skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> When you rent physical goods, do you find it acceptable to be tracked while you use them with some hidden surveillance mechanisms?

Ah, so you're also against most car rentals? They are often GPS tracked to enforce rules about leaving the country and such. I see no problem with this. It is their property, and they want to know where it is.
Can someone please explain why "feature parity" even matters here? If Nvidia can do something with GNU/Linux that is technically hard to do with Windows, why shouldn't they do it? In what way does it make sense to force technical limitations of Windows on GNU/Linux users?
How was a trust relationship built?

I could assume that major vendors with high ratings could do early FE as their means, but would unrated vendors have to essentially front and hope that the buyer would FE?

Was the FE ever automated based upon FedEx/UPS tracking numbers?
Live reload is in the roadmap, stay tuned!
As an engineer directly involved in a company working on one of the biggest mongodb deployments, i also believe that this is crazy because the technology truly sucks outside of a very narrow use case (prototyping, no shard).

However they market it so much and they accept very flexible deals with enterprises, in combination with the easy-to-bootstrap for the VP/Manager/CTO, they can probably sell a lot of it.
They're citizens of a democracy with every bit as much right to organize in support of their legislative proposals as any others, is what business it is of theirs. I may tend to disagree with their arguments, but until they try a coup, advancing those arguments is well within their rights.

(Thought experiment: Would you make the same argument against LEAP, which is another organization of LEOs who take the opposite position on decriminalization?)
I called them analogous because of their potential effects and their development in secret by governments. I don't think a crime syndicate could do it so effectively; when the NSA "owns up the backbone", even if the operator discovers the intrusion, it stays owned.
AWS DynamoDB Multi-Region Replication
I'm not sure where this "perfect the first time" thing comes from, but so far every first version of the product I've seen from Apple was far from perfect. It is true that Apple spends a lot of time on visual design and polishing the limited set of scenarios to their complete satisfaction, but I don't think is can be called perfect.

For example, first version of iPhone OS did not have copy-paste functionality. On a device that has keyboard with keys sized 1/4 of my fingertip size. Now try getting a long URL or email from one app to another in this setup. Perfect? Yeah, right.

Another iOS thing - it gained multitasking (for apps other than select few) only in the 4th version. For years we've been told multitasking is evil - right up to the point when they got to make it usable and then it suddenly became newesest bestesest thing ever.

Now we can look at hardware. Macbooks are extremely popular, but I've personally seen a number of Macbooks dying at 2 years of age from exactly the same symptoms (failure of graphics subsystem). It's a reasonably nice piece of hardware, but perfect? No way. And it still doesn't have docking capability, after all these years.

And those are just random things, if I tried, I probably could list dozens of deficiencies in Apple products. Both first and current versions. It doesn't make them especially bad - all their competitors have their sets of faults - but let's not buy into the "perfect" hype too much.

So I can attribute this "perfect the first time" myth to a definite success of Apple marketing, but, unfortunately, there's little substance behind it.
It failed on "Are you sure that's a good idea?"
Is $1.4 Million in seed round normal?

What is normally the level of dilution after such a round?
Google vs. Facebook vs. Baidu: Battle of the Internet empires
Today in our supplement: Is Betteridge's Law always true?
Definitely. And also, people have short term memories. No one will remember what didn't work after it eventually gets fixed. It becomes the new normal. One day, no one will care that Apple maps weren't great when they first debuted.
I'm reasonably proficient in Linux, but lost hours trying to install (intent was a greenfield upgrade) Gitlab on clean Ubuntu instance.

The drop-in-and-run WAR stuff is the greatest thing ever (I'm using Gitblit).
17 studies, 284 participants?? And that's supposed to be reassuring?

That kind of numbers is a red flag to me. It indicates that these studies may have issues, which I suspect they do.
So, according to these documents, NSA and GCHQ do have few "owned" exit nodes, but not so many, hence, they want to own more. Interestingly enough, GCHQ set up Tor exit nodes on the AWS cloud.
Out of curiosity, do you have a source for this? I developed tinnitus last year and currently do wear earplugs while sleeping, however I certainly don't want to make it worse.
Everybody Needs a Little Competitive Intelligence
RAW support is a killer feature guys!
It's probably the best you can do, but it still doesn't prevent your anonymity from being compromised. As soon as the malware is installed, it can phone home, even if you end up wiping it after you are done.
Keyboard Shortcuts and Typing Tips for iPad, iPhone & iPod Touch
DRM doesn't hurt people who work around it, it ONLY restricts the people who use the service as offered! It isn't about piracy, it's about abusing customers.

http://www.defectivebydesign.org/what_is_drm_digital_restric...
It's not only transactions. It's battling fraud. Mitigating financial risks. A boo boo is not that we are offline but also merchants losing money.
In the 1930's, people traded the liberty of growing hemp for the security of keeping stoned black jazz musicians from raping their daughters (that was one of the reasons put forth by Harry Anslinger[1] in the era). We see how that trade has worked out, much as giving up the liberty of privacy for the security of government oversight of communications has put us where we are now.

Point being that the liberty/security trade isn't a false dichotomy.

[1] "Most marijuana smokers are Negroes, Hispanics, jazz musicians, and entertainers. Their satanic music is driven by marijuana, and marijuana smoking by white women makes them want to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and others. It is a drug that causes insanity, criminality, and death — the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind."

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Harry_J._Anslinger
It doesn't. That's just their excuse. If it did, they'd start removing Windows driver features, too, since they can't be found on the Linux driver, and therefore there's no feature parity.
Ideally you'd want to be running Tor with transparent proxying of all traffic on a physically separate (and locked down) host. I believe there are guides on how to do all that on a raspberry pi out there.

On your primary browsing/whatever machine, I believe (but have not exhaustively researched) that it would still make sense to run inside a VM/container, because that would provide a much more 'generic' set of system characteristics (MAC address, clock jitter stats, CPUinfo, etc) than your actual hardware. It does provide a greater attack surface, so you'd have to weigh up the value of potentially masking physical identity vs likelihood of gaining root due to VM exploits.

There's also the risk of overconfidence because of these measures, which might lead you to overlook important details in the host OS, or in your communication habits.
Bullshit, lots of straight authors write gay characters and vice-versa all the time in both fan-fiction and professionally published.
Pressure from Microsoft in some fashion?
There have been attempts to address git's shortcomings with respect to independent revision control of a single file: There is the "zit" project at

http://git.oblomov.eu/zit

...although it wasn't ideal for me, and it doesn't look like it's been updated in a while. E.g., these days that should be on GitHub!

RCS really fits well with the use-case of /etc configuration files. It's a pity that Git doesn't function very well for that particular case.
In Friedman's system, it's not "everyone votes on each issue, and only the winning issues get implemented," but rather "everyone pays for each issue they personally want, and therefore gets it" (limited by their means, general marketability of issues, etc.). It's the difference between "everyone votes on which car should get made, and only the winning car gets made" and "everyone pays for whatever car they want." Most economists and people agree that the latter works better for cars, and I don't think that the production and enforcement of law is an easier task than automobile production.

> Imposing private law anarchy on everybody because the betting market says it would best achieve national welfare is just as bad as...

It sounds like you're defining literally any society as "imposing" its traits on its members. I suppose that's true in a way, but I don't see it as a very useful definition, since there's no way to simply not have society (apart from something like transhumanism).
This is the best answer. If you asked me to create Amazon from the ground up, I wouldn't just be building a website, I'd be building warehouses and stocking inventory. Covered CA has 3 call centers with 400 agents, with a 4th on the way with 150 more. There are hundreds of employees working on regulation, compliance, support, integration, etc. 1000 employees at $50,000 contracted for a year is already over $50 million.
Nintendo bringing MonoGame Framework to Wii U
If you having issues managing or scaling MongoDB you need to use a service like MongoDirector.com - make its really easy to deploy and scale shards (even in your own cloud account)
Oh, you bought Nvidia? Well, that was your first problem, and fault.

The Intel graphics are not so fast, but at least a big chunk are open source.
Google+ just introduced RAW support too. Glad to see web services finally beginning to officially support it.
Commercial banks have substantial trading activities on their balance sheet as well. I'm not sure I understand your distinction between management vs. tracking, but systems that forecast the balance sheet to assess interest/market/credit risk need to be fairly sophisticated. Running a bank effectively goes well beyond correctly tracking deposits and other transactions.
Maybe Nvidia doesn't want end users to feel like they're missing out on anything on Windows, therefore finding the need to cripple Linux users?
On finding good collaborators
I find it undesirably weighty for such purposes, and potentially limited in future prospects by the politics of its developer community. Decoupling the view layer from the backend makes replacement of the latter, with something offering an identical API but better prospects, easier to contemplate.
I agree, banks and financial institutions are data driven businesses.

I have seen several banks from inside, and most of them think that they are driven by financial analysts, figuring out clever equations for managing money (e.g. lending rules, mortgage policies, etc), while IT is just a cost center for tracking the transactions. It's old school, and they change very slowly.

Sooner or later they shall realize that the transaction data they are tracking is a good source of information, and they could use "hard" data (through some machine learning and data mining), instead of or alongside of the "soft" intuition of their analysts.
Any experienced drug user will say the same thing, that their lives were not improved by that drug use, and in most cases was made far worse.

Using personal anecdotes about your casual or social cocaine use is pure nonsense that has no bearing on the grim reality that addictive drug users experience every day.
>(here, there's a subtext that Tor actually made NSA's job easier)

I'm not sure how you reached that conclusion.

The slides mention that Tor is:

* Very difficult to identify on the network-level, since Tor-tls traffic is indistinguishable from Apache-tls traffic as of 2011

* Impossible to fully deanonymize

* Only exploitable via a handful of browser exploits.

Further, later in the "Tor is the King" slide deck, there's this rather glowing endorsement of the TAILS livecd:

"Tails... adds severe misery to CNE equation."

...which is what you'd expect, given that TAILS is entirely ephemeral, and so all of their callbacks and APT-style attacks are useless against it.

I had previously considered TAILS a rather "amateur" system myself, because of the glut of livecds bundling Tor. But it turns out they're actually adding severe(!) misery to the NSA's exploitation team! I'm downloading the TAILS cd now so I can switch over to using it in a VM rather than running Tor Browser Bundle on my own machine.
I can't make anyone's mind up for them. But if all they ever read are the hyperbolic marketing pieces about the glories of one tool, they're less likely to take the time to vet the claims and compare it to other tools.

There's a lot of people on HN, and many of them simply aren't familiar enough with technology not to buy into every product shilled in a blog post or news article. It's like the "HN effect" is convincing people that because it's on the front page, it's somehow intellectually stimulating, superior, or factually correct, when often this isn't the case. Luckily we have comments to put forth alternate views.
I've been using Loom for the last few months for photo backup and I've been really impressed with their improvements since then. Can't wait to see what they'll be bringing out next.
Cannot be emphasised enough. Less than 1% of Oracle's market cap; and pretty sure they could complete their offering with a NoSQL database.
While the feature set may not have been perfectly filled, I think that you're highlighting areas where their 'perfect the first time' philosophy clashed with customer frustration. They hadn't figured out how to do copy/paste 'perfectly', so they didn't do it. Same with multitasking. While I agree, these things were not perfect even when they did launch, Apple has always preferred to leave out a feature than to push something out half baked. This is why they still haven't integrated NFC into the iPhone.
I just use the nouveau drivers. They perform well enough, cause me far less xorg.conf headaches, and are free.
I guess I would expect the price to change.

Netflix (as it is all streaming and not really "renting") isn't the greatest example. For some things that I can't stream on Netflix, I often rent from the iTunes store. The cost is much less than a purchase from the same store. The only difference is the understanding that the digital media I'm renting will no longer function after a well-understood period of time. I'm an adult, I can make informed consent to that arrangement.

I wouldn't be happy with this being the only media option, but I like having that as one of the many options in the media ecosystem.
I beg to differ. In a world of fraction-reserve banking, banks are in the business of capital aggregation and debt issuance - in order to generate all important "spread". But, that world - the world for the past ~700 years - is disappearing.

We live in a world with collapsing credit spreads and Basel III will tighten them even further. In the US, Dodd-Frank's prohibition on lots of fee based income (which was a huge profit center for banks) and the disappearance of debit inter-change due to Durbin makes banks very concerned about the future of their business.

Banks are increasingly turning to transactional systems to make money.
Some of the donations are particularly funny.
> it tends to induce horrific, apocalyptic nightmares

I've used melatonin for years, as have many of my friends and family, and I've never had anyone mention this. I've always had more vivid dreams with melatonin, but I've never had nightmares.
Well said. Matt Ringel is spot on here.
This.

At least here I know what I know, even if I don't like it. But that's also me convincing myself that I'm ok here.

The worst part is the demoralization that happens. You start to feel like you are becoming less useful to other organizations.
And they could presumably find a way to support DRM modules provided by the operating system, if the pressure was great enough.
Another nitpick about the source code:

Let the code breath a little -- no whitespace around control structures is a bit jarring:

if(error){
...
}else{
...
}

Instead:

if (error) {
...
} else {
...
}

Maybe adopt this Node style guide: http://nodeguide.com/style.html
Speaking of which, now is probably a great time to mention that the Berkman Center is doing an open call for fellowship applications:

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/getinvolved/fellowships

And I'm sure the EFF is looking too.
Ask HN: Review my startup, blogvio.com
Blogvio launched publicly a few minutes ago, today, after more than 10 months of development and 50.000 EUR invested!

We're by far still in beta, but we thought it's good to start collecting real feedback from users world wide and improve the system and the concept.

We’re creating a platform for content distribution and I would be excited if you guys would let us know how we've done so far. We've iterated so much on the product design that I feel at this point we could just keep on doing it, or launch it. So we picked today and put it live!

I'm most interested in the Composition creation flow, if you guys find that easy and intuitive.
Once we have this perfected, we can open our API for all users.

Any feedback and of course bugs found :-), would be very, very much appreciate it!
Have an awesome weekend! Hola from Spain! :-) http://blogvio.com
No, Firefox allows you to rebrand modifications and so is Free Software. If it enforced that you keep the branding, that would be non-free.

Here it is right in the list of APPROVED Free Software licenses: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#MPL-2.0
As a Quantopian user, thank you.
Over-eager investors confuse Tweeter with Twitter
What happens when stock markets die?
Firefox is NOT non-free, period.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#MPL-2.0
But what is Nvidia's motivation for that? How does Nvidia win if people stay on Windows vs. moving to Linux? As far as graphics cards are concerned, they would just start putting more effort into their Linux support (to match the swing in customer OS usage).
>"The eSports audience is a particularly valuable one for brand advertisers because they are hard to reach via traditional media channels," said DiPietro. "They tend to be extremely tech savvy, they are often cord-cutters, and they are hyper-engaged in the online video and chat experience -- all of which makes them very valuable for advertisers."

And very likely to use ad-block. I wonder when Twitch finally starts baking ads into the actual of the stream.
If you're really going to propose that technology and science will advance that much, then I feel compelled to counter that people five centuries from now will look back on 20th and 21st century robotics forays and pity us for having to live in such tiny, stupid, chaotic brains. They'll wonder how we ever accomplished anything while so congenitally incapable of proper thought or feeling.

Hint: the lesson is never to make futurist predictions, because they're almost never coherent.
The World’s First $99 Eye Tracker With Full SDK
"Now imagine that someone comments on the survival story of this kind that she wrote using words like "wonderful". Is that a normal reaction?"

FFS. No-one is saying that this guy meeting a serial killer was wonderful. They are saying that the writing is.
I wouldn't really consider Tor an amateur libtech product since the basics of the underlying technology (onion routing) was developed by the US Navy.

Here's the original patent from 1998:

http://patft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=...
I would definitely love to read up more on how and why things are optimized the way the are.
Indictment: 13 Anon Members for Op Payback
I would stick to in memory cache solutions like redis, memcache over mongo
> Under the assumption that selling an addictive product is immoral. Coffee shops must be the work of the devil himself,...

There is a vast difference between crack or heroin addiction and things like - drinking coffee, playing video games, and wasting time on social networks.

Making the connection between those two groups (and equating them) via the word "addiction" made me stop reading after the quoted line.
Tumblr Eats a Pelican: A Static Website Story
Having worked for a 700M$ quant investment fund, I'd say, uhem no. It's pretty simple: algo investing doesn't work well or at all. algo trading does. nobody publishes very good algorithms. there are perhaps only 20 very good systems in the world. usually they are statistical arbitrage or HF. these kinds of systems are measured in sharpe ratio and turnover at least once a week. although I've spoken to a 25 year old who managed to make a killing auto-trading an emerging market, but these things don't happen at scale.

also, Bloomberg is in completely different business.

if somebody really wants to work on replacing Bloomberg let me know. this is a huge market, which nobody is working on AFAIK (=~Angellist).
Ok, but Salesforce was also the fastest company to ever reach a billion dollars. They are definitely an outlier.
"feature parity" is a poor choice of words, but nVidia builds their Windows and Linux drivers from a single code base.

Keeping support for four monitors in the linux code probably meant adding a bunch of #ifdefs in various files.

They just decided it wasn't worth the effort to maintain.
There is a difference between arguing in favor of a natural right vs a civil right, and both are valid things to argue for in a society.

natural - I have an inherent, inalienable right to this
civil - Regardless of if its natrual, I only want to live in a nation that has this other right protected. So I'll fight for it.

Your argument assumes that techno-libertarians are only arguing a 'natural right' toward anonymity.
Melatonin has made a huge difference in my life. I don't use it regularly, but when there's a day when I absolutely need to get a good night's sleep or other things will go badly, I no longer have to worry about it. I take 3mg of melatonin and wake up refreshed.
Iconic: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation
The malware would have to escape the virtual machine. The VM needs to be firewalled off from the host and NOT have the host <=> guest tools installed.
This is still a reason to cause upset though. A small minority of linux users actually care about GPU programming and 3D acceleration and rely on proprietary drivers. Nouveau is improving but nowhere near commercial grade (this is largely Nvidia's fault as well).
I'd say, such tracking is not appropriate as well. Except that car example is not like your personal computer. It all depends on the level of the breach of your privacy for the sake of enforcement.
Pretty cool animated picture
This is what can happen if your girlfriend knows your Facebook password (just a good joke!)
How many times can you employ that tactic until the savvy targets move onto more secure networks?
> I know drugs aren't safe

...and keeping them illegal adds to the danger.

Heroin is an unsafe drug, but impure heroin, injected with a needle that has been used and "cleaned" multiple times increases the dangers.

Making sure that heroin is hard to get makes people turn to other drugs. (Because addicts are addicted, and drug addicts take drugs.) One alternative to heroin is the Russian drug krokodil - desomorphine - often made using a variety of weird things.

CAUTION: GRAPHIC IMAGES

(http://www.krokodildrug.com/what-is-krokodil-drug-how-to-sto...)

EDIT: MORE HORRIFIC IMAGES

(http://www.democracyindistress.com/2011/09/warning-graphic-p...) (apologies for partisan source)