skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If a government entity had enough tor exit nodes and peers in place, might they catch some traffic end-to-end, and therefore be able to track usage of some people?

Any chance that is why usage has jumped?
Meet the Google Founder's Mistress
The fish shell does some (if not all) of this interactively at the terminal.
The sad part is that even after decades of technologists debating this, the reality is that most non-technologists working in the industry don't know, don't care, and really just want their pet features. The real measure of productivity in organizations with non-technical stakeholders therefore becomes whether or not a stakeholder feels like they are getting what they want. Attempts to measure productivity, whether via lines of code or "velocity," are often little more than a way for everyone to pretend their opinion is backed by something quantitative. In especially bad cases with non-technical management, they'll just keep swapping out processes until they either get what they want or have something with numbers and graphs that makes it look like they should.

While I could be accused of excessive cynicism, I do believe this is common enough that it should be addressed. There's a pervasive delusion that decisions are made by rational, informed actors, when that is rarely the case.
Perhaps I did write a great protocol for communicating among nodes in a network, how would I go about marketing that and selling it to somebody?

It makes much more sense to work in the opposite direction: start with an idea for a product and use your specialized knowledge in the implementation details.

On a related note: I think it's a mistake to do compsci R&D in a startup. If you run into a problem that can't be easily solved by today's common algorithms, data structures, and protocols, it makes more sense to "weaponize" an existing PhD thesis than to build something from scratch.

After all, startup rule #1 is "Make something people want." People want products. They don't care about the underlying technology.
I disagree with this. In a plain text file that consists of prose, line breaks are presentation, not content. Hardcoding them into the file doesn't appeal to me. It makes editing a pain in the neck. It also means the line breaks have to be removed again if you want to move between formats.
> I much prefer a system that's geared to projects and not specific types of document too. For example, if this supported housing a collection of documents and an image or two - with changes able to be made on each file, it would be amazing.

Nailed it. That's what I'm building :)
It was reported that Booz revenue is ~$5.5 BILLION, most of which is direct defense contracting.

>As of 2013, 99% of the company's revenue comes from the Federal government.

---

>Key Facts
Founded 1914
Headquartered in McLean, Virginia, USA
NYSE: BAH
Employees: More than 24,000
Revenue: $5.76 billion in fiscal year 2013
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer: Ralph W. Shrader, Ph.D.
Web site: www.boozallen.com

---

https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=boo...

---

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booz_Allen_Hamilton
I agree with the sentiment of your last paragraph, though in fairness Fowler seemed to end his piece saying that measurement was seductive and likely to make things worse.

Still, I can't help cringe at some of the ideas posited -- for one, the idea that more features == a better product.

Or that profit is a measure of engineering productivity. As if it's that uncommon for great products to be badly marketed.
Demos in apps!
140js - coding in 140 characters
> There are plenty of fields where "it won't work" if you lie. Law?

The field of Law is based on interpretation and persuasive authority.
Honest question: Why is it such a great idea?

Wouldn't it be easier/quicker to either:

a) Have a command-line tool to resize images? Alternatively, one that's integrated into the shell so that you can access it from context menus? I.e. right-click -> "resize image"

b) Just open it in mspaint or your open-source image editor of choice?
Wonderful, looks like someone (@mislav and @christoomey) has already shaved this yak for me:

https://github.com/christoomey/vim-tmux-navigator

"Seamless navigation between tmux panes and vim splits"

So great. Off to check another random side-project off the list...
There are class of keyboard like [1]. They are used for specific operator cases but I find fascinating the idea of implementing your own layout from scratch. Usually they have more keys then standard keyboard has. So you could arrange Greek letters in a separate raw; or split alphanumerics to the edges and place arrows in the center; or have to enter keys for both hands; etc

[1] http://www.cherrycorp.com/english/keyboards/POS/SPOS_Rows_Co...
Welcoming Steven Sinofsky as a Box Advisor
So cool! Big Data is unreal.
Are you entitled to suck the milk out of your mother's breast?
Nasdaq Says Software Flaw Exposed in Data Flood That Led to Halt
Why We’re Traveling
Microsoft has a new ergonomic keyboard coming out, with chiclet keys like the Apple Keyboards / Laptops:
http://xahlee.info/kbd/Microsoft_sculpt_ergonomic_keyboard.h...

I think I'm going to order one of these once they come out. It looks gorgeous, and I'm coding so much these days, I think it would be wise to buy one of these.

It also has a detachable number block, which I find great. I need these for Blender 3D work, but apart from that never use them. So I can just stow them away.

It also seems to have two space keys. I wonder if it is possible to detect which one is the left or right one. Or remap them. Then I could remap one of them as ESC for vim, for example. That'd be rad.
This is really awesome, but what would be awesome as well would be the inverse, which is the ability to find potentially relevant options from man pages based on keywords.

This site is a great idea for when you want to find out what some command line black magic is, but the inverse would be great for "I know this command line tool can do this thing, but I don't know the options".
That's because Django is one of the most sensible frameworks around, with the developers being fully aware of the costs of upgrading, making massive efforts to minimize it and not break backward compatibility unless absolutely necessary.
Nothing makes me happier than removing code. If I can find ways to deliver the same functionality in less code I get excited.

Now, I do like to look at my personal lines of code because it gives me a gauge to compare features I implement on a relative basis. It also gives me a relative, rough measure how much effort a particular feature took to produce.
Well you can count any way you like if you absolutely want to make it so. But I count Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, iTunes and the App Store as pretty good successes.
It does. USB can't report enough keys being pressed at the same time. So keyboards that support n-key rollover internally can only support 6 key when using USB: http://www.daskeyboard.com/product/model-s-ultimate/
Another great book, which expands this thesis in more detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_my_teacher_told_me
Pretty sure the idea is to make this available as a service, for UGC-type sites.
> But for every case like the King speech there are plenty more that are examples of its benefit.

Nope [1].

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/07/31...
If you stay in Emacs, a Lisp OS will never come back.
Also if you procrastinate a lot, you might end up learning something useful and get new insights that will make you more productive in the long run.
Amazon's core business is retail, not technology. I am excluding AWS, Mechanical Turk, etc. in this discussion. So selling the Kindle at a loss makes sense to them given that it will used by consumers to purchase retail goods (books, movies, music, etc. in the case of Kindle). Microsoft's core business is Windows - what would they sell if they give it away for free? Tetris?
As is knowing what MAC and DAC are
This is a great step-- I note that you chose to open source after your were on the store. As a well-known company, was that to prevent pre-release copycats?
This seems like an absolutely terrible idea as far as writing code that other humans will be able to understand goes.
I like the first comment in the info graph...

->>> 1) Chester PA has a homicide rate of 62 per 100,000. Camden NJ is almost as bad. US male suicide rate has soared to
19.9 per 100,000.
Black unemployment has averaged 15% for the past 5 years and the real median income for black households has collapsed to
barely above what it was in 1970.

The most deadly threat to many Americans is not foreign terrorists -- it is the corruption of our ruling elites in Washington DC.
They have long shown that they serve the agendas of the billionaires --not the national interest of the American People.
What product was 25% of their revenue that they began giving away?
That is indeed ultra-helpful, thanks for the explanation!
What is the best method to manage your AWS infrastructure deployment?
Yes. Basically, the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_problem.
While there's a lot that is rather farcical about the historical backdrop behind the (phenomenal) AC games, Da Vinci working on the development of weaponry is not exactly one of them.
No, I can't.

I claimed that Typed Clojure doesn't get you the expressive power of Haskell's type system. I understand that Typed Clojure has some sophisticated facilities for refining types, and (e.g.) tracking what keys a map has, and lots of other neat stuff. This does not seem to me to increase the expressivity of the language, whereas Haskell's type system does (well, since I don't think one can separate Haskell into the language on the one hand and its type system on the other, it's misleading to talk about Haskell's type system increasing its expressivity). (I just about plotzed when I saw the definitions for `eval` and `view` in <http://okmij.org/ftp/tagless-final/course/Intro2.hs>.)

Everyone who writes a monad library for Clojure, for instance, has to take special measures to implement a properly polymorphic "return", or punts and doesn't do it. If Typed Clojure let me annotate `(return 5)` [ETA: or annotate something dynamically enclosing `(return 5)` with something that would force the given interpretation of the return call] with the type list of integer, or maybe integer, or whatever, and have it actually evaluate to [5] or #<Just 5>, or whatever, that would be great. AFAICT, it doesn't do that.
Shhhhh! The east and west coasters haven't figured it out yet wink wink. Good technology professionals in the South live very well. :)
Find Out Who’s Using The Pirate Bay… and Why
Sorry for your issues anfleene. Reliability is our top top priority. FWIW our uptime has been 99.9% over the past year - and this is far from where we want it to be.

We now also offer isolated clustering for production level highly available applications that need "4 nines" availability.
PHP sites have been doing this with TimThumb for quite a while. https://code.google.com/p/timthumb/

I wrote https://bitbucket.org/btubbs/thumpy at work and we've been using it in production for a couple years. It's very similar to Pilbox.
Aren't these stories sort of the very definition of spin propaganda?

At least Snowden hasn't been locked away in a hole for three years only to be brought out into the public to tell everyone he's really thinks his a woman.
Dust: A Censorship-Resistant Internet Transport Protocol
(via http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/08/evading_interne.html)
1 - You describe what most Banks and Hedge Funds would call RAD (Rapid Application Developers) Developers (I know redundant like saying "The La Brea Tar Pits...the the tar tar pits ; 0 ). They are those who are good enough with dev, but understand the biz domain well. I've seen some startups where Product Managers can also function in that capacity, prototyping, basic dev.

2 - Couldn't agree more, but ALAS, there aren't enough people graduating with CS degrees, let alone STEM in general. When I tried to do a market analysis, it was a painful experience. My CoFounder (Great Engineer) was able to do in two hours, what would have taken me two days, because of his software and database skills, not to mention that he had more time to interpret the data vs just gathering. I'd be curious to continue the discussion. If you'd like, please send me an email to ben@projectsherpa.com
probably a quote from a non techie think Bob howards bosses from the laundry that sort of level of technical knowledge.
How did Kindle lose money for Amazon? I'd imagine the money made from Kindle hardware plus the fact that ebooks are cheaper to stock and therefore have a much higher profit margin would be a gain for Amazon. Stocking a billion books isn't cheap like stocking a billion ebooks.
Why some dreams come true
> The US was built on the hard work of immigrants.

The US was built by the descendants of Europeans who nearly wiped out the existing native population. How did immigration work out for the Native Americans and their descendants?
I'd have more hope for companies that went down under after being wildly successful, whose early team members no longer feel the need to stay silent.

Some candidates would include the Delorean car company, RIM (they'll surely cease to be a going concern with time), some of the Linux companies of the 90s, etc
I use my thumb to press alt, ctrl, and shift!

I have a big thumb. :)

Also those "garbage keys" are very useful. The Menu key on the right side of your keyboard is, in Windows, a right click button. If I want to spell check something that is marked erroneous (such as "erroneous" when I tried to just spell it!) I can arrow over to it and use my Menu button to pop up a context menu that lets me select the correct word.

The Windows keys are also awesome, there are a ton of useful shortcuts bound to them already, and you can always feel free to bind even more! Especially if you are in unix land, where binding keys is easier than on Windows. On Windows, the Windows key is reserved for system commands such as Window management. Win-arrow for docking, win-d to minimize everything, etc. Heck Win-# switches between applications in the order they are open on my task bar!

Except for a few misbehaving apps (and the bloody web!), those extra keyboard keys mean the Windows UI is pretty much keyboard driven. I find it funny that people come over to Windows land from *nix and complain about how mouse driven things are! Of course you take take your favorite X windows manager and do all of the remapping yourself to get similar functionality. If you are using one of the keyboard based window managers already, think of it as a way to avoid the need for double bucky key-bindings.

The FN key on laptops does suck, but for a lot of smaller laptops with reduced keyboards, there is no other way to access a lot of functionality. Things like back-light controls, external monitor settings, and so forth, are all vital and accessed through fn key combinations. They aren't /often/ used, but they are used often enough!
Already super happy with Feedbin.me.
Ask HN: How to get a wordpress website built?
My friends have asked me to help them build a website for our small school alumni (about 500 people) and I was wondering the best way to go about doing this.

They need to have an index of people, a way to make donations, a hosted newsletter, and a couple more simple things.

I'm a developer but obviously I don't want (or have the time) to build it from scratch, so I thought I would use Wordpress and some plugins. But I have a couple questions regarding this:

Can you do enough frontend design to make a Wordpress site not look like a Wordpress site at all?

Who could I hire to do the front end design? Any recommendations?

How long would it take to put together the functionality of the site with a few plugins?

Is it a better idea to hire out and let someone else pick all the plugins and put it together?

Who could I hire to do this? Any recommendations?

What's the flexibility of adding new features if I hire out to build the functionality?

What would these things cost?
"was". He hasn't posted since Nov 2011
Misleading title; Coffeescript != JS. And while it's certainly possible to use this in JS, it's not particularly clean.
What are you referencing? The quote (from an NBC story):

> “Every day, they are learning how brilliant [Snowden] was,” said a former U.S. official with knowledge of the case. “This is why you don’t hire brilliant people for jobs like this. You hire smart people. Brilliant people get you in trouble.”
Show HN: Another iOS 7 themed UI Control based on a Dribbble shot
I see two possibilities, though I am not that well-versed in the software used at the NSA:

1. Administrator accounts were not confined (in the SELinux sense), so he was able to transition to whatever security context he needed/wanted.

2. He was able to set up the login credentials for other users. He could have created his own accounts with higher-level clearances, or set up his own smartcard for logging in to some other person's account, etc.

It may seem like poor design, but it is understandable why things might have been set up like that. In the first case, it is because the admins need to be able to solve problems that happen in a variety of security contexts / levels, and the overhead of defining a second set of policies governing the admins was just too high. In the second, it would be because someone has to be able to set up credentials and that there are a lot of systems for which credentials must be set up, making it hard to impose restrictions. There is also the matter of audit logs -- it might not be so bad to allow an admin to transition to whatever security level if each transition is logged.

I suspect that much of the NSA's computer security is devoted to ensuring that people do not accidentally leak classified information, and that preventing insider attacks is done at a higher level (the clearance process, random audits, etc.).
It seems gauche to insult Rails for being bloated, while bragging that you can write your own framework in 43 lines of code -- while using ActionDispatch::Routing::RouteSet, a fairly complicated, very powerful, part of Rails which takes way more than 43 lines to express.

(735 lines, not counting any of it's own dependencies inside Rails. https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/actionpack/lib/ac...)

Sure, you wrote your own framework in 30 minutes -- by using a part of Rails which many many developer-hours have gone into, over many calendar years. (https://github.com/rails/rails/commits/master/actionpack/lib... history stops at rails3 four years ago, when they moved the router from one project to another... the actual history goes back further)

Rails may arguably be bloated, but as of Rails3 it's also amazingly modular and decoupled, allowing you to use just the parts of it you want. And OP thought the Router was awesome enough to want to reuse it. At least give it the credit it deserves, for that, when you're using Rails to write a framework you say shows how Rails is awful!
Show HN: Humble – The first beautiful Octopress theme
Cool, I like that. Seems better than janus or spf13. Leave you some issues though.
UK government legal position on Syria
Definitely, true. The purpose of the signature and allowed hosts functionality is there to help mitigate that risk. Also, since the image service would be run separate from the main application, it shouldn't impact the performance of your site. Likewise, in a real production environment, this would run behind a CDN or Varnish, the DOS would just prevent new images from being generated until it could be addressed.
I wrote a similar image service (resize, crop, border, color analysis, format, and other fun features) a few years ago. It served about 6M image requests a day from 4 servers, plus a whole lot more from the CDN.

If you're using a CDN, just make sure they cache on query string parameters. Our resize controls were part of the URI, but the other commands were part of the QS. Our CDN stripped queries, so the first image would be cached and any calls with different QS would return the first hit.

A possible alternative that I never implemented was using the request header instead of the query string for additional commands.

Edit to add: Also, if you have lots of resized images on a page, be careful when Google or Bing scraped you. Your CPU and IO will go through the roof as your servers go crazy trying to dynamically generate all the images.
Well, from the point of view of the user it is happening now. Just check all the crapware that comes "by default" with any Windows machine (Dell, I'm looking at you).
More likely runcon:

http://linux.die.net/man/1/runcon
I think Max is talking about the Z-Machine interpreter that Infocom created to make games like Zork and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. There are many of modern ways to use it, like Inform (I recommend Inform 6 over 7), and even a web interpreter, Parchment.

That's if you want someone to PLAY the choice in the story. Which is slightly different from what you're talking about.
Companies would still have to spend billions on commercial support for Windows. RedHat's built a big company on open-source software, as an example. Tech support alone could rack up billions.

Microsoft would probably consider doing this at some point because piracy would shrink to zero by definition, and it'd be even more impossible to eradicate Windows from legacy systems because it would be possible to support it perpetually.
http://xahlee.info/kbd/Corsair_keyboards.html
USB 20kro
So it can be done.
In all fairness, I misread the article. However, dot product is a very basic mathematical concept all readers of Hacker News should be aware of. Again, expressing the dot product as a matrix multiplication is basic linear algebra.
Thanks for the links, very interesting. I see the guy behind this had the same problem:

> Long parameter lists – I struggled a bit with this, and still don’t have a great solution.
Steve Jobs is turning in his thumb... you just suggested the p word
Wouldn't this be just a bit more awesome in some use-cases as a PNaCl app?

EDIT: I get it now: People would change the URL to dynamically request an image of just the size they need.
I know the article is only to report what is said and it might be taken out of context. However, I am disturbed by the kind of mentality around hiring "great" and "brilliant" employee's. I see no future with that kind of organizational thinking.
This Is Why There Aren't Enough Women In Tech
>The CIA and NSA have launched aggressive new efforts to hack into foreign computer networks to steal information or sabotage enemy systems, embracing what the budget refers to as “offensive cyber operations.”

Not just "enemy" systems. But "targets'" systems, which include a lot more allies than "enemies". Then again, US seems to have a very Cold War-like mentality these days (even though Obama accused Russia of that), and sees everyone as a potential "enemy".

As Bruce Schneier said a couple of years ago, if you think "cyber-war" is imminent, then you must think war against US is imminent (which seems pretty unlikely right now, but they keep pushing the fear of cyber-war anyway, to increase their budgets).
Why would he treat your argument fairly when your argument is that life is unfair?
Well, thank goodness only one "brilliant" person has ever snuck past the NSA's defenses. If two or more ever got in, they'd establish themselves as our hereditary emperors in no time.
Rachel's English has a lot of free videos with focus on phonetics:

http://www.rachelsenglish.com

I like this course (I bought the pdf+mp3 version):

http://tarlespeech.com/accent-services/accent-products/stand...

http://tarlespeech.com/accent-services/accent-products/stand...

She also has some very helpful free videos:

http://tarlespeech.com/accent-services/minute-of-speech/

It's very important to record and listen to yourself. It'll become clear very quickly what you need to improve.