skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Our ability to exploit metadata has grown by leaps and bounds since the 1800s. What was possible then and what is possible now are two different things entirely.

It's simply not possible any more, except via face-to-face chat, to communicate with someone without turning over some metadata (or possibly data) to a 3rd party.

Letter? Envelope gets scanned. Calls? Logged and your location is tracked to boot. Internet? Tapped. What's left?
Or, more simply, Apple ran out of gold phones because they were rightfully cautious about over-producing an untested color. Just like the first all-white iPhone, there's no rush prioritize the new color while proven ones are already selling as fast as they can be made. Of course, this doesn't make for good link bait.

Is the article racist? Yes, a bit. Only long-term sales data will reliably tell us which colors are preferred in which markets. Right or wrong, the article is rushing to judgement based on flimsy racial stereotypes.
Damn, that is the ShareThis plugin. Thanks for notifying it
A "PostSecret type thing" would make having a signup even less appropriate...
Microsoft Surface 2 live blog
I am sure 'project management', especially in Indian outsourcer firm's context (managing people + forwarding messages to and from them and customers to conceal the fact how dumb the coders are) is long-term, a much worse of a hole than working for the same outsourcing firm as a coder. Because it doesn't give one any marketable skills, and slowly turns him into a neurotic.
New Oracle dual-format DB 100x faster
Surface 2: a closer look at Microsoft's more refined iPad competitor
Throughout this thread, people have posted links to evidence that there is a higher demand for gold in Asia than the rest of the world. Ignoring them doesn't chang e Business Insider's piece definitely could be improved by adding some more context beyond "My friend says.." anecdotes, but not everything that is poorly researched is racist.
Based on their sites, I believe they're UK-based company (and US endpoints are just endpoints, in case someone wants to have US-located exit to access US-only services), so it makes somehow reasonably harder (but not impossible) to correlate between the client and their traffic.

Still, I don't see any significant difference between NSA and GHCQ, except that we have (thanks to Snowden) some details of former's operations leaked, but the latter's remain secret (or I didn't pay enough attention to the news, maybe).
How are you handling backups? LVM snapshots? Incremental/differential backups? What is the disaster recovery procedure? What monitoring tools do you recommend? Is clustering as advanced and complicated as it seems? Should one explore traditional slave-master read/write segregation, sharding, partitioning, archiving etc. and exhaust those options before going for clustering or is it better to just jump to clustering?

I'm a mysql newbie but am very fascinated with scaling relational databases. It's just seems so challenging and exciting.
Hi Andrew, the migration notes cover the removal of `get_form_kwargs()`.

The simple answer here is that you're actually much better off just overriding `get_form()`. It's no more complicated, and it's much more direct and obvious. We can do away with `get_form_kwargs()`, `get_initial()` etc - they're unnecessarily granular.

> you need to know the implementation details to know it's not worth calling super

The simplicity is self re-inforcing here - the implementation is trivial, so it's easy to figure out how to totally override a method if you want too. Of course this doesn't prevent you from using a `super` style if you want to.
These guys changed our lives. Very happy for them.
This brings Django one step closer to including scaffolding (like Rails).
I personally don't find the regular CBV to be difficult to use and I prefer CBV to FBV in 99% of cases. I actually find it easy that the flow is separated into different methods, so that when I want to change a specific behavior, I don't have to read the whole view.
That being said, I do find that I have to look at the source code for CBV from time to time, even though the documentation is quite good - but maybe "looking through source code" isn't quite as intimidating to me as to more beginner programmers.
Surface Pro with 512gb of space and 8gb ram, if I decide to move country again next year I'm replacing my desktop with a Surface.
Smart Teenage Brains May Get Some Extra Learning Time
I did not know this service, great you told me
I would say that there is too much speculation in your comment . You go from 4.5 million devices all the way to 2.25 just because you think 5C's are selling better?
Was it the device itself that caused such poor sales? I assumed all along it was a marketing/image problem which remains unsolved. Has relentlessness by a company ever overcome this issue in the past?
Ahh forgot about Xbox Live. I know they recently announced having 300,000 servers: http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/21/microsoft-updates-xbox-li...

Mind you, 300,000 * 3k per server is still only 900 million.
I didn't post on the last threads I think, but I have had some modest success with passive income, was making up to 700 euros a month 2 years ago, this is down to 130 euros a month now. Still not too bad considering I haven't really touched the site for almost 2 years. But my heart isn't in that kind of projects anymore. Passive income is a bit overrated in my experience.

Still nice to get a small check at the end of the month.

The site in question is http://www.giftcertificatefactory.com, it provides printable gift certificate templates.

EDIT: I should add the money comes in from Adsense. I tried other monetization schemes as described there http://www.sparklewise.com/my-first-passive-income-project-o...
So if some of the worlds most elite biometric hacking experts need 48 hours, knowledge of the registered finger AND an almost perfect print left on the phone, I think it actually proves how secure the system actually is. If this was that easy they would have cracked it Friday, but it clearly took them several attempts despite being (some of, if not) the best in the world at forging fingerprints.

Yes you can't change your fingerprint, but you can change which is registered on the device (or with the bank, or whatever) and I'm guessing financial transactions outside of iTunes might require a passcode also. It's just another layer of optional security. Clearly it shouldn't be relied on as a foolproof, 100% secure authentication system but it certainly shrinks to pool of people who can gain access to my phone from "anyone who sees me unlock it several times a day" to "fingerprint forgery experts and highly sophisticated and motivated criminals."
Here is a good roundup of evidence that gold is more popular in Asia (BI did a poor job of providing non-anecdotal evidence): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6431520
ipython notebooks, as another comment mentions (or is it missing something specific?).
google.org is their charitable extension.
They don't store any user logs (I have no reason to suspect they'd lie about that). So there's not much stored data to break. Which means the focus will be on breaking their traffic encryption protocols.
I use this service, and have been thrilled with it for a long time. They do no logging whatsoever, and their encryption and endpoint options are great.

they are also by far the cheapest truly secure option in this space - $40/year
nitpick: There is a native OpenVPN client for iOS in the AppStore. I don't know how they managed to, but it's plugging into the native iOS VPN functionality and it works perfectly well.
True, though I'd think it would be easier to exploit a torrent client than a browser.
Glad to hear it wasn't intentional.

Also: I edited the parent comment while you replied (yes, I know, it's a very bad habit of mine).
For the RT, it's marketing (which was lame), confusion (it says it's Windows but it won't run any actual Windows apps), and a lack of any compelling apps. It's Microsoft trying to use their dominance in Windows to extend to the tablet. That's why we're all forced to use the half-assed Start Tiles on the desktop when running Windows 8, so they can put 'Modern' apps (which suck on a desktop) front and center.
Technet, Windows Update, Xbox Live, Hotmail, Bing, Skydrive and so on.
I don't think the article is racist. Just poorly sourced. It's rushing to judgement based on anecdotes (which are probably rooted in a bit of stereotyping - just in the case, there is some data backing up the stereotype). This comment has a good round-up of evidence that gold is more popular in Asia than elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6431520.
Exhibit A: Xbox vs. Xbox 360.
A dark Munin theme
Will that same random blog now turn 180 and consider it's failure?

No.

(Queue a half dozen responses about how Apple actually has failed by selling more phones than both Nokia and Blackberry last quarter in a single weekend. Sometimes, I think people who think Apple is a failure are actually it's biggest supporters, because really, who but those most invested in the company's success are pushing for it to do better? You'd only call them a failure if you thought they could do better, right? So...tell me who the Apple fanboys are, again?)
Minimally, the first point is wrong. Official Apple Retail stores all do this the same way. Reservation cards were provided. It's possible that the person while in line was informed they didn't have the color they wanted and left, but highly, highly unlikely (unless they entered later in the day) that they made it into the store and had to walk out.

FWIW, I did see a few people leave because the color they wanted was not available, either to try a carrier store or order online and wait.

Also, 9M in sales and the huge upgrade numbers pretty much speak for themselves. YMMV, but the anecdotes from your circle are not reflective of what happened.
What are your thoughts on Arch?
Not everything has to be a web application, and not all web applications have to be hosted by a third party.
Yeah Microsoft went all in on the "living room computer" with the Xbox and Xbox 360 which made sense at the time of the original Xbox however the vision they had wasn't what came to fruition. What did we get instead? Well we are still in the middle of the transition but it is most certainly away from super powerful set to boxes and more towards things like the Apple TV and Chromecast with powerful tablet computers doing most of the work and just pushing the output over wireless to the little receiver.

Now obviously MS saw this which is why we have things like Surface now but I am really surprised that they decided to kill off the Media Center Extender platform they had. They could have easily taken that and built a device similar to the Chomecast/Apple TV for dirt cheap and had a decent head start.

Their plans for Xbox One are interesting with all of the TV features and HDMI pass through but the Xbox One is seriously expensive so it still only really appeals to pretty committed console gamers.

With Ballmer leaving in the next year I hope Microsoft bring in a decent tech-oriented CEO although I have a feeling they will go for another business guy who will do similar to what Ballmer did. Not to say Ballmer did a bad job. Sure he had some duds but he wasn't an awful CEO. I am going pretty left field here but I would love to see J Allard come back but I don't know if he is really MS CEO material. He certainly has a good image though and is respected by most of the tech community and I could see him being a Steve Jobs type figure head for MS if they played it right.

Then again I am just some random guy on the internet who hacks code for fun so I am probably totally wrong about it all but you have to agree seeing Allard back would be pretty interesting :)
I like keeping the price of RT down, and giving a middle option between it and Pro.

I'm interested in Haswell reviews, including the power/heat levels.

I just can't justify $900 when I could get an Ultrabook with more power for a little more. I guess that is just the price you pay for form factor.
In that case wouldn't you be better off with something like Minix that's designed for this?
I'm a college student studying engineering. I can say that replacing my laptop with my Surface Pro has been amazing. I'm virtually 100% paperless, with all my notes being taken with OneNote (seriously amazing!) and textbooks saved as PDFs. It's also awesome that the Pro has enough power for me to do real dev work on it. So make the switch! You won't be disappointed!
My phone's getting a bit old (4S), and I'm taking this opportunity to move to T-Mobile, where the BYOD offerings are much better.

BYOD means $20 off your monthly bill (or subsidizing is +$20, whichever way you look at it), and the BYOD rate is legitimately substantially cheaper than similar plans from AT&T or Verizon.

Plus even if you subsidize the device the terms are far better. The $20/month goes towards paying off a debt, which is simply unsubsidized price - subsidized price. If you leave early you pay the remaining balance and the phone's yours. This is in stark contrast to AT&T's rather punitive early-termination fees that exceed the actual subsidization provided initially.
The under supply can't be too bad though - I just checked on eBay, and 16gb gold iPhones are going for around $1000. You can buy a TMobile contract free for $650 online through the Apple Store. That's only a 50% markup...
I started working with Django in 1.3.1 as my first REST framework. When I got to the views, it was easy to understand how the function responded to an HTTP request:

if request.POST:

validate

save form

redirect to success page

else if request.GET:

show the form

Learning the views this way was very helpful when I barely understood how the internet worked. So naturally, when I took on an intern this year, I got her started with the Django tutorial, then gave her the above pseudocode as an example of how to write a simple form. After she worked on it for a while and got very confused, I looked over the Django 1.5 tutorial with her and saw those awful, overmagicked generic views they use now. I spent an hour trying to implement what would have taken me two minutes if the views were written manually, until I gave up and rewrote all of her code while standing on my soapbox.

Needless to say, I've been hoping for something like this project ever since.
I think it was the device. If you read the reviews (or better yet, used one) you'll see that it suffered from severe performance issues. That seems to have been resolved in the new one (the demos on stage looked convincing, but you have to take that with a grain of salt).

The marketing/image problem was to be expected considering it was a new product entering a slightly fermented market. It was always going to take time to build a brand.

(full discloser: Windows Phone employee)
>As an engineer, that seemed perfectly reasonable to me.

But it was a bad thing to do, because you were taking parking spaces from the people they were for. Their fine structure was broken, but your moral calculus was the problem.
Because the UI consultant said so. The A/B testing clearly showed their proposed design was preferred by 99% of users over a blank black screen.
If you aren't involved in the drug trade the chances of being killed by a gun (omitting suicide) in the US are quite low. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but incidents like the horrific killing of the Australian baseball player a few months back are exceedingly rare but get a ton of media attention.
Let the Fantasia nightmares begin!
Another good example is the Aggregations issue, which details a new faceting framework coming out soonish:

https://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/issues/3300
I Don't Lock My Devices
Should Excel Spreadsheets be Subject to Rigorous Peer Review?
There's also Dynamics CRM online (Salesforce competitor), Sql DB as a service and some windows phone services
"White knight"? Sure, because I couldn't possibly be directly affected by issues like these.

Until and unless the assertion is actually supported, it's racist BS.

I read the article. It completely fails to support its assertions. It talks about behavior the entire world appears to be engaging in, but singles out Asians for no reason.

They're telling a story they've basically made up, and are taking advantage of the "mysterious other" to do so.

This story would not pass muster if it were about black people. The author would get run out of town!

I believe that my points are perfectly valid. There's been a whole slew of articles about "Asians love gold" with absolutely no data to back them up, which are clearly based on a racist narrative rather than anything rational. How is that invalid?

"Wasting many a programmer's time"? That's hilarious. Even if the story is completely true, it's a waste of time to read and to comment about.

Personally, I think pointing out how casual racism is tolerated and ignored in certain situations is quite a bit more useful than the other comments on this article.
I often wonder what the bandwidth for Windows Update (and MS Download Center for OS patches) is. I would love to see some details on it if it has ever been discussed by MS engineers?
Danish IO Interactive (Hitman etc.) are also out of the demo scene with notables like Jesper Kyd and the Lemon group.
Salesforce Architecture - How They Handle 1.3 Billion Transactions A Day
Nope:
http://www.asymco.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Screen-Shot...
Wow. Dude, you really need to learn how to parse english.

1) When i said, "i don't buy that..." i was referring to people blaming the collage or university for their own lack of knowledge.

In today's world where the internet is available to everyone with a net connection, i would expect people to use some initiative, go online, search for C sources or tutorials, download free compilers and linkers, learn them thoroughly etc. ie The real blame for their lack of knowledge is with them not with their collages.

2) Why would you claim, on the one hand, that the blame for kids is with their collages and poor teaching, and then claim that i expect everyone to know c cause that's the first thing they learn in engineering?

And, lastly, don't get huffy with me, dude. If you make generalizations like "Any engineering grad in India should know C" good for you. I don't care. I really don't give a damn.
[Regarding the point that this is only supposed to be convenient for users, not to be unhackable...]

Today: "Fingerprint scanning on my phone ... that's super convenient."

Tomorrow: "Fingerprint scan required by government ... oh well, I already use that on my phone."

FTA:

"We hope that this finally puts to rest the illusions people have about fingerprint biometrics. It is plain stupid to use something that you can´t change and that you leave everywhere every day as a security token", said Frank Rieger, spokesperson of the CCC. "The public should no longer be fooled by the biometrics industry with false security claims. Biometrics is fundamentally a technology designed for oppression and control, not for securing everyday device access." Fingerprint biometrics in passports has been introduced in many countries despite the fact that by this global roll-out no security gain can be shown.

iPhone users should avoid protecting sensitive data with their precious biometric fingerprint not only because it can be easily faked, as demonstrated by the CCC team. Also, you can easily be forced to unlock your phone against your will when being arrested. Forcing you to give up your (hopefully long) passcode is much harder under most jurisdictions than just casually swiping your phone over your handcuffed hands.
The problem is that you can't back out the 5C sales and say you have the 5S number even if you did know it.

They are priced very similarly.. the 5C is probably cannibalizing a significant portion of would-be sales of the 5S.
"If you don't like it, tough" can work as an attitude, sort of, if you're a car dealership battling with another car dealership over some piece of marketing territory in Texas.

But if you're a startup with an iffy business plan trying to convince sentient human beings with high-end to spend their salad years sweating on your vision, in as competitive a labor market as what we have now... not so much.
Most of the issues that I had with Surface Pro seems to have been resolved by this update:

- Gets pretty hot - new haswell processors seem to be doing better
- Short battery life of 5 hrs - 75% improvement brings it to around 8-9 hrs, which is a typical work day and that's a great improvement

Overall Surface Pro hardware has always been top class, and I think this version might be the one to buy.
You still have to trust somebody to host your VPN endpoint.

(Although, it's probably less risky to use some relatively obscure VPS/dedicated/colocation ISP than major VPN service which certainly attracts some attention of TLAs)
If you click the "No, thanks" link under the subscription button you will get access to the tips. The difference when you subscribe is you can vote them, search them by tags, and see them all in one infinite scrolling page.
Pretty bogus preset choices, what is this? If the provider isn't providing the expertise to ensure a safe connection for every customer, what the hell are they doing?
And that Europe (esp. Germany and Britain), the USSR, China, and Japan had been largely destroyed.
I wish I had a good answer, but what I do is point out why we are using what we are using. When we have a disagreement about this kind of thing my way usually wins because I'm the team lead, but I wish that weren't the deciding factor in most of our tech choices. I let that particular coworker use the MS stuff on small internal tools type projects, but when it comes to longer term stuff, or things that are more central to our company, I will push for the solution I think is best.
Did you notice that I already replied to that comment?
License isn't open. Pass.
it's times like these where I wish they still had the "Beta" in their logo..
turns out "timer for 23 hours 99 minutes" breaks it too :P

more testing google.. more testing
This is almost as bad as cosmo.

When it comes to sex between you and your partner, somebody else's desires or secret tricks don't matter. Wanna know what your partner likes? Ask them.
It was the Surface RT that did so poorly. $900M writeoff that forced out Ballmer. Which is why I'm so surprised that they're attempting to do it again, with the Surface 2.

People familiar with Windows want a cheap way to take their desktop with them. That's the primary audience, and introducing an ARM-based tablet that CAN'T run their desktop apps, is killing them. I would have gotten rid of the ARM one entirely (at least until there's a big enough native app economy for it), and found ways to bring down the cost of the Pro, and just sell that one.

That said, the smart covers are pretty innovative. Being able to switch between a keyboard one, an extra battery one, and that amazing looking music production, is a stand-out feature. Something that Microsoft needs desperately.