skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Idea: pre-prepared websites that call to attention representatives that are against privacy (voted for SOPA, the NSA, TSA, etc.) make them available to deploy on heroku, github, s3, whatever. Then developers in support of privacy can litter the internet with them come election time.

If all these guys care about is getting re-elected, lets make it clear not supporting their constituents will seriously damage their chances.

Also love the followup idea.
Linux: We're all in this together right?
> To be clear, this is not to assert that targeted, justified intercepts should not be possible under appropriate and realistic court supervision.

Why make this disclaimer? To avoid being branded a fringe anarchist?

It seems to me that we should absolutely be building intercept-proof communication privacy to the best of our ability since A) there's no such thing as perfect security and B) anything of importance eventually comes into contact with the real world where governments have immense power and don't need backdoors to do their job.
What is going on with the photo of Judy Chu and the guy below her? I'm referencing the duct tape.
weird, it worked fine for me. Try to just manually add it. The positive Tweet was "Thank you for supporting #privacy! You're earning my vote, keep up the good work! #defundNSA http://defundthensa.com/" while the negative Tweet was: "It's shameful that you voted for unconstitutional record collection instead of #privacy! #defundNSA http://defundthensa.com/"
Bummer!

I was really excited about this concept. I was thinking they were taking product ideas, internally vetting them, and finding 26 submissions that they were going to provide MVPs for. In return they become equity partners.

Instead, they're asking everyone to divulge their ideas, they're still selecting 26, but they want you to pay $7500 for your MVP, and if it takes off, then they want to be equity partners.

I'm a UI/UX Designer, with decent front end Dev Skills, and an incubator full of ideas. For $7,500 I'm quite confident I could find a number of Developers, with proven track records, who could assist in creating an MVP.

Oh well...
Umm what is the threat here? I think the police woman is just trying to help. Informing that what he is doing might be illegal and it's probably not a good idea.

Trying to explain to this young man that even if he doesn't like his former employer, harassment in the internet is not right way to take it forward, but going to health officials instead. I call that service.

I frankly see no reason for all this butthurt.
> The various three letter agencies had no interest in correctly predicting the USSR's collapse as it'd get them defunded.

You make a really good point here.

It's not that there's a conspiracy, or they censored themselves. There's simply zero reward in pursuing any path that leads to the conclusion that one's job is obsolete or soon will be.

With a minor caveat, I guess. Those who can figure it out without much effort will then be those who seek new employment before it happens. It's hard to predict these things however.
In my experience, it all depends on who's picking up the tab. I assume you were hired as a consultant for a project. In that case, their client was paying, so there wasn't a reason to be cheap.

(And, of course, Microsoft is a huge organization; even if some policies are standardized, the way they are implemented can still vary wildly.)
>> And there is little 'new ruler' can do to establish himself if people don't need a ruler.

How charmingly naive!

I don't know that people have needed a ruler at many times in history, but there has always been one. A power vacuum almost always results in war, revolution almost always results in war... basically humans like war and leaders. I don't think that will ever go away. We're tribal animals.

Even if people don't need a ruler, leaders will arise, and some of them will recruit violent men to force their will on others, growing into warlords. Factions will fight each other, people will die.

Better, IMHO, to have a codified power structure that seeks to eliminate or at least mitigate these flaws.
The file is a standard, but the contents are not. For the most part, that makes sense, but it would be nice if there were a few standards there. Eg, DISABLE_ALL_SERVICES=true|false. :)

More examples here: http://serverfault.com/questions/526075/fixing-services-that...

As it is, figuring out exactly how to do this has to be done for each service. It's tedious, IMO, though I understand the history of why this is the case.
Pelosi and Hoyer, whose lives were defined by the Cold War

Then I'd expect they appreciate the view that any government that perpetrates pervasive surveillance upon the populace at large with no notification & no recourse is the embodiment of Evil Communism™ and the antithesis of core American values, totally violating the US Constitution.
He did a talk about Project Grok, a piece of internal Google infrastructure he created, back in April at an Emacs conference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRO3dNJx5Dw
> we need to question it every time it appears

We really don't. You playing armchair internet detective will not stop people from getting more attention than you.

What do all of those things hurt? Nothing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being a story on the internet for a few days. It's not being shoved in your face, you're not being made to read about it. You chose to join this thread, like you chose to look up those four examples of the thing you hate so much.

I would much rather question the people who spend their time trying to denounce others.
House rejects effort to cut off NSA surveillance program
He had a big problem with putting the trash cans in the walk-in, but I don't really understand why. I leave my trashcan open and in the kitchen all day everyday. Am I putting myself in danger without realizing?

A walk in is by design a closed air-flow environment. Not sure I'd really like a trashcan sitting in a closed environment with food. I usually avoid putting my garbage in the fridge.
Animated Beer Labels
I'd agree there but with a couple of caveats.

First, I went to a type of magnet school, so it was more difficult and required more initiative than most colleges.

The top tier of students were probably about 50-50 intelligence and labor, but it wasn't "hard" work per se so much as diligence. Leave no stone unturned and spend a lot of time on repetition.

On the other hand, I did know a number of highly intelligent people who were at the bottom of the class. The phrase "not engaged" comes to mind. These are 50-50 hackers and liberal arts academes at this point.

Is your disclaimer licensed under the GPL? The same disclaimer applies to my narrative here.
That was my first thought, too. I checked out where my various projects are being used on the web, something I've been wanting to see for some time, and was pleased to learn about various properties using it.
I went meta myself, sorry about that.
That's a nice view. What sucks is that you need money in order to get elected. And if you're not a millionaire already, chances are corporations won't be willing to lobby for someone proposing to change the status quo.
This kind of comment is unnecessarily mean. It's an attack on Yegge, who does not deserve the kind of vitriol you're directing. Please don't do this on HN. It's poison for the community.
> The United States, for all it's faults, is not a totalitarian state.

The US has the highest prison population per capita on the planet. It is most assuredly well on the road to totalitarianism.
Just for the sake of inane semantic pedantry, I have to ask: How do the words "honest", "humane" or "civil" correlate to "affordance" in this context?

In the book, the term "affordance" refers to any kind of opportunity for a user to exert leverage on a designed object or system. So, a hair brush has a handle, and that handle is the point at which the object (the hair brush) affords any use by the user, because the person can grab the handle and orient the bristles when the dragging the brush through their hair. Hence the book's cover design, depicting the coffee pot with the misplaced handle, demonstrating a misplaced affordance, which results in the user getting burned when they try to pour hot coffee. The mouse is an affordance on a computer, because it's the device used for pointing. The keyboard is the affordance for typing. The video monitor is the affordance for observing output. The "submit" button on a web form in an HTML page is the affordance for sending data to the web server.

When would you ever use the words "honest", "humane" or "civil" in place of "affordance"? Those are adjectives, but the word "affordance" is a noun.
Hi please see this video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrFzGKUs8-I

Love ALL your comments.

If I look tired its because I pulled two all nighters getting accepted on Kickstarter :-)
I haven't checked Udacity in a long while and it's amazing the breadth of coursework that they offer for free. It's a much better format, and more convenient, than coursera too.
The way I look at it is that anyone who gets upset over trivial details like that is almost certainly unimportant. If they were important, then calling their bluff on something so minor wouldn't be taken as an attack on their usefulness. Minor things only become major things if the person demanding them has nothing better to do.

99.9% of the time when you call peoples' bluff on stupid shit like pant color at a talk, nobody cares. Most people who demand that sort of thing have better things to be worrying about.
> just for reference, the service is _not_ operational

Your product looks really interesting and it sounds like you got some traction. What happened, if you don't mind sharing?
Less is more.

> http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Works-Communicate-Effectively-...
"I'm not saying it won't succeed, because I hope it will, mainly because I want Ubuntu as a serious mainstream alternative to Windows, but they could've tried this a lot earlier"

Ubuntu Edge or not, at the end we will have a free open source solution for mobiles running Linux or any other operating system.

I am not "blaming" Ubuntu/Mark for the late start, I am blaming GNU for not pushing hard enough. While they were discussing and criticizing Microsoft's push of a newer boot system the main vendors in the mobile space were closing our freedom to install what we like in our devices. For example, with the slow update cycles of Android on fully capable mobile devices I would rather prefer to install a good Linux distribution there.
Full-Stack PHP Engineer – Build something people love
Congratulations Geoffrey! Excited to have you on board at Pluralsight!
Yeah, one second, let me submit those idea's to you right now Mr. Doe...

As pointed out, the irony is that what is he showing is definitely not an MVP. Now if we could actually see some features in the form of collaboration assets/tools. (i.e. see lists and how you would connect for example with a minimal signup, providing skill sets and in what category(s) your idea will fall..)

Actually this gives me a great idea, and I'm afraid I won't provide you with what is pretty much a business plan for a potentially profitable venture, without you first signing a NDA, Mr. Doe.
I don't understand why the solution, at least in PAX's case, is not to ban bots. That would open up purchasing to regular human users, and since PAX is a ridiculously popular event, tickets would still sell out.
Oh so weird riders for special interest causes are okay now?
As a customer it can definitely be annoying to experience at times. My tolerance seems to vary depending on the wait times and food expectations.

A perceived upshot is that the restaurant must put an emphasis on quality at reasonable prices, otherwise they won't draw those crowds and I'm definitely not going to wait for a crappy meal.

However, the "no reservation" method itself seems to help draw crowds too. Kind of like the lines outside a night club seem to draw people. Throw in a bit of edgy branding with some cool marketing and it pulls well - having an "image" works.

Queuing is a bit of a cultural thing/expectation over here. Having someone cut in line can be a huge no no.
If someone bought their way into the queue, I could very well see it causing some highly vocal responses.
But I'm sure there are people out there trying it out.
Ah, I see. Yeah, I don't think client side caching is affected. Can't think of a reason it should be.
The only defense against government snooping is air gap. Don't connect your stuff to the Internet.
And it's about time for a new version too. I've been reading through the older version of it (2002) and was talking to family about some of the anachronisms of the book - such as Norman remarking at how much easier videotapes are to use compared to film reels, and ending off by saying "but it doesn't matter, because soon there will be no film, only videotapes". I remarked that many examples in this book would be incomprehensible to 20-year-olds ten years from now, who've never dealt with technologies like a VCR or the button-covered phones of the 80s and 90s.

All in all, though, highly recommended.
... reading blog posts doesn't scale? ;)
Vocabulary people, learn it. Geez.
What The Greatest Rock Song Ever Teaches us About Landing Page Design
A couple months ago I created an Angular app just to try it out for myself (only NYCers will find it useful: http://summerstagelove.com) and it was the first Javascript-using website, since having learned jQuery 5+ years ago, that I've made that doesn't include jQuery...I tried for awhile to get jquery.isotope.js to work but didn't know enough about the order of callbacks and such in directives, so just left it out entirely.

I've developed enough Rails apps to think architecture-first...but thinking back in my jQuery only days, the OP's question seems like it'd be a very common one among jQuery-only-front-end developers...and the top-answer is excellent: if you don't include jQuery, then you're forced to think about the architecture, and you'll be better off for it as a developer.
And they are avoiding "embarrassing mistakes" with rigid enforcement how?
If I have a dog and treat it as property (instead of a friend maybe), that relationship is certainly tyranny -- one gets to command, the other gets to listen or else. That I might sometimes pretend to be nice to it when others are paying attention, or when I'm afraid the dog might run away to someone else, is kinda offset by the fact that I am actively trying to make both of that impossible.

Sure, it is currently impeded by factors of the world it's embedded in, but in spirit it's still tyranny. Just recall how capitalism started out, and how much struggle it took to inject even the most rudimentary sanity and dignity into it. People got killed over that stuff. Now we have the constant backlash, always smiling with eyes that don't partake; just like some people want to see women back in the kitchen, others would love to have free reign back over the people who work for them. And goddamnit, if that isn't gobbled right up by some.

You can bicker about the words "pure" and/or "tyranny" all you want, but the point would be the same if he had said "have a strict top-down flow of authority", and then what? Same point, "requiring" a whole new set of responses.
20+5 GB Cloud Storage for free
So young, so naive. You still believe in that "hope and change", don't ya?
Free software means you are a terrorist to them.
I'd hoped HN would have a larger vocab, but alas.
Watch Gail Goodman's presentation "How to negotiate the long, slow, SaaS ramp of death" [1] for an interesting discussion of this. (Skip ahead to 20:42 for her description of "coaches".)

[1] http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-...

(edit: presentation title)
OpenDaylight Software-Defined Networking Codebase coming together
A question for you since you seem to know about light in media: my understanding is that the speed of light is also the speed events propagate through spacetime. So, considering a galaxy made entirely out of pure crystalline diamond, would events propagate slower in that galaxy? In other words, does time itself slow down under those circumstances, does it not change?

It could also be that the speed of light is constrained by the speed events propagate through spacetime and not the other way around, but I am most probably thoroughly confused.
Scientists Just Discovered a New Force That's Stronger Than Gravity
Next step in escalation: make a bot that books with fake names, sell primo reservations on Craigslist.
>so the first thing we're gonna use it for is to try and kill as many people as we can before they kill us?

As we always did. But let me correct you "the first thing we're gonna use it for is grabbing as much power as we can, which involves killing as many people as we can before they kill us, as they have the unfortunate tendency to resist".
Show HN: Help Make The World A Little More Accountable
Beta release of an MVP. I know it's not the prettiest design-wise compared to many of the others. But I would like to get some feedback from you guys. Thank you!
Mark Shuttleworth AMA
Having just watched the video (YouTube: vKmQW_Nkfk8) I feel nothing you say takes anything away from what he said. Most of us, including Steve, get caught up in short term goals and many of us indulge in some sort of entertaining distraction from thinking about hard problems. That's why we're not the next Elon Musk or Steve Jobs. Even if I take your word for it, that you know Steve Yegge and have many friends who hit it big, how do their failings (which are also most of ours) detract from the ideal?
The short answer is yes.

Aside from tiny losses like tunnelling, scattering from vacuum excitations and thermally-generated fields, etc., a perfect optical cavity will store light indefinitely. No laser required, only light of the appropriate wavelength and phase.

The combination of Fabry-Perot cavities and power-recycling in the optics of the LIGO gravitational wave observatory "gains" a ~100 W laser up to a few megawatts. If a cavity is formed in free space, like LIGO, then careful attention to vacuum is required to prevent loss.

ULE clock reference cavities have quality factors that are much higher, and need no vacuum, as the light propagates entirely within a glass substrate.

Edit: I should add that the "tiny losses" mentioned at the outset are precisely what prevent you from making a "perfect cavity". As the quality of a cavity/oscillator increases, the number and deviousness of loss mechanisms does too. This is especially the case at frequencies that are low compared to those at which an experimenter can iterate.

For HN, consider building a host that can run uninterrupted for 10^12 seconds (30,000 years).
Sublime Text 3: Worth the upgrade?
Firstly and most obviously, the FSF is clearly the only group that believes this garbage. Stop a minute and think about the consequences if coding to an interface made your program a derivative of whatever (first) implemented that interface... have these actually happened? does anyone even act as if they take the possibility seriously (outside the FSF's FUD)?

Remember the story of how IBM-compatible PCs came to be, with the clean-room reimplementation of the BIOS? That would be a copyright violation, except it clearly wasn't (or the clones would have been shut down). WINE and ReactOS would be copyright violations, and especially so given wanting to implement undocumented/non-public interfaces. Samba would be a copyright violation.

Any Win32 program that Microsoft didn't like, could be shut down as a copyright violation. So the browser wars would have been conducted rather differently. WordPerfect could have been blocked or forced to pay for licenses, instead of hindered by sneaky means.

IIRC the FSF claims support based on one case, where someone made singing children's toys and someone else made replacement ROMs (or maybe it was the whole electronic module?) to make them sing differently; the replacement parts were found to be a copyright violation because the performance that the toy put on, was found to be a derivative of the original performance. Which is still ridiculous (and IIRC other districts have found differently in a few similar cases involving video games), but even so does not support the FSF's extreme interpretation.
Great idea and nice execution!

But I think 2% over sales is too much for a shopping cart API!

And what Snipcart does to avoid fraud? Like the user changing the HTML attributes.
I have a dream of a mirror that reflects the light of yesteryears.

You would look into it and see the reflections of the people and scene from the exact place and time as you were now - but 10, 20, 50, 100 years ago.

It would be a type of city attraction, where people would come to visit daily, so there would always be new and interesting people (and fashions) to see.

We actually have the technology to implement this right now, with video cameras, monitors and hard drives.

But the simplicity and beauty of a device that actually slows down light to accomplish this - now that would be something.
The conference owes the conference attendees an apology for putting their speaker in the position of having to choose his wife or the attendees.

For that matter, they also owe the speaker and his wife an apology. Of course, as you could only expect from Microsoft, this has not happened.
I admire your enthusiasm but just want to remind people that it is not a done deal. People across the country tried to come together to get a replacement for Lamar Smith[1] but he still won with 63% of all votes. Change is not easy.

[1]: Smith faced five challengers in the 2012 general election on November 6, 2012: Candace Duval (Dem), John-Henry Liberty (Lib), Fidel Castillo (Grn), Bill Stout (Grn), and Carlos Pena (Ind).[14] He won the race with 63% of the vote.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Represe...

http://www.ksat.com/news/politics/Joaquin-Castro-Lamar-Smith...
Seems to be the case these days. Tricky to please both candidates and recruiters without intentionally inconveniencing the other.
> when we need to slow down light

Why do you need to do that? I'd never heard of "photonics" before now.
The NSA spying program is horrible, yes. And I think it should be halted immediately. But we need the NSA—they do important things for this country despite the bad clout they've received because of this one domestic program. That program is minuscule in size compared to the sum of the important operations that are conducted in the agency.

I want to make myself clear. I think the domestic intercepts are 100% wrong and unconstitutional. That needs to stop. But that agency is home to smart people who do other necessary work to protect us.
Check out http://www.symbolhound.com/ for a programmer friendly search engine.
After reading that I want 10 mins of my life back.
Why SQL Injection Attacks Still Haunt Developers
Yeah I am guessing that having computers made people more sendentary and less prone to violent urges etc.
We want collaborate with the most passionate and ambitious people from around the world to turn ideas into products and products into companies.

- Should be *We want to

Also, Privacy/Terms links at the bottom do not work (the links are hashes)

Doesn't seem trustworthy at all.
I can really see why people would want to keep ISO8583, and I can see why it was a good option at the time, but its dated and it shows a lot. I agree with your approach, if I didn't love my current job, I'd apply at Standard Treasury because its a good move. Baby steps into the industry with open interfaces and practices, people will catch on. The thing is, I think the power shift needs to go back to the banks from the vendors. If you can manage that convince them thats the way it should be, you'll win the market.