skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is another backchannel that can be used if your air-gapped computer ever does get compromised, which I haven't seen anyone discuss yet. If your internet-connected computer and air-gapped computer both have audio speakers / microphone, then that seems like a perfect covert way for a compromise to set up wireless communications between them An audio signal can appear to be similar to fan noise, or outside of human hearing range. I wonder if this has ever been exploited before.
It's an example of a control scheme the controller drivers allow you to come up with in order to map to a game's expected mouse-and-keyboard inputs. If a game developer wants to explicitly support the controller, then even better schemes can be designed.
Fortunately I used to live in Mountain View. Unfortunately now I live 5000 miles away. Fortunately I'm going to Palo Alto next week! Unfortunately I'm flying out Nov 3. Doh!
Valve's main objective was probably to replicate the keyboard/mouse combo rather than improve or alter the standard joystick gamepad (like the X360 Controller). In the end, it looks like a controller halfway between these 2 types of input.

The main problem with a controller-based "mouse" (and it shows in the video) is that you control the cursor with only your thumb rather than your full hand gently set down on your desktop. I guess we'll never obtain a perfect alternative to the mouse. And the Steam controller will probably leave both joystick users and mouse users somehow frustrated because it tries to be both at the same time. But considering the variety of Steam's library, it was probably Valve's only solution. Anyway, like this comment, everything still remains speculation until you've tried it yourself (for a reasonable amount of time).
This seems like a good place to leave a quick plug for the recent computer game "Papers, Please", which perfectly simulates the experience of being a clerk inspecting prospective entrants at the border of a dystopian republic and approving/denying visas.

As the game progressed I found myself "just following orders", even as they got increasingly creepy, and now I think I have a much better understanding of what life is like for these people. There are rules, and you follow them because your job is to carry out the rules. You may occasionally think hard about whether what you're doing is wrong, but you don't stop doing it because you've got a family to feed.

Spooky stuff. I felt like I had a much better understanding, after 30 minutes in the game, of what border agents are actually doing when I give them my passport.
As I recall, Rubinius did things like attempt to document the Ruby Language through a series of test suites rather than the standard formal methods (Edit: they did have the quandary that Ruby had without much exact specifications but still, no number of test by themselves can formally capture a language).

Having play with "Test Driven Development" just a bit, I feel like it tended to involve a lot of arrogant posturing with a flavor of "who needs design, who needs formal specs, if you've got the balls to write test and dive into the code, you can do anything without knowing anything".

It's not entirely unpleasant to see such reasoning break on the shoals of reality.

Edit: This sounds mean spirited but it seems like tail of the problems of 2007-8 programming styles.
It would be a nice tweak if when you put your thumb all the way to the edge you would get decaying momentum on the cursor while you moved your thumb back into place to swipe the mouse forward again. And if you didn't go all the way to the edge it would stay as it was in the demo.. with some haptic feedback to let you tell the difference. I guess it would ultimately make it feel like having a thumb trackball.

There is no reason a touch pad can't be as accurate and natural as at least a trackball, which could already probably let you play Civ from your couch.. or quake

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8Yky7WXrwU
But then the people you do hire are super into it. I can't imagine there are many people using a lisp at work begrudgingly when there are so many people who'd love to get to use it professionally.
The TSA has nothing to do with this interrogation, as bad as they are; Customs and Border Patrol are the offenders, here. And this guy made a critical mistake: He announced his intent to "work" in the United States; i.e. he was going to play shows. This requires a Visa, even for nonprofit purposes, which is a silly law, but it is the law.
Well I'm glad this didn't happen to me. I travelled to the US in very similar circumstances a few weeks ago: European, carrying a guitar, visiting the South, previously stayed in the US on a J-1 intern visa. The only difference being that I had a one-way ticket.

I didn't even go through secondary at customs. No issues.
Land of the freeeeee, hooooome of the brave. (I'm also beating my chest with my hand and yelling about American Exceptionalism too)
I'd like to see a customer satisfaction survey implemented across the board.

It needs to have teeth.

All of these problems are the result of giving people responsibility without accountability.

As it is now, the only accountability they have is whether or not something 'bad' happens. But the actual chance of something bad happening is so low that it is no more than statistical noise. So no matter what they do, they can claim it is necessary and effective because, see nothing bad happened!

Adding additional dimensions of accountability is the only way to reign in the bullshit. Customer satisfaction surveys would be a step in the right direction, but the organizations who currently enjoy the carte blanche of zero accountability will fight any meaningful reform tooth and nail.
Bad PR also occasionally gets congress investigating things and poking around, etc. Many times companies "voluntarily" make changes when that is the case. OP's solution of don't blame the player just blame the game won't get us anywhere any time soon.
If you s/anti-government/anti-government surveillance/ then I think the article would be considerably improved. Was Lavabit explicitly anti-government?
Android game console displays on TVs, PCs, phones
That sounds like a "no true scotsman" argument. If comments were added to the spec then normal tools would support them just fine.

Besides, JSON has already become a common format for config files. Config files that don't allow comments are truly a step backward.
If you read Krasimir Tsonev's article about this, it is much cooler than you might think: http://davidwalsh.name/write-css-javascript

EDIT: Krasimir Tsonev's article not David Walsh
Home of the brave indeed
It baffles me that nobody here seems to realize what this is about, and what it's NOT about. It's not about Prism, it's not about US spying, it's not about that at all. The governments tried to bend the internet to their will last year through the UN, throught the ITU, and failed. Mostly due to US opposition.

Here's what it's about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Telecommunication...

A few choice proposals the UN demanded be implemented (mostly, but not exclusively, pushed by China and islamic nations):

1) Banning of anonymity on the internet (Chinese style no commenting without a government-verified name below the comment)

2) Pervasive options for all government to remove any piece of content from the internet, irrespective of where it's hosted.

3) The ability of any worldwide governments to retract naming assignments from any entity for any reason.

4) The ability for governments to demand transit IPSs themselves implement "great firewalls" around any territory (including the very inconvenient (for service providers) url blocking, since of course police or governments can't be bothered to think)

Here's what these governments wanted to see: you offend China, as a Finnish citizen ? no more IPs for you, not from RIPE, ARIN, or anywhere. Posted a videoclip illustrating that the islamic prophet is a mass-murdering slaver ? No more dns names for you.

They intend to use this to exert media control on the new media. Western EU is upset that neo-nazi organisations have internet sites that they effectively can't touch, and can't find the owners of. Eastern EU are almost-dictatorships, and well ... don't ask. China, well, can't just download the mail of the Dalai Lama anymore. And islamic governments are terrified of their own citizens and want the ability to take Danish cartoons offline, and porn, and ... before history repeats itself. None of this is good for freedom, of course.

For half of the governments involved that this is bad for freedom is the very reason they're doing it.

Anybody who thinks this move is anything other than non-US governments threatening these guys into giving them what they demanded before is delusional.

Anybody thinking more freedom will be the result is a dangerous lunatic.
Given the way we treat the productive, the non-corporate, and the individual, I'm surprised things haven't boiled over already.
I suspect soon enough (unless it's already a trend) Americans may be afraid to even speak of this in public as with mass surveillance you never know how and when your unfavorable words of the regime may affect you.
Scott Adams can likely teach a robot to laugh. And to make jokes.

Well done.
Why do you think the German spelling reform of 1996 didn't succeed? Of course some people, especially older ones, didn't make the switch in their own writing, but basically all newspapers, magazines and books use the new spelling nowadays.
I use it exclusively for all my clojure work and have been for a while. It works well, and especially shines with its REPL integration, and when paired with Leiningen. Chris really has done a great job at keeping things minimal and elegant.

However, I use it because I'm a vim user and clojure has never had stellar support in vim (whereas Light Table--or rather CodeMirror's editor--has vim bindings). If you're an emacs user, Light Table might not offer anything over existing emacs tools.
I realize that. I'm just sad to see UTF-16 vestiges living on, in current specs. Who can fathom how much misery and billions of dollars in wasted productivity (byte order marks - fun!) that wrought upon the IT landscape....

Python has an upper case \UXXXXXXXX literal that seems a lot cleaner.
I think that's probably a fair point.... Doesn't seem like it changes any of the legal analysis though.

You can't disobey a search warrant because it would be bad for business or because you want to protect the target.
I don't see this competing with a mouse. "Ratcheting" around your POV with your right thumb would make any FPS intolerable.

However, playing a FPS on anything but a Oculus Rift or equivalent is going to feel quaint in a few months.
Scott is a Harvard MBA himself. Me, I'm going to let the MBAs fight it out :-).
The fact that it's arbitrary doesn't make it any better.
YouTube-Google Supports YT Video Thief-When Will It Stop?
Rap Genius is on fire (in the good way).

Good luck in jail!
You might find the essay, 'The Checkpoint' interesting (and thoroughly bleak). It is by an Israel Defense Force conscriptee who started working those internal checkpoints between israel proper and the occupied territories.

It is an account of how an even more extreme situation is utterly soul-destroying for the people working those jobs, no matter how good their initial intentions are.

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.4/oded_naaman_israeli_defen...
Mark movies you watched, liked, or plan to watch, and share with your friends
Alright, what Brazil can do except cancel billion dollar contracts?
So what?

Under-representation is not used primary to prove discrimination, Under-representation is simply an undesirable state of affairs to many people. Some of the remedies for this involve correcting apparent discrimination, some involve encouraging girls to get involved with CS and some involve making CS more appealing to everyone (with the hope this will include a lot of girls).

The focus or, uh, fixation of a certain breed of poster on "this doesn't prove discrimination, you can't prove I'm a sexist, no way..." seems telling to me but of course what seems clear to an Internet poster isn't evidence sufficient for policy.
There is no exit to a hidden service...
Maybe, but the events in this article are bad enough on their own, there is no need to inject a racial element into the discussion.
I think most people would say yes to about 90% of these items. If some of them were marked "privately owned", I would vote "no" on a few, like prisons. Time to see who of my facebook friends are libertarians.
While I agree that this person was probably treated very poorly, I also want to point out that they were traveling for work purposes.

In the United States, non-US citizens entering the country for work purposes are generally required to get a visa. There are a few (and very few at that) business exceptions to this process, as listed here: http://travel.state.gov/visa/temp/without/without_1990.html

He stated that he was: Trying to work several unpaid shows, he would receive meals and tips as compensation at one or more shows, and then he was going to write articles for Noisey (http://noisey.vice.com/) about it.

Bringing musical instruments with you (and admitting you are a musician - even if just as a 'hobby') on a supposed tourism visit and going to one or more cities where you did not have relatives or explicit non-business reasons to be there probably immediately triggered an investigation as to why he did not have a visa / whether he required a visa for his visit.

Yes - our border control system is horrible. I totally grant that. But this person was also explicitly not playing by the work visa rules either.
Widely propagated technical nonsense seems on-topic to me.
Libeskind is the new guy. The original was designed by Minoru Yamasaki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoru_Yamasaki

Or was that a joke? :)
Ah, fair. The fact that port ends up as "" if it's default is almost certainly a "this is what most browsers do" kind of thing.
Belgrado Recebe Congresso Internacional de AVAC em Dezembro
So, the expectation when you write a positive review on a Google service is that the review will not be displayed as an endorsement of the product?

Isn't that the entire point of writing the review?
> But joe average shop owner in nebraska will be much more likely to sign his shop up for the Bike Index if he knows a shop in NYC that he follows on twitter has.

That is so wrong on so many levels but hugely comical!

'joe average shop owner in nebraska' is condescending, patronising or something not exactly respectful.

'joe average shop owner in nebraska' is actually working too hard for a living to be on Twitter. He works a long week and that is a six day week with a late night opening. Every morning is early for him. He stands on hard concrete floors when he is not rushed off his feet. He certainly is not following even his own arse on Twitter.

'joe average shop owner in nebraska' would not be following a trendy NYC bikeshop on Twitter, hanging on their every tweet.

Even if he was then do you think that the trendy NYC bike shop would mention Bike Index on Twitter and 'joe average shop owner in nebraska' would notice that tweet and go about some religious conversion to the Bike Index cult?
He lifts his finger just as much in Portal play as he does in Civ. It's incredibly fast. The ergonomics of this thing make it pretty hard to say that it will be frustrating to track the cursor across the screen just because you have to lift your finger. Think about how you use a trackball. This is basically a trackpad device with the thumb ergonomics of a trackball.
T-mobile totally screwed me on my Galaxy Gear order
Levinson deserves more support than the paltry $90K (https://rally.org/lavabit) he's raised so far for his legal defense war chest. I hope he can continue to fight this as he goes up the court of appeals ladder.
A horror story about how YouTube video thief is making money with stolen and re-uploaded videos to YouTube and how nearly impossible it is to contact YouTube-Google who share in the profits from such stolen videos with the thief. There is a partly happy ending to the story but what is sad is how intransigent and uncommunicative YouTube and Google are.
There are also companies that give you room to learn and to grow, help you advance your career in the direction you want, and also let you work reasonable hours.
"selfies cornhole messenger bag"

Seems about right.
Neural Networks - A Systematic Introduction (free book)
I wonder if they are using some of the tools developed by Palantir.
But that's not what this is, it's reviews from Google+ Local.
His point is, that for some artists, exposure is helpful enough that Spotify's awful rates and the fact that the money goes to the labels and not the artists is still a net positive. Once you get past the new, unknown stage, it's a net negative.

David Byrne is one of my favorite artists, and coincidentally, another one (Lois McMaster Bujold) had a similar issue with releasing a bunch of ebooks for free. Where the exposure can be _very_ helpful at the beginning of a career, giving everything for free after a long and relatively full career doesn't help pay the rent.
I wonder if Moore's Law will proceed in a similar fashion as it did with traditional computers. Now, quantum computers are so expensive that only the government and large corporations can afford them. How long until the BBQ-Micro?
I thought it was posted already. This was my try to find the discussion thread. Seems it wasn't.
Mexico has a similar law. Near where my parents live, they recently started enforcing it with some vigor. The problem being that foreign musicians (mostly Americans) were playing shows for "donations". Whether that was actual donations or bar owners donating was unclear, but either way it was plausible that these people were displacing musicians entitled to work.

The shorter version: jackasses getting around a law cause more laws, ruining things for everybody.
Can you fire workers on strike, and replace them? If not, that's essentially a hostage situation. They can protest and boycott all they want on their own time (after hours), but if they're paid to work, then they should work.

EDIT: What I'm trying to say is this: if the business depends on the workers, and they go on strike, and you're not allowed to fire them and hire new ones, then they're effectively "stopping a business from functioning".
The Craziest Theme Marketplace: 60% commission for non-exclusive sellers
Sound the retweet
Startups need people. People need to have a life. SF offers precisely that!
Even as a U.S. citizen, every time I've traveled to other countries in the past few years, it's always jarring going from the hospitable, friendly customs people in the other countries, to the literally rude awakening of getting practically accosted by the agents in the U.S. upon returning.
I suspect you don't know any Americans.
I love the LightTable "waY". But unfortunately as an Eclipse user, it will probably take me a long time before I want to adopt it. Even though Eclipse is a bulky heap, You can make it so easily adept to whatever you want to program.
Sub <0.5 LT versions have been disappointing / too buggy for me to seriously consider. I'm really looking for a LightTable way of a truly modular editor.. (That means without having to switch workspaces).
To play devil's advocate, he traveled to the U.S. with a guitar, had 5 shows booked in advance before his arrival, uses a pseudonym to perform and didn't declare any of this to the border officials. I think the article can also say he has a CD coming out soon. I can actually see why he was turned away. He's a musician, hoping to travel and do some shows in the U.S. for fun.

You can't work in the U.S. without a work visa. The rules are pretty clear about that.

And performing for free is still work.
I imagine it's fairly uncommon for someone to arrange seats to attend a crayfish party with their rapist immediately after they've been raped.
I'm not sure yet, but I think so. I need to spend some more time with LightTable, but I think it has the potential to cover all the ground the notebook does but with a nicer interaction style (more keyboard-driven).
You don't think its weird to be strip searched, and kept from contacting worried parties, because you decided to play a non-profit show without a visa?

Law or not, I don't think that makes sense.
I think it's mostly situational depending on the kind of business.

For the classic, pure, viral, social and/or user-generated content businesses -- that will probably be monetized with advertising -- the generic headline metrics like daily/weekly/monthly active users and engagement/retention rate are important. There are just so many new products that attempt to be the next Facebook/Twitter/Youtube/Pinterest that showing that you are already punching through the noise is pretty important.

For two-sided marketplaces (the next eBay/Etsy/AirBNB/Uber) it's most important to have a real theory about how you're going to get both sides of the flywheel spun up. The traction doesn't need to be gigantic but there needs to be a real plan. We still see too much handwaving in this category -- it is REALLY hard to spin these up from a standard start and most simply languish and die.

For ecommerce and ecommerce-like busineses (the next Fab/Ziluly/OneKingsLane/Zulily), the most important thing is showing a model, with initial proof, of how the cost to acquire customers is less than the lifetime value of those customers. For example, in recent years it has become harder to build these businesses based on Google keyword advertising -- search volume isn't growing very fast, and lots of people are trying to acquire customers in most categories, and so keyword ad rates often get bid up to just past the point of unprofitability (the delta is the amount of excess funding going into businesses in these categories). So creativity on customer acquisition -- and showing that in economic terms -- is key.

I think that a credible team with any of this in reasonable shape from a seed round is not going to have trouble raising an A in this environment. But for those that have already raised an A, it has become really critical to have these factors nailed (whichever are appropriate) to be able to raise a B.

Finally, probably obvious but worth saying -- investors are all over the map on all of this stuff all the time. It's very valuable to be able to prequalify investors for interest and knowledge about particular categories -- and frankly IQ and judgment -- prior to meeting with them. Good advisors and angels can be very helpful with this. This is also why we try to be transparent on these topics (such as with Scott's interview) -- better for us and for entrepreneurs to know how we think before they walk in the door.
America's border control system is so broken that it saddens me to see posts like this that reek of sensationalism (I mean, it's Vice) and hide the fact that, you know, he didn't have a valid visa.

I'm having trouble understanding what was so deplorable about this story besides the reprehensible treatment by the officials (which, again, seems exaggerated)? Am I misreading the story or is refusal to enter the country not the proper response to not having the correct documentation?
This contract echoes the story of Nina Palin's attempt to get her Free (creative-commons share-alike) movie "Sita Sings the Blues" on netflix streaming without DRM. Netflix refused. They even refused to let her put a title-card at the start of the movie telling viewers that the movie was free to download from other sources.

http://blog.ninapaley.com/2010/04/23/turning-down-netflix/

Three years later she went full CC-0 (public domain) with the movie because the hassle of dealing with other entities who simply couldn't understand the share-alike license was too much.

http://blog.ninapaley.com/2013/01/18/ahimsa-sita-sings-the-b...

For anyone considering watching her movie - Roger Ebert rated it very highly.

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/sita-sings-the-blues-2009