skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have to wonder what it's like for Zuckerberg, or Brin, or any of the other big internet moguls today.

Here they are creating internet experiences made as addictive as possible, meanwhile gathering every damned little piece of miniscule information possible about each of their users: where they are, who their friends are, what they like, what they hate, their favorite colors, their favorite brands, and so on.

Hell, people are happy giving away this stuff! And all of if can be plugged directly into a big honking machine to sell stuff!

Then the government comes along and wants in on the action too. They start vacuuming up data gigabytes at a time.

It must seem like the only people not getting in on this action is the common folks, the patsies.

I have no idea and could care less what their official statements are. It's obvious they have no problem with gathering the information as long as they were the ones doing it. But in private, what kind of opinion must they have about all of this?
Has there ever been this much fanfare and media speculation over the unveiling of an idea before? The hyperloop is not a product or research, its just an idea.

I can't think of an instance when this has happened in my lifetime. Kind of bizarre
Udacity, Coursera, Codecademy, Codeschool.
Really, you should use Codecademy to do a few drills in the language you want to become familiar with the syntax first. Udacity is great and the problems are deep enough. Coursera has a few outstanding courses (Stanford Startup Engineering!)
$1.7 billion / 2000 is $850K per criminal. Even if they were all caught by this program, probably not worth it.
If you feel truly passionate about this issue, your job isn't just to convince politicians it is important. It is also to convince the average Joe that it is important. The tech community has a tendency to be too insular. Part of the problem is that we aren't doing a good job of explaining an issue like this to people outside our community.
To Stay Afloat, Independent Bookstores Turn to Crowdfunding
This is overly ideological. Agreed that the NSA probably doesn't control the Internet, however the argument that the government does or doesn't control the Internet cannot be assumed either way at this point. We do know the government has desired/requested control of the internet before, the kill switch initiative is well documented. Whether this has actually panned out for the Gov in any concrete way we do not know, and if it did pan out it would probably be classified.

As for 'the little people' being the good guys, that's kind of fundamentally what a democracy implies. Now whether the paranoid HN types really represents the people, or the soccer mom who would scream bloody murder if their family was injured because a terrorist plot went off that 'could' have been stopped with widespread snooping without warrants really represents the people is an entirely different question.
Use Cat pictures as communication medium: Applied steganography with JavaScript
I am thinking the repo's README.md should be enough as I do not have anything more to say than what is there: "Thing X does Y, here is a quick start". Usually I put a picture up there or even a link to an online demo.
Though this is a great idea ( similar to one I had created in the past) there is a major problem I think users should be aware of, concurrency.

Usually using a ID generating system is used when data needs to be shared or asking for an ID from a database is just not an option. It is not typically used in small environments.

I think this solution has an upper bar of effectiveness that is just to low for the problem this is trying to solve. The use of a pseudo random number generator ( python's random module) is too vulnerable to not generating "random" numbers and so many collisions can occur at high concurrency.

Most pseudo random number generators usually are seeded with the time on the host system. As stated in the docs, the best way to use simpleflake is to setup NTP so all the servers times are in sync, the random module on all the servers/processes could be seeded with the same time ( like after a code push). If all the servers get seeded with the same time and the objects being operated on take a uniform time the probability of collisions go up and slow down all processes trying to interact with the objects, as they generate new IDs. As new Ids are being generated you lose the time sort that you originally wanted by including the time in the ID.

I do not mean this to be insulting. I am speaking from experience from having debugged a problem caused the the ID generator at the company I formerly worked for. We used a similar generation technique to identify messages passing through the system, but we included more meta data in our IDs such as sender and recipient of the message and even the server name. With all of that when we ran 150 processes on a 4 core server, there was a .01% of collisions, but that jump significantly once the servers were upgraded to 16 core machines and at that point in the process there was no way to regenerate a new ID, the data was simply dropped out of existence.
I'm currently using an android app to browse HN which uses the hn api. No matter how you change the api there would be no real way of preventing app makers from allowing upvoting from their main story browsing page.
Creating High-Performance Mobile Websites
Old article, circa March 2009! Look at the monthly visits mentioned, and also this highscalability article- http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/3/30/lavabit-architectu...

I wonder how much of this architecture still exits and how much has changed!

Do they still host servers, use CentOS+Apache+MySQL+Memcache or was there an architectural change with more apt software components?
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him...and then nobody will because everybody understands this basic principle."
Well, what they were doing was probably never illegal. That doesn't mean the City of London are obliged to let them do it – they're their bins.
I believe that tracking users in this way is wrong no matter what the reason is. About 2 or 3 years ago I removed all analytics and other forms of tracking from my personal website and all other projects. At first it felt weird, now it just feels normal and when someone shows me their google analytics dashboard it feels plain creepy.

I suggest that if you support privacy then the things you create should reflect that.
Βασικές Αρχές SEO - John Divramis Paramarketing Blog
1) Good.

2) who the hell wrote this article?

"The UK and the EU have strict laws about mining personal data using cookies, which involves effectively installing a small monitoring device on people's phones or computers, but the process of tracking MAC codes leaves no trace on individuals' handsets."

I'm sorry, what now? a small data file is not a "device." (answer: Joe Miller, apparently.)
National Geographic Robots Get Intimate With Lions
If you are in the mode to tell a good story, have a try on our visual story telling platform: http://www.visual-marks.com.

It provides round-trip markdown/HTML editing to let you focus on writing and easily layout the page.
True. We evolved to find protein tasty, and we evolved the ability (digestive system and teeth) to eat meat as one protein source.
> Any Internet-based meshnet is vulnerable to filtering at the ISP level

Theoretically - yes, ISPs are in full control of what's passing through them. But, if we're not considering a whitelisting only explicitly allowed sorts of non-encrypted communications, filtering with reasonably good success should be quite a costly task.
At a minute per scan, that comes out to exactly 70 more years the rest of us have to stand in line waiting.
Their opinion probably is along the lines of 'Show me the money'.

Really wondering what 'zuckerberg' or 'brin' feel like is kind of besides the point.
I have lots of websites hosted on S3 - you can have up to 100 buckets per account and every bucket can be a website. I use different setup - s3sync for syncing and AutoIt script for static blog generation (~100 lines of code).
There are a couple shortcuts here.

You can use the 4th or 5th leaf pickings, which have reduced flavor, antioxidants and caffeine. These elements are highest in concentration at the bud and reduce in content as you go down the plant, so don't get a bud-heavy tea picking like Silver Needles (an atypical high-caffeine-content White tea). The steep time and water temperature also dramatically impact flavor and the infusion of chemicals from the leaf into the water, which includes caffeine content.

And keep in mind that loose leafs transfer less content than broken-up or fine pieces. Also, between 2% and 30% of the caffeine content may transfer in the first 30 seconds of steeping - caffeine actually transfers slower than the antioxidants and vitamins, and never completely in 30 seconds (unless your water was still boiling, which is too hot for any tea!)

Another tip: don't disturb the water or tea infuser while steeping, remove it swiftly, and don't let the last drops from the kettle into your cup - they contain the most concentrated part of the tea.
> Haskell was conceived in 1990, and the latest version of the standard is from 2010

Haskell was released in 1990, but the designs started on Haskell itself in 1987 and were heavily based on prior languages; standardizing on a common, agreeable subset. The fact that there is a 2010 version of the spec provides zero insight into how much the language has evolved over that 23 year period. That's not to say it hasn't evolved, just that it's silly to pick on my obviously hyperbolic trivialization of 20 years of progress.

> Haskell is evolving rapidly precisely due to the use of language extensions

Sure. And the fact that it is still rapidly evolving, especially in the type system department, is proof that there are interesting classes of problems that don't fit in to Haskell's type system in a sufficiently pleasing way.

Evolution is a good thing & I have a ton of respect for both Haskell & the PL research community. See the rest of my post for how I'd prefer an advanced language/type-system duo to work in practice.
ArduSat successfully launched in space (with video)
Congrats!

The photos didn't appear correctly aligned though -- some 70-100px "whitespace" at the right edge of the screen. And resizing the screen removed all content.

edit: I'm using Firefox v22 on Xubuntu.
I know someone who had intel in their new business name/URL and they got a very clear letter from Intel's lawyers saying 'so sorry, can't use that', even though the business was transport-related.
Bret Victor: The Future of Programming [video]
While I understand that Lavabit and others have taken a stand, Im not sure that I would call going out of business fighting. I see this as an NSA victory. If they could shut down all of these niche secure email businesses, what option will people have but to use less private alternatives?

I would argue that a shut down is exactly what the NSA wanted from lavabit.

Of course the flip side is that you don't want to be complicit in aiding the NSA, so the stance is honorable. I do think that it would take a company with the utility Google drawing the line for any traction to occur with the average person. Google would either have to:
- suspend operations like the SOPA blackout
- put up a fight very publicly to the point where there is so much transparency the NSA has no either back down or to penalize them in a way that would piss people off.

Otherwise, this is and will always be a fringe topic.
Gauss Machine Gun (Rate of Fire: 7.7 Rounds/Sec Muzzle Velocity: 42.03m/s)
Congratulations on having it be usable on an iOS machine straight out of the gate. This is something that still eludes scaladoc, for example.
For the good of humanity, I hope someone reasonable (Google?) buys the ex-Certicom ECC patents and opens them up (free, ideally, but genuinely easy to license would be ok.)
Same in Firefox 22. Scrolling seems broken, and removing the "find on page" part of Firefox clears all the images.
That's an apples and oranges comparison. Python's type system doesn't restrict me in the same ways a static type system does. There are Haskell programs that were not valid that are now valid if you enable a compiler flag and change something in the type sub-language as opposed to changing something in the term sub-language.
Linux is here to stay
Wipe off the rim before and after if there is anything there. It will also prevent you from slipping.
One of the most intriguing Windows Phone handsets that I saw when WP7 first hit the market was Dell's Venue Pro [1]. It very much seemed like a Microsoft response to the Blackberry market. I was surprised when it sold so poorly and was dropped without much fanfare.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Venue_Pro
Tesla's $0 Marketing Budget Is Great Marketing
I don't know in the epistemological sense, but there's just no reason to believe such a thing to be true.
This works well when the photos are not time sequential. I find it harder to follow the story when the photos are ordered by the partition fit instead of the time taken. It would be neat to optionally incorporate time into the algorithm.
A no-trust-required system would consist of taking these sources and hosting your mail yourself. Which pretty much defeats the purpose, since what you want to avoid is hosting your own email (another alternative).

Honestly I lend more towards phasing out email completely. Maybe providing gateways to other protocols.
I'll do you one better: explain how requiring an ID prevents ticket scalping.

To be honest, I couldn't care less about scalpers. The limit on ticket purchases already do a pretty good job preventing the "I'm going to buy ALL the tickets and resale them for 10% more" business plan. I see no reason a private individual shouldn't be able to resale their ticket for any amount they think they can get for it.
Keith Alexander believes that terrorists live amongst us, trying to implement Sharia and create a Caliphate. To fight this, he needs to "Collect it all".

It's just as important to understand his motivation as it is to understand ours, and assess the reasonableness of each in comparison to the other, comparing our current situation to others in history that were similar, and the result they had.
More likely to sell it or spin it out. A buyer could open source it though.
You could always make it open-source and allow users to "download" and "upload" their mailbox. This way, when one service provider is shutdown, you can find a host and install the email system and upload your mailbox.

I had a similar idea, but I have no time to execute it.
> That's a great way to get absolutely nothing done.

I agree. I've actually been having trouble deciding whether or not this us vs them mentality has been deliberately cultivated by people who don't want things to get better or not. It would not surprise me to be told that there's an NSA program intended to do that; after all, the FBI sent in undercover cops to suspected terrorist groups who ended up being overzealous, so it's not like such false flagging is unknown.
I guess I meant register the domain. Thanks for the TN shoutout :)
For those (like me) who didn't know, APL is a programming language...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)
9 Tools to Help You Measure Mobile Analytics
Hyperloop Alpha by SpaceX
Is not a solution, is a temporary mitigation.

Even if democracy seem that lost its meaning in US (either by power grabbing or media controlling population) the political way must kept to be tried.

But while that is in the works (and will take time, is not that they will admit that they are wrong, they know they are, they must be forced to change their ways by international and national pressure), some technical hacks could help. And at the very least, if popular enough, is another way to tell the government that the country don't like what they are doing.
Checking out pull requests
Sometimes you are in a public place with nothing to use as a platform. Never use the seat, of course, since other people put their butts there, and as you say they can be fragile. I use the rim. I have never slipped or fallen. It is quite secure.

At home I have platforms.
I think Blackberry has some juicy "smartphone" patents, too, that aren't so end-of-life as Motorola's patents.

Plus, BB10 is pretty great as an OS, and has the best and most efficient multi-tasking system from what I've noticed (stuff can run in the background without a big hit on battery life, and the transition between apps is very smooth).
That is gorgeous and a huge step up in readability over the previous docs (and most others that I see, honestly). Amazing work, everyone involved.
Toastmasters has been a big help for me. You get to practice speaking in front of a group of people who are all there to practice speaking as well. Knowing everybody is there to learn the same skills takes some of the pressure off. Plus every time you give a speech somebody is assigned to evaluate it in the same meeting. So you get instant feedback and constructive criticism.

Another big advantage of Toastmasters is that there are a lot of opportunities for impromptu speaking. This made me very nervous at first but it’s incredibly valuable to practice speaking for 1-2 minutes without notes.
and .it (please)