skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Wants to use your webcam"

Just a suggestion, if it's going to do that it should explain why. I'm not hitting yes to that without a good reason.

If it's using it as source data for the pixel shaders... I get you're trying to go for a wow factor, but from experience I think a lot of people are creeped out when their likeness is used for something they don't have direct control over.
If I might ask a meta-question, how could this story have gotten on the front page? The vast majority of the comments vehemently disagree with it.
We have those and they're generally free. We call them "social clubs" and "mixers". Heck, Mensa is basically a social club for smart folk.
LOL! Okay, we don't like Piwik because it's written in PHP, so fsck privacy, google can haz it.
This is truly sad.
I have seen people sorta 'merge up' migrations at a point in time...

As for JSON generation, there's an open ticket for it already: https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/9212
Love the command line, queue, dotenv and log format suggestions.
Shouldn't you be using schema:load or structure:load rather than running your migrations from scratch? Migrations are for a database which already has data.
More realistically, commenting it by default would be IHMO a good idea.
A friend of mine who currently learn rails and angular by himself got bitten by it. And angular is definitely not the only JavaScript framework / plugin that don't work well with Turbolinks.

It's a very nice gem for some use cases but a terrible default.
Years ago I had a good talk with David Chalmers at a Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness conference. That prompted me to read his book. Roger Penrose and others also have interesting ideas of what is really consciousness.

Most people probably never experience expansive meditation, but for those of us who do that seems like further evidence that consciousness is not all in our physical brains.
Ok, more source diving. Bitcoin Wallet calls into bitcoinj java/com/google/bitcoin/core/Wallet.java sendCoinsOffline(...), which calls completeTx(...), which calls core/Transaction.java signInputs(...), which calls calculateSignature(...), which calls core/ECKey.java sign(...), which performs:

ECDSASigner signer = new ECDSASigner();
ECPrivateKeyParameters privKey = new ECPrivateKeyParameters(privateKeyForSigning, ecParams);
signer.init(true, privKey);
BigInteger[] sigs = signer.generateSignature(input.getBytes());
return new ECDSASignature(sigs[0], sigs[1]);

This _appears_ to be a correct invocation of spongycastle-formerly-bouncycastle, initializing the signer with an instance of ECPrivateKeyParametes, and NOT an instance of ParametersWithRandom, so that, on org/spongycastle/crypto/signers/ECDSASigner.java line 41, we call SecureRandom() with no arguments.

I don't see spongycastle ever calling setSeed, and I don't see it ever leaking its SecureRandom instance, so unless calling setSeed on ANY SecureRandom instance is a problem, this _looks_ like a correct usage.

Also, I now remember how much I hate reading Java.
No, I refer to bullshit like the amount of trouble you have to go through (and subsequently the amount of upvotes you get on HN [1]) if you manage to center a rectangle on the screen. Stuff like that. It's 2013, the web is the application platform of today, and centering a rectangle is nontrivial. What?

It's just one of the many examples of how broken HTML and CSS are. I dare say that anyone who claims that HTML and CSS aren't completely broken simply has absolutely no imagination and should consider accountancy.

On WebGL, we can reinvent presentation and styling entirely without sacrificing performance. Maybe keep parts of HTML, and ditch CSS entirely in favour of something better, and use a JS lib to render it all on GLES hardware, the same in every browser. Designers can think about different devices and screen sizes, and not about ways of telling a browser that a div is secretly a table cell so that it can be centered. We now have many competing programming languages, competing frameworks, and so on, with a few mainstream ones and improvements/replacements all the time. Rendering entire websites in WebGL enables having the same world-wide innovation in presenting web sites and web apps to users.

But even if you don't think going all-in on WebGL is a good idea, you have to agree that HTML/CSS is a gigantic 💩[2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6191350
[2] http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f4a9/browserte...
Nothing is pure lua, you could probably use GObject-introspection to write a GTK app, but nobody do it.All of these apps have _some_ lua code, but it is nowhere close to 10%, I will give you that.
4th Amendment says warrants are supposed to be specific. I don't have the background, years of reading or sophistication to understand how the general Verizon and other warrants are constitutional, so I believe these programs are unconstitutional. So this opinion piece is falling on my deaf ears.

They need to figure out how to do this constitutionally, at least at the broad institutional and program level, or not at all.
People go to elite universities because they are the best schools.
At 1:44:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=o2... it sounds like he is actively looking for an opportunity to use Scheme as an embedded language in a game. Does HN know of any examples of such use?
In Chrome's F12 tools I see three _utm.gif requests from the article itself. According to http://utmgifparser.appspot.com/, the three requests appear identical except for the "X10 data" ('utme'); not sure of the significance of that w.r.t. GA reporting. Any GA experts care to enlighten?
Except during filming a real rat really was submerged in oxygenated fluid.
Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook will own lots of content
Ask HN: Willing to work for free for 10 days as a Product Manager
I am a Product Manager with 9+ years of experience working at one of the big software companies (based out of Redmond - so it should be pretty obvious which one!).

I will be in the Bay Area starting the first week of September for around 7-10 days. I am looking to work for free for a funded start-up that can benefit from a Product Manager during this time.

Why I am doing this: I am actively looking to move from my current big company to a start-up. This helps me to get a first hand experience of life at a start-up and the huge difference in what it means to work for a big company versus a dynamic, young start-up. It also gives me a chance to see how I adjust to such an environment.

What you get: An extra pair of hands and eyes for a week. Help with ideas, brainstorming, doing the dirty work, technical design, user requirements etc. I can share some of my experiences working at an established company if they are helpful. Looking to get my hands dirty and help with any work that needs to get done.

Ideally, I'd like to work for companies that are looking to hire experienced Product Managers, and can treat this as a week long interview plus a chance to get an extra pair of hands for free. Sort of like a try before you buy at no cost to the start-up. However this is not an absolute requirement. I am willing to work for a company without any hiring prospects, even if it just gives me the experience.

Anyone interested, please leave an email address, and I can share my resume and any other details you might want.

This is not a 'HIRE ME' post :)
Willing to work for free for a week without any expectations of being hired or any compensation/benefits for the week that I am there.
Yeah I figured something like that.

I found this very detailed explanation, in a nutshell skin scatters light. https://www.imt.liu.se/edu/courses/TBMT36/pdf/blue.pdf

And this list of animals with actual blue blood, when its healthy and oxygenated not de-oxygenated: http://www.buzzfeed.com/donnad/10-animals-that-bleed-blue
Am I the only one who thinks mirror test is stupid?

You won't realize your recorded voice is yours. You won't realize it's you on a CCTV footage. It's not granted.

On the other hand, it's trivial to make robot pass the mirror test, indeed necessary in the environment where mirrors are common.
Dear software engineers,

Welcome to being a large enough part of the economy to attract political attention.

Love, the energy industry
I agree. Seems like the response went no deeper than: "Hire some (possibly unpaid, illegal) interns! Stop having time-consuming meetings!"

What about the truly hard questions this might bring up? How do you plan for the possible long-term absence of a founder without ruining their hope of beating their disease? What happens to the equity of a founder who passes? Is this something you need to discuss with them, along the lines of a will, to get straightened out? How do you deal with employees who might also be experiencing emotional grief over the situation? Are there situations where you need to slow the growth of the company so people can deal with their personal reactions to a situation like this? How do you cope with the dual emotional roller-coasters of running a start-up and having a friend on death's door?

Any of these would be interesting questions to hear responses to. Instead, this article chooses to take the shallowest route possible and actually treat the horror of cancer more like your co-founder got the flu and was out for a week or two...
With baby-zeus I mean https://github.com/rails/commands. The secret_token is indeed hard, other people proposed the dotEnv gem which makes sense as well. Or maybe link a whole directory to a shared dir?
"and if the goal is security, the harsh truth is that we should often err toward more secrets rather than fewer."

I thought the ongoing debate was to determine whether the security afforded by the secrets is worth it if it means establishing a surveillance state. The goal is not security at any cost, is it?
Lightweight printf-like formatting for C++ streams
If I had a brain tumor I'd want my friend/cofounder to use it to pimp our startup. If she can move our business forward while I'm ill, that's wonderful for both of us.
Very good suggestion, this should be default.
>(The NSA) simply doesn't have the time to read irrelevant emails or listen in on conversations unconnected to possible plots against American civilians.

Possible "plotters against American civilians":
-Occupy
-animal-rights protesters
-environmentalists
-tax evaders
-prominent politicians (http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/new-york-times-nsa-ag...)
-whistleblowers
I don't think this venture will succeed but I do think that it raises an obvious point: Elite and other universities don't groom you to be elite nor do they teach you enough of the basic things that are valuable to employers and therefore to you. Instead universities spend a great deal of time on things that most people, in retrospect, would say were not useful.

If you were to ask recent top graduates about 6 months into their first job what basic useful things they learned that they should have or could have learned in school I think you would find many recurring themes.

Why are students forced to unnecessarily learn things the hard way?
* the tension between 'rails' and 'rake' has always been there, and I see it trip up beginners. There is a gem that sorta does this, I'll give this some thought.

* Making apps no longer a singleton has been happening on master already, so expect to see a bunch of that.

* I like multipart emails too, since I prefer plaintext emails.

* Working on the tokens issue, I already commented about it elsewhere in this thread.

* As of Rails 4, you can slip in your own Logger, so this is pretty easy to customize if we don't change anything.

* Queues were explicitly brought back to 4.1, that's a feature that we (and I, maintaining Resque) really want to get in.

Thanks! <3
It will help me to understand myself. That's much more important than programming robots. What if I don't actually need any robots in the first place?
Thanks for commenting, good to hear Ember compatibility is also in scope.
Minitest 5. I'm getting great results with Minitest Spec.
Where people click vs where they pay their rent
Yey for bringing queues back!
I'll check that gem, thanks!
I'd love to see a move away from the activerecord model, towards a datamapper / mongoid / declared format. It just makes more sense in multiple ways

Some defaults for:
queueing
background jobs
timers

Will come back at this tomorrow.
I commented on this elsewhere in the thread, but I'm working on it, thanks!
Voting an article up implies interest, not agreement. People vote an article up to see it discussed more thoroughly. And, if they disagree with it, to have it get slapped down roundly.
>If I had a brain tumor I'd want my friend/cofounder to use it to pimp our startup.

Even if my ill friend/cofounder "wanted" that (which amounts to "was ok with it"), I still wouldn't do it. Being human is more important than pimping a company for the big cash out.
> The conspiracy buffs are too busy howling in protest at the thought that their government could uncover how long they spent on the phone with their dear aunt. Let me break this to you gently. The government is not interested in your conversations with your aunt, unless, of course, she is a key terrorist leader.

Let me break this to you gently. The president of the United States would never send burglars into the opposing political parties national headquarters to ransack the place and conduct espionage, in addition to many other covert and illegal actions, in an attempt to force the next presidental election his way. If the FBI and press began uncovering this, he would never abuse executive powers to strongarm the FBI, have congressmen of the same party attack television media licenses of the media companies reporting this etc. Oh yaa, this actually did happen. Within my lifetime.

It's good to hear the CIA can be trusted. In the 1980s, Congress banned the US from sending money to terrorists who were fighting to overthrow the elected government of Nicaragua. Terrorists who killed Americans like Ben Linder. Oliver North joined the National Security Council and began secretly funding these terrorists in violation of Congressional mandate. When it became public he was doing this and Congress began investigating, North testified CIA director William Casey shred all documents pertaining to his illegal activity, so that Congress could not find out what had happened.

The average American has no idea what it means when it leaks out that fibre optic beam splitters are making records of our conversations and data connections, or how something like XKeyscore work. We have a better idea of what is actually happening in this respect, which is why we have some extra concern. And a more realistic view of what is happening, despite what this former-CIA Rand Corp. apparatchik says.
The oj gem helps json generation a ton. The circular reference checks are still slow though.
AOL CEO Tim Armstrong Fires Patch Employee In Front Of 1,000 Coworkers
Unicorns and God for me.
True, that's sorta outside of the scope of the framework.
BART strike averted for next 60 days, ensuring trains will roll
It struck me how well Carmack's ideas about running all actors in the game world in parallel map to Clojure's agents[1].

Clojure introduces a bunch of interesting ideas on how to handle parallel programming. "Perception and Action" by Stuart Halloway is a great talk to listen to if you're interested[2].

[1] http://clojure.org/agents
[2] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/An-Introduction-to-Clojur...
+1 for this. My team "rolls up" migrations akin to spring cleaning, because the migration files often have more important information that the db schema, and are easier for team members to learn quickly. I'll contribute $50 if this feature is accepted for Rails 4.1.
Can you help us build out this prototype (www.insp-i.com)? You could even join us as tech co-founder.
What did the LA Times get wrong? Everything.
As a Russian citizen I can only add that in the same days Putin accepted the new digital copyright law, more severe than SOPA, lobbied by media corporations, allowing domains seisure (like the 3-letter agencies do in the US), and other ridiculous measures. All in the name of movie and music corporations.

This means Putin is totally loyal to the US.

What also fascinates me is that CNN/FOX/3 other letters TV anchors speak EXACTLY like Soviet TV in '70s and '80s, making statements in place of questions:

"Julia, to start [the White House statement canceling the summit] with the Snowden factor, for the Russian statement to say, 'this is a situation which we did not create,' is of course a lie.

Welcome to the USSR :)

On the situation: punishing Snowden does not make any difference: he is already punished, and others won't dare whistleblowing. On our side, the government is involved in anti-American campaign, so they can't afford sending Snowden to the "enemy" after Manning has been sentenced that severely.

(sarcasm on) Why bother insisting on extradition? I think to an average American who saw Russia in Hollywood movies, Snowden is like in hell already.

I think our state diplomacy and propaganda could have negotiated the Russian SOPA with the US & corporations better, they should have demanded making more noise and scandal, accept Assange and somebody else. (sarcasm off)
Background jobs are something we explicitly punted from 4.0 with the intention of 4.1, so hopefully this will happen.

Thanks!
I would love to see rails-api become a first-class player in the Rails ecosystem.
Does our discussion really benefit from comments attacking "these people" just for the sake of criticizing them?

Please don't take this personal, I'm not a US citizen and I don't like the NSA capturing and archiving my personal, "private" information either, but what do we get from just venting our anger in an online forum?
I consult for a number of startups, both at seed stage and with significant revenue. Mostly I do web applications, as opposed to "sites."

I'm seeing more organizations learning towards frameworks like Ember.js and Angular.js. I'm also hearing lots of things like, "When I update the data in this browser, I want the changes to automatically propagate to other browsers."

Among other things, this means I need robust plugins like ember-rails that integrate into the asset pipeline and provide appropriate generators. I also need libraries similar to Socket.io that can notify the browsers when the model changes.

I don't necessarily want these features to be in the Rails 4.1 core. But I suspect that I'll be building more and more apps like this over the next two years, and I'd love to see Rails be a strong competitor on the back end.
While I agree with you completely I just don't consider reading on a tablet an option.

Yes, DRM is an issue. Personally, when paying about the same or more for a DRM-e-book than for the real thing I consider it fair game and morally acceptable for me to strip the DRM (no one can claim that I'm getting a cheaper version because of DRM when the DRM crap costs more than a physical book).

Currently this is childs play so I'm gambling somewhat on that this won't change or my e-reader won't be able to new books from certain places.

Of course, this makes me a criminal.
> [...] We need politics. We need laws to regulate both government and corporate aggregation and handling of private information.

Sure, but I don't think the "why bother when another obstacle stands in the way?" argument is a good one.

We have also seen that secret laws make regulation difficult since public oversight is not possible without government transparency; your final paragraph seems to imply current-situation + politics = trust in government and no need for privacy software.
People are sending you Facebook messages that you're not seeing
13 tech leaders reveal their favourite productivity hacks
The "I know secret stuff and you guys just have to believe me" doesn't cut it.

The CIA have a pretty atrocious record. Gun and drug running, undermining other countries democracies because they don't toe the Washington line, funding and founding Al-Qaeda through its proxy war against the USSR in Afghanistan.

Really this guy need go take a long walk of a short bridge.

What is really sad is that they all think like this. He isn't an isolated case.
Show HN: We made a low-budget ‘how it works’ video. What do you think?
http://youtu.be/nT8xXIdwDGo
Ok, so maybe I came off a bit harsh there. I've worked with a number of excellent security professionals who have found weaknesses and provided great prioritizations and solutions to the problems they've found.

However that's not the case whenever some project on HN claims to use cryptography. The answer usually is: "you don't know what you're doing, so don't use cryptography." While that is "safe", for many it's not actionable: sometimes we actually do need to use it and not everyone can afford a security consultant. I wish instead there was a recommendation for some library out of the box that would handle everything from key management to supporting my specific use cases.

Said a different way: I want an API that is simply giveMeANewKey() and encryptSecretMessage() and decryptSecretMessage() and the library takes care of both secrecy and integrity with strong defaults.

You can't expect it to make the whole system secure of course, but I think a better API that makes it harder to shoot yourself in the foot (both by having sane defaults and being very opinionated to the point where it affects your system design) would go a long way, no?

EDIT: looks like the stuff you linked to is more what I am looking for. I wish I had heard of them sooner!
> I'll contribute $50 if this feature is accepted for Rails 4.1.

Oh yeah? I wonder if others would also pay for bug bounties.
> Frankly, I don't understand how anyone would want to pay USD 250 per year to get a service which albeit behind a beautiful website just can't match the experience and control that you get when running things locally.

People not wanting to run things locally are exactly why we decided to launch the Kraken service in the first place - just upload and forget, let someone else deal with the complexities and use their resources. We actually decided to go commercial in response to a ludicrous number of feedback emails we were getting asking for this. It got to the point where we decided to found a company and make it happen, as it just made sense. Moreover, it's really difficult working out a pricing strategy for a product such as an image optimization API, and expect to make amendments to our pricing strategy in response to feedback and other learnings.
This is super useful, and I hope to see many many more examples of this kind of approach to teaching programming and math concepts, especially in graphics where real time visual feedback is so important. As he says, there is a lot of material for the already advanced out there, but not much that fills the gap for people already used to coding but that lack the experience for digesting dense packets of information relevant to the topic. I hope he can finish this. Does anyone know of other interactive learning projects such as this?
Well, this great, because it's a discussion about what Snowden leaked, and not about which hotel he's staying in.

Apparently, the debate finally got big enough that those who support the NSA's actions feel the need to defend themselves, in detail, and not just oneliners. This is an open debate, in the media, very different from e.g. Alexander's talk on Black Hat.

Sure, we all disagree with him, here on HN. That's not the point. Everyone reading this can make up their own mind. The point is Snowden's leak is starting to have the desired effect.
Enough With The JavaScript Already
https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/activesupport/act...

<3