skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> A while back
this guy discovered that his Quake
bots that had been running for 4
years found the perfect strategy to
survival, which was to stop fighting.

That sounds fascinating but also a bit hard to believe. Can you give a link to that story?
> Another [official] said that the NSA has a poor audit capability, which is frustrating efforts to complete a damage assessment.

Wow. The NSA spent untold billions building advanced tech to snoop others but never bothered to set up proper internal controls for their own systems?

Of course this also raises the question, how can they continue to insist that there are reasonable controls in place to prevent abuse when they can't even determine what Snowden accessed, after he collected thousands of documents over a span of years?
Spying on people is terrorism and should stop ASAP.
I would argue that, in general, people aren't caring.

We are caring; the small band of software and technology enthusiasts who develop software and online businesses. We care. But in the grand scheme of things, people don't care so much about this. In the grand scheme of things we are a special interest group, like Anti-Fracking protesters or Animal Rights activists.

Until I hear my mother or my girlfriend or my old university pal - none of whom work in computing - talking about this issue I really don't expect things to change. The difference between now and then is that we have forums like this where everyone can instantly express their outrage, but I think all that builds is a small self-fueling bubble of outrage that nobody else who lives outside the bubble knows or cares about.
I'm actually very curious about that sort of thing which is why I find A particularly interesting. My assumption is that Google would just avoid the headache altogether, but one of the rarely spoken truths about teaching physical security is that your students may have malicious intent. You apply whatever social screening you can, but at the end of the day, bad people exist and some pass pretty well for good people.

When doing a proper lockout I can take IDs, have people sign things, etc. all of which have (in general, not in my personal experience) failed on one level or another and the modern history of locksmithing is rife with tragic stories of locksmiths unwittingly helping absolutely terrible people.

Some means of identification/authentication would certainly be possible with Helpers, but again, I cannot imagine Google would engage in the headache of adding that layer.
TPM isn't limited to iPhones!

I don't think TPM or walled gardens are a political problem, but more a technical and marketing problem. Lobbying for legislation that prevents alternative marketplaces from being locked out of a particular ecosystem doesn't actually mean people will use them en masse, or even know they exist. For example, despite Android's open nature, Amazon Appstore is very unlikely to ever beat Google Play because most people don't switch from the default. Similarly, Internet Explorer remained the most popular browser up until lately, despite alternatives and European legislation. Google Chrome is now the most popular browser, but it took an expensive ad campaign to make Google Chrome happen, not legislation. Firefox is trailing in last among popular web browsers!

Increased adoption of FOSS is really the only solution. It only becomes political when FOSS is legally restricted.
It was badly formulated in the first place. Ubuntu on phones is interesting because it's Ubuntu, not because some team with no previous track record in hardware wants to build a high-end phone. Making it about the hardware was unnecessary. How many of you would have bought a pre-configured Ubuntu phone on any decent existing ODM hardware platform?
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/britain-forced-guardian-destroy-cop...
Design is how it works. Not how it looks. How it looks is properly called "style".

If you have found a "Designer" who is overly concerned with how it looks and not so much how it works, the conclusion to reach is that you have found a bad designer, not that all "designers" are concerned only with aesthetics.
Hi Matt

We created some compelling that got lots of natural coverage both on social networks and news sites and we seem to have been punished for it!

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/webma...

Thoughts?
No, this is a Fixed Funding campaign.
What next? Will they offer secure email services?
"Fixed Funding

This campaign will only receive funds if at least $32,000,000 is raised by its deadline. Funding duration: July 22, 2013 - August 21, 2013 (11:59pm PT)."
Now is a great time to make this announcement. Everyone's trust in the US government has never been higher!
I certainly understand the sentiment, but we've been talking about the end of the Windows era for at least fifteen years. At some point it will inevitably end, but I suspect that we will only be able to point to the 'final nail' in hindsight.
I agree, I was talking about the desktop version.
I just wanted to say that the so-called "ugliness" of HN's design has nothing to do with the fact it's not convenient on mobile.
This campaign will only receive funds if at least $32,000,000 is raised by its deadline. Funding duration: July 22, 2013 - August 21, 2013 (11:59pm PT).
US dollars. See http://www.worldsalaries.org/computerprogrammer.shtml
The numbers are dated, but it doesn't turn upside down in a decade. Uruguay is not included in the statistics. It does seem to be more expensive at first glance - I looked it up on http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_countries_resul...
It could, in mental work. You could forget things.

Also, in my experience, real understanding of mathematical concepts comes to me after I've studied it, when I'm thinking about the matter in the background while doing other things. It's plausible that, if I were to overextend myself, I'd lose focus and not assimilate that much later.
Google was founded on the principle of "Don't be evil", it has the power and influence to effect change, and it helped lead the charge against SOPA. Why is Google so silent now?

"He who has the ability to act on an injustice, but who stands idly by, is just as guilty as he who holds the knife."

How Google handles this will be its defining moment.
This is could be an opportunity for Google to win the world over by showing it truly stands on its principles, or it could be its downfall, destroying its credibility, losing the trust of its users.

Maybe Google is working behind the scenes putting a game plan together, or maybe it's getting something out of the situation -- let's hope it's the former. Like Eisenhower said, "A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both."
> Do competitors usually give that shipping for free though?

It isn't free - the cost of the shipping is baked in the product prices. Walmart's threshold is $45 for no additional charge, shipping to one of their stores is no additional charge, and below the threshold shipping is usually 97c.

In any event this isn't about "can you pay more for faster shipping" which is the case virtually everywhere, but that it seems like Amazon is holding back on their lowest tier before the actual shipping which none of their competitors seem to do.

There is an obvious benefit to them in Prime upsells. Actual logistical reasons seem at odds with the story about huge spending on warehouses.
Ah no. It's Fixed Funding.

This campaign will only receive funds if at least $32,000,000 is raised by its deadline.

Indiegogo offers two funding choices. Fixed and Flexi. Fixed is like Kickstarter. In flexi, you'll get what you just got.
They kinda screwed it up. They should have went for something more reasonable like 8-10 mil.

One of the rationalization was that 32 million funding goal or 40k devices would give the market validation. But they ignored the part where they are a new player in a very saturated existing market, with a new unproven device.

The plan to only sell device through indigogo is also silly. It kinda back-fired from the intended goal. They thought that having it exclusive to IG would help it make it a successful campaign. I don't see why couldn't they also make it available through Ubuntu shop and sell it in the future like Nexus.

Anyways, it easy to find mistakes when things don't work out as planned. But I genuinely hope, they rethink the brain-fart idea to not sell it if they don't meet the funding goal.
That could work in a full conversation, but it needs to be packaged up more for our sound-byte/online-comments/tweet culture. You could circulate a hashtag on twitter like #things2hide to get popular conversation about it going.
They can make it stick for government benefits and taxes and so forth. ("Use our IRS-ID or you can't file your taxes and we'll jail you for tax evasion.")

I doubt if they can make it stick in areas where people have a choice.
When you were a child...

When I was a child, the President of the United States was murdered in front of thousands of onlookers and the primary suspect was murdered on live television (while I was watching) by a mob hit man. As far as we know, everyone behind this got away with it and got everything they wanted.

Since then, not much has really surprised me.
False. The money is returned if the funding doesn't reach the goal. From the FAQ:

What if you fail to reach the funding target?

We appreciate every bit of support we receive during the 30 days, and every backer will be welcomed into the Ubuntu community. If we don’t reach our target then we will focus only on commercially available handsets and there will not be an Ubuntu Edge. All contributions will be fully refunded.
> Anyways, if apple's solution is simply better than the android micro USB solution, who wins?

I win, because I don’t have to buy a new charger for every phone, because I can use standard USB cables to charge my phone and because said USB cables are ridiculously cheap; allowing me to carry one cable to connect my phone, my camera and 90% of my other gadgets to my computer (the rest using eSATA).

Frankly, I don’t care whether Apple’s solution is ‘simply better’ if it is only available for Apple’s products and hence necessarily restricted to a small percentage of the overall market.
I started coding when I was 10. I think what made the difference for me was that I started out in QBASIC and it had excellent documentation within its help menus.

I didn't have any books or anyone knowledgeable to learn from at the time, but I was able to constantly look through that documentation to try to figure out what I wanted to do.

I had to make meticulous notes on everything, and make sure I really understood something in order to use it to solve a problem I was getting stuck on.

I think that hard-won knowledge was excellent, and it really taught me the value of API documentation and being able to find the answers myself just by reading that documentation.
Remember, there is a difference between not auditing access to their internal fileservers that they keep their PowerPoints on, and not auditing access to their wiretap data.

Now, a big concern is that even if they do audit access to the wiretap data, there are still too many people who have "legitimate" access to it, and it is still hard to prevent a rogue sysadmin or programmer from bypassing those controls. Merely having all of that data makes it a high value target for attack.
I'm imagining Canonical might chip in the remaining money at the last minute?
what I am saying is that, unless the prices for flights were WILDLY different last week, the flights that don't go through heathrow are both cheaper and faster than the ones that do.
But what would that contain? If it were a list of incorrect codes, it would be pretty easy to demonstrate that you were lying.
Dangerous jobs like Roustabout and Miner are not badly paid but they are "dirty" jobs and attract a premium I was at a training course recently and we had a couple of Pit deputy's (ie mine supervisors) on the course.

They said that the going rate for a single 12 hour weekend overtime shift was $2350 and that some of their "young lads" could clear 125k in a year. This is around 4 times the UK Median wage.

Miners in Australia also could command a very good wage
That, and briefly glancing at the outbound URL before clicking the link. In this case, my logical progression was: 1) "Hmm, that title looks interesting." 2) "Oh, it's by Tim Ferriss." 3) "Skepticism shields up!"

I have nothing against Tim Ferriss in general. I think he's an interesting character, and in a weird way, he's to be commended for his exceptional skill at self promotion. He's sort of our generation's equivalent of P.T. Barnum. And occasionally he'll even make a really insightful point. But I take at least 70% of what he says with a grain of salt.
How do you propose bootstrapping the cipher onto a "known compromised" machine in a known compromised environment?
If only there was a HN app...
Same here - but I hope that Jolla can produce a viable N900 replacement for the future. It seems to be the only Linux based Smartphone platform currently in development that offers and is based on a "normal" Linux environment.
Visualizing Our Place in the Milky Way Galaxy with Mathematica
When you elect anarchists, it's hardly surprising that the government stops functioning.
I question whether this was anything more than a way to test the waters and see if people would actually put up some money. Maybe they can use this as a benchmark to at least get some leverage with suppliers, and then set a more realistic goal for fundraising.
So you'd describe what the folks at Bletchley Park did 70 years ago as terrorism?
427GHz at room temperature isn't nothing.
If you can read something, you can copy it.
A Year and a Half With a Nissan Leaf (Part 3): The Winter Drive
Maybe they knew what they were doing and the whole thing was to get valuable market data (and also free press). With that data, they probably become more credible in negotiations with carriers. So it's still a win for everybody.
GAE-Studio, the Google App Engine enhancer is at version 0.3
Let's not kid ourselves. The original hook was replacing food.
Well you know the old joke Actuaries are people who would find Accountancy jobs a bit to racy and

"What is the difference between an introverted actuary and an extroverted actuary? An introverted actuary stares at his own feet during a conversation, while an extroverted one stares at the other person's feet."
As armchair theory goes, it's not a bad one. Taking it one step further, I could see how classical music might activate / operate on some of the same brain patterns as certain sleep cycles. Sleep is well known to be our brain's equivalent of garbage collection and recovery.
Geeze I need to move there....somehow.
The biggest personal shift for me came when I realised that marketing is not about me, my experience and the marketing copy on my website. It's about giving things of value to other people. Maximise the value you give to others and the number of people you give it to, and the "marketing" takes care of itself.
So, you are studying the habits of the scandinavian countries for ways to kill government education?
To be blunt it is because you are trolling and being a dick.
From what I can tell, if they've targeted you, they're going to take your stuff. Doesn't matter if the drives look like noise or are nothing but zeros. The point is primarily to be a thorn in your side and to drain you of money. Any intel gleaned is just icing on the cake.
Bare salaries don't tell you a whole lot. I suspect that most of the programmers in this dataset live in places like the bay area, NYC, and Boston. The cost of living in those areas are much higher than in much of the world.

> Why are you on HN then?

Why is this relevant? Is there a reason you'd expect higher-paid programmers to not be interested in relevant news?
The fact that you said "clients" instead of "apps" shows that you still don't understand the vision. App.net provides functionality that you can safely build an app on, and which is fundamentally more useful than the sandy foundations of Facebook or Twitter. That functionality is something which is non-trivial and which has potential network effects. You can use that functionality, you can extend it to something private to your own app, or you can mix and match with all the compatibility compromises that would entail. You can do all this safely without worrying that the rug will be pulled out from under you just when you figure out a magic formula that works.

In short, App.net is something with the potential to build a business on, whereas anyone trying to build a serious business (as opposed to just doing something cool) on Twitter is an outright fool at this point.
Mark Shuttleworth has specifically said that he will not do that. From the Reddit AMA:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1j166z/hi_im_mark_shut...

"Lots of folks have speculated I might close the gap if it's close. But I think that would not be in the spirit of the project; rather I would hope someone smarter than me will come up with a better concept that DOES get greenlighted, because I really believe in the idea of crowdsourcing the signal to innovation."
It's brilliant marketing though, because they've managed to sell a $230/month system as cheap!
Here is the GAE-Studio website : gaestudio.arcbees.com
I think journalists or other hobbyists/professionals with work they need to protect should start thinking about keeping an air-gapped computer around. I've seen this phrase used recently to describe a computer which has never been connected to the internet, a network or another device. I'm sure it's non-trivial to source a computer that arrives in a trustworthy state, however.
If that's what they're trying to convey, they're incredibly erroneous unless they're doing US centric (or Silicon Valley/Boston/New York only)
> 1) Bytemark has not yet been approached with any spook-y requests;

> 2) we will always be happy to discuss this topic, unless we suddenly decide that we'd rather avoid it;

> 3) secret network taps are probably going to be very unreliable. If we ever had to host one and keep it secret, I'd expect a customer to see difficult and inexplicable network problems, with queries passed up to the directors to answer.

2) is a nicely phrased canary policy.

3) is a little doubtful, at least after the first one, and might get them arrested. But it's a nice try.
Well, the whole affair sounds a bit like a he-said, she-said. There are claims that Mr. Miranda was a courier and that they offered a lawyer and water during the 9 hour ordeal. The law office, which represents Mr. Miranda categorically denies that legal representation was ever offered to him, for example.

Now, I don't know the truth, but even assuming he had documents they wanted to get their hands on, or files on his devices that they thought pertinent they could have handled the whole thing in 30 minutes max and then let him go on his merry way.

That they held him - almost to the minute - for the legal maximum of 9 hours looks not only vindictive it looks as if they indeed intended to send a message.

Put that into context with other documented occurrences, like the totally senseless destruction of hardware and sandbagging the Guardian into this action (and yes, The Guardian has here more credibility then the UK government, which denies any threats, but that's just me) and we get a whole other picture.

While totalitarian police state may be an over exaggeration , we should be very careful about the direction this is going into.

Assume you're a journalist and suddenly the government(s) have a truckload embarrassing material on you (from Google searches, Facebook accounts, Skype calls and whatever your friendly operating system leaks directly to the NSA's vacuum cleaners) to directly blackmail you.

And no, I don't consider myself a member of the black helicopter faction, but nevertheless find those developments extremely worrying.
Ask HN: Best ways to promote an ebook?
Hi guys,

I wrote an ebook about creating Wordpress plugins a couple of weeks ago and sales haven't been great. I've followed the usual advice of social media, creating a landing page, telling everyone I know, but so far it's been quite slow.

I know a few of you on here write and sell ebooks for a living. Do you have any advice for a first time author? It's my hope to continue writing books but I need to learn the marketing side of things before my next book I think.

Advice, help and suggestions much appreciated!
Data from hundreds of sites shows 23% usage of adblock
We don't know what Amazon's order flow is, but if it is reasonably uniform then it doesn't make sense. Stalling super saver orders for several days doesn't save you any work or priorities. It still has to be shipped and new orders still come in.

If the higher priority orders are very lumpy then it does make far more sense to process them first and have variability in the response time for the super saver orders.

Without some sort of crowdsourcing effort we can't tell what everyone's actual experience is. The anecdotal data so far is delays in Amazon's lowest tier happen that don't exist at their competitors. The story is about them spending more on warehouses, so something doesn't add up.
Some work has already been done in this area: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubberhose_(file_system)
Yes. But they are tacked on to the language after the fact rather than built in from the beginning. My experience is that both language and libraries support that kind of pattern better in node than in Python (no Ruby experience with async).
Let's say you were the british security services, you didn't like Greenwald, and you wanted to show him who was boss. And his partner was travelling through an airport.

What would you do differently?
The 3 Biggest Emotions From Quitting My Day Job To Work On My Startup
Left unchecked, they'll eventually claim sitewide taps on any operation of any size, down to single private laptops.
More than a little Kafka. The secret laws interpreted by secret courts with secret opinions being used to secretly murder citizens "legally" without the slightest hint of a trial is solid Kafka. The innocent people held in high-security prison indefinitely on secret charges because it's too difficult to work out a legal framework to set them free are also solid Kafka.
and an empty wallet...
I said: "faster or more stable or somehow better". Obviously you must believe that typing make causes one of those things, or you wouldn't have made your comment.
Fascinating. I didn't know that webworkers were available in node.js. I stand corrected, then.
PS. you can check it out for free here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EG7BMVY any feedback would be extremely useful.