skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What does something like PRISM have to do with an individual privately run site using information provided by the client software in order to prevent abuse?

I feel like I explained the issue pretty clearly in the preceding sentence:

> Back then, the proponents of that plan insisted the privacy concern was largely academic.

We now know via the various leaks that have occurred recently, that government agencies will use any information available to them and that there is largely nothing the public can do to stop it or be made aware of it except through the occasional one-off leak like PRISM.

That is to say, the privacy concerns related to any private company tracking PII to this degree aren't academic or abstract. Information kept to prevent abuse can just as easily be repurposed for surveillance. I suspect (and would hope) many of the same people pushing for this feature back in 2011 would reconsider their support for a feature like this knowing what we know now.

> Expecting privacy-minded people to opt-out of using telephones or emails for fear of government monitoring isn't reasonable.

I'm not sure what part of my comment lead you to believe I would think otherwise, but I don't.

> Opting out of Stack Overflow is nowhere in the same league.

In the comments of the post I linked, several people were insisting that there wouldn't need to be an additional disclosure because it's information that's either public, available to other third parties (like browser makers), or already available to Stack Overflow in a different form. Not knowing that a site like a hypothetical Stack Overflow—where a feature like this was implemented—is keeping records on this level and therefore not opting out isn't informed choice.

Indeed, a significant portion of the outcry with respect to the NSA leaks is that nobody knew that the government had such a direct connection to the information stored by private companies that people could've easily opted out of using (e.g., Facebook, Apple, Google, or Paltalk).

But all I was attempting to do here was mention a past experience with Panopticlick and muse how it might've went today. I guess I've been bitten by something pg once said[1], that "you can't be concise on forums because if you leave any possible room for misinterpretation, someone will reply with it".

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5365222
The real selling point is the aesthetics. That's why I bought it anyways.

The self-learning scheduler is nice, but I could easily program a manual one in a few minutes.
New Nexus 7 “razor” Factory Images and Binaries Now Posted
The cryptographic announcement to president Obama's announcement is snake oil.

OK, snake oil is probably not recognizable as such for a politician …
It worked fine in the previous version. The concept of auto changing street intersections or street address with names of random venues sucks and is inaccurate at so many levels. That it would make it to the product symbolizes an overall failure with the present Maps team.
Related discussion from two days ago:

Android AOSP maintainer quits
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6174514
No image of the product and a preorder button. If this weren't a YC company I'd dismiss it and move on.

Still, the scans seem promising.
MSM is a branch of government. Understanding this simplifies quite a bit.
Yeah. It would have been valid if this was said publicly, that this was being done - that they knew reforms were needed and were in the process of the change.
Something similar but published just last week: http://flippinawesome.org/2013/07/29/writing-a-command-line-...
I don't understand what it is but there is a culture in Ruby/Node to make installation "easy" to the extent that it is dangerous and, worse, offer no documented alternative.

Installing rvm shouldn't add lines to my .zshrc without prompting me. That behavior would be outrageous anywhere else but in Ruby land it's normal.
Administration White Paper: Bulk Collection Of Telephony Metadata
KISS for Chrome will randomise User-Agent.

https://github.com/hultqvist/Kiss
Is this nest controlling an A/C or a heater? Or both? Do they really use electric heat?

The graph doesn't make sense.
Um, I suggest you look up the definition of the word "Hyperbole". I understand that as a Googler, you wish to defend a fellow Googler, but please differentiate between the arguments of "I disagree with the premise of your argument" and "You're wrong". As a Googler, I'd hope you are reasonably technically literate, and therefore could come up with a rather more refined response than "You're just wrong".
Don't live in Mountain View. Moving sucks, but there's no other options. Living in MV isn't a right.
If you were a user who didn't understand the difference between embedding the video and actually downloading it to local storage, it doesn't seem unreasonable to say "PowerPoint doesn't work", that program isn't loading the resource you thought you had.

> Those who don't, can't use computers.

The trend for the last decade or more has been to put more and more resources online or tie them to computer systems. In the US especially, libraries and social programs are underfunded and cannot meet the need of those that must use a computer to access something they need while not being able to use a computer. Applying for unemployment, handling documentation, finding work, and more are very computer centric now. In a perfect world, there would be options even for those that can't use a computer. However, we don't live in that world and as designers and implementers of hardware and software design we have a social duty to make the situation better for every user and potential user.
From the article: 'The judge said she wasn't ready to rule on the government's suggested remedies to eliminate antitrust behavior. She seemed dismayed as she noted that the publishers and Apple seemed to express together their opposition to some government recommendations, "reflecting a seriously continuing danger of collusion."'

I do not blame her, Apple along with others are behaving more and more petulant as not many are putting up resistance. I would love a good hard look at how market favors are given to firms like Apple for 'work' rendered back to the US federal government.

Didn't some hardware sales block recently get overruled by Commander in Chief Barack H. Obama, 44th President of the United States? Interesting reasoning used, if I recall.
Some of it is just having a lot more wind, which sure helps when it comes to wind power. Texas's 50m wind-resources are somewhere around 20x California's [1], mostly because the usable generation area in Texas is across a huge area, while in California it's limited to some areas of the Sierra Nevada [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_generation_potential_in_th...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Wind_Potential.gif
I used a 1080p prototype and it looked really good. The consumer version may even be 1200p.
Yep. And I didn't know that our browser sends plugin info to websites. Wonder if there's a plugin to turn that off :P
I think Texas is a great state. I live in Georgia. I travel to Texas a lot. I've visited Houston, Dallas, and Austin. Houston is a decent city once you get to know it and if you can embrace the cowboy-style. Dallas is fine; although I never really got the feel for it. Austin is awesome. I could visit Austin any time; if I wasn't happy here in Georgia I could easily live in Austin.
This is what I think: this "service" is rather old, and I'm sure it is not being used regularly by lot of people with recent versions of browsers, so the majority of those 3.2 million fingerprints were made in older times (when it was being Slashdotted/HNed several times, like today) that's why we get many unique results.
The Might Dictionary (Learn to know your dicts)
It would be useful if you took ideas and code from or took over https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/firegloves/ development.
This guy has a few books that, from the face of them, seem very similar. Can anyone point out the important differences or give some advice (e.g. which to pick in what order)?
Meta (YC S13), The Crazy AR Glasses That Aim To Do What Google Glass Can’t
Again, you can search with mobile, or someone else's mobile, someone else's laptop, etc.

I appreciate your point regarding the multitude of possibilities for a server error, but remember what we're talking about. The user did not even attempt to read the error message, did not know what it said, and kept retrying thinking things would change. He didn't take some next step to try to diagnose potential connection problems (e.g. check for ethernet cable), he just threw his hands in the air, said it doesn't work, and ran to IT. He can't use computers.
Depends on the job. I'm writing a command line app in Node right now to automate a couple thousand SQL queries for a db I'm working with. Node wasn't my first choice, but I looked at how to connect both Ruby and Python to MySQL and it seemed like more trouble than it was worth for a one-time use utility. Node was just 'npm install mysql'. Might not be the best way, but I only need to use it once.
The reason Obama Administration is pissed at Snowden is not because he leaked so-called "secrets", but because he exposed the "man behind the curtain". That is to say: Obama is no different than any mainstream Republican would have been.

I voted for Obama twice; and in 2008, when the race against McCain was tight, I spent many weekends in Reno and Northern NV, campaigning, pounding the pavement, going door-to-door in the heat.

And I will be cancelling my Democratic membership. I urge all of you to do so too (Democrat or Republican). It is clear that neither of the two parties are interested in our rights. Democrats like Feinstein and Pelosi are war mongers; and Republicans are merely a shadow of their so-called ideals. Republicans are also to blame, because they go out of their way to push for such things. Look at the Republican braying after Benghazi; they will take even the slightest setback to go after Democrats as weak on terror. And the Democrats are more than happy to oblige by bringing in a police state.

Please: the only way to bring about change is to stop voting for either party, and to actively campaign against them. We are lucky: we have 15 months to go before the next election. Let's get some third-party candidates in the House!
Well, Fox News isn't entirely, e.g. I saw them reporting on I think Silent Circle and Lavabit while my father was cooking today. See e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Afoxnews.com+lavabit+s...

I don't know who works for who, were any of their reporters called on in the press conference?
Except when it's a rhetorical question
"I'm not sure how anyone can has enough reasonable information to make a case that FISA doesn't rubber stamp cases."

The burden of proof is on the positive, not the negative.
I always say since they basically want me to work for them I need to charge them like any other client. Since computer support is not my forte it would probably cost a lot.
Is there an email where we can do that? There isn't one in your profile or on the senic page.

Also your website is being rendered very strangely.

http://snag.gy/wCkIm.jpg
http://snag.gy/2PXRW.jpg
I think it was Judge Judy who said it.

If a person has lied to you once, you can be sure that the person will be capable of lying to you again.
That's not uncommon for (custom) dev builds, or if you have a plethora of addons that manipulate core browser behavior. I have a user and dev profile on firefox.

But that makes you more unique and a better target.

"My browser firefox fingerprint appears to be unique among the 3,230,950 tested so far and 21.62 bits of identifying information, mostly acceptable to be shared." But this is just a demo, a real attacker could get much more info out of it, I'm not protected against this.

Why do you think that you have gotten that result? Did you compile Chromium with some special flags?
But I use spacejump to heat my room! It's part of my workflow.

http://xkcd.com/1172/
Oy. The unit of heating/cooling temperature comparison is the degree-day, not the average temperature of the month.

For each time period, take the difference from your desired temperature. If you have an acceptable range, take the difference from the near edge of that range.

e.g. with a desired range 65-75, a 40 degree day counts as negative 25 and a 90 degree day counts as positive 15.

Keep track separately of positive and negative.

Now you have a record of how much you needed to cool or heat. Local newspapers -- remember those? -- will usually keep track for you on their weather page.

That's a suitable basis for comparison. Not monthly average temperature, not average high, not average low.
> Another reason to write in JS would be to gain code reuse.
> If the person has a web app that uses node, then they can
> share code between the web and CLI applications.

I often see this argument presented for just about any server side js. I often wonder about actual real world reuse though.
And Germany has, currently and historically, shown an utter contempt for the rights of it's citizens, far moreso than the current US crisis. Germany talks a good game with their data privacy laws, but those only affect citizens data being collected by corporations; They've dramatically increased their data collection laws[1], and while some have been found unconstitutional (Look up the Telecommunications Databank opinion), they've quickly been reworded and re-enacted[2].

Because of German data seizure laws, they believe they can request any data about or belonging to any German citizen without a warrant, so long as that data resides in Germany. At least one large cloud provider has German datacenters, but will not use them for storage of any German citizens data because of this.

[1]: http://idpl.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/09/10/idpl...

[2]: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/04/11/germ-a11.html
Meanwhile, my father had mastered the old VCR-style programmable thermostats, but he doesn't really 'get' the Nest I gave him. Too high-tech and automatic for him. But, Mom likes changing the temperature from her iPad.
Your API could be mapped to a filesystem. (Although you might consider consider a filesystem a database.) If this were the case, it would make sense to use PUT for commands like chown and chmod, which are idempotent. Calling "PUT" "CREATE" here would (IMO) be confusing. I'm not creating something. I'm performing an action, putting things in their proper place, if you will. Another example could be home automation. You might design a REST API where you can PUT cameras to turn them on.

The way I see it, the great thing about HTTP verbs is that they are mostly (not all) unbiased about what they map to, and allow us to be more descriptive. If I'm inspecting the requests my browser is making, I'd much rather see "DELETE /path/to/resource" than see "POST /path/to/resource" and only discover that that call deleted my resource because the body of the request contained '{ "action" : "delete" }'.
I found this site, that way :)

Go here => https://stopfingerprinting.inria.fr/ Chrome + Firefox add-on.
http://ff6600.bikeshed.com/ to be precise.

I'm impressed with how much effort he put into his dynamic subdomain parser.

More obscure colors work as well:

http://fuschia.bikeshed.com/
http://limegreen.bikeshed.com/
Bunch of broken URLs due to closing parentheses
Are you talking about Costco? I like Costco, but they have so few people out on the warehouse floor, and those that are there dress like civilians so it's hard to find them. My takeaway is that there is zero customer service, aside from the cashier. Everywhere else I am on my own.

If only I could get back a fraction of the time I've spent searching for products that they moved from one aisle to another.
"It's a cache" isn't a semantic argument, being a cache under the definition given in the DMCA is a legal exemption from copyright infringement.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512
My designer friend was watching a livestream, where he clicked a link that infected his OSX Computer at work. He was worried and asked me to inspect the payload, which was funny, because I only got a blank page. Only modifying my UA-String gave me access to the java exploiting payload, but imagine how they could go undetected by sniffing for more than just the UA-String!

After some investigation I found out that one guy has infected many thousand OSX and Windows PCs and turned them into drones. Now I know how they make money, selling their bot-nets. Kinda disappointed, I thought there is more thought and work required. But you see the point, anybody with enough patience can do that today, the tools are available.
He said that because most people are not technically literate or have enough time to understand exactly what Snowden did. Considering the way he is portrayed in mass media I would bet that many people think what he did was along the lines of releasing the secret passwords to our spy computers of which then Al Qaeda can access and disrupt our job in killing and detaining terrorists.
Documents shed light on U.S. surveillance programs
Save your money, the people who released this solve the problem:

Go here => https://stopfingerprinting.inria.fr/ Chrome + Firefox add-on.

EDIT: solved->solve, they didn't solve it yet, but this add-on helps them solve it.
Despite the disappointment that a lot of us felt over the accomplishments of Obama throughout his presidency, he really had plenty of chance to get out in front of this one. However, what we got instead was the perfect illustration of just how much of a politician's politican he really is, and how nothing that comes out of his mouth reflect anything other than whichever way the wind happens to be blowing today. I'm sorry Obama, but your greatest legacy will be nothing more than the illustration of just how impotent democracy is in the media age.
Organ Trail: Director's Cut One Year Sales Figures
Your position is unsupportable. Anonymous analytics is not a threat.

What's next, I can't stand outside and record how many people walk by with t-shirts versus long-sleeve shirts? That's how I see anonymous analytics. Now if you want to argue that the analytics are not anonymous and they can be linked to real people, like that one AOL search-data leak a few years back, then that's a discussion. But you can't say websites/app collecting anonymous analytics is bad anymore than you can say me standing outside in the city collecting visual info on the people walking by is somehow an invasion of privacy. That's just paranoia. You might as well just not use the internet at all if you're that worried because I'm sure whatever ISP you have collects some kind of analytics too. In fact, I'm sure just about every successful business ever has some kind of stats on its users/costumers. You'll just have to exit modern-society if you don't want anyone collecting anonymous analytics from you.
One very interesting tidbit - regardless that this is simply some PR stunt at exactly the right time - according to a renowned german news magazine Die Zeit, two of the founders of Narus, which helped develop the PRISM technology, are now working for the Deutsche Telekom. Go figure!

Source: http://www.zeit.de/2013/33/nsa-spionage-industrie-profiteure
It accepts any word and also nothing. Just tried 'mongol', 'restive', 'philharmonic' and '27b-stroke-6'.

Presumably the Mongols liked bureaucracy, since the colours were the same for those two...
Wouldn't switching browsers/adding a plugin get around the block really easily?
These guys are from the future.
True. I don't take issue with the fact that he was fired, but, rather, with how it was done.

No one should be fired without the opportunity to defend themselves or explain their actions. Being fired should also be a private matter, as studies have shown it's bad for morale which is bad for business.

WHAT you do isn't the only thing that matters; HOW you do it is equally important.
I've read this article several times at this point (it does tend to pop up everywhere) and it resonates with me but I'm not sure what to do about it.

I really want to experience the kind of math the author writes about; can anyone recommend a place to start as someone who has only ever done "fake" high school math? I'm in college now and I'm halfway through a computer science degree; I've tried a few times to break into theoretical math classes but I've found the bar for entry pretty high (especially when I only have room for one or two courses), with most classes and even peers asking for years of experience and "mathematical maturity." Have any of you ever succeeded in learning some math outside formal curricula?
I want to know when politicians are finally going to start holding crowdsourced press conferences where the questions asked are determined by the audience tuning in to listen to the politician talk. I want a reddit/HN/digg style platform where all the questions are submitted, voted on and then only revealed to the politician at the last minute so they don't have time to carefully prepare an answer.

Richard Nixon was caught off guard by the impact of television when he debated live on TV against John F Kennedy. We need that same moment but for Internet journalism and social audience interaction like the audience voting for what it collectively cares about.

This old media bullshit is quite frankly getting old. Maybe Bezos can shake up things by using the WaPo as the old guard avenue for letting democratic internet processes in to the party.
New Sublime Package Control Site
The NRA is not the most gun-friendly organization. The JPFO and Gun Owners of America are better. The NRA is a sellout, compromising on principles in order to maintain political power.

Just as the Rutherford Institute is more protective of individual rights than the ACLU is.

But you're right we need an organization for privacy.

The EPIC and EFF are not enough.
I appreciate that - I'm familiar with Condorcet's and Arrow's theorems. I'm not a fan of FPTP myself (as I come from a country with proportional representation, and quite like that it's how local elections are run where I live); I just don't think it's deliberately engineered to effectively prevent the formation of other parties, although I certainly agree that it's frequently gamed to that end.
Beeing unique is bad, because that makes you an even better target.
Houston is a decent city once you get to know it and if you can embrace the cowboy-style.

Now I'm wondering what I missed in Houston. I lived there for years, and graduated from high school there. But what do cowboys have to do with it? My experience of it was that it was just a modern American city like anywhere else, with a heavy focus on sprawling suburbs. I didn't feel there was a lot of uniquely "Texan" culture or anything. Life had little to do with cowboys; it revolved around living in suburban houses that cover literally hundreds of square miles (most of the city), and doing things like studying to get into good colleges and trying to get a decent job. Nobody I knew even spoke with a Texan accent, which was something more associated with West Texas or the Panhandle, places like San Angelo or Lubbock.

Now if you had said flying cockroaches, africanized ants, hurricane evacuations, and 6 months of the year where you can't reasonably go outside because it's >90 F and humid as hell, then yes, it's great if you can embrace that part of the lifestyle. ;-) I do like visiting nowadays, but only in December.
If what you're doing isn't working, do anything else.

Voting 3rd party is anything else.

I vote 3rd party, which to me is invoking "none of the above."
I've seen QA teams or training teams run into difficulties with smartphone screen sharing. That's one use case where I guess this makes it easier.
Firebase 404
Isn't Ruby just 'gem install mysql'?