skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We had the same experience at a VW dealer. The salesperson was nice, let us take a nice long test drive, and worked out a reasonable deal for us with little pressure. As soon as we went to the finance side, though (we used VW credit), it turned into Glengarry Glen Ross. Additional warranty, extra fees, extra maintenance plans, and on and on. We sat in what felt like an interrogation room saying "no, thank you" for 30 minutes before we could walk out of there.
There is indeed an approach to locate phones based on the signales from Wi-Fi routers. The challenge is its accuracy which is not better than 6-10 metres - so it's you are in this room or in the other room.

With cheap and tiny Bluetooth Low Energy beacons the accuracy could be down to inches. So it's about you being at the front-door, at the check-out, in front of the mirror, next to sofa bed in the furniture store, etc.

It's much more precise, thus the context for the app on the phone could be better and the experience almost magical.

And also Bluetooth Low Energy is fully supported by major phone companies (http://blog.bluetooth.com/os-season-what-it-means-to-you/) so BLE beacons like our motes could trigger different actions based on your location even if your phone is in the pocket.

You can't do it with Wi-Fi and AP infrastructure and since the beacons are wireless, cheap and easy to install there will be eventually new infrastructure build.
Feeling a little Rick Perry this morning? :-)
unfortunately integrity and business success are often negatively correlated (asserted without proof...)
So what can we do about it? This is a serious question, not a rhetorical one. Given our recent enlightenment of government agency behavior, what can we as citizens do to get things moving in a different direction?
There is nobody in the world of politics whom they can't blackmail in 5 nanoseconds. As long as you are good tool they won't say a thing. But once you get too independent...

that's how democracies work from US to Germany. They are ran by secret services. In some places it is more visible and obvious - Russia, Poland, France, Israel - in some less. However, when you think about, that's the problem with all democracies. That the intelligence communities are running them from the shadow.

Why do you think in the US all the Nazis were so cooperative with the State? Because the CIA had them by the balls - we're going to ignore your past as long as you cooperate. The minute you don't the public finds out about the war crimes you committed. Have you noticed how all politicians have their careers ended once they become troublesome to the current state of affairs. Somehow, somebody tells the media some dark secret about lovers, cocaine, money, whatever, bam! You are history!

The rest is just a show for naive.
It's a trend with certain dealerships. In my experience, the low-end car companies tend to do this more often. As a hobby, I help friends buy/negotiate cars, so I've had experience with several dealerships. Here's my list from memory:

Chrysler/Jeep/Dodge: Horrendous. I have never found a dealership I like in this chain.

Nissan: Hit or miss. One dealership was fantastic (San Diego) and one I went to was the awful "hard sell" place.

Mazda: Every one I've been to has been good save for one (unfortunately, that one is the closest to where I now live in Austin, TX.) If you live in Austin and want a Mazda, go to the dealership on the south side. They will literally throw you the keys and let you test-drive any of their cars.

Acura: Good overall, though have not been impressed with the salespeople themselves.

BMW/Mini, Lexus, Mercedes/Smart, Porsche: Have always had good experiences with these dealerships. One caveat: My fiance has a BMW and we bought it certified used, and it didn't come with a manual. A year later, despite multiple requests, we still don't have a manual. The sales experience was good, however.

Of all of the above, Lexus has been the most consistently awesome. I've been to 4 different dealerships and all were extremely pleasant.

Of note: Two dealerships have offered me jobs as a car saleswoman after I negotiated with them for friends.
How you know it's a serious, well-thought-out, easily supportable position being argued for is that it's capped off with the accusation that people who disagree are "Google fanboys".
I've audited both WHMCS and Solus. I found a half-dozen bugs in minutes of looking at each codebase. I can't express how horrible this software is that 90% of these hosts are running on - they are both an absolute trainwreck. More hacks are only a matter of time, especially when neither company responds to emails or security incidents well.
That's what CCP did with the EVE-VR demo, and it makes sense in the context of a flight sim. It'll be interesting to see what developers come up with for FPSes.

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/eve-vr-an-expe...
> Once they get on this "corporations are evil, government is evil, everything is evil!" tangent, there's no talking to them.

Nice way to dismiss my post in the most condescending way possible and without even bother to think about the point I made.

I'm not saying corporations nor governments are evil. All I said was that corporations are not interested in the well being of the average person; which they're not. The average person only matter so far as a potential source of income - and it's been proven time and time again that you don't need to respect your customers to earn their business (Sony are a great example of this - just look at the number of times they've screwed over their customers and yet how little impact it's made on their business). This doesn't make corporations 'evil', it just makes their priorities different (and anyone with even the slightest idea of how businesses work shouldn't need to be told that the priority of a business differs from the priority of an individual)

Hence my point; that since the priority of businesses are not that of the people, businesses shouldn't be allowed to influence law.

As for the government being 'evil', I'd probably say they're more a mixture of business men making decisions that are most profitable for themselves (normally an acceptable trait, but in this instance we're back at the conflict of interests argument) and the less intelligent officials who honestly believe anyone they don't understand is a dangerous threat to the United States - so they go completely overboard in their mission to protect the nation against Linux system administrators, other religions and kids who post memes on social networks. Heaven forbid they ever meet an 18 year old social network addict Muslim who works as a sysadmin; I bet some officials would probably have a heart attack.
Load balancing now available on Google Compute Engine
Tips for Novice Developers (and why you should become a Rubyist)
The dev kit is not yet consumer ready, but it does show a glimpse of the future.

The (low) resolution of the screen on the dev kit is really distracting, but more importantly we are still learning about the control schemes. Right now, it is very hard/disorienting to play FPSs on the rift (IMNSHO).
Lavabit webmail down (Snowden's service)
In terms of on-paper efficiency, I agree. However, doesn't the wi-fi network solution require shoppers to have wi-fi enabled on their device in order for it to work? Most people I know with smartphones keep wi-fi off unless they need it, and asking shoppers to "pretty please turn on wi-fi while you're shopping" is a questionable proposition.
Yes, you're absolutely correct. I'm also capable of managing several different client SSL clients (I do it everyday).

Can the average user keep track of just a few different SSL certificates and remember which one to use for which site? No, they can't, and that's why having "multiple IDs" won't work and we'll need some single centralized issuer of certificates in order for it to work "at scale".
(Hi there, I took the coursera course too!) I disagree with your compare and contrast of R as not-a-programming-language. R is absolutely a real language in every sense of the term. R, and its precursor SPlus, both have a very lispy feel. If you should ever try scheme after learning R, the biggest superficial difference you'll find is that the parentheses move:

function(x1, x2) becomes (function x1 x2)

R has a number of warts as a language (e.g. how it deals with copying objects in memory, amongst others), however it's just as "real" as Python, which also has its warts.

I do like the direction Julia's heading, even if I'd prefer to see something like Clojure/Incanter, or better still, something like Racket be the next baton holder.
Oversight happens. They responded quickly and sent an email to all their customer explaining the problem and how to fix it.
I find this quote highly offensive:

"Who for them are the World Trade Centers?"

Thousands of people died and many others thought they barely cheated death. It's insulting to compare that with the dangers of these "hackers."

Is there a Godwin's law of the NSA now that involves the WTC?
One thing that worries me about "stealth" start-ups is that it implies (not all the time, but often) a lack of market research and validation ahead of time. While there are ways to get potential customers excited about a product and challenge your assumptions without necessarily revealing everything, more often than not, it seems like the majority of the assumptions will not be tested until launch, which ends up being a few hundred thousand (or million) too late. [0][1][2]

There are some products that don't necessarily need that level of validation ahead of time. There are some founders who have networks so wide, that they can start with a userbase of 5,000 people regardless of what they build. But for everybody else, proper validation of your assumptions might be the one thing saving your start-up from failure. And not telling anybody about it seems like a pretty easy way to get there.

[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/33-startups-that-died-reveal-...

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericwagner/2013/03/19/warning-7-...

[2] http://jamesmaskell.co.uk/2013/why-vinetrade-failed/
read Infinite Jest by DFW. or watch the TNG episode http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Pursuits
Because the 'least scary class of attackers' represent the vast majority of potential attackers. This feature makes it trivial for a user error (not locking your desktop) to leave your passwords immediately visible to anyone that walks by.

Yes, this is cosmetic and anyone with sufficient technical knowledge can still get the passwords without the chrome:settings page, but this feature widens the pool of capable attackers to absolutely everyone.
I tried to Love AWS, but right now I just like their effort. There is something organically that feels right about the way DO has positioned themselves, they can always scale pricing based on additional features added. Yes, there margin is thin, but the the fact that the service is easy to use means less user support issues when adding them at 500 per day.
The heroic city- St. Louis.
"JavaScript has farther reach than any other programming language out there."

The ghost of Dennis Ritchie would like to have a word with you...
Ah, it makes much more sense instead of a username. Odd, the title is a bit misleading, then.
I think it's just capitalism, and economics.

Consumers are constantly pushing down the prices on everything, expecting more and more for less and less. Faced with this reality, companies have to streamline and become more effective in order to succeed and profit. This is what Amazon are doing.

We moan about having to pay for baggage, choosing seats, food and even using the bathroom on flights now - but this is solely because of our want to push down the headline price of flights. The price has been reduced...but the cost is still there.

AFAIK, Amazon aren't doing any illegal, they're just working very efficiently.
Sparkicons and the humble Hyperlink
The thing that I never see mentioned here is that it's not actually Amazon listing these items, but third party merchants through Amazon Marketplace. Doesn't that mean that the merchants are the ones setting these "high prices"?
If the merchant thinks their Monet is worth $1.5M, then they can sell it (or lower the price). Amazon pays very little for each listing and then takes their commission (and I don't know what that is, but even 5% of $1.5M is a shiny penny). So if it doesn't work, all that's lost is the dev hours spent on the experiment. If it does work, then Amazon has really increased their profit, and the customer/merchant experience is that much better
The clear-text storage of Chrome passwords and the Google devs stubborn refusal to admit that this is a problem is VERY old news.

It has been discussed ad nauseum for years. As is the frequent suggestion to store all passwords via third party utilities or services (keepass, lastpass, etc).

The password protected password manager is the main reason why Firefox remains my primary browser. If my laptop is stolen, I'm confident that my passwords will be safe (although I still do not store banking related passwords.) More info at raidersec.blogspot.com/2013/06/how-browsers-store-your-passwords-and.html

Encrypted passwords are only unlocked in FF during a single browser session after one has entered the master password. Do people not understand this??
Why, when I was surveying lisps to learn, was Racket an afterthought for me? I ultimately started learning Clojure, which is great, but has the benefit / curse of the JVM. As I play around in Racket (and look over at Typed Racket), I realize how nice a language it is.

The one thing I really miss from Clojure, however, is the destructuring bind. I'd love it if someone smarter than me could opine on how hard it would be to extend Racket with destructuring bind...
I don’t think it’s going to work that way any more. I think that the power has decentralized. Successful people on Twitter basically can fulfill a lot of that same role. You can follow Tim O’Reilly and Robert Scoble and Tim Lee and you can get a pretty good summary of what’s happening around the universe.

Odd argument, considering that the content on Hacker News is more about products than the people making the products. And I can say with confidence that I've never seen Scoble linked to anywhere on HN.
If you leave your machine unlocked, you have made it trivial for someone to steal your secrets no matter what Chrome does.
A demo of BoEBot with Johnny-Five and bluetooth
RubyMotion Update: One Month Later
Funny that he says he wants a Hacker News digest with the top 10 stories each day... my Hacker News Daily is precisely that.
This is great. I think it should be a requirement that offers specify the stack they used to build it with so that potential buyers can know whether they can personally manage the app.
#include "necromancy.h"
Should work very nicely with http://geojson.io/ which is already set up to save to gists.
But in asking people to vote libertarian, you're asking people to suffer mightily in the short term for a thin possibility of gain in the very long term.

Because you're saying, "Don't vote for the lesser of two evils; vote for this other candidate who can't get elected, just to send a message."

And then the more evil candidate gets elected, because the better people vote libertarian.

And then it's not even clear if there will _be_ a long term.
A year on Mars - best pictures from Curiosity
I thought chrome always used the OS X keychain for passwords, but that doesn't look correct anymore.
Admit it, you didn't read the post, did you? Because if you did, I'm mystified as to how you came to the conclusion it was an ad. It's hardly a glowing post about Nissan's pleasant buying experience.
The finance guys are always the worst. (See my above post; as a hobby, I help friends negotiate on cars.) Here is what I do: I always scout for the finance guy beforehand, and let him know I'm going to say no to everything. They always laugh and say, "Okay, but you know I have to ask you this stuff anyway."

So I sit down in the finance room and as he's printing out the "long sheet" I just look him in the eye and say "No" before he even says anything. He'll laugh again but then he'll go through it really fast for you. I have done this countless times and it always works well.

P.S. Never buy an extended warranty. Invest that money instead and use it if you need to buy parts later. They are a ripoff and the finance guys know it. If you do feel a great need to give the dealership extra money, know this: The fees, like everything else, are negotiable.
Boost and old compilers
This is a rather dubious comparison and seems more targeted at selling ASM.js than making a meaningful comparison. The author includes asm.js but not native JS. Well, he actually does test it, but removes it from the results because it did too well.

From the article:
To be frank, I didn’t include the regular Javascript scores in the results because regular Javascript did far too well, and I felt that including those scores would actually confuse the analysis instead of help it.

https://blog.mozilla.org/javascript/files/2013/08/Dalvik-vs-...
My other half dropped her phone recently and was utterly distraught. Neither of us realised just how insanely favourable the like for like replacement deal was, and were unsurprisingly hugely complimentary about Apple afterwards.

I cannot overstate how helpful and efficient the staff were and the process was just so quick and simple. If (mildly idiotic) apps like this being banned are the price of that piece of mind? I pay it gladly.
That's a little harsh. I've been using the term on LinkedIn because we haven't filed our paperwork for our S/C Corp yet. I'm perfectly willing to tell you what the general field we're working on but we're nowhere near ready to go live yet, or make promises about what we're going to ship.

I have other friends who are also working at "stealth" startups who don't want to tip their hands specifically because they're backed by relatively famous people in the space. If they start talking they're going to get a lot of unnecessary and unmerited attention just because of _who_ they are and not _what_ they're going to build.
>>I beg to differ: if enough people vote for candidates who don't affiliate with the Republicans or Democrats, we'll see real change.

But that's the thing: this will never happen. The current establishment is so firmly entrenched, with so many rich and powerful groups vested in it, that it will find a way to sabotage any upstart.

If you genuinely believe that a third party coming to power in the US is simply a matter of it getting enough votes, I don't know what to tell you. I guess I'm envious: I lost that kind of hope a long time ago.
aerodynamic is calculatable from deceleration which is sum of gravitational "g" plus aerodynamic "Cx" multiplied by square proportional to the speed. The weight is known for a given model of device.
A better UI would be something like the Hydra. There was a cool hack where someone used one Hydra controller to track the user's body while the other was used as a gun: http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/6/4595062/new-oculus-rift-cov...
For all those sad iPhone users out there who really want to break their phone, I threw together http://jsfiddle.net/2Kxzv/2/show/. The interface is primitive, and all it tells you is the time that the phone was in the air (and possibly not even that, if the phone spins at all).

My high score is 604, and I think I want to stop playing this game.
Here's an idea: A port of Incanter to Typed Racket
> It just seems like you don't get how people ACTUALLY use your product.

Exactly. Well said.
That is my single biggest issue with the LiveScript name... Not that most people know this, it still bothers me a lot.

Though, I'm one of the ones who had the same kind of problem when Mozilla named their new browser Firebird (before becoming Firefox).
Heh - Great idea, but can you imagine testing that during development?
I read the book last night. Pretty cosmic to wake up to this news the next morning. Earth shattering.
The Things We Do To Change The World
If adding SSID is helpful, then it can be included in the "location" definition that I'd still rather manually specify.
Thanks to those who have sent mails to us. Please send any further CVs to roz.young at littlebridge.com.
Nope. GPS isn't anywhere near accurate enough for that- believe me, I've tried. It's usually accurate to a few meters, which is fine for an overhead map, but would be horribly jarring when used for AR.
Or acting as a generator and throwing an over voltage into a circuit that isn't protected from it. (Also, don't push your robot with the motors wired unless you know you protected the motor driver circuitry.)
... "as of 2004."
Yeah, googling for "top 10 stories from hacker news" returns http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/ as the first result.

Maybe he will see this thread and sign up :)
Voter blocks.

edit: also pissing off hackers and privacy advocates doesn't have the same political downside to pissing off the NRA
This was covered in The Verge this week: http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/5/4590794/ios-7-will-ask-user...
He's already an investor with a considerable equity stake.
If you want a better alternative to RxJs, also written in Coffescript, check out Bacon.js.

https://github.com/raimohanska/bacon.js
Funny---I did literally exactly this in my senior year of high school with some friends. Pygame is so easy, it's amazing what you can do.

I think what we build should still work!

https://github.com/keevie/Awesomer-Game
Blueport Commerce Becoming Furniture Industry E-Commerce Leader
There's a few threads on SO that try to summarize what you need to know if you haven't programmed in java before(and, yes, it's a decent amount), e.g. what a JAR is, classpath, -server vs. -client, -Xmx and Xms, GC options etc. Alternatively, ask on reddit, IRC or the mailing list

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5721496/learning-java-so-...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11358929/what-should-a-sc...

http://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/1ev4u5/what_do_i_ne...
What's new in Visual Studio 2013 for native development
CVPS is as sketchy as they come, they have a fan-following of past-users who makes fun of their offering. They got hacked more than once and each time they botched their response to customers.

As someone who have used quite a few servers from LEB over the years, there is no way I am going to put anything serious in most of their offering. There are some exceptions, like Ramnode, BuyVM, but DO pretty much made the choice easy for me. Why bother taking a risk?

1) Cheap price and good offering and service.

2) Now I know they are going to stick around for a while.
An RSS feed would be fantastic, I think. Otherwise the site seems to do its job nicely.
Ahhh this reminds me of 2002 when advertisers discovered that you could send vCards by bluetooth. I used to get requests to pair whenever I walked through waterloo station, so that I could receive tiny little 1bit bmps and some contact details.

You cool kids with your "new" bluetooth.

It'd be interesting to see what the security ramifications are of having a thirdparty broadcast content directly onto your phone. Pin lock stealer anyone?
For those, like me, wondering why that 'detect visited' hack doesn't simply bolden visited links or changes its font or font size and uses getComputedStyle or getBoundingClientRect [1] to see whether that changes the bounds of the element: that trick has been mitigated three years ago. See http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/03/privacy-related-changes-com....

[1] not explicitly mentioned there, but I think the solution described intends to plug that hole, too.
Can this be scaled?
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/23520052/the-big-roundta...