skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The argument here is approximately this: as solving jigsaw puzzles has been dramatically improved recently, you never know, maybe manufacture of weapons of mass destruction will suddenly get really easy overnight, resulting in an apocalypse.

What Joux and others have done is both important and impressive. But it simply isn't the same as breaking secure cryptosystems. The analogy between the two is simply overplayed.

Did people have reason to believe that the systems Joux and co. can crack were hard? No, despite not knowing how to crack them. Do people believe that their more secure cousins are hard? Yes, they do.
I'm totally hacking this comment.
The success of your startup is measured in happiness not dollars
Pardon the obvious question, but ... is it ironic to have this post on Svtble, a non-open source, invite-only platform?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown_%28abolitionist%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleeding_Kansas
How the US Government is Destroying Lives
Ok, you guys are kind of blowing this way out of proportion. This is absolutely standard -- whenever classified information is disclosed unintentionally, you aren't allowed to discuss it in a non-secure compartmented facility. There are tons of reasons, starting with:

-Limiting exposure of the information already divulged

-Preventing further (especially unintentional) classified information spills

-Limiting adversaries collecting on what information and to what degree people are knowledgeable about

The fact is, if you're a legislator who is given compartmented access, you should know better than to propagate information that has been unintentionally released. For one, it promotes discussion of classified information in unclassified spaces. Secondly, it gives apparent validation to information that might not necessarily be true.

It's getting really tiresome reading these flavor-of-the-day NSA bashing articles, having worked at NSA and having eaten of the tree of knowledge. The intelligence community does not dictate foreign policy or collection policies. They serve at the direction of the federal government under the DNI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Director_of_National_Intelligen...), who is appointed by the president. They carry out the tasks that are given to them under the direction of the administration. There exists a feedback system which allows agencies to understand what information was vital in helping make decisions and what information wasn't important.

Here comes the tricky part: politicians clamor for more information in order to make better informed decisions -- just look at the situation with the possible use of chemical weapons in Syria. When intelligence agencies don't come up with anything actionable, politicians ask "Why not?", to which the agencies respond, "We don't have enough access to real time information.", or "You stated that X mission wasn't important so we stopped supporting it.". Then the politicians rewrite legislation in order to prevent further roadblocks to obtaining information in a timely manner with which they can make decisions.

All of that happens, and you want to blame an intelligence agency for doing its job at various levels of efficiency? In that entire process, the agency only gives feedback as to what its capabilities are and what it needs in order to increase its capabilities. The administration and legislators determine the scope of the work which the agencies function in.

There is no secret conspiracy, people. It's a very simple system: you vote in people and then tell them that you want the prevention of terrorist attacks prioritized above funding NASA. The public is then made aware to what degree the politicians were willing to go to in order to expand intelligence powers, so outrage ensued. Now, there is legislation being pushed forward (not successfully yet) in order to limit the powers. Is this not a representative democracy working to correct its mistakes and push towards a more perfect union?
Something I find annoying is that Data Centers often figure that if they get you in, then you will be either unable or unwilling to move so the 'renewal' can be a lot larger than than the original contract. Equinex tried to take us from $108/kva to $450/kva on the renewal. I was like "Really? You don't think we'll move out with a > 4x gain in cost of staying?"
This may be true for a few of the largest universities, but it is certainly not true for middle schools and high schools, which is really what this discussion is about.
The essence of PG says is that you have to bring down critical mass.

For that reason, a founder has to make the product/app so that it's even useful only with several hundred users.

If your product is not useful with only a several hundred users, you built the wrong features. --> Try again.
Yacht hijacking shows potential of GPS spoofing
"At no point do you give advice about what he could/should do now to 'make up for his sins'"

What do you want him to do to make up for it? Travel to China and tell the government to stop spying on their people using software he helped program?
Yes, sorry I should have been more specific.

After researching the blades a little further is seems a company called eurocopter did find a way to reduce the noise made by the propellers [1]. Heres a video of the difference between the two blade types [2]. Do you think this would be applicable to the blades at the drone level?

[1] http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/02/eurocopter-moves-one-st...
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBS1NRsYuF8
Disrupting the comment industry!
You can't imagine how the people in such a "hypothetical modern totalitarian regime" would be intimidated by their being assassinated at all levels but the very top which can afford really good protection, but would have to stay mostly bunkered down anyway?

That's just one example of how widespread gun ownership can be a bit more than an "aggravating nuisance". Another is this classic from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The GULAG Archipelago:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?

Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?

After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria [Government limo] sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked.

The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!
After Discounting Surface RT, Microsoft Now Cuts Surface Pro Price by $100
Rally Against Surveillance today in San Francisco
typo on http://scrz.io/faq.html
... is that scrz uses of btrfs instead of aufs. ....
should be
... is that scrz uses btrfs instead of aufs. ....
I love it how simple the tethering works. I thought it would be some kind of rocket science, but in fact Android is simply enabling IP forwarding by writing a 1 into /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward and running a dhcp server. Sometimes it's the simple solution that works best.
Domain & SSL prices are on the rise
They still list SHA-3 as one of the features, even though the standard isn't released yet, and it will surely change details from the keccak submission (has been hinted at several conferences).

By introducting functions like `sha3_256` they are setting themselves up for a big compatibility fiasco.
I sent the scanned bank statement and driver's license, got validated, re-entered the order, received an invoice, authorized a paypal payment, received a payment confirmation receipt on Monday, and then nothing. The paypal transaction has not been completed, and there are no pending orders or invoices in my online control panel.

I too sent a status inquiry to customer support, but have not received a reply.
Having written the document that this links to, my goal of pointing out the surprising behaviour with android not requesting an attribute it cared about was to avoid other people banging their heads against this problem when they tried to implement this solution.

This is obviously an incomplete feature: The TODO shows that they intended to actually plumb through the "metered" bit from the upstream interface, but never implemented it.

And this is a default, I suspect you can override this, either in the individual applications, or by disabling the "hotspot" option in the buried menu.

Yeah, it's a bit annoying if it's your default way of getting to the internet, but it's at least not going to cost you a massive pile of money as it sync's everything before you have a chance to turn off all the syncing. This way you can at least turn the syncing on again later if you're ok with it.

[Edit: speling]
Vacation? What's that.

Really, it isn't that hard to quickly scan emails while on a trip. No need to reply. If you are running a business you have no choice. And, again, it really isn't that hard. Part of it, in my opinion, is to systemize. For all of my business email I use Outlook exclusively. I have twenty years of cleand-up email (no spam, notices, etc) archived. This database has come in handy at times. The key is organization. I have extensive filters and even custom VBA code in place to organize and systemize email. I also run multiple instances of Outlook simultaneously, one per business, each with it's own separate pst file.

Incoming email gets sorted into relevant folders. For example, email from employees, vendors, customers and hosting providers go into their own folders, sometimes with additional granularity.

Stuff that is OK to delete --like notices-- goes into folders that get flushed out every ninety days.

I also sort email into an "Unknown Sources" folder: If the sender isn't in my address book they are an unknown source.

This and a few other tweaks makes it easy to manage email for more than one business without having to spend tons of time manually sorting and parsing. I have never in my life used automatic vacation response emails and can't remember any instance of wishing I had.

Again, this is from the perspective of an entrepreneur. I know some of my employees completely turn all company comms off during vacation. And that's OK.
Someone should read how to disagree (http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html). He is criticizing something that Sal probably got wrong. Sal could probably do a better job of using findings in educational research to make his videos and exercises better. But the author seems to be implying that KhanAcademy as a whole is of poor quality. I think he's using a DH5 to argue something that requires a DH6.

I think Sal does an excellent job with his videos as a whole. He does a good job of explaining things in an intuitive and deep way. See http://www.collegeanswerz.com/rethinking-education for more information. Or read Sal's book http://www.amazon.com/The-One-World-Schoolhouse-Reimagined/d....
Yes 100% agree. I just switched over to emacs 24 starter kit for just this reason!
Surface Pro Price Lowered by $100
Awesome, can't wait to play with this! Is it two way?

edit from the video it appears that it is, nice!
I hate these N+ posts. Just comes off as spam! If you want to know the key, here it is:

Produce more than you consume.
> In short, these videos and their accompanying exercises are useless.

That's a bit harsh
Who said anything about working for free?
opencongress.org exists. but that doesn't mean that Congress looks at it.
Seems very much like an advert for namecheap
GenVoca
Cycle Collector on Worker Threads
I'm going to stand out here, but I didn't actually like the essay.

While it started solely as a stylistic distaste stemming from the continued use of first names, which immediately makes a work sound less professional to me, it just continued along not really making a point.

Yes, these people are in opposition to those other people, who are in opposition of the US government, but we knew that already.

I was hugely put off when it sounded like (to me, I admit I may have been projecting) he was insulting Assange's demeanor, specifically the stuttering part, because it doesn't seem relevant to the point being made.

Mostly, this seemed like a piece of entertainment, not giving a new view our new information.
From a comment:

>I don’t want to fix KA. I don’t think it is possible to do so given Sal Khan. Sal Khan should not be the voice on his videos. He should not be the person putting together the actual content of his videos. And, I suspect, he should not be making any important decisions about either content or delivery of instruction, from the pedagogical side of the operation. I’m sure he’s a competent business/finance guy, but as long as he is engaged in making these borefests, they will be third-rate at best

That, friends, is why the "best minds of [this] generation are thinking about how to make people click ads".[1] That is why we're stuck building photo-sharing apps: because no good deed goes unpunished.

[1] http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b42250609...
Mawk update 20130803
For reference: http://brenocon.com/blog/2009/09/dont-mawk-awk-the-fastest-a...
I think it's to limit the damage you can do: someone who knows their links are DOA would be more likely to create a new account.
I agree with the sentiment of the letter but why does Sal have to provide the optimal video lecture (code) for every topic (module) for his project (Khan Academy).

As a single person, even with a team of advisers, he will not be able to do this for every topic he covers.

One solution can be that he provides a clear interface to each of his modules and sub modules e.g. this module should cover changing base of logarithms and the student should be able to pass these questions (units tests) in the end.

In this model people can contribute in two ways - either make unit test more comprehensive or make the teaching material (code) better.
To paraphrase your last paragraph: "If your ideal system allows parasites, you're not entitled to use mechanisms (e.g. social stigma) to control those parasites."? Complaining about parasitic behavior is a form of social control. It actually comes part and parcel with the open source license. If you don't like people talking bad about free loaders, stay away from the open source community.
I can't see any mention of the new asynchronous programming support presented by Guido in this year's PyCon. Has it been discarded from this release?
Lots of liberals were famously armed when they went into the South, like Eleanor Roosevelt, many blacks kept themselves alive or less repressed with personal firearms, like Condoleezza Rice's father and his friends, and then there's the Deacons for Defense and Justice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deacons_for_Defense_and_Justice . jivatmanx in the other reply right now covers a bit of what happened prior to and during the Civil War; I hail from the southern edge of what you might call Bleeding Missouri and have studied it a bit, guns were most certainly a very important factor.

As for strike-breaking and all that, while it's not an area I've studied, it's well established that both sides were armed and used their guns.
Remedios para hongos en los pies y uñas
Ask HN: How do you deal with Fuzzy Duplicates? 
Hi HN,

I would like some advice on how you guys would deal with fuzzy duplicates in a mailing list (currently an excel file with 40k+ rows) with records that have not been entered in a uniform manner. For example, sometimes just the initially be given for a name, or the physical address may be formed slightly differently, and other small errors.

I am looking to create a web service for the nonprofit that I am helping out in India to help them deduplicate files in a 'user friendly manner'. I'm not so worried about exposing it as a web service, as lost on what tools I could use. I would desperately like to use Python and Unix command line tools if possible but am not sure where to start.

Thanks
In my time we called it trolling.
Looks like a good way to practice Haskell. I've been learning about the language but haven't yet found ways to make use of it in my day job.
Some people, including myself and it seems OP, love open source but aren't dogmatic about it. I see no contradiction between using open source and proprietary software. In fact I think both models have benefits that the other lacks.
That's the idea of hellbanning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellbanning

tldr; unwanted users can't contribute, feel excluded or ignored, then go away.
Fine, give away my work for free. It's a competitive advantage. If your employer pays you to write open source code, so be it.

Most don't; let's face it, Open Source does not lead to a strong business. Proprietary software makes money hand over fist in comparison.
Well, evidently the ITC "considered" FRAND inaccurately, as their decision conflicted with both, the Obama Administration and the European Commission. (Not to mention the opinions of jurists such as Judge Posner.) You could cry "protectionism" on this veto, but what excuse could you make for the EC's actions?
Yeah, the "pathological infatuation with firearms" bit struck me as out of place among the other issues. I don't own guns, but I'm not afraid of people that do.
Can you give context what is Tapbots and why should they OS/contribute their work?
Certainly a worry, but one bottom line is who do the local police answer to? Who pays them, who can fire them and make them outlaws with all the latter entails?
Big Data and Advertising: In the trenches
Prosecutor Stephen Heymann Compared Aaron Swartz To Rapist
I find it amusing when GPL advocates get hurt over a company not contributing. At least people who license with BSD tend to be more pragmatic.
1984 Day
Sal does a great job with the higher level mathematics. His videos helped me get an A+ in calculus. He does his best, and he should be applauded for that.
Contributions to open source projects are like gifts: you shouldn't take them for granted, and particularly you shouldn't expect them as a baseline.
It is hard to get the details right with math. First there is the basic factual level (not saying anything wrong), then there is a language level (will an 6th grader understand this? an 8th grader? a 10th grader?). Finally, and this is the hardest part, presenting the material in the most pedagogical way.

Posting an open letter is a bit of a sensationalist move, but this way it will be sure to gather enough attention. Perhaps there should be a content-improvement suggestion box for this kind of things. With more teachers starting to use the khan videos and exercises, I am sure bugs will be found, but let's treat them as such.

I've seen lot's of the old Khan videos replaced by newer and improved ones. I wouldn't be surprised if the decimal video gets an update.
Hope it attracts more than the shamefully pathetic 400 that turned up to the last one.
It's interesting that Reddit was used as an example of a site that doesn't have a chicken and egg problem. Reddit admittedly seeded the beginning with fake users.
لعبة رجل المافيا
لعبة رجل المافيا من العاب اكشن الحديثة على موقع عالم الالعاب المتعدد استمتع باللعبة من افضل الالعاب الالعاب
Laws get broken all the time. They pick and choose what they enforce.
It doesn't guarantee that any specific e-mail is snooping-proof, but it makes it hard for someone to trivially look through all your e-mails from the last five years.
When you bring hackers together, it is likely to be a recipe for terror.
Eh, I don't really think that's why people are reluctant to do good/big things. I think the core reason is because it's a cached thought (http://lesswrong.com/lw/k5/cached_thoughts/) to make safe and familiar choices in life.
You know how it works, Thomas! People translate comments into the version that best suits their lives. :P
I cannot conceive of the world in which substantive changes would be made between now and publication. The algorithm has been vetted as-is, any changes would need extensive reevaluation. It would basically be starting the process over.
For yelling, "Fire!" in a crowded theater.
Sorry, you are wrong. In a truly dark site with well adapted eyes the Milky Way looks very much like this. I just got back from an observatory in the Oregon high desert, and the views were staggering. The dust lanes and many other details were clearly visible.
We are also going to live stream. Link around 11. Speakers at 12:45
I have three activities with slightly different tools and workflows.

* Generic

Everything is under Subversion, my employer's VCS of choice.

Briefs usually come as Word/Excel/Powerpoint files.

Compositions usually come as messy Photoshop files that I spend too much time tidying up.

Emails are the basis of interaction between departments (we have tried other means but they all failed for one reason or another) and we use Mantis for tracking bugs.

I'm on Mac OS X.

* HTML/CSS/JS frontend dev

When I start a project, I do it with a small script that creates a standard project and puts it under version control. Once it's done, I tipically open the README in Vim, populate it with a bunch of infos on the project and a TODO list. That file is my entry point in the project:

$ cd /path/to/project
$ vim README

Subsequent file navigation is done from Vim itself (either with built-in commands or with CtrlP), keeping the README in its own tab.

A tags file for my CSS and JS is generated at the root of the project every time I leave insert mode for better navigation.

On the browser side, I used an "autoreload" extension for a long time and now I use tincr http://tin.cr which works very well.

Deployment is never handled by me but is a manual task done with FileZilla, :-(

I'm sorry to say that we have no internal guidelines on anything.

* "Heavy" AS3 dev (whole apps/sites)

Almost everything is done in Flash Builder (with a vim plugin called vrapper) for my new projects or on an old PC in FlashDevelop (used by two previous coworkers) for legacy projects.

I also use a little Java app called Vizzy to show debug info when the app is not run from Flash Builder.

* "Light" Flash dev (banners)

Everything is done in the Flash IDE itself.

At home, it's typical linux hackery: terminal+vim.
Probably that change didn't affect newer accounts ?
If one is opposed to violence but still depending on a livelihood from an organization that depends on violence to realize its goals - be it a gang, a government or a military - then one might not be as opposed to violence as is thought.
I'm currently between pursuing finance (banking), consulting, law, and entrepreneurship (CS). I love making new things, so I think that CS would be very freeing; however, I know that those other paths would probably be more straightforward for me, but maybe I should at least take a chance on CS.

That said, I'm currently no expert on programming. I've self taught Python, HTML, CSS, some js, and I'm currently learning Ruby on Rails because my friend and I are working on making a web app (he's doing most of the programming, but it was my concept). Right now, I'm not sure if I should declare myself as a prospective CS major or not considering my lack of credentials. Economics would be much easier for me to justify.
Yeah, I know, I have a pretty high tolerance. Thanks for the suggestions, though, I will work on it. As for shrinks, I don't particularly trust them :/, but I will look into it.

Thanks for replying, I appreciate it.
Give Manning and Snowden the Nobel Peace Prize