skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google Answers. lol

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Answers
Aren't there plenty of unexplained phenomena? Sometimes I have the feeling the universe is getting weirder the more we learn about it.
Scraping Tabular Websites into a CSV using PhantomJS
Don't Americans have guns to protect property? I suppose in fairness Disney cant run out and wave a gun at people downloading cartoons.

Yes, its disgustingly over the top, but then, what isn't these days?
Perhaps my mistake was working for academia (support staff, not academic) but I make a bare fraction of that. (and for comparable work to what I've done elsewhere in industry.)
You don't need the pass-phrase when you can get the encryption key itself. And there are several techniques to identify encryption keys and vastly reduce the search space for these, making it rather fast to extract.

This paper describes (and implements) a few of these (Chapter "Key Identification"): http://cryptome.org/0003/RAMisKey.pdf
Me too. Replaced all native Android HN apps for me.
I contacted Apple while I was travelling for work in India about a busted macbook air. The trick is to grab some skype credit and call their international support numbers (listed on their website).

They shipped out a new one to me within two days, and the same delivery guy took my broken one back. Fantastic support experience.

[Edit] they charged me for the new one until they received the faulty one back and then did a charge back [/edit]
It's funny how Windows 8 is singled out as if other Windows versions are any better. Windows 7 can be securely used till 2020? That's the cut off date for updates from MS. The same MS that the article says " For the user there is simply no way to tell what exactly Microsoft does to their system through remote updates."

The above is true of Apple and Google, but it is glossed over.

First, I fail to see any relevance or technical info about what the TPM or trusted boot has to do with the issue at hand.

If anything they should be warning people about using Chromebooks where everything is uploaded to the cloud by default, same with Google Apps and Skydrive. Or Outlook.com and Gmail.

Oh, also be careful about Ubuntu, Shuttleworth said he has root on your machines.

In short, this is a rambling article full of technical sounding gibberish designed to get semi technical folks riled up with scary sounding buzzwords instead of actually educating people.

Edit: Fixed typo reported in reply.
I signed up. My main skill is opening/troubleshooting locks, and I think it would be an interesting experiment to see, A. if they would allow me to be a helper, and B. to test my efficacy as a digital locksmith.

I've successfully had vicarious openings via both voice & text, so video seems like it would be even better.

I have no opinion on whether or not this should exist, whether google will shut it down, whether it will be effective, etc.
It's a cute argument, based on the number of universe simulations - if there are heaps of them, the odds are ours is one.

But this argument misses something - what about the number of people being simulated? If there are many more than actual people, the same argument applies. You are likely simulated.

But, you may object, if you simulate a person, don't you need to simulate a universe? Well, yes, but only the bits the person can see. Like in a fps, it doesn't render the entire world from every possible perspective - just one. Much easier (and, dare I say it, more likely than simulating an entire universe). This is just Descartes systematically deceiving demon + how many there are.

A second objection is that it would be more efficient to share the same world across many simulated people. This might be true, but the underlying question remains: to determine how likely you are simulated, we need to consider the simulated vs real people ratio, not the simulated vs real universes.

PS: If we're going all Vishnu's dream, all bets are off. Why should it in anyway be bound by the observations we have gathered? For example, why assume the simulation must be finite - any justification that we can generalise from our own observations is parochial and anthropocentric.

Of course, it is simpler to imagine (and probably, to do), if it's a simulation of the actual universe. So let's use the argument again: of all the simulated universes, how many will be of the true universe, and how many will be bizarre variations (which ours would be)? Of course, we cannot hope to estimate these probabilities for an arbitrarily different parent universe - even less so than to predict what that parent universe would be like! But it seems pointless to simulate an exact copy... for us, iteration-like variations, or of fiction seem more likely.
api.ihackernews.com/‎
If it is possible to simulate a universe such as ours, and there definitely is a real universe somewhere (which is an entirely different can of philosophical worms) then it is most likely that there is more than one simulated universe being run in that real universe. In fact there could be a great many simulations running right now (either due to one civilisation at the relevant technological level running many simulations, many civilisations running one each, or many running many) and that multiplies up over the course of the real universe's remaining existence.

We are either in the one real universe or one of the many simulated ones, so it is more likely that we are in one of the latter.

Even if you consider the possibility of there being an infinite number of real universes this basic arithmetic still holds: for each real universe there is potentially a great many simulated ones.

To compound it further: if the simulation is so detailed that it is possible for the simulated life to perform its own simulations, then each simulated universe may contain many more simulated realities. Turtles! All the way down! There will be a limit to how far this can go of course as each simulation must logically be simpler than the parent reality (caveat: some might question if that logic is true or just a limitation of our current knowledge about information theory) so the complexity of the real universe(s) will dictate how may levels of virtualisation we could potentially find ourselves within.
In theory, yes. But my research indicates that you don't see smooth games like that yet.
Dangerous, but what if your destruction code was 1 character out of 20 different to your actual password, do you reckon you could claim the intruder had fat fingers?
Better would be a code which reveals a convincing fake account/data.
Interesting. I'm catching up on Bamford right now. I'll put The Shadow Factory on the list. As far as tapping the cables. I can't imagine tapping a cable is much of a challenge for any nation at shallow depths. Having an operational submarine makes it possible to do so at greater depths and with less risk of detection.
1. Web and mobile games.I see Adobe Air is getting popular as a cross platform game dev library + starling , feathers , etc ...
2. Flex dashboards and reports in banks( e.g.Morgan Stanley ).
Oooohhhh that is devious. So the Australian Sex Party is trying to break into the Senate and have a say nationally. Their best bet on securing a seat is in Victoria. With the aid of preferences in Victoria from that small group of libertarian-minded parties, that was feasible. In return, the Libertarian bloc got preferences nationally; maybe they'll win, maybe they won't. But they've got a shot. All gravy, right?

Well, actually, the Sex party also had preferences nationally with the Liberal Democrats (whether the Lib-Dems were above or below the Libertarian bloc in those preferences is irrelevant, as we'll soon see). And it just so happens that the Libertarian bloc --that the Sex party is counting on to get their seat in Victoria-- had substantial backing from the Lib-Dems. By hook or by crook (hint: crook), the Lib-Dems utilize their influence over that libertarian bloc and stop the GVT from getting lodged. Now they get to keep the Sex party's preferences flowing to them, while not having to worry about the Sex party actually gaining a seat at all! Even the threat of the remaining libertarian preferences to them in other states is minimal; they've likely got better backing from other parties anyway.

http://i.imgur.com/s2zg1qc.jpg
Surely who you're working for and what you're working on has a much much bigger effect on income than what programming language you happen to use. People using python at a top hedge fund will surely earn more than people using python at a low end web shop.
What you need is a dummy account... login in to PC with the dummy password and you see a different system.
See argument upstream-
in summary, autohiding scrollbars:

Pros:

Looks tidier sometimes

Cons:

Causes frustration and confusion.

My question is: whose lives have been significantly improved by the addition of this feature? why does it exist?

> Whereas you are?

yes

> And we should take your opinion on scrollbars over Apple designer's one, because?

because I am right and Apple is wrong.

On top of that, the reaction to my position is so weird. Oh Zen, if you had your way we would be FORCED by your tyrannical fascist ways to look at ugly scrollbars ALL the time instead of just some of the time. :(
are they widely used in APIs to e.g. send a query to the sql database or open a file?
What was wrong with XSLT for-each - which loops over a collection of things quite happily?
>A good design is a design we can read easily and use easily

HN on mobile achives neither.
This is similar to bootstrap's .active.progress-striped progress bars[0].

We use bootstrap already, but I wanted the user to feel a sense of progress, whereas the indeterminate ones merely give a sense of action.

The iOS Messages app has a SMS progress bar that is totally fake: its duration is actually the mean duration of the last time it took to send SMSes, and is made to fill up to ~80% in that duration. It takes advantage of the knowledge that the exact same task takes about the same time. So despite being fake, its progress statistically makes sense and gives valuable, quantitative feedback to the user.

[0]: http://getbootstrap.com/2.3.2/components.html#progress
Even if a "neutral ISP" was providing the access, they could always partner with a Google or Facebook to produce the same result.

Arguably some Internet is better than no Internet but I don't think there is a complete solution until there is enough competition at the local access that a user can choose between a completely open pipe and Google like alternatives?
CO2 from concrete manufacture is a big issue. Considering that all the buildings being built here are concrete construction, I think China is significantly higher output than a few measly brush fires
GIGO.

Most commercial Haskell jobs are in finance -- where you don't get to contribute code to github. That leaves the PhD students and open source folks, shifting the data sideways.
Life is not zero-sum. Just because big corporations gain, doesn't mean you have to lose.

And please, stop with the slavery metaphor. It's offensive. There are actual slaves in Africa that would love the serfdom of targeted ads.
The problem with that was that you can just type stuff into google and search it yourself (google answers). The alternative is a few minutes of typing.

This is different, it's for physical work monitoring, and where real time face to face interaction is valued. Alternatives to this are get in a car, rent an office, get on a plane.
My roommate bought a Windows 8 equipped Asus a few months back and installed Mint on it. Seriously, Google 'How to install Linux on a Windows 8 laptop' sometime.
Then you must not be using HN on a mobile device, because it is pretty much unusable.. that is, unless you like panning left and right incessantly as you read titles.
Netflix Introduces “My List”
Folks, take a step back and take a look what is going on here. When you were a child, would any of you have believed that one day in the early 21st century, you would wake up in a world where your own government spies on each and every single citizen, plus whoever is connected to them in another country, where they send agents to newspapers to oppress the freedom of the press?

I mean, isn't this almost surreal? Like a cheap sci-fi novel has become reality?

Who's the real terrorists in 2013? I for one am more scared, appaled by what has been bubbling to the surface every week, almost every day since Snowden.
The only thing I'd add to this is that there exist organisations in the world that can afford to hire a team of developers (or, as it were, execute long-term contracts with a consultancy at an aggregated $10k+ day rate) indefinitely with little or no function that couldn't be achieved with Wordpress 1.0, including the security vulnerabilities.

In the worst case, I... I mean my made-up friend Bob... has worked on teams that seemed to have no other purpose than to execute the new idea that week, with little or no connection to any actual business value.

Bob has seen this happen too many times for it to be a random occurrence. According to Bob, such engagements/teams are typically funded by the taxpayer or upper management at companies that have more cash than God. Then I told Bob to shut up, because he's in breach of all the NDAs and sometimes people read things on Hacker News.
Zooming and scrolling left-to-right to read every link is a broken experience.
Ditch Your Passwords? US Gov To Issue Secure Online IDs
XSLT smells to me like it should be a compilation target for a scheme rather than something you actually write directly.
This look quite promising:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_radiation#Selected_radi...

We're speaking of radiant heat fluxes in the > 1kW/m^2 range for a sunny day.
Mandating them encourages drug use to get there, stay awake, etc.

They ARE dangerous. It isn't like humans stay awake on their own for 3 days. Drugs are required to do that practically speaking
I agree. Strange phenomena at very small and very large scales seem like perfectly sensible optimization choices. Like the copenhagen interpretation of wave-particle duality (no need to simulate the particles until they are actually observed by an actant, just represent them as waves) or dark matter (no need to accurately simulate gravitational force at vast distances).
actionscript, whaaat. I thought people are using flah less and less.
I've heard pricing rumors anywhere from $300 to $500 off-contract. If it's priced towards the top end of those estimates, it won't really help the developing world. Personally, I feel that anything over $300 is going to be a slap in the face to consumers. Apple's supply chain management is the best in the industry, so they wouldn't really have an excuse for not being able to compete with Google's Nexus pricing.
First, Windows 8 allows you to run whatever desktop apps you want, including third party antivirus software of your choice that have full access to the system.

Second, I haven't seen your argument made for iOS and Chromebooks which are much more locked down than Windows 8. Though one could argue that Chromebook doesn't need to have malware since everything is helpfully uploaded to the cloud.
What about programmers who are proficient in multiple languages? (As any good programmer should be).
Multiverse theory, I guess.
If that's the case we're part of the ultimate "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks".
And how would you know about it?

If we are in a simulation, then it is not a given that the simulation does not get "rolled back" and restarted from an earlier point regularly, or just ditched and started all over again if/when bugs are found, just like a researcher will empty and clean his petri dish when he notices contamination that'll ruin his research.
FlowType: font-size and line-height based on element width
(podcast, about 15 minutes, from Philosophy Bites)

Nick Bostrom on the simulation argument:

http://philosophybites.com/2011/08/nick-bostrom-on-the-simul...
REfO stands for "Regular Expressions for Objects"
When the internet is being used as a "right" or commodity like food and your digital persona, which you don't "own", is being used to profit someone else, and your "right" to it is revoked if you choose to "own" it, the metaphor is apt.
if enough crimes can be committed by sharing data online then the government would have enough incentive to hold complete control over the internet to prevent such crimes.

these people really want total control over flow of information.
I think in reality the highest paid languages are C, Objective-C and C++, with Java a close second (though it very much depends on what is being done).

And if you're looking to be at the top of your game, one single piece of advice: master C. Once you've mastered it, you can pick and choose whatever else you want.
Ask HN: How do you accept/make international payments?
Two questions in one!

US clients: How do you pay your international freelancers when dealing with them directly?

Non-US Freelancers: Barring risky payment methods like PayPal, how do you accept payments from US-based busineses when dealing with such clients directly (i.e. not through a lowball marketplaces like Elance)?
In case you ever wanted to read that article as a short story: http://qntm.org/responsibility
"restrictive diets AND other fads".
Yes, I know people can be characterized as brains in vats. I used the terminology I did for a reason: http://www.iep.utm.edu/brainvat/

There's one difference between the brain-in-a-vat question and the simulated-universe question: one, in theory, characterizes "you" as part of reality being deceived, and the other characterizes "you" as not part of "reality". But those are just words; they don't even have consequences within the hypothetical. Literally everything else that can be said about one can be said about the other. They're both impossible to gather evidence for or against, and they both (relatedly) have no ramifications either way. If you think there's any merit in positivism, then the only possible response is "that's a stupid question". A question for which evidence cannot be gathered one way or the other is meaningless.
David Miranda feels 'invaded' after password disclosure
Sorry, do we know that you'll only be able to get online if you only have a Google account? I haven't heard anything like that, and if, as I suspect, nothing hints that this will happen, then this is much gnashing of teeth about nothing.

If Google does require a Google account to get online, then, okay, it's not as selfless as before, but it's still internet access where people had none before. The possibility of accessing Wikipedia and Khan Academy is worth an inactive Google account, at least.
"First, I fail to see any relevance or technical info about how TPM or trusted boot to the issue at hand."

Is that a sentence? It sort of looks like a sentence, but something seems missing.
Telegraph: Why I believe the Guardian has smeared Britain's security services
Good luck if it's a state monopoly (mine is). Between bad internet and no internet, I chose bad internet.
Providing internet access is not the same as locking somebody into their cloud services.

There is such a thing as win win in business. Yes, Google benefits if more people are on the internet, because of the network effect - more people searching, more stuff to be found, and, yes, more potential advertising space. It's useful even without lock in.
Actually the only really interesting thing about that data is how close the lowest and highest values are, certainly they must be within the margin of error (something I noticed he failed to talk about). So it seems the real conclusion to draw is that average income is largely uncorrelated with language used.
True. In order to know something is not running correctly, you would need a clear concept of what it would look like if it were running correctly. (The old argument that if you were raised in a cave in total darkness, you can't know it is dark unless you know what light is.) In order to notice a bug, we would need to be outside the simulation.
It changes the whole "why do we exist at all" question completely. If we are inside a simulation we may never be able to see outside to the true nature of reality. Instead of being part of the an explanation for the big bang, black wholes could just be a bug. Inflation could simply be due to the people running the simulation wanting to skip that long drawn out expansion bit so they could study something else.

Of course for our day to day lives it doesn't matter a jot. I still have to work to earn money to pay the mortgage, even if my job, my money, my house and the bank don't really exist in the real universe...

Of course you could consider the simulation and the life within it to be equally real: I think I am thinking, therefore I quite possibly may be. This makes it even less relevant to those of us who are not philosophers or theoretical physicists.
From my opinion, the most concerning thing about this is that NZ has typically distanced itself from the US, and that appears to be changing.

Sure, we were always part of the five-eyes, but only within the last couple of years has NZ been so warmly welcomed into the whitehouse, and the co-operation with the Dotcom fiasco scared a lot of people as well.

The passing of this law is largely a knee-jerk reaction to the fact that the GCSB have been doing this all along but got caught out, so rushed it through parliament.

These changes align far too much with US agenda's, the revelation of prism, etc.

I take your point that at least they're acknowledging that they're going to be doing it, but it's just a horrible gut feeling about the future.
Virtual-Notary.Org hereby notes that on
Date: Wednesday August 21, 2013 08:11.29 EDT (UTC-0400)

a random drawing in the range [1, 100000], inclusive, based on
a hardware source of true randomness, yielded the following decision.

Random Value: 85108

----

24:2 And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre.

24:3 And they entered in, and found not the body of the Lord Jesus.

24:4 And it came to pass, as they were much perplexed thereabout,
behold, two men stood by them in shining garments: 24:5 And as they
were afraid, and bowed down their faces to the earth, they said unto
them, Why seek ye the living among the dead? 24:6 He is not here, but
is risen: remember how he spake unto you when he was yet in Galilee,
24:7 Saying, The Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful
men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again.

24:8 And they remembered his words, 24:9 And returned from the
sepulchre, and told all these things unto the eleven, and to all the
rest.

24:10 It was Mary Magdalene and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James,
and other women that were with them, which told these things unto the
apostles.

24:11 And their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed
them not.

24:12 Then arose Peter, and ran unto the sepulchre; and stooping down,
he beheld the linen clothes laid by themselves, and departed,
wondering in himself at that which was come to pass.
Marissa Mayer, the geek as babe