skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
MIT could have stopped this circus at anytime.

The report gives plenty of evidence that doesn't support that contention. It looks to me like the prosecution didn't care what MIT or JSTOR thought.
It will not help the discussion forward to behave like fans and treat any substantial critique as "you are one of those old fashioned mindless programming dudes".

On the other hand, in the light of Victor's achievements in industry (including "shipping" stuff) one cannot dismiss him as a smooth talking TEDdie either.

Victor has provided many crafted examples of what can be achieved in the fields of engineering, mathematics and programming, or any field of science and technology, if the feedback loop between the tool and its user is improved.

Indeed, this 30 minute talk does not compare to an industrial delivery. It has some theatre and some deliberate exaggerations or unfair treatment of society evolutions. Such is the nature of talks.

I do not think he sees the current state of affairs as a great mistake. He will surely acknowledge all practical circumstances and conceptual challenges that have made certain inferior designs survive while superior ones did not materialize.

The message is: we shouldn't accept this state of affairs as final or as one that can only be marginally improved. It can still be radically improved. The industry is still fresh - even ideas from the 60s are valid and underachieved.

I see his critique as a positive statement of hope and encouragement, not as a pointing finger to all you silly programmers.
I can get it on the UK store no problem.
Bootstrap 3 And Responsive Data Visualization
Detachment: On the scientific research of Romanian orphans
The article says that Activision Blizzard is buying the majority (about two thirds) of the shares itself. And presumably Kotick and Kelly have some personal stake in the investment group getting the rest of the shares?

I don't know if this makes them "independent," but it doesn't seem to make them owned by a conglomeration of other parties either.
>I've had nothing but pleasant experiences going through security.

Surely "pleasant" is too strong an adjective.
InnoDB Full-text Search in MySQL 5.6, Part 3: Performance
Vivendi was never a publisher for Activision, Blizzard or Activision Blizzard. It was merely their owner. Both companies as well as the merged version of them were always self-publishers. They were always independent of other publishers (sans Blizzard back in the early 90s, but that's besides the point).
Angular Backed SVGs
Grape - Build Lightweight API service in Ruby
I'm not a laywer, but I think the concern with protecting trademarks is to demonstrate that you actually have an interest in said trademark, and are not simply trolling your competitor.
By having a token royalty, they demonstrate that they do care about the trademark even when it is being used by someone they would otherwise like to hurt.
Not that it changes the ridiculousness of the matter at all, but I think their sex blog also factors in to the persecution.
Especially in a city that is consistently in the top-5 most violent cities in the U.S.

(disclaimer: I live in Flint, MI, another of those top-5 cities)
We just signed an enterprise deal with Adobe. Would you like to do more?
I'm Vivek, one of the founders of interviewstreet. Our product helps companies screen programmers using coding challenges.

We started the company in 2009, failed thrice, got into YC in summer 2011, raised money from Khosla Ventures and now a strong product with tons of top tech companies as our customers - Facebook, Amazon, Walmart, Palantir, Evernote, Riverbed and so on..

Till a few months back, we were relying almost entirely on inbound sales and then realized there's a huge opportunity to go after.

We're scaling fast and looking to hire a Inside sales manager to maintain, and exceed, the bar we've set. The expectations are frighteningly high. Are you up for the challenge? As an Inside sales manager, you will be responsible for:

>Ensuring that every customer has an amazing experience with the company's products

>Walking customers through the product if they've any questions

>Responding to inbound sales and support requests via telephone and email

>Engaging in outbound lead generation (blogs, twitter, facebook, etc)

>Pushing the limits

Who we are:

We're a team of 25 almost equally split between Mountain View, CA & Bangalore,India. This role is in Mountain View. You'll be working with an incredibly smart team that is comprised of ACM-ICPC world finalists, ex-Googlers/Amazonians and most importantly people who are fired up & inspired to get things done no matter what. We can guarantee that this will be a place where you'll realize your full potential.

Benefits:

a. Healthcare b. Dental c.Competitive salary d. Stock options e. Your choice of gear

Interested?

If this sounds like you, come find us. Send us an email with:

a. The biggest non-technical hack you've done. An example where you (or the rest of the world) thought it wasn't possible to do but you ended up figuring out a way to get it done.

b. A simple program in Go that prints "Hello world" 100 times - you're going to be interacting with hackers. Even though a CS degree isn't essential, the curiosity to understand and learn a programming language is.

c. The biggest failure you've faced till now.
Yes. That is exactly who this is.
The actual report is here:
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-624

Apparently they did hire 3,200 more people as well. Although it does look like the percent increase in misconduct is greater than the percent increase in employees, new employees are often more trouble at the start and hiring quickly often forces you to lower your standards.

I actually left a laptop in a stacked security tray a while back and the TSA called me asking about returning it the next day and kept it at their offices for me for the month it took me to get back from Asia for it. So there's definitely some good people manning the line as well. I didn't expect to get back something I made the mistake of forgetting.
Principled != crackpot. Crackpot is an insult intended for the feeble minded and is used to reduce any opinions a person might hold on a subject as reject-able out of hand.

Over unity energy generation from the vacuum is rightly labeled as 'crackpot' imo, Stallman's position, while extreme should (again, imo) not be labeled as such.
Ten-year venture returns still lag the broader markets
BladeRF, USRP
I thought as much. If the goal is to not write code then writing stored procedures is akin to writing code, just in a different language.
The funniest part is the ancient version of IE they are using in the screenshots.
Negative. The problem with conspiracy theorists, or any group for that matter, is that they are so easily put into that group and then dismissed as a whole. Personally I think at the core of the matter is an enormous imbalance of importance placed on the authority or source of an argument, to the detriment of argumentative logos. Possibly some form of the genetic fallacy.

For example, you deride an entire "group" of people for believing their postulations to be 99% probable and assert that instead they are more likely 1% probable. I would say you just fucking pulled those statistics out of your ass, the very act for which you are deriding the group for! Such irony in a single sentence has been seldom found.

Sure, I agree with you that there are a plethora of quite frankly ridiculous conspiracy theories (not to be confused with the theorists themselves, who can often be just as ridiculous). That being said though, you are in fact completely wrong when you say "In the overall game it simply makes much more mathematical sense to treat conspiracy theorists as crackpots since they will so often get it wrong." and here is why.

Conspiracies are a driving factor throughout history. To ignore them in the past and in the present is to dismiss the very core their historicity. To dismiss them based on some flawed, arbitrary assertions about mathematical calculations that have no academic backing is simply daft.

Also, as I said before, there are indeed plenty of logically absurd theories... but why exactly are they absurd? One, they defy logic, but more importantly, the more absurd ones are often based on no evidence whatsoever. If you have such a difficult time sifting through the completely absurd to find the logically probable/possible in order to more finely tune your engagement, that is a deficiency on your part, and no one else.

I'm trying to think of an analogy to this... It's very much like the general reaction to homeless people. Many people have a general reaction to homeless people in which they assume they are either scammers, drug addicts, or lazy. They may have had a bad experience with a homeless person, and now seem to think almost all homeless people are not worth the time/effort. I understand how they can come to that conclusion, but the statistical facts do not support their argument, and, similarly, the statistical facts do you not support yours either, because you have essentially taken the same approach to "conspiracy theorists".
Note that this is overall misconduct, not misconduct per employee. What has happened to the TSA's budget (the majority of which is spent on staffing) over the past three years?
Productivity Tools We Love
No, that's a huge leap, actually. You could go make a certificate right now for your web site and keep the private key private. I could visit your site and verify that the signature is the expected one. If you and I are both diligent, we can know that our TLS session is safe.
Panasonic intros cordless landline smart handset running Android
You seem to forget that they are replacing AT&T.

I guess being cynical is understandable but you shouldn't over do it: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2013/jun/19/google...
so you're an ex creepy, overreaching and domineering person with no respect for individual rights? why should we trust you now?
For the record, I know plenty of alive people in Detroit :)
OK, I will take the bait. What do you think the greater machine is?

Here is my take:

You do not need to posit an organized Illuminati-like conspiracy to have cause for concern. We can find plenty to worry about even if we limit ourselves to properties of the system that are either emergent or driven by natural human behavioural traits.

For example, a lot of people in positions of authority got there because they have authoritarian instincts, and seek self-validation not only by dominating and controlling others, but by ensuring that their position of authority and dominance is recognized by others.

This is very human, and very instinctive, and operates at an unconscious, almost sexual level. The alpha male will seek to dominate the pack and to remind competing males of his superior status. You do not have to consciously be aware that you are seeking power, money and sex, but you are, nonetheless.

This instinct can operate both consciously and unconsciously. Those who make decisions to concentrate power and authority, to separate and elevate themselves from the general population - they do not have to be consciously aware of what they are doing. They can and will rationalize their beliefs and actions to make it fit in with the dominant culture of their peers. This process is called confabulation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation) and everybody does it all the time - it is the only way that we can make sense of our lives and live in a human body without going insane with the sheer irrationality of it all.

These instincts manifest themselves in lots of small, individually inconsequential decisions. Normally, this is OK, because our social and bureaucratic technologies are (were) too ineffective for too much harm to be done. The ongoing march of modern information technology, however, looks likely to change that, meaning that the unconsciously malicious instincts of humans in positions of authority can become amplified and magnified.

I would be particularly worried if this resulted in a feedback loop - so that increased power and increased power-seeking behaviour mutually reinforce one another in a runaway process. I cannot readily identify such a loop in operation though -- can anybody else?
> That is already the reality of Python and Ruby.

And, Common Lisp and Scheme and Java and C and C++ and SQL and Pascal and BASIC and C# and JavaScript and ... pretty much every language that is (or ever has been) both popular enough to have interest enough to support multiple implementations and not proprietary to a single vendor.
What's so difficult to understand? Governments "negotiate" with public sector unions and the taxpayers foot the bill. Public sector unions and union members then support the party of government (currently more the Democrats than Republicans, but that's subject to change) with money and legwork. It's a great game until the government runs out of money; see Detroit for the current stark object lesson in that.
It depends on what you're doing. If you're making an internet toaster, go buy an arduino. If you're doing anything CPU intensive, or if you're not familiar with embedded systems tooling, cross-compilation, Yocto or similar build systems, Atom >> ARM.

I'll very happily pay $200 for this.
That depends on what you define as "their boundaries". If you define it as staying within TSA guidelines, yeah, they're good about that. But TSA guidelines are far over what I would consider reasonable boundaries.
These are quotes from the Bolt drama "A Man for All Seasons," not Sir Thomas More himself.
As a counterpoint:

For my social circle it's not remotely in the obscure category. I suspect that none of my friends or coworkers would have to look it up on Google...

This is what a liberal arts education is for.

--

Of course I realize that not everybody is lucky enough/even wants to get a liberal arts education, but the social/educational structure of America is not something I'm looking to attack this comment.
There's a false dichotomy between educated and uneducated which is perpetuated by schools, indeed may be their entire point of existence. There's also a dichotomy between exploring an idea and solving a problem.

Being ignorant is less good than being informed, but informing yourself is expensive. Becoming complacent due to your perceptions of your intelligence is foolish. Not exploring something because it's not in your skillful sweet spot can lead to failure to innovate.

So, there's nothing surprising here. If you educate yourself more you'll tap into a wealth of knowledge about how to get things done more powerfully. If you use that as an excuse to step away from solving problems then you'll likely solve fewer problems, so hopefully you'll investigate things with greater theoretical validity (or else why bother?).

More people using tools means that more people will become more informed and get more stuff done. Tools should not be made as to be inaccessible. But a technique or idea often begins as inaccessible and there may even be no way to make it more accessible. This does not mean that it is invalid and it may be that it gives people who master it greater power.

Whenever learning, don't learn for learning's sake and don't learn to meet some end point defined by your teacher---seek what the master's sought. They often are solving real, practical problems and by training yourself to look for that perspective you can understand how to arm yourself with their knowledge in the way that they did.

A person who generates knowledge in effort to solve a hard problem is usually one who is more than willing to throw that knowledge away if it does not serve them.

Many problems are no longer as hard of problems as they once were. This is directly due to the fact that advanced technologies have become increasingly approachable and because larger bases of people have improved their mental technologies so as to use them. This is a great thing, but it's not an end state---harder problems still exist and gains can be made by tackling them. People can learn more things and more powerful ideas can be made the foundations of new mental technology to improve anyone's ability to solve problems.

None of this is controversial.
Here is a spec sheet from '96:

http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/slws011d/slws011d.pdf

Back then they used a 40 bit rolling code.

Found here: http://auto.howstuffworks.com/remote-entry2.htm
It's right there in the slide: decrypt and discover.

It's interesting that they appear to seek out encrypted traffic (PGP, VPN, etc) as a red flag.

So, it appears the more security conscious you are, the more likely it is that you'll come under scrutiny.
Next iteration of Numba - The core language ideas
Announcement and discussion thread:
https://groups.google.com/a/continuum.io/forum/#!topic/numba-users/FCektSC4sUQ
The joke wasn't lost on me, it's just a super-tired slashdot era thing that needs to die.
Aaagh! Everything is tinfoil! Where did this tinfoil even come from! Get this tinfoil away from me! Aaaagh! Heeeeeeeelp!
At what point do we, as a society, say you should probably create new works in order to feed yourself, your partner, and your cats?

Copyright, like patents, is an economic policy. By guaranteeing a limited-term exclusivity you encourage the creation of new works. This cuts both ways: if the term is too short creators are disincentivized, as anything they create will shortly be copied before they can make substantial money from it; if the term is too long you can just coast forever without creating more work.

There's a balancing point here. I don't think there's anything intrinsically justifying that you should be able to make a living off a work you wrote 30+ years ago.
Impossible to add the chains with a touchpad.
Etcd, a key value store for shared configuration and service discovery
The details of the design of studies is critical in assessing most research and the field of psychology is no different. While it is incredibly frustrating that it's not possible to see the full paper to make a reasonable assessment, this small result with no long-term data is likely to become headline fodder.

It would be great if it were true, but there's not enough information available to draw any conclusions at this point.
Responsive Menu Using Trunk.js
Advice for people who ask you for a website
Not exactly. Compromising a CA would let them fool a browser into thinking that a fake Google certificate is a real one. However, if Google were diligent, they could publish their valid cert signatures anywhere they like, and users could check the signatures of the certs that are presented as genuine.

The TSA can't crack or impersonate a cert at will; they can only 1) try to trick you into accepting a phony one or 2) demand/steal the private key from the site.
Some extra information for context:

Here's something I learned in the last week I didn't know: the Senate Intelligence Committee that Wyden sits on has explicit authority to de-classify anything it sees fit. All it takes is a majority vote.

Not sure if that's ever happened, or if any senator on the committee has asked the committee to even vote on declassification. Now might be a good time to start asking those questions.

Also, as much as the committee is supposed to have access to everything that is classified, in practice this is not the case, there have been a few cases where information was only shared from the Executive to the leaders of the majority party in each legislative body. I believe (but this is wild speculation) that there have also been cases where individual senators have asked for material and have been rejected. It's not as if each senator can go and look at whatever they want.

What's been happening in practice is that these committees are a sieve; information gets out via political leaks. So there's a big trust problem between the intelligence agencies and the legislature.

Finally, as much as "National Security" is trotted out as a reason not for elected representatives to talk to the people, constitutionally I'm not so sure that the executive can bind the legislature not to talk in any way it sees fit. What's the president going to do? Start arresting and imprisoning senators? Not happening. Another case where somebody, anybody just needs to stand up and do their job.

So there's the way things are constructed to appear, and there's the way things actually work. It's good to know both.
Cellphone numbers can very easily be abused to steal money (premium SMS), to steal my identity, to spam me in the middle of the night, to pull me out of the "zone" by calling me/messaging me during work hours, to track my location while roaming and probably a lot more stuff that's not currently apparent to me.

Also, my phone number is known to some identity providers I trust. If they sent me an SMS asking me to click a link, I might be inclined to follow that link. This is quite right despite the sender being very easily spoofable because nobody but these identity providers know my phone number.

No. I'd rather be very careful with that number.
>"If the candidate did not take the time to use your product, why are they sitting in your office asking for a job?"

Because my personal level of interest in what exactly you're selling may have little/nothing to do with my ability to deliver and passion to improve the infrastructure you use.

I'd say it's certainly a good thing if a person understands and is passionate about your product end-to-end, but it's a bit much to try and make a hard and fast requirement.

By the way, I'd never heard of Zaarly and found it a bit irritating that I had to scroll through 3 pages of marketing with four uses of "amazing" (The new beautiful?) to find the small "Purchase shippable items from select communities »" link in order to see what exactly the site is offering.
That's good to know about Bali, but from what I understand Java is very close to living under Sharia. Having lived in Saudi for a while, I can report that its about as terrifying as you've described there.

PS I think the last time I ran into you on HN a beer was offered, then we had a fight about a movie on twitter (I forget what). If your adventures ever bring you to London, that beer offer is still open.
Microsoft Will Have to Rename SkyDrive, BSkyB Wins Legal Battle
I can't think of a single complaint I have with the TSA, of which I have many, which could reasonably be blamed on unionization.
Seems to me that people aren't too concerned of nameless, faceless people looking through their stuff so long as people they know (parents, spouse, friends..) don't see it.
Indeed. It's our family life that allows my wife & I to go the extra mile when needed because the other is able to jump in & take care of all the chores & such.
The Alioth benchmarks do a really bad job of capturing the reality of language-related performance issues. The choice of specified algorithm is going to dominate all other concerns in their benchmark, and that's not the sort of problem people face in the real world, perhaps out of rarefied HPC circles where benchmarks on one quad-core machine aren't relevant to anything.

Performance handling in high level languages is more about knowing where the landmines are (total heap usage in GCed languages, various troublesome malloc()s, weird caches in dynamic languages...) and trying to figure out as quickly and cheaply as possible if the program you're planning on writing is going to hit them, and how much it's going to cost to mitigate it. It's not relevant if the actual runtime overhead of the problem is 5% or 1000x, the end product is either fast enough or it isn't, and the workaround is either viable or it isn't.

Trying to protect yourself from this by picking the fastest language in a shootout isn't going to work because the perfect, gotcha-free language hasn't been invented yet. There are sound performance reasons to avoid any language, not just Perl.
Re "Person of Interest":[0]

If yesterday we were "conspiracy theorists" when we suspected things like XKeyscore, what are we today if we suspect things like "Person of Interest"-like programs?

[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839578/