials behind closed doors with "they could know better".

It's not their job to do anything by themselves because they "know better".

Their job is to inform the public for what they do, so it can make an informed decision (based on it's interests).
Windows natively has several data collecting operations on any machine with Windows installed.

Each time you visting a page, IE sends the URL over to be "checked" by Microsoft.

Each update, a summery of all installed packages are collected and sent to Microsoft in order to "improve the experience".

WAT collects your hardware specification, including the serial number of your hard drive.

Each time you connect your operative system to the Internet, it calls home to a Microsoft server to check if the connect works. Its doubtful that they throw away the logs from this.

Microsoft can forceable push new executable code as updates, regardless if settings has turn of updates.

Microsoft word (and Outlook?) do also collect information, but it is supposed to be optional. I don't remember if its on by default, but I am rather sure it is.

Then we have semi-native application such as massager or skype. Both has messages being "scanned".

Some of the sources: https://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/privacy-stateme..., http://redmondmag.com/articles/2010/07/01/what-does-microsof...
>How would you suggest that decisions be made on questions where the necessary data to make an informed decision must be kept secret?

I suggest not taking such decisions in the first place. This is a false dillema.

In a true democracy, very little "must be kept secret".

Let's say that we believe that it was absolute necessary for the various services "to monitor everyone's mails".

While the content of the emails they monitor could have been kept secret (for operational reasons), the decision, reasoning and procedure of monitoring them should have been public knowledge and voted explicitly.
Ingress Boot Animation made with HTML5
"Apparently, they meet." What makes you say that, if I may ask?

I noticed Globo/Folha/et al haven't reported on this despite it having been revealed in December of last year.

___

On a side note...

Anyone who speaks Portuguese, I recommend the documentary "Vocação do Poder", that follows 6 electorial candidates in Rio while on the campaign trail. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI8_oz6lsbE

For those who don't speak Portuguese, search out the documentary "Send a Bullet" which looks at crime and fraud in Brazil.
Is scrum a sham?
Interestingly, other early monuments in the locality - such as Rothiemay recumbent stone circle - have been supposed to align with astronomical events and, consequently, evidence of early horology.

http://canmore.rcahms.gov.uk/en/details/1114898/

http://canmore.rcahms.gov.uk/en/site/17820/digital_images/ro...

This is a later monument, but to my mind still an indication of "pre-historic science" - and just how advanced it could be.

As an aside, I was always pleasingly intrigued by the fact that Rothiemay was furthermore the birthplace of James Ferguson...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Ferguson_(1710–1776)
When kids ask why, parents are at their creative best.
The difference these days, is they blog about it.
Vulnerability allows Hacking Facebook account and password reset within a minute
You still need to pay the bail bondsman 10% of your bail (and you don't get it back). He probably didn't have a spare $50k. The question I have is why was the bail $500k? That seems excessive.
Looks like hn do distinguish between http and https in submissions. This thread is about the same Hetzner page as the other thread, only the old thread was about the https url.

This: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr...

Old: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr...
hah thanks, I think Max Ogden came up with the name (this project existed a long time before I started working on it)
Apple had internet services since around year 2000. Apple had mac.com emails for a very long time, as well as

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MobileMe

.Mac: July 17, 2002 – July 9, 2008

MobileMe: July 9, 2008 – June 30, 2012

iCloud was launched on October 12, 2011, one year before Apple entering Prism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICloud

The main difference before iCloud was that you had to pay for it. I can however remember that I've had free .me account before iCloud, so even .me must have had enough users.