skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To backdoor a server of a large hosting provider, a NSL would be sufficient, so I doubt that the NSA would go to such length just to break into a single server.

This is worse on a larger scale: The same code could be on each hard drive sold in the US. You can't even trust your own computer any more.
Learn your node.js ~_~
So, not surprisingly, the fine article and the original quote seem to be at odds, and both are more than a little obtuse.

First, if you're going to have a statically typed language with no type declarations, how else are you going to do type checking? Sure, it's generally agreed that Hungarian warts are unnecessary in this day of tools (editors, IDEs, what have you) that will tell you what type a variable is in an instant, but if you're playing some silly game of "let's set arbitrary constraints to see how convoluted we can get", then you very well might come up with required Hungarian warts.

Second, if hardware programming is a place where static type checking would be a boon, could it not be said that any language which doesn't have it built in is less than ideal for the task? It's been a while since I've programmed in Verilog, but surely there must be other off the shelf tools (both OSS and otherwise) that would be better suited. Even if you stick with Verilog and go the route that the article describes, that's not trolling, that's just practicality.

This article is interesting in and of itself, and I'm glad to see it hit the front page, but the author could have left off the quote and not claimed to be a PL troll.
Two spaces is wrong.
I'd be happy to amend "inaccurate" to "disingenuous" and "dismiss the work" to "try and work out what the authors might have meant [and then dismiss]". I don't at all mind making those semantic adjustments.

But the point still stands, as you put it, that "the authors of Intellectual Impostures are at pains to limit [their inquiry] to the scientific areas."

What is the use of that? I mean, sure, it's fine for the Bruno Latour chapter, because Latour's work is actually on science. But what's the point of demonstrating that Irigaray mangles fluid mechanics and Lacan mangles topology, in books that aren't about fluid mechanics or topology? Who cares? Pointing it out isn't wrong per se. But it also, despite Bricmont's extensive handwaving, doesn't prove anything worthwhile.
Whatever you may think about Bitcoin itself, the _story_ of Bitcoin is impressive. Bitcoin started as a small, open source hacker project by an anonymous fellow on the internet. Somehow, this has snowballed to the point where an entire datacenter's worth of custom computing power is being thrown at it. That's inspiring and amazing no matter how you slice it.

Amidst the on-going onslaught against our digital world, it's refreshing to see what people can accomplish using open source ideals.
Justin Tadlock Publishes The Results Of His ThemeForest Experiment
Sidenote on the writing: Its obnoxious to end sentences with "U.S.", especially twice in two back-to-back sentences that don't clearly end.

What I'm talking about:
"For months now, it’s been next to impossible for Mt. Gox to get money into the U.S. Bitcoin discussion forums are filled with complaints by Mt. Got customers, who have been unable to get their money into the U.S. Banks don’t want to do business with the Japanese exchange —or bitcoin companies in general — because they fear the glare of regulatory scrutiny."
The data retention directive is undoubtedly problematic, but if it is implemented according to law, it means that telcos will hand over metadata on individual accounts at the request of a court. There are no secret courts, no gag orders and no dragnet mining of content as opposed to metadata.

But of course that says nothing about what European police organizations are up to ... secretly. I'm thinking of things like the "Bundestrojaner".
Probably sales people. Twitter is an advertising/media company after all.
I sent an email to around 30 people. I have been following the lean startup advice of getting feedback from users to develop the product. I was about to abandon developing since I couldn't even get them to talk to me for about 20 minutes.
It's a dying gasp of people too young to pirate, people too old to pirate, and people too poor or otherwise technically un-savvy to pirate - nominally a very tiny portion of the population, and consists entirely of horrible music.

As far as I can tell from this: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=6393116&whence=item%3f...
only one album has sold 20M copies in this millennium.

http://www.katyperrylately.com/post/53310641303/teenage-drea...
tl;dr - this solution does not work, but Aereo, as of 2013, does.

I was successfully able to watch the Summer Olympics last year using a VPN in this manner. Actually ended up watching the whole thing via the BBC -- it was oddly enjoyable to listen to the British commentators remark about the Yanks as if we are a race of athletically superior, somewhat lovable, giant children that are obviously in every other way doofuses :) .

The solution as proposed does not work from the USA for NFL Season Pass. I've tried, very hard, to find a way to make it work. (I cleared cookies, caches, changed the clock on my computer, deleted an installed a browser for the sole purpose of watching these games, etc. etc., to no avail.)

But every time, the NFL can somehow, someway, sniff out that I am a US user, and directs me to the page saying to sign up through your local cable provider. I've never owned a TV or subscribed to cable, so... grrrr.

Happily, Aereo, which last season was blurry, blotchy, and somewhat inferior to going to the local bar / friends', is this year very, very good. I set up the NFL games on CBS and NBC yesterday to record. They recorded, and I watched them from a giant Dell screen I have set up for the purpose. We also watch our Netflix and Hulu stuff on the same screen.

They do have a tough time with games that go over the scheduled time, like last night's Seahawks-49ers game. If you see that that is going to happen you have to go to the next show, and the next, next show, and click "record". So that even though you have no intention of watching local news at 11, Aereo is recording the correct station at the correct time.

For a non-TV, occasional sports fan who does not need a whole bunch of bells and whistles, Aereo is a fine solution.

(And, no, I have no professional, personal or other affiliation with Aereo other than the $10 a month they nick me for the service.)
Support, marketing, sales, partnerships, there's a lot of things that Twitter engages in that are people heavy and wouldn't be present in a software shop. Take a look at their jobs page for an idea of the sort of people they're using: https://twitter.com/jobs & https://twitter.com/jobs/positions
If your data, encrypted or not, travels through the US or any of it's allies, don't you think they already have access if they want it.
Privacy is an illusion.
I strongly suggest watching Jakob Appelbaum's speech at the NSA hearing in the European Parliament:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu6accTBjfs&feature=youtu.be...

Here's a question he asks to people who think that because they're Americans they're "more protected" against NSA spying than foreigners:

Who would be me more afraid to call someone like Appelbaum or Julian Assange? Someone from US, or a foreigner?

I think everyone knows the answer to that question, and you also have your answer for how protected Americans really are against this total surveillance.
GamePop's plan to help iPhone games break out of the App Store
I think you might be underestimating the task of scaling an app to a quarter of a billion users.
For comparison Facebook has over 5,000 employees.

Besides programmers there is probably a small army of sys admins to handle their data centers in additional to daily operational IT, business development folks working with partners, the entire ad/sales platform, lawyers and accountants. Plus all of the facility staff for that crazy office (kitchen staff, janitorial, gardeners, etc).

I agree though. That is a lot of people and it's hard to wrap my brain around that since I work at a very small software company of less than 10 people.
I view Devise, CanCan and SimpleForm as unnecessary gems these days. Rails has better facilities for all the things those three gems provide. If you take a little time to create your own login or auth system you'll be much better off than inheriting the bloat that gems like CanCan and Devise add to your code base.

I could flip a coin on whether SimpleForm is still useful or not. I tend to find myself fighting with its method signatures so I don't really like it.

All in all, Rails has grown since these gems were created. Use the new facilities that Rails provides as well as some OO design to solve problems. It's much better than including fat gems like the three I mention above into your code base.
Eating lunch together can foster connections and spark conversations like this.

Also, it's funny the number of times just speaking a problem out loud changes your perspective on things. I've worked on short-deadline projects where we asked team members to set a one-hour time limit on problems. If you're stuck on something for more than an hour, explain the problem to your neighbor and ask for help. There were several times when I turned toward my neighbor and realized the solution before I said a word. I suspect that the act of organizing the problem in order to explain it made it easier to solve.
I found this to be an astute observation about Little Brother, but it's not something I'd apply to the genre as a whole, or even Doctorow. I was highly impressed by the characterization in Makers, which was only published a year later. Little Brother was written in haste[1] with an explicit focus on the ideological, at the expense of more human characters. I would urge anyone who felt the characterization in LB to be lacking to check out Makers.

[1]:http://www.sfcenter.ku.edu/GunnLecture/Cory_Doctorow-Little_...
Great article, I appreciate you sharing. I don't want to sound presumptious, but sometimes in articles like these where we are looking back at our original thoughts on something, they can be clouded by our current beliefs. I really am struck by this line: "But I went home that day and realized that Twitter, and the ensuing social media explosion, would dramatically alter the landscape of not only what I do through my blog, but design, fashion, lifestyle, culture, everything. I later voiced my concern to our staff meeting, but no one else seemed to think Twitter an issue." But when you click on the link about Twitter from 2007, there is one line about it.

There isn't much point to my comment besides, I wish the author had written more about how Twitter was going to change things in the past.
The Cost of If
>The Internet is living, breathing, functioning proof that, at least to 99.9999% of human beings, utility > privacy.

Imagine, for a moment, that evidence comes forward that Snowden wasn't the first.

Imagine that someone in Snowden's position did exactly the same thing, only for financial gain, say, selling private company secrets to a competitor.

That would change the situation, would it not?
NSA spies on international payments
12 Strategies to Keep Virtual Employees on Task
I call bullshit.

"Once a clear design exists, estimation is easy."

Nice to have the luxury of putting in free design work in order to produce a fixed bid.
It's funny. Folks used to laugh at me for being too paranoid to allow loadable kernel modules on my firewalls (actually I preferred to host the kernels on read only media and have no lkm support all with custom compiled kernels). What seemed horribly paranoid to so many people seems so reasonable today.

This being said, one of the key issues is that I could expect that a compromised motherboard and controller (for example ethernet controller) should be able to make such changes in ram after the boot process has completed, with or without the help of BIOS. The level of paranoia certainly needs to be stepped up a bit.
No kidding, not a chance I would get anything done in such an environment.

Also, although well intentioned, that a company serves 3 meals a day, has snacks and recreation, makes me a little fearful that I'm not accepting a job but rather a lifestyle. Hopefully this gets cleared up in the interview process. Because I'm leaving at 5 unless there's a fire to put out.
If the poisoning is obvious to the intended recipient, at some stage it will also be obvious to anybody collecting enough (poisoned) data on them.

This is a bit like the spam / spam filter arms race.
These "how i got into yc?" post are usually lame but this was actually a worthwhile read. Good luck to these guys. I am rooting for you.
Yes, who could have guessed we would still have bugs in the 21st century, right?
What is the big deal about Datomic?

From their FAQ:

"Datomic is not a good fit if you need unlimited write scalability, or have data with a high update churn rate (e.g. counters)."

Don't you get most of that through... caching? Also, it seems to assume that the dataset will fit into RAM.
> I went home that day and realized that Twitter, and the ensuing social media explosion, would dramatically alter the landscape of not only what I do through my blog, but design, fashion, lifestyle, culture, everything.

Sounds about right.
>Without copyright, the recording company could have just downloaded his recordings off MySpace, pushed them into iTunes, funded a huge marketing campaign, and make a ton of money without sharing any of it back to the artist.

Only to the extent that the record company could convince the public to buy something that was being made available by the artist for free.
Why the new 64-bit chip doesn't make the iPhone 5S worth a buy
So how much of your income are you donating to the poor?
There's some correlation between the recent NIST/NSA row, especially since the same trading of researchers occurs between those too.
(author here)

I guess I view Rails as a tool with which to get things done, and usually rolling my own login or auth system is not within scope of the work I want to get done. I'd rather just use something off the shelf and proceed with the itch I want to scratch. You also get the benefit of lots of eyes on that part of your code base, which means bugs get found and fixed more quickly.
Can you build feedback into the app from the start? This sounds like a good idea but you will have to market it. You might try having people agree to a follow up call after the interview to get feedback from them before they do the interview.

Do you have their phone numbers? Call them directly. Your email might have gone to the promotions tab... I wouldn't give up so quickly.
Good analogy. But I would add "this book and the next one that I create" and "you can have help from whoever happens to be with you"

In the best case there is still a little "unknown unknown" about both the scope and team. The project manager can tighten things but you can never completely get rid of it.
UAV Provides Colorado Flooding Assistance Until FEMA Freaks Out
View the source code for that. Just don't look at it for too long.
Data analysis, maybe?
are other folks also reminded of the beautiful john-brunner's novel "stand on the zanzibar" by this post ?
Performance, and/or deployabity...
Two points:

1) The issue at hand is about the choice between mainstream languages vs. niche languages. Your reply does not address this and sidetracks into a discussion about native languages vs. high-level languages.

2) Even assuming every decision to use C++ was an optimal one, what about the decision to use Java?
> pandering to powerful middle class votes.

Don't you think that problem will take care of itself as the overpricing of a college education reduces the size of the middle class?
Well I used the term software shop loosely. Both are fairly large in their reach nationally. The one I worked at did hosting in the building as well. No more than half a dozen on the IT staff, hosting hundreds of clients who had numerous employees. Obviously no millions, but they had what I would say is a lot more complicated product.
Bad title, but interesting post. Better title: If everyone lived as densely as they do in Manila, the human race could fit in Tunisia
This is actually illegal.

The DCMA and perhaps some earlier electronic circumvention laws make this act a very real breach of US law. Publicly stating it is a bit dangerous and could cost the author if the NFL decided to pursue a case. How crazy is that?

Of course, while illegal, I personally think it is very RIGHT.
> I wonder then, if all that talent is not better served by implementing a BETTER version of the core 50% or 70% Ruby language as a new language, getting rid of edge cases and garbage.

No, if you want languages that are less expressive but faster, there are plenty of options available. The thing is, MRI itself keeps getting faster implementing the whole of Ruby. The fact that new Ruby implementations that implement the easiest bits first tend to start out much faster than the mainline interpreter on code that only uses those most-straightforward-to-implement bits but then tends to converge closer to the speed of the mainline interpreter as it the implementation gets more complete doesn't mean that it would be better to make a new language. Much of the experience of those alternative interpreters is relevant to making improvements in the mainline interpreter that speed up, or otherwise improve, "complete" Ruby (including times when the alternative interpreter becomes the mainline interpreter, as occurred with YARV, which was an alternative interpreter before it became the mainline interpreter in 1.9.)

> Matter of fact, didn't Matz do something like that, with an embedded-oriented Ruby like language recently?

If you are referring to mruby, that's an embedded-oriented Ruby implementation, not a Ruby-like language.
LinuxCon North Live Stream Now
> To answer my own question, as someone who interviews people quite often, I'd love to hear that a candidate did this sort of thing. Honestly, if you're worried that you're going to be weak in your interview for a company which you really want to work for, do this.

Guilty as charged. There are a handful of companies that have provoked this type of reaction from me. I have yet to actually get an interview from any of them, though.

I'm actually surprised how much Pamela sounds like me when it comes to interviewing. Almost exactly like me. I just have crippling anxiety on top of that which I only recently got taken care of.
" But the track record, well it is hard to get a better indicator that you are a good team than a successfull previous startup."

While this was probably true for Amir, YC routinely rejects founders who have previously built startups for other reasons -- eg, insufficient traction.

Regarding your application: I was one of the alums who reviewed Amir's application. I will generally review a few each application period and give pointers. Most YC alums that I'be known will do the same if they're not too busy with their respective companies/lives at the time. Just politely E-Mail them, be prepared and treat them like you think their time is valuable.
I think Twitter is moving towards advertising with their MoPub acquisition. Twitter has your identity and users have no expectation of privacy (unlike facebook or google), so people think that they have a unique advertising advantage.

I think the license restrictions on its firehose partners will become more strict as Twitter realizes it can go vertical and use the data itself to create platforms for social media analytics and advertising.
TFA does go on to reference "reflectors in the Sea of Tranquility (Apollo 11), at Fra Mauro (Apollo 14) and Hadley Rille (Apollo 15), and, sometimes, in the Sea of Serenity. There's a set of mirrors there onboard the parked Soviet Lunokhud 2 moon rover..."

That would sort of imply that it happened more than once. I do wonder, though, why the Sea of Serenity doesn't get a mission name tied to it.
Sucking Big Data Through a 10,000 Mile Straw
The service is legal. Your use of it to watch NFL games from the US may not be.
As an aside, does anyone have any good hacks for watching cable television online? If I don't have cable? ESPN, E!...
I'm still surprised the Data Protection Act hasn't been mentioned in the UK in relation to those issues. Basically it says in Schedule 1, Part 1 (The principles), point 8:

> Personal data shall not be transferred to a country or territory outside the European Economic Area unless that country or territory ensures an adequate level of protection for the rights and freedoms of data subjects in relation to the processing of personal data.

Which people usually assume includes the US. Well... I guess you could argue otherwise now. It was demonstrated that even encrypted data is not protected while sending it to the other side. Can we start referring to the DPA every time some storage of the UK personal data is done in AWS, or similar hosting?
I don't think no replies from 30 people is unexpected - unless you made it clear that you would be contacting them for feedback when they signed up. I'd probably shoot them a personal one line e-mail asking them one more time.
Show HN: iOS7 Inspired Web & Mobile Application Template
The reason Zambia is poor is the exact same reason other countries are poor: the people of Zambia don't sell enough products to other economies in order to get richer.

Why don't they do that? it's a matter of culture. They don't open up to the possibilities of the economy around and outside their country.
Exploring Scala
http://scalatuts.com/blog/2013/09/13/abstract-members/
In short, you can ask a datomic database stuff like "Show me all things that are different for customer X from the database today versus the database one year ago on September 14th at 9:32 AM" and it can answer those types of queries with high performance.

And no, the dataset does not need to fit in RAM.
Don’t build Labor’s NBN - build the right NBN
You also forget the competition from Javascript as well. Rewrite all of the things in all of the languages.

I'd much rather see neat algorithms and libraries being re-written in C with an FFI-friendly API. I think it would reduce the number of "Show HN: I rewrote X in Y" posts. The majority of HN users rarely care about Y. Such posts are just attention-grabbing noise.

If it was written in C you could just write bindings to it in Y and nobody but Y developers would need to hear about it. Instead we could read about X on HN. X is interesting.
This doesn't sound like a useful service. Problems that people have with interviewing on the phone are not that they can't hear the question that's being asked. They mostly stem from the fact that interaction space with the interviewer is so much more limited.

Your service does not simulate a phone interview -- there's no ability for your automated service to interpret and judge responses and to provide feedback.

I suggest you pivot into setting up mock interviews between developers. They can interview each other getting valuable practice and then rate each other on interview skills on both sides of the fence; your value is in
- setting up developers with each other and tracking their info/scores if they do more than one interview
- providing interview scripts and questions to guide them
Except these issues are with companies that are using the currency not properly understanding local regulations. This had nothing to do with bitcoin as a currency or protocol.
True, but I'm also saying that Instagram had 13 employees at the time of being bought out. I don't have any numbers of users they had at the time but I know they had 1M+ new users on their Android launch. Which makes me assume a large iOS crowd.
New NIST/NSA Revelations
Yes, this is exactly what I was thinking.

You can replace one single Resque worker to see how the performance improves without changing the front-end queuing or having to run an additional queuing server