skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It has been reported in many places that Canadian authorities intercepted a package to him containing several fake IDs with his face on them and passed that along to US authorities. I imagine he was under serious scrutiny after that happened (this may be sourced from the complaint against him, but I haven't personally read the complaint).
"That movie with the living car" came close for me the other day, giving me http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine instead of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_(1983_film)
While reading the emails, I do want to correct one thing.

The author to a copyrighted work are not obligated by the choice of license. GPL and other copyright licenses give people other than the copyright holder a licence to do things that they don't have under regular copyright law. The copyright holder however has full rights regardless of license.

The only exception is false advertisement laws, but those are quite narrow in definition, and might not matter much for non-paying customers. A paying customer would have a case however.
I saw it in action at hackMIT and it seemed to work really well.
Your anecdotal evidence is entirely irrelevant. I've seen kernel panics multiple times on OS X, including when I really needed to use the machine (OTOH, I've had a solid experience running Linux on various ThinkPads for years). Does that mean I should judge it based on that?
Interacting with a DB or reading a html file from disk is in essence non-pure.
My friends and I used Kik for a while when they used Blackberry and Anroid phones. I was the only iPhone user at first, but once another friend got an iPhone it became much easier to convince the rest of them how much better it was for all of us to use iPhones. Apple is better off holding out and letting their product sell themselves, and iMessage and Facetime will keep them locked in once they're users.
Social Media Generation -- Comic
I like the idea, but it was very simple: choose the right point on the spectrum of startup vs. skill building. This could have been expanded on much better.

1) Startups vs. skill building aren't always independent. This could be discussed.

2) Examples/stories of points on the spectrum should be discussed.

3) The pros and cons of different points on the spectrum should have been discussed.
> Scan Philip Ellmer-DeWitt’s Apple 2.0 or John Gruber’s Daring Fireball and treat yourself to intelligent repudiations

The minute that I saw "Gruber" and "intelligent" in the same sentence was the minute I knew that this post was full of shit. If someone is so blinded by the reality distortion field that they can't see that Gruber is nothing more than a 3rd party PR person who trades insider info on Apple for pushing out propaganda on a regular basis, then I just can't take them seriously.
What if you have an open source project for which you can't easily find a community? For example, I've got what I feel is a fairly good backup utility as an upgrade for people using rsync snapshot backups. But it would feel improper to mention it on any rsync backup tool mailing list (as it technically competes with these tools).

The only thing I can think of is to make packages for various distributions and see if they want to include it. But I'd like to get a bit more testing and feedback first, with maybe a couple dozen users before going mainstream.
It's a defence mechanism. Actively improving yourself makes the rest of the group look and feel bad [because they aren't]. They don't like those negative emotions, so they try to equalize. But it's much easier to equalize you to them, than themselves to you.

So they make fun. They passively bring down your efforts. They're much too nice to do it actively. And provide plenty of excuses for you to fall off the wagon.

BUT!

This is also a test of your resolve. If you can't do something against your friends' and family's will, how do you know you actually want to do it?

At least that's how I look at it. If I'm not confident enough in my choices that they would stand up to the scrutiny of my friends and family, then my choices need some more polish.
The NSA et al. know everything. It's just a matter of whether they can figure it out again using legal investigative techniques. I imagine it like the solutions in the back of a math textbook. I'm given the answer but I won't get credit for answering them correctly unless I can actually list every step in deriving the solution. See the recent news stories on NSA-DEA parallel reconstruction.

Specifically to your question, I'd guess they run a large number of Tor exit nodes and from there it was fairly simple to see exactly who was doing what.

Also it's come out recently in the Guardian, the NSA can backdoor machines through special servers running man-in-the-middle attacks.

Basically, the Internet (and planet Earth too) is not secure, so trying to pull off a large-scale crime is kind of foolish.
What you're saying makes sense, but I suspect is different than what the author means to say: "What you do for a living distinctly differs from who you are." There is work and there is job. I want to associate my work with my life, not the job where I currently do my work. I think the original article is telling me to not associate my life with my work.

He also says "learn languages, play music instrument, do sports", but these actually require work and overcoming yourself, and are synergistic with whatever you do 9-5.
Do something for the improvement of the human race instead.

If you can't, please stop releasing idiotic extensions that bring individual human beings more suffering than benefit.
How do you track your number of downloads on Github?
introcessionable? Google doesn't know that word, you get to define it.
Amazing, in the 13 hours since this link has been posted, the site is still down.
The Giveaway Guy: One Possession a Day for a Year
Actually, given a Turing Machine M which outputs x when given x, then we would have the description of program T0 (for terse language T) equal to the concatenation of the [specification of the] machine M with T0, M T0. Given program J1 (for verbose language J), its description equals M J1. Given sufficiently small M and large T0, the M factor's importance is quite reduced and we see that Kolmogorov complexity is roughly analogous to the respective sizes of T0 and J1 themselves (for this specific Turing Machine M).
It's hard to know the entire timeline of their investigation, but from how they describe it, the first lead they got was the username "altoid" posting what is apparently one of the first advertisements for Silk Road on a drug forum in January 2011, and then 2 days afterwards, an "altoid" posted on Bitcointalk looking for an IT pro to contact him at rossulbricht@gmail.com.

They implied this was the first thing they did. The interception of the fake IDs may have occurred before or after he was already under heavy suspicion of being Dread Pirate Roberts. I also believe there was some discussion that the fake IDs might've actually sent by an undercover agent.

Either way, I think it's very likely that they already had the idea that Ross Ulbricht == DPR before finding his Stack Overflow post.
It doesn't know which files exist on the server.

And the file can change on the server just as easily as the client. So how can it tell this without sending the complete list?
Great Betrayals
This is where triggering deploys through Jenkins is really helpful. Now you have a record of which SHA was deployed, when it was deployed and a copy of the console log for the deploy. Can't do much better than that.
My preferred method is using source control to update the files on production to the latest desired version.
Consider yourself lucky, A year and a half ago I was supporting PHP 5.1.

I wasn't confused by the title on the linked-to page, separating the version number from the name helped.
You apparently didn't read all of my comment as I mentioned Java's anonymous inner classes being used to fake lambdas near the end. And, the point remains, given any TC language L, all possible language features for all possible languages are implementable within L itself. It doesn't matter if L has operator overloading or not; only that it be TC.
Do you mean the ArchiveTeam Warrior? http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Warrior
Thanks, I'll have to try that out. So far, I haven't had great experiences accessing my Android devices from my Linux laptop.

That said, your workflow isn't representative of most users, if only for the fact that most users don't really have a workflow per se, they just do whatever's easiest at the moment. People have photos all over the place (mobile devices, multiple computers/drives, social networks, email, etc.), and Everpix pulls them together into one unified collection.
He probably aspires to date the equivalent of Hannah from Girls.
Yes, but rsync doesn't store any state for each xfer.
The criminal complaint[1] mentioned the FBI searching for the earliest mention of Silk Road. The earliest they found was a user called 'altoid' advertising it in two separate places (including bitcointalk) around the same time. Later, 'altoid' posted a second time on bitcointalk searching for an "IT Pro" and publicly listed the email address "rossulbricht@gmail.com" as the contact info for the gig. This was also the email address he used to register his Stack Overflow account.

[1]: http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/UlbrichtCriminalCompl...
Nice concept but the readability needs further improvement until this can become my #1 feed reader.
It was really sweet. They were a little crunched for time so they didn't get to fully show everyone but they had my vote for winner.
French Guiana (in South America) is labelled France on this map...
Agreed, it seems like the root problem here is that mugshot data is being made publicly available for people who haven't been convicted of crimes. Being arrested is a far cry from being guilty of something.

It's very unclear what "public interest" is served by making these available in the first place.
Do you know anything about the author?
That was not the final script, but Kent made the mirror.

3:30 of
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ds0wYpc1eM

he just said something like 'look I mounted it' because he had already shown him the mirror before and the last thing he did was mount it.

Later when they are pretending to be God talking to Kent, they say "what do you think the ... mirror was for" indicating that he had made it.
Is this really realistic: self-taught programmer?
So I'm 31, and decided to change careers. I was previously an engineer (not CS), and did well @ a small company, made and saved money, and now I make about 60k per year after tax from my invested money.

I live off about 2.5k per month, but can probably live off less, so I'm still saving money per year, but not making any money other than my investments. I made about 20k worth of angel investments via angel.co, so hopefully I win the lottery there, but I'm not planning on it.

I have always tooled around with computers, but I'm nowhere near an expert, nor have I ever been a coder.

I am currently taking the one month rails course, and also considering something like LPTHW or similar, with the main goal in mind to just make prototypes, then hire the real talent if I get something going. I don't expect to get hired as a dev, but what about getting work or consulting from front end stuff, or just prototype stuff?

I read posts on here all the time about people who have CS degrees, the whole 9 yards and have problems finding work. So it seems asinine for me to believe that I could do it on my own.

What should I expect? Should I just accept that my life is going to suck and go back to my old job that I hated? I really don't like not working, but I really don't see how this whole coding thing is going to work out for me. I need some HONEST feedback. I feel like maybe I've been a bit jaded by all this entrepreneur/ self taught coder talk. I mean, my chances to make millions doing this is pretty much non existent, isn't it?
Nope, just looked him up. Apparently he was an Apple exec in the 80s. Your point is?
The copyright page mentions that they will provide a commercial license through their employer if requested.
>The NSA et al. know everything.

Parallel construction doesn't actually imply that the NSA is omniscient and that the entire rest of the American justice system is a charade meant to mask its power from the muggles. The NSA doesn't know everything. They don't see everything. They don't whisper words of power into the ears of every prosecutor, and a dark man smoking a cigarette doesn't appear from out of the shadows with fabricated evidence for the Department of Justice and a dossier from ten minutes into the future every time a hacker opens their browser.

It gets mentioned every time a post comes up involving court case or arrest, and it's quite honestly as useless a form of speculation as suggesting divine intervention as a first cause in science. Assuming too much power on the part of the NSA (and by extension, that no other methods used by any other bureau or department are effective except as a smokescreen) is as dangerous as dismissing them entirely.
That was much better reasoned than the article.
While I agree with the line of thinking exhibited by this article and people like Tim Ferriss I'm stumped these ideas have yet to gain more recognition, not to speak of mainstream adoption.

Sure, we can all aspire to living the 4-hour work week but not everyone is Tim Ferriss and not everyone can or should live on selling digital products online either. Software needs to be written, products have to be designed and produced.

The question is: Why are these things measured in hours wasted during their creation instead of the actual business value that's been generated?

Why do we measure the work of a freelance software developer in terms of hourly payments instead of the value she creates? Of all things creating software should be measured by something else than the hours wasted during the process. Measuring output this way certainly is the easy way out. It provides some well-known and commonly shared standard.

However, it also promotes lazy thinking. In this kind of framework the programmer who develops software by using anti-patterns copiously is rewarded because he makes sure he can waste even more hours on maintaining this software in order to get paid even more. Basically, in this mindset writing maintainable software is as valuable as copying and pasting 'System.out.println("All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.)"' all day.

The problem with software in particular is of course that buying and selling software this way is not only well-established but it's also difficult to measure the business value beforehand.

Nevertheless, while I certainly haven't found a real solution to this problem I keep thinking there has to be a better way of measuring the value of work. Any thoughts?
The 3D printed prosthetic hand
My Cervical X-ray after experiencing a wide range of neurological problems
See anything abnormal?
Yes. I'm fond of the Kinky Friedman quote "find what you like and let it kill you". You should enjoy what you do and do it well. This includes, where necessary, putting in the hard yards.

The author is right that working long hours for an employer is actually an intellectually lazy way to live. However this doesn't make hard work, effort or high-standards in themselves wrong at all. This is also a lazy attitude.
Brings back memories - I ground a 30 cm reflector back in my teens. Was interesting to read how they no longer use two glass blanks, instead use one blank and one tile grinding tool. Took me most of the summer to get the mirror ready for coating, and that was working on it most every day for at least an hour. All very worth it when everything was finished and assembled and we pointed it up into the night sky. Nothing like a clear cool fall night and a decent (if amateurish) scope to contemplate extremely large numbers.
Humans 1, Robots 0
> Google has been working on question answering for years now, but only exposes it when it is sure of the answers.

I find this only works for very particular, seemingly whitelisted, cases. For example, it does date of death well, but try to ask it the date of any other sort of historical event. It doesn't do the date of surrenders or famous battles, the day Columbus discovered America (it won't even tell me that date if I straight up search for "when is Columbus Day"). "When was the declaration of independence signed" gets me nada, and it can't tell me what year the Magna Carta was issued. It can tell me the day that Hitler died, but can't tell me when victory in Europe was declared. It can't even tell me when Enron went bankrupt, despite the first words in snippet under the first result for "when did enron go bankrupt" being "Before its bankruptcy on December 2, 2001"

I'm not picking and choosing examples here, everything that I tried besides birth and death dates did not work for me.

What Google is doing really seems like nothing but a parlor trick compared to what Watson can do. Maybe they really are doing all the same fancy math behind the scenes, but what is ultimately surfaced to me, the end user, is not impressive.

(Note that although I can't get coherent responses from Wolfram Alpha with natural language questions, Wolfram Alpha can answer most of these things if you don't ask it questions that way. "Battle of Hastings date"? Wolfram Alpha can do that, Google can't.)
Regarding the mailing of fake IDs and other stuff, I heard so many media accounts of Silk Road in the last week or so, and I really didn't understand this part: why bother to go through the trouble of all that crypto and anonymizing if in the end you are going to use your real street address?

I thought this part was the dumbest aspect of the whole arrangement, but then I heard about posting on Stack Overflow to get your bugs fixed, and "contact me at rossulbricht@gmail.com kthxbye", and I begin to think that "criminal mastermind" is not exactly an apt description of this guy. I find it hard to contain my laughter at this.
He also later founded and ran an Apple competitor that built highly respected computers and a highly respected OS.

Dismissing this person's opinion simply because they don't agree with an unsubstantiated attack on Gruber makes no sense.
It certainly would be much 'easier' to have a niche to target.

I spent a year work on a product based on some informal surveys and a lot of assumption. Luckily it doesn't cost me a lot to run it, so I can keep it going and continue plucking away, but while it was a good learning tool, I also learned that trying to find a niche would be much nicer to start with.

Thanks for the link.
> To expect Airbnb research hotel laws and taxes in every country they operate in seems like an undue burden.

I really hope that's a joke. Why should they be exempt from the law, exactly?
How a Scrappy Startup in a DC Garage Revolutionized Healthcare.gov
This was exactly my feeling about NetBSD. FreeBSD was the fast BSD; OpenBSD was the secure BSD; and NetBSD was, well, never discussed in the terms I found most useful. People talked about it as the "ported to everything BSD," but what I remember most was its consistency and clearly thought out design.

Case in point, I remember when WiFi started becoming more prevalent. I can't even remember the hoops I had to jump through to get WiFi working in Linux. I just remember being annoyed that I couldn't configure the new network interface through ifconfig--I mean, it's a network interface! By contrast, I remember being pleasantly surprised at the lengths NetBSD had gone through to make WiFi a natural extension to the existing network configuration tools.

I ran NetBSD as my primary workstation OS for a few years 99-03 or thereabouts, and then on an assortment of other small systems, servers, and appliance-like things for somewhat longer. I even used the brilliant pkgsrc on FreeBSD, Linux, AIX, and MacOS X for a while. In the end, I gravitated away from NetBSD for the reasons you mentioned. It was never a quality problem, it was an inertia problem. Sad, because it really was a lovely system.
Which Chrome release channel do you currently use: Canary, Dev, Beta, or Release? I haved used Firefox Nightly as my primary browser for almost two years and have only hit a few major problems. Aurora is a nice balance between stability and new features and optimizations.
I find it a bit funny that the author states:

2. Never strive for endless perfection

and

3. Stop associating your life with your work

and then goes on to use a quote from Steve Jobs to drive his home point. Considering that Mr. Jobs was a repeat offender of the above two rules.
This piece is laughable if you've ever used drugs, sold drugs, or know your way around anywhere. Oh man the article writers delusion.
Again purely anecdotal from my own small sample, but I've known people taking prescription pills illegally by buying through a dealer, haven't known anyone keeping their habit going based on legitimate doctor prescriptions. Have also known dealers who had pills available - though in what quantity and from what sources I've no idea.
I heard someone the other day saying that now that Jobs is gone they're bringing back the hokey colors to the product lines. I told them that it wasn't until Jobs was back that the colors were introduced and they didn't believe me.
I'll tell you a secret: that fellow was me, every one of several times over the last half-dozen years that I tried running Ubuntu or Debian, in the latest stable version then available, on various commodity laptops not more than a year or two old.

Oh, I suppose my mistake was in not choosing my hardware according to the recommendations of the assembled gurus at linux-laptop.net, or just not being awesome enough to know what incantation I needed to mumble where, or the precise angle at which to incise the throat of the sacrificial chicken, or some damned thing to which those who haven't yet got bored of sysadmin drudgery are welcome.

Of course, the Linux community being as it is the apotheosis of "blame the user", I'm sure I'll hear all sorts of detailed explanations of what I obviously must have done wrong, none of which does anything to make my Macbook any less preferable as an Emacs substrate.
How Russia became the Worst Country in 2013
I was buying gas a month ago at a local grocery, when I saw this magazine put out by some small publisher.

It's basically a catalog of mugshots of local people and what crimes they were charged with. The cashier told me people love that stuff.

I'm not sure what words of wisdom I have to offer about the intersection of technology and this behavior, but I can assure you that widespread publishing of mugshots is not new.
> No technology is worth such zealous defense.

Tell that to the Linux community.
Was she considering an Apple laptop, or an iPad?

Are the educational apps ones for her to use herself, or ones she'll use for teaching kids?

Also, are they apps she already has and wants to keep running, or ones she will buy now that she has the new machine? Finally are they Metro Apps, or traditional windows apps?
just to add to this...
The persons name is mentioned 11 times in the source code,in the URL, in the title, in an H1, in an alt image tag, and many other instances...
I see no reason why all of those instances are justified by public interests.
I think one contributing factor is that discernment, critical thinking, and even applied pessimism are all good qualities for a programmer. Many of us get grumpy because we are on high alert for such extended periods. We are looking for bugs and issues. We are objecting to proposals, finding fault, raising negative points. It's a critical mode of thinking, so we accept being critical. Or grumpy.

So when some other human is the source of the bug or blocking issue then we don't take care to be social and delicate. That's broken, that's badly built, hey that sucks. Or just channeling other pent up annoyances onto whoever is around.
IPhone Fingerprint Scanner Hacked Again