skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Again you can't change it by voting for candidates when they all bow to the same master. You must first remove those who control the system.
"Mir takes it a step further, now wm and toolkit developers will have to target either just Wayland, and lose out on the vast Ubuntu userbase, or target just Mir."

Won't the toolkits simply support existing widget libraries? I mean GTK-Mir and GTK-Wayland or QT-Mir and QT-Wayland &c? Else there will be something of a dearth of applications! I'm genuinely asking as this is an area I don't know much about.

PS: There is a privacy settings manager in system settings probably as a result of the reaction to the Amazon search thing.
Meh, this is simply a symbolic move to win the election. Our govt cares jack shit that everything is monitored by foreign powers.
I'm actually an economist and I use it all the time.
Wow, what a crap article. I've got a more to-the-point headline, if Mr. Vaughan-Nichols has trouble coming up with another: "World Doesn't Stop On A Dime To Fix Problems: Must Mean Nobody Cares". Classic spin-down.
> and JSON is code

JSON is data. It appears to be JS code, but JSON is data. Data is not code ( http://www.c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?DataAndCodeAreNotTheSameThing ). That's why the idea of data holding parsing directives is silly. If you want to do that, then embed that in the data (hold a MsgType key in the data records). There's no need for comments unless you are trying to use it for something other than raw data.
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This is what makes Munroe so awesome. It's one thing to be able to make nerd comics. It's another thing to put in the effort to make accurate time/location maps of various movies [1], or attempt to explain money with all sorts of relative comparisons [2], or think up weird google searches and show the results [3]. It's a completely different league to execute on huge projects like this in such a novel fashion (as well as the "umwelt" one [4] which showed one of fifty different comics to the reader, depending on their location) that make Munroe so unique.

[1]: http://xkcd.com/657/

[2]: http://xkcd.com/980/

[3]: http://xkcd.com/887/

[4]: http://xkcd.com/1037/
Failing to pass the law but coming close to passing the law means literally nothing. That is not a victory.

And have you talked to people outside of the Internet about it? Plenty of people didn't ever care, and are now upset with Snowden for even having leaked what he did.

This is not going to "pick up steam" any more than it already has, short of non-spying related leaks (Obama killed a guy with his laser vision, for example).
That example is fine, but you wouldn't want a long comment getting loaded into memory because the parser doesn't know any better.
Tweet-favoriting is an insidious form of twitter spam.

What's weird is that almost all favoriting done by someone I don't recognize is done on a tweet that is many weeks old. It's always bullshit.
you learn it in the PL class at UMD (that everyone takes) and the compilers class (which is an elective) uses it for everything.
JSON did support comments for a time and people were starting to use it for meta data.

The problem is that JSON is not meant to be used a configuration file format and just because it's really good for information exchange, doesn't mean it's good for configuration (and vice-versa). Configuration really requires comment support and information-exchange is better avoiding it. Two standards are needed.
Yeah it makes more sense when you think of it in the context of making a living. Though it comes off as doing anything in any context is a waste of time if you're not making money, until he mentions startups
Vektor - Build Robots with Node.Js
I love George Carlin, but I don't draw a lot of political opinions from his humor! It's easy to pick villains by using "they" and "them", because it's vague. Vote the bums out. The problem really is that everyone hates someone else's representative.

I guess if you want to take something away from that Carlin video, it'd be that people are lazy. If people did more political research before voting, we could be in a lot better shape. But instead, people (myself included more than I'd like) make their voting choices based on either A) political affiliation alone or B) political ads. People don't spend enough time to really think about critical issues because they're boring--they'd rather read reviews about the new XBox, or the new iPhone or whatever. It's no fun to seriously considering farm subsidies, pension funding for people you don't know, etc.
I am building a stack trace app to analyze the relationship between the urls -> views -> templates in a visual manner
The Professor Who Printed a Handgun
Did actually anything come out of that? Any results?
How a Convicted Murderer Prepares for a Job Interview
Do something new everyday
Why You Entrepreneurs Should Write
Re the headline: duh, I'm reading HN. Anyone who has convinced themselves that this is work is in denial.

I do agree with TOA though. You have to learn to call yourself on this stuff, or get a buddy/mentor/manager who will.

Do first what needs to be done now. The backfill tasks can be saved for when you have a slow time, or really need a change of pace (to solve some kind of long-slow-thought problem, or when you're tired at the end of the day, or whatever).
Can we get the original one redone first? The animated series was excellent imho but the movie was a travesty.
It's highly unlikely that anything about the Zimmerman trial was a deliberate ploy to distract the American public from more pressing issues but... The president did explicitly weigh in on the trial which gave it more notoriety in the press. It's not impossible that he was hoping it would distract from the NSA issue.

More likely though, there are just more people for whom race relations is a bigger deal than government spying.
I see nothing wrong with preventing the publication of the exploits UNTIL they are resolved. If the company responsible for the security system does not want to resolve the security vulnerability, then they should be published.

Even though this scientist first discovered the vulnerability, it doesn't mean that someone else won't do so in the near future.
This is a great quote:

The idea of the Fourth Amendment is not to get in the way of law enforcement and intelligence, but rather to see that they do a good job by having to prove at each step of the way that they know what they’re doing, that they’re not off running down hunches and going off on wild goose chases and witch hunts.
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>This is the loudest "fuck you" Germany has given the US in half a century.

From the article:
>and would have no impact on current intelligence cooperation between Germany and its NATO allies.

No offense, but that's one pathetic "fuck you". "We're going to cancel an unsused cold war administrative policy while maintaining the current status quo on intelligence cooperation with our deep alliance".
The problem with the NSA outrage is that it's about what the NSA could do with the data, not what they have done.

The abuse of power is mostly theoretical at this point, and until we see confirmation that the NSA is using their knowledge of people for evil, it's all just speculation.

The privacy violations are simply not enough for people to care, and I'm not 100% sure they're wrong.
Why not? It's just a configuration file.
What I mean by all this is it seems Bobby Kotick could hardly care if he's running a multi-national pizza franchise, a music label, or a construction conglomerate. He's just a numbers guy.

It's really hard to tell if someone like Kotick is running the business in a sustainable fashion, or if he's just beating all the value out of the company, getting in a good run, and then dumps the company in someone else's lap when it's exhausted.
I request a hand screening every time I fly as well. But I don't kid myself into thinking I'm effecting change.
The Pentagon Papers didn't impact Nixon directly (Nixon was even pleased at first since it could only affect the reputation of his predecessors). But you have a good point, certainly it seems there's finally an awakening in Congress. Even most of those who voted against defunding NSA then sent a letter to the White House saying that some form of changes would still be required.
Indeed. It took me a moment to figure out and then verify that the concept is centered on donating blood. There are certainly several clues about it, but it seems like (just intuitively) the site would increase its chances of signups if the purpose were stated upfront and clearly.
Yes he probably had the Russian laissez faire attitude to IP and had obviously not been listening at all to the training courses all big companies have on ethics and computer security.

I agree its pretty obvious that this was a deliberate action
The code editor does not appear to work at all for me with IE 8.
Meaning is better then happiness
This dovetails nicely with my feelings that too many people chase frivolous things and externalize their happiness instead of focusing on things that matter.
In a message posted to the website of Latvia's Foreign Ministry, minister Edgars Rinkevics said Latvian law guaranteed that people who broke the law suffered only "proportionate punishment".

Mr Rinkevics said the US sought a jail term for Mr Calovskis that exceeded 60 years.

"In my view, such a penalty is disproportionate to the amount, and so far no-one has been able to conclusively dispel my fears that it might be otherwise," he said.

Sanity and a spine from a politician ... now that is surprising. And refreshing. Also with US max sentences gone berserk it could be seen as a human rights issue.
IIRC one speculation on the matter was that the information that was taken would have proven that GS engages in all sorts of illegal and rule-bending trading strategies (say it ain't so).

edit: added quote from court record below.

"...because of the way this software interfaces with the various markets and exchanges, the bank has raised a possibility that there is a danger that somebody who knew how to use this program could use it to manipulate markets in unfair ways."

See page 8 http://www.scribd.com/doc/17191934/USAvSergeyAleynikov-7409-...
I think you're being unnecessarily negative. I like the metaphor Wyden had: "The side of transparency and openness is starting to put some points on the board." All-or-nothing thinking is not helpful.

But you have a point. Snowden didn't come to the public with revelations about how these programs were persecuting anybody in particular. So the objections one might raise are more theoretical, about "turnkey tyranny", or that panoptic surveillance is itself an offense against the people. I have a feeling that if a more specific case came to light, it would change everything.
Many water utilities also have a penalty rate if you exceed a given usage.
Teaching Kids Computer Programming the Fun Way
So is all opinionated design "stupid"?

I do not presume to know who you are, or what you have accomplished, but there are few people with the professional and academic background that qualify to be able to call Douglas Crockford "stupid".
It does seem kind of spammy, but to play devil's advocate:

1) At least the favorites are related to the account. I get favorites from spam bots all the time with seemingly no connection to anything.

2) I might be wrong, but I believe by default emails are only sent if the favorites come from people you already follow. So it clogs up your "Connect" tab, but not your inbox.
Reminds me how I can goof off on the internet for hours, and then as soon as I bring up vim, all of a sudden I a) have to go pee b) am hungry c) need a cup of coffee d) should clean my desk ...etc.
F# is a superset of OCaml and both are descendants of ML (ML was created here in Edinburgh). Having worked with Ocaml extensively I would say that the ecosystem around the language is pretty stale: the standard library sucks, as does the documentation for it and important libraries such as "batteries included" are under the GPL, which rules out many uses. Usability is poor: stack traces can be a nightmare to get working properly, the compiler errors are the worst I have ever encountered anywhere (including C++ templates!), there's no standard build chain, the list goes on...

I switched to Scala and haven't looked back. Haskell is very popular here in Edinburgh also.
Was just discussing Tim Sweeney on reddit when someone told me that he was publishing papers on dependently typed languages (found a public one in pdf) http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1jj40p/john_carmack...
Show HN: A read-only FUSE for Dropbox written in Python
That's the problem with the American judicial system.
Whenever they want to convict someone innocent of a bullshit crime they just assemble of idiots who just say guilty to go home to their trailer.
Have they heard of the phrase "jury of their pears" that actually means pears not of the same species.
I wouldn't consider any of the people on that jury my pears.
I knew there was a good reason XCode kept telling me it couldn't launch my app as the device was locked. So unless I missed something, if the device is locked this hack doesn't work.
I was on a jury (robbery) in the UK. It's a crime to say, afterwards, what happened in a jury room in the UK.
No, salt does work as a facial scrub. It does not dissolve because it is in a saturated solution (lots of NaCl, very little H2O). It's kind of fun to use because it scrubs for a while and then just disappears when you rinse with water.

Here's an example product:

http://www.origins.com/product/3829/10219/Bath-Body/Star-Col...
Wow, that must be the least professional promotion video I've ever seen
Spending over a trillion dollars on various nonsense wars, completely destroying the education system, massive youth unemployment, a political system with candidates entirely out of touch with their base, you know, nothing to get upset about.

The problem is if you asked a dozen people from the under-20 demographic what "Occupy Wall Street" is it's like half would have no clue.
At work i force myself to shutdown Chrome daily to prevent tab bloat.

Home is another story. I've got two instances of chrome open, split screened on my 24" monitor. I constantly bounce back and forth between the two while pages are loading or watching youtube in one while surfing in the other. I haven't seen favicons in weeks and frequently resort to Ctrl+Tab and Shift+Ctrl+Tab for navigating because the tabs are so small.

It's bad, some of them are for things I read two months ago and wanted to reference to code something but then lost interest. Can't stand to close them though cause I might just find the interest and time again and then wonder where that page was.

Bookmarks are never looked at, i have a very strong out of sight out of mind mentality.

I cry on the occasions that Chrome crashes and for whatever reasons the session can't be restored. But I purposely don't have any extension to save tabs. It's my forest fire, a destructive but necessary part of the process.
Here's the original post, with an added update:
https://medium.com/something-like-falling/2e7d13e54724

> CLARIFICATION AND UPDATE

> We found out through the Suffolk Police Department that the searches involved also things my husband looked up at his old job. We were not made aware of this at the time of questioning and were led to believe it was solely from searches from within our house.

The reason she thought "the Government" was monitoring her searches was because "the Government" told them they were looking at their searches. They clearly did not communicate that well, but I don't see how that's terribly irrational.
There are a lot of comments saying this isn't feasible. I disagree. I don't mean this as an appeal to authority, but, since people are attacking Steve Blank's background, I used to design CPUs, and I've done pretty much everything except low-level stuff like layout (which I only did in classes).

I have no opinion on whether or not there is a backdoor, but, here are some possible mechanisms.

1. Periodic SMI on steroids. Intel used to have a debug mode based on an SMI++ like mode, where the chip would periodically dump the entire state of the machine out to memory. That's not nearly as useful for debugging now as it was 15 years ago, but it could dump out compromising information to some buffer that your network card DMAs out.

2. RNG weakness.

3. Put the machine into ring 0, with no other changes.

4. Put the machine into ring 0, while transferring control to some address.

5. Access to the microcode patch mechanism.

It took me about 15 seconds to come up with those ideas (I thought of 4 when I wrote down 3). Regardless of what you think of the NSA, they have the of the best security people in the world. They can probably figure something out.

Any of these things could easily be triggered by a sequence of obscure instructions. There are plenty of userland instructions that are never used today. An arbitrary sequence of, say, 20 of them is likely to never be discovered even by brute force attack. If you're really worried, you can load up a few registers with some specific values, and now you've got a 192-bit keysize (or more, if you want).

If you want to keep it secret from the companies themselves, you're probably better off using a secret register key in some microcode instruction, since that would be relatively easy to surreptitiously sneak in after the official tapeout. Looking for a sequence of instructions wouldn't be technically difficult (I doubt the decoder/translator is on the critical path, but, Intel's might be custom, in which case it would be a lot of work to find spare space), but, it would be more work to sneak it in seamlessly. Then again, they almost certainly have free gates lying around so that post-silicon bugs don't require a full-layer tapeout to fix. You could write a program that edits the right mask layers to access those and patch your change in. But, if those actually get used for debug purposes, you'd lose the ability to make the change seamlessly, and, it's much more work than the first approach.

I suspect '5' would require restarting the machine, although you could design a mechanism that lets you hot-swap microcode. Doesn't seem worth it, though, considering how easy it is to compromise a machine if you control the hardware.
CPU backdoors that work by exploiting known software are entirely imaginable. Think of a situation where the bad guys target the network stack. They make a CPU that always executes instructions in exactly the correct way, except that if certain registers are filled with precisely specific data, the CPU turns of protection and suddenly jumps into whatever is pointed by one of the registers. Then target a network packet handling routine with that -- so if a specific malformed packet is received, the cpu jumps into the data payload. If your magic data is long enough (4 32-bit registers would be enough), no-one will ever trigger it by accident.

Doing this would be trivial with the microcode in modern x86 cpus, and while it would break (no longer trigger) if the netcode is updated (or even recompiled), that's rather rare, and cpu ucode can be updated too.
"The third development was the release of nodejs – for the first time, you could have high performance JavaScript on the server, thus potentially ending the nightmare of having “client side developers” who knew HTML/JavaScript and “server side developers” who knew .NET/C#/Ruby."

Why is this a nightmare?
Facebook just an app, not a platform.
I see your point. Thanks for your feedback.
> Who are our enemies?

Eastasia. We've always been at war with Eastasia.
Thanks, but not mine. :) I think this may be the original:

http://reasonableconversation.wordpress.com/2012/07/19/punch...
Yes, this form of social engineering is just a minor annoyance. Still, there are multiple ways of making the world a better place if you only had those 15 seconds of attention back.
To be fair to the agent, I think uploading company code to your private third party repository is pretty bad.

Especially if you are thinking (later in the article, quoting the programmer), 'they wouldn't like it', 'it was like speeding, in a stolen car'.
Some people have been thinking about that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa
Asian mobile chat apps challenge western dominance
The best is when you have a few youtube pages or other auto sound generators in the stack. "Where is the sound coming from?!"
Ex-affiliate fraud manager here.

Here's the kicker about affiliate marketing: the unethical practices exist because the system is set up in a way that there is no real incentive for mitigating fraud.

The merchant who pays the bottom line might have no idea that fraud is happening - they only see the traffic numbers going up without realizing that this was already coming in through other means (bought or organic).

The fact that the affiliate management or program might get their salary or bonus based on the size of the program (ie. traffic) does not help the situation at all. The largest affiliate in the program could be a sophisticated thief without anyone knowing any better!

There's also the issue of technical illiteracy from the operating parties - they all claim that they fight fraudulent practices, when in fact they might not even know what is affecting them specifically. This is obviously to lure in more affiliates, clueless-hopeless people who bought in (often literally in the form of SEO and other infoproducts) on the dream of passive income. They've read two-three books on white hat practices and are trying to compete with, say a mob of savvy blackhatters buying Pay Per View (read: adware) traffic and stealing the commission.

And don't get me started on the numbers.

And then you realize that to the merchant itself, it doesn't really matter, because the profit at the end is so high that throwing millions out the window still doesn't even put a dent in the side of the business.
This is all true, but it still doesn't mean the problem shouldn't be addressed.

And yes, the outrage is going to die down somewhat, the question then becomes how much is the media going to sell out their principles? Most people have to go back to their lives. But for journalists, it's their job to report on this sort of thing.

Are they going to continue hammering for answers? Are they going to continue to report on whether anything has been done about secret warrants and the FISA court?

Or are they going to give up at the first sign of fickleness in their audience and cater to their whimsy? Are they going to skip writing an article about the issue and instead write a meta-article about how people are no longer outraged about the issue?