skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Open Letter to Jeff Bezos From ex-Washington Post Staffer Kara Swisher
I really dislike reporters with biased/loaded questions.

I was once on the operating side of a site that was controversial to several traditional/entrenched industries, but we were just a small little flea to them and they ignored us (for those that even noticed). Until a lovely blogger happened upon our site and decided to write a story about how innovative we were. All of a sudden we started getting C&D letters from very large firms that had tenuous (but expensive to litigate) claims against us. Turned out the bloody blogger had gone around asking loaded questions to them all about how we were undermining the industries' business model and what they planned to do about it. Once it was put to them in that way, we were no longer an annoying flea but a blood-sucking tick that needed burned. We had to shutdown because of that. :(

I can forgive uninformed people inadvertently asking loaded questions, because it takes practice and effort to be unbiased. However, it is inexcusable for the media to do so (even if it is par for the course).
Actually, a few recruiters found my personal address by scraping AUTHORS files like https://github.com/joyent/node/blob/master/AUTHORS
> social media is what advertisers want today

Is it? I don't see any quality advertisement on Facebook or Twitter.
Don't we stick everything into the body of a JSON object in a GET request these days?
What is the Worst Mistake ever made in Computer Programming? [null]
My understanding is that "PUT" means "make it so that the contents of this request body live at this URL". Meanwhile classic HTML forms only send lists of name/value pairs. So it would have been saying "make it so that this list of name/value pairs lives at this URL" which isn't very useful and would likely have led to widespread creative abuse and corruption of the meaning of "PUT".

Likewise, it doesn't make much sense to send a request body with a DELETE, regardless of what it contains. Not forbidden, but not really useful either.
Ask HN: How to securely purchase a project?
I am looking into purchasing a website/project. How can I assure that I do not get scammed or tricked, which method should I use to perform the transaction.
One way to look at technology education
"And thus spoke someone who has never built a REST API"

Here are Brett's projects: http://www.onebigfluke.com/

Maybe you've heard of some of them? PubSubHubbub, Google App Engine, Camlistore, Google Consumer Surveys.
Cfr https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6140631
This was handy, I'll miss it. Luckily my SO is an iPhone user so I still have her on Find My Friends...

As the Google wind-down goes on, I've lost all trust in them to keep any of their services running. I won't invest any more time into a new Google service anymore. The only question right now is Google Apps email. I like their Gmail iOS app, but I might switch to another ActiveSync provider (for iOS push support).
I believe it is just some subreddit css that implements that effect.
Here are some further ideas, how to do it:
http://www.scatmania.org/2012/04/24/visitor-tracking-without...

or simply enhance the mentioned method my HTML5 / CSS3 support (e.g. through http://modernizr.com/) and you will get even much better results as shown in this study (https://panopticlick.eff.org/browser-uniqueness.pdf).
Hadn't read it. Did so immediately. Very good read! God I love it when people hate on java. (I know I shouldn't, but I do.)
> Arguing to replace a well-defined single idiom (verbs) with some arbitrary combination of URI, custom headers, request body contents is exactly the opposite of what you want.

It may not be what you want, but it is what you'll get. It's what you'll get now, and in the future. There isn't much in the way of discoverable APIs that adhere to the data model suggestion in the HTTP spec, and that's becoming more true as time goes on. As HTTP APIs become more popular they have become less normalized. It's natural: if you want to expose something, you want to expose it as it is. Not many things adhere to the verb structure of HTTP, I'm not sure anything does unless it was designed to be HTTP from the ground up – which isn't how you should design an API, you should design it to do something useful from the ground up.
Javascript can use them just fine. Browsers without JS can't do a lot of useful things, that's why JS exists.
I don't see Obama worth a Nobel price. Maybe they will give one to Snowden next time.
I think we can officially start calling all this "transparency theatre"
I agree with CloudFlare for taking a stand and making it public - I'm a huge fan of their work and John's.

Surely CloudFlare just like any other company should take a stand against possibly pretentious bloggers, but the whole america-land-of-the-free is tiring, more so given the recent spying disclosures brought to light by Snowden and others.
The point he's making is against unnecessary rigorization of introductory calculus and I think you are getting a bit too hung up on the "function-based approach". I repeat - introductory calculus. There's lot of time and space to make things more rigorous in a class like Analysis.

When I help students with calculus most of them have no trouble with the ideas but the implementation that they are required to perform. I spend a lot of time getting them to understand the simple particulars. There are ways of teaching calculus that would dispense with some of the more rigorous aspects and make it a much more bearable experience for most.
Trojan targets Linux desktop users, steals web banking info
Doesn't work on my smartphone (Android stock browser).
I don't see what a bunch of corporate entities have to do within election campaign. This is a response the the German publics concern that a foreign government is doing content analysis on emails within Germany. This makes it harder for the spooks down in Ramstein to analyse the traffic flowing between German consumers and German corporations, which is a damn good thing. This spying might also be (mis)used for corporate espionage as well.

It isn't going to stop a German police warrant or BND investigation requiring these companies to hand over your emails, and the EU data retention polices are still in place, but it does stop the foreign spooks sticking their noses in where it isn't wanted. DE-MAIL, is as you say, bullshit, but that isn't why this is really about.

I know that from my GMX account I can email someone on a Web.de account, and even if the Internet decides to route my email over the Atlantic first or through Frankfurt where I hazard a guess the NSA will be doing they optical splitting, it doesn't matter.

If they want to read my emails they have to brute force that or have a copy of the keys.

This is a small, but great step forward in my opinion.
there are several escrow services out there which are not meant especially for web projects but you could use them.

it depends on the country of buyer / seller, the amount we are talking about and so on... there are several ways of buying something securely.
Like he pledged to close Guantanamo, protect whistleblowers, and so on? He lies more than the Bushes or Clinton ever did.

I think at this point he's just a puppet of a fascist machine, and until it collapses, we're going to face more of the same -- an empire on its last legs.
Listening into communications between known terrorists is legitimate. I'm sure this function has "protected" me in some abstract sense.
Labeling somebody as a patriot should not be seen necessarily as signalling approval.

I would not hesitate to label anyone in the military who enlisted[1] for non-selfish reasons[2] a patriot. I think it would be inaccurate to claim otherwise.

[1] Somebody who was drafted may or may not be a patriot.

[2] Reasons that I would consider 'selfish' for these purposes include "I wanted to see the world" or "GI Bill".
Catch22
How can they run their service if they don't have a solid understanding of the flows and the consumption of resources their customers are using?

I don't think they watch your site in the way you mean it: they are content-agnostic.
CRUD doesn't cover the whole world, but it's a good start to cover the most frequent 80%. Saying just because it's not 100% let's make all 100% more complex by removing the unifying principle under it makes no sense.
Any "civil officer of the United States" can be impeached. In fact, judges are the majority of officials that have been successfully impeached. Calls for impeachment are more often frivolous than they are serious though.

How do you know the court has continued to rubber-stamp the activities it considers unconstitutional?
In my mind, two HTTP methods exist: encode things in the URI or encode things in the body of a request.

Go read the RFC definition of PUT and report back. I can never understand it. If anything, PUT needs to be retired in favor of something unambiguously specific like CREATE. In fact, why not go all the way and make all HTTP methods just CREATE, READ, UPDATE, DELETE? That's the only change I (as a nobody) could get behind.

We're not kinda new to REST. REST has formally been around since 2000 and people have been using it heavily since a little before 2008.

Browsers seem to not want to support anything other than GET/POST in forms, so we hack it with running other methods over GET with _method params. Why bother? Just use GET/POST and let the endpoint denote what your intentions are, then have the server side code validate, perform the operations, return results, etc.

(Still rambling: I think one reason REST methods (not URL structure) bother me is it allows lazy (or inexperienced, or incapable) server side programmers to just allow what the client wants. Oh, the client wants to DELETE? Sure. They know what they're doing. No ACL/ownership checks needed). Removing the ability of the client to forcefully say "CREATE/DELETE" may (may) remind the programmer (who is in an outsourced operation in CantProgramistan) they are responsible for the data, not the client asking (asking, not demanding) for operations on the data.)
In general, a very nice thing and thanks for sharing! But...

1. Are you sharing the raw data? (It would be great!)

2. It would be useful to see frequencies (e.g. as sizes of nodes).

3. Why we cannot see 'git', 'ls', 'cd'?

4. At the first glance things like "pytho", "sourc", "worko" look like a glitch.
Also, when there is a cluster of commands starting with the same thing, the subgraph is hardly informative. How about scaling text (instead of cutting them)?

5. When it comes to a measure of co-occurrences, a nicer quantity than correlation is the following - http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/6047/does-this-quan... with a direct interpretation of "how does the observed coincidence rate correspond to the expected one for independent variables".

I used it a few times (after testing other measures of co-occurrences (also: conditional probability) and being dissatisfied by results, especially ones favouring edges for big or small nodes). Examples (with their recipes) below:

My StackExchange visualization:
https://github.com/stared/tag-graph-map-of-stackexchange/wik...

And my visualization of themes in books:
http://stared.github.io/wizualizacja-wolnych-lektur/polish_b...
The people are trusted with the interpretation of Constitutionality and government legitimacy through Article I, Section 2, Paragraph 1, Article I, Section 3, Paragraph I (as amended), Article III, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the US Constitution, Article VI of the Constitution, The First, Second, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Amendments to the Constitution.
Spoken like someone who has never looked at any of the other stuff that Brett Slatkin has worked on. PubSubHubbub to name just one.
No matter how I try to parse that it doesn't seem to make sense, neither as a straight reply, nor as satire/joke/irony.

Can you elaborate? Sorry if I'm being thick ...
I think that language (at least English) fails us here. The word "creative" can be used to mean both "relating to or involving the imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work" [1] or "resulting from originality of thought, expression, etc.; imaginative" [2]. It seems that most people identify the word more strongly with the artistic sense of the word, in which creativity is a proxy for a kind of self-expression that is not bound by any rules, logic, or structure. In doing so, they seem to mistake one of the more visible manifestations of creativity with its essence, which really lies in the "originality of thought" and "imagination" of the creative person.

If we had a specific, unique, and widely used word for the "artsy" free-expression type of creativity, I think the confusion many people express when you try to convince them that mathematics is a creative endeavour would be greatly diminished.

[1] http://oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english...

[2] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/creative
Alternatively, quit your whining that you entered a profession where you're not as marketable, and don't minimize the problems people have even if they appear trivial.

This being HN, by definition devs are certain to be over-represented, as well as their problems (real or imaginary!).

Also, since I know I am out of my peer group here, I hope that as I learn from fellow HNer's, I can also contribute, however minutely, and in this instance, by sharing perspective from my neck of the woods.

As to marketability, (something you also suggest) it varies across professions and disciplines, and I have no problem with that per se. From where I stand, the problem, as defined by you, and many others in other HN posts over the years, appears akin to complaining of flies when you are drinking from a river of honey.

Of course, there are annoyances in every facet of life, but from where I am looking at things, all I see is a bunch of fat piglets squealing that their milk is cold.

tl;dr - Peoples' problems are peoples' problems. Other peoples' problems don't make them go away, but they sure help provide some much needed PERSPECTIVE!
Programming Made for Humans
It doesn't matter. It's what advertisers want, and those are the ones paying the network.
This is exactly right. I don't want to have to "trust" anyone that things won't be abused. I want a real system of checks and balances such that abuse cannot happen and when it does it will automatically be brought to light.
I think you should eat brussel sprouts. My opinion entitles me to publicly deride you for failing to meet your moral imperatives. To do anything else makes you complicit in the great evil intrinsic to non-brussel sprout consumption.

I am a one dimensional human being who can easily assess the complexities in your life, so we're cool with this broad statement, right? There's clearly no other reasons you could be avoiding brussel sprout consumption.
I think the argument was to remove just the unused verbs. I think GET, POST, and HEAD are the ones that make up 99.9% of all use on the web and those are the ones the author thinks should be the only verbs in HTTP.
"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel". Particularly used in the negative tense (calling someone unpatriotic). Hermann Göring did the same thing.
How to secure and encrypt your OS X Mail messages with GPGMail 2
You are right in that this Telekom solution does not allow for truly secure communication. However, it does prevent men in the middle from snooping on your emails, which is a step in the right direction.
Cultural Differences -- in a nutshell
I get that a lot, actually.

Still trying to figure out what it means, but thank you.
That's exactly how I do it. Why wouldn't the session be treated as a resource?
Music @11:18 is cool! Wish I knew it.
I'm not trying to say the recruiters are pleasant or anything. I just feel like the amount of complaining about recruiter emails is disproportionate to how inconvenient they actually are.

There's nothing wrong with disliking the emails--a lot of people get recruiter emails and just silently ignore them; a few complain loudly about them, and that's who I'm talking about.
I my mind, there are only two kids of HTTP transactions: Those that can be repeated over and over safely, and those that can't.
do you even internet, bro? what is this jank text host
Introductory calculus classes are hardly ever rigorous. The only formalism you see is functions and limits, and that's a very useful one, far from unnecessary, it might just not always be motivated appropriately by poor teachers who themselves have little understanding of its usefulness. Your interpretation is also very far from what he has actually written. I edited my parent comment to make what I mean more clear.
That isn't the point is it? The step forward here is that the comumunications between these providers is now encrypted by default and foreign entities such as the NSA will now have a harder job to do traffic and content analysis on German emails being sent to and from German nationals.

I don't have a problem with a German judge in a German court, granting a search warrant with reasonable grounds where all checks and balances are in place. I do have a problem with secret courts with secret laws and gag orders hiding this kind of thing from the public.

If foreign intelligence agencies are allegedly granted unhindered access to their servers then I see that as a scandal. Have you got any evidence to back up that claim?
I'm curious if the blogger would ask the same of Google? A quick search shows that Google has about 334,000 pages from the site in question in its cache. Would the blogger suggest that Google should be required not to index this website?

It's a faulty analogy IMO. Cloudflare chooses to let this company pay CloudFare for services provided. It is 100% CF's choice as to whether they accept this person/company as a paying customer. Google isn't asking for money for their index. There's a massive difference there. In one case, the paying customer agrees to follow CF's TOS. In the other case, Google agrees to follow the site's robots.txt and meta tags (which operate almost as a proxy for a TOS).

No, nor would it be right for us to monitor the content that flows through our network and make determinations on what is and what is not politically appropriate. Frankly, that would be creepy.

This reads as, "We don't have any filters whatsoever - anyone can be a paying customer and, as long as they pay their bill, we'll let them use our services no matter what." That's just disingenuous - no company operates that way. Take, for example, a case where Group A uses a CF-hosted site to attack Group B. Group B complains to CF - does CF take the same stance? I doubt their lawyers would approve. I suppose CF could now backtrack and say, "See that line where we say 'politically appropriate' - we're really talking about censoring people, not about copyright/attacks/etc." If that's the case, they need to take this post down and have a re-write in which they make it clear what they mean.

Or what about DMCA takedown notices? Is CF's stance just to thumb their nose at them and say, "Nope - we aren't even going to investigate."?

What about pirate sites - is CF saying, "We don't want to know. We're just closing our eyes and ears and just letting whatever happens happen." Bull#%*^&

Perplexing.
good article on cost and performance benefits of cross-trained public safety workers in sunnyvale:

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/01/local/la-me-sunnyval...
Extending this, a normal power lens by definition "sees" about what your eye can see, a telephoto much, much more.
What sort of magazine attempts to intimidate the objects of its reportage by front-loading FUD (and poorly informed FUD at that) into its inquiries?

Not the sort of magazine that anyone here would read or support, I would hazard. Let these hacks run themselves into the ground — for the second time, apparently.
What moral imperatives were implied?
I was guessing the pirate bay which has been down repeatedly lately according to the headlines here
It is easier than installing Windows (partition layouts in the Ubuntu live cd are much nicer than what Windows provides).

You can also get a machine with Ubuntu pre-installed and supported, see system76.

They will have commodity Ubuntu Touch devices next year. They won't be powerful enough to take advantage of the convergence features Canonical wants to push, this device will. Carrier devices will also be horribly crippled by vendor bloatware to an even worse extent than Android because Canonical is literally selling the soul of its OS for potential market share.

You can already put Ubuntu Touch on a Nexus 4, and I bet next years Nexus Tier will see an Ubuntu Phone version as well. No problem there, nothing to do with this crowdfunding campaign. This is all about making a phone with extremely high end hardware and storage to act as a desktop replacement, period.
Good point. I mistakenly thought that they were going to rewrite the email addresses in git commits, it appears that is not the case.
I'm sorry, I must have missed the <hyperbole> tags.

Yes, the comment is embellished, but the only place where GET and POST are the only verbs is in a basic web browser. Step outside that world, and the other verbs are in use every day…and intermediary devices - with no knowledge of the business logic of the target server - accommodate those verbs, with proper behavior for the most part. Moving those to the URL means that intermediaries cannot disambiguate the intent.
Mark, I agree. I think that the situation is this: politicians, in the short term, view the security side of the security vs. freedom debate as the best option. If you can stop a terrorist attack from occurring by infringing freedom, then do it. An attack will make you look much worse than a few intelligent people being upset about privacy invasion. That, sadly, is the unfortunate incentive happening here.

I think this short term benefit of always choosing security over freedom has always been too tempting for politicans and leaders not to do it. The founders recognized this, which is why the 4th Amendment, along with the rest of the Constitution, is supposed to be enforced by the separate branch of government that is the Judicial Branch.

But you know what? The Judicial Branch hasn't kept up with the Executive at all. The Executive Branch has huge agencies within it. The Judicial Branch is just a few judges and their staff.

Why isn't there a Judicial Branch agency that safeguards the Constitution from the other two branches?? Why couldn't this agency have a bunch of people with Top Secret clearances working for it who answer to nobody but the Supreme Court and can be contacted by Edward Snowden type whistle-blowers whenever someone feels the folks they work for are undermining the Constitution?

We need a Constitution Protection Agency that is part of the Judicial Branch. Their entire job should be going after the bastards in the other two branches who go against the constitution.
99.9% What? Has nobody on HK ever used REST either as a consumer or producer?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer...
The article doesn't present a compelling case for it, though. It points out some quirky aspects of HTTP's history, and concludes "therefore let's remove the verbs" while ignoring the fact that lots of people are literally using the verbs, successfully, right now, and the fact that there's this whole history of SOAP and REST and why having arbitrarily lots of verbs might be a bad thing. It should at least dimly acknowledge those things, before baldly asserting "let's remove the verbs and let people define their own stuff." That's what SOAP did and it failed.
Real senators are not afraid of the transparency that's being championed by journalists who don't have salaries. (Fake senators prefer legislation that's written by lobbyists, contains thousands of pages filled with gifts to campaign donors, and isn't even read by any real senators before being voted into law.)