skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
According to the New Yorker, they received the documents but did not respond because they mistook them for input generated by their own internal tests. See [1], linked from [2]

[1] http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~aczeskis/research/pubs/DeadD...
[2] https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/blog/2013/10/how-we-plan-...
Well said. How you analyze and solve problems yourself is different than how you first introduce your resulting idea to someone who's never heard of it.
Facebook Is Trying to Buy Its Way Into the Developing World
You can also use the open source disconnect.

https://disconnect.me/
Those truly paranoid have thing called local backups.
Interesting. Going to check em out.
Off by default yes but blocking trackers is also off by default and as soon as you hit the settings they promt you to opt in. And if you're opted out you can be sure that every few weeks to a month Ghostery will update and try to get you to mess with it's "redesigned control panel". This is less annoying than YouTube's constantly trying to trick you to sign up for G+, but it's still annoying behavior that 90%+ of addons avoid.

And they downplay the sales angle [1] and fail to mention that they sent every url you visit back to their servers in the clear [2]. That's fine if it doesn't bother you but it strikes me as shady and disingenuous on Ghostery's part. Anyone who feels likewise should check out Disconnect [3] which is open source and breaks fewer sites.

[1] Although not as egregiously as in the past. Here is how they originally pitched GhostRank: Ghostery provides reports to Evidon about advertisers and data collectors, which Evidon then provides to regulatory agencies like the Better Business Bureau (BBB) and the Direct Marketing Association, parts of the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA)[2]. These agencies then use those reports to monitor how Online Behavioral Advertisers operate and, when needed, refer them to the Federal Trade Commission.

[2] http://wtf.cyprio.net/ghostrank-logs-every-visited-url-in-cl...

[3] https://disconnect.me/
Sounds like if one wants the quotes, buy the book. This article seems to be a synopsis of the research, so one wouldn't expect all actual quotes.

// Wikipedia is relevant because their "Verifiability" page is the top result for the phrase "poorly sourced" and Wikipedia tends to be the only context I hear the phrase. Outside of Wikipedia, "poorly sourced" doesn't mean how extensively phrases are in quote marks. it means where the information came from.
> The apply/call thing is from an old email thread with you, so I must have misunderstood. My understanding still led to performance improvements though, so that's quite mysterious :)

Ah, I remembered the thread. If I am not mistaken the problem was that you were adding properties to function objects and those function objects were flowing into f.apply(obj, arguments) site making it polymorphic. At this point Crankshaft would fail to recognize this apply-arguments pattern and disable optimization for this function.

Situation was similar to http://jsperf.com/apply-argument-poly

(microbenchmark warning :-))
Well, it's certainly possible, but I'd like to point out one thing. IANAL, but I've been through enough to know that courts will often/always consider the aspect of compliance known as "good faith". It's almost certain that handing over the key and them immediately changing it would be seen by the presiding judge as compliance in bad faith, and would put him in a substantially worse position with regard to possible contempt. Given this, unless Levison is legally suicidal, I think it's a fair bet that any relaunch using a new key pair was done, at the very least, with the blessing of the feds and/or the judge. And I can only think of one reason the feds would give such a blessing.
I've heard about those cheap VPS that simply disappear from existence.

Unless is something completely disposable, I'd rather pay 5$/month and go with something like Digital Ocean that I can be pretty sure will last for years.
There are people working on it, see for example: http://sciruby.com/
This is actually entirely untrue. Greenwald was a prolific blogger far before the Snowden leak. In fact, I only found out, like, a couple of days ago that he was responsible for publicizing the Snowden leak.
It's nice to see the contextual diff as struck out text and highlighted text instead of the usual line by line thing.
I use digital ocean for my personal stuff, AWS is being used by our startup.

I've heard that Heroku has become incredibly slow (thus expensive to scale) in comparison to alternatives like plain AWS or even the Azure platform.

Have you guys seen this happen?
Avoid LowEndBox.

Owned by ColoCrossing, and ColoCrossing providers get posted ASAP. They also lied about owning it for a year, until someone found out.
Or how about we all start open-source project where we can all contribute scrapping code for each bank and put Yodlee and put this ridiculous bank feeds business out of business? Is anyone seriously interested?
Traffic flow and merging during congestion
I use EngineYard which provides automation and great support on top of EC2.
If I used nothing but CLI programs, I would happily switch to Linux or FreeBSD. But with GUI a consideration then, after becoming accustomed to the fit and finish of OS X and the quality 3rd party apps it attracts, it's too depressing to spend time in stuff that's at best amateur.

Becoming a fancy-pants appreciator of particular attributes is its own kind of lock-in...
I have a Dell Poweredge 2U in my basement that I have been playing with lately. I replaced the 15k SAS drives with regular ol SATA drives the other day and wanted to see how they fared against some of the VPS's out there. (Reason: Twin 73gb drives, while they might be pretty quick, doesn't leave a lot of room for a home lab type setup where I want to run a lot of different VMs)

The command used for this was:

hdparm -Tt /device

Not even sure if this is a really great way to benchmark drives, but here are the results:

Digital Ocean where my drive was /dev/vda:

Timing cached reads: 17246 MB in 2.00 seconds = 8632.56 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 892 MB in 3.00 seconds = 297.20 MB/sec

Next was Linode where my drive was /dev/xvda:

Timing cached reads: 12680 MB in 1.99 seconds = 6381.79 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 614 MB in 3.00 seconds = 204.66 MB/sec

Was expecting a more dramatic difference considering DO uses SSD's and Linode does not (I am not in the SSD beta). When you compare consumer grade HD's and SSD's the difference is night and day.

I do not have results from my Poweredge because it's currently powered off. The fucking thing sounds like a C5 doing an assault landing on a tattered runway during a hail storm.

Take this all with a grain of salt just sharing since we're comparing hosts here.

Finally, I love Linode and have never had any shit with them. Digital Ocean is also great although I have only really dipped my toes into their stuff. Have not tried their recently launched internal-networking yet. Also, unfortunately you cannot (easily) downsize a box, only expand one. Rather you need to create a backup and then a new box and restore the backup to that new box or something. Seems silly. Linode lets me do this, and I do it for some ghetto on-demand scaling from time to time.

Sidenote: If you wanna muck around with FreeBSD I had some good experience with doing that on Rackspace. Doing it on EC2 is not as rewarding.
SF folks who want to contribute to SecureDrop: we're having a SecureDrop hackathon as part of the Aaron Swartz Memorial Hackathon series Nov. 8-10: http://aaronswartzhackathon.org/

The event kicks off at Internet Archive on Friday night, and will be at Noisebridge all weekend after that.
Most are kiddie hosts who rent a dedi for a few months, install OVZ, and get on the front page the next day. That's what happens when you go with ColoCrossing - instant post to LEB to you.

Linode, AWS, HostVirtual, Digital Ocean... Just anything but a LowEndBox VPS.
I use Linode and Rackspace for VPS's and Dreamhost and Bluehost for web sites.

Dreamhost has gone downhill over the years in a variety of ways. Customer support, server response etc.

Bluehost I use very lightly but it has been fine.

Rackspace? Well, here's one of my Nagios logs from 24 minutes ago

[2013-10-15 17:00:11] HOST ALERT:
mondragon.whatsanovel.com;DOWN;SOFT;1;PING CRITICAL - Packet loss = 83%, RTA = 5656.74 ms

Yesterday it conked out nine times, to recover within ten seconds. I have to say I heard about this sort of thing before signing up.

Linode has been fantastic. Great uptimes, free additions of bandwidth, disk space and so forth.

Others have mentioned Ramnode here. That's a service I might consider if I was expanding. One reason I never signed up is last time around their new slots were full. Some services sell when they're overloaded, but they don't - why is why they're popular I guess. I may get a VPS there in the next few months and try them out.
Well one user is Netflix for their streaming, who have 32% of US traffic...
> one-child policy means that each child has two parents and four grandparents to care for exclusively, so that's not going to work out so well

Some on-the-ground experience with China would indicate that the one-child policy has basically no effect on the number of children per couple. As would the international fertility stats.

Most recently, I asked a group of chinese software developers about the policy. They went around the table admitting they weren't only children.
What are your favorite online courses?
I have been participating in the "History of the world since 1300" at Coursera and find the content absolutely fascinating.

What are the other online courses that you can recommend to a fellow hacker?
Remember that you get what you pay for. I had a very cheap VPS ($1.61 per month) for a few months until it went down. I got an email 2 days later saying that the hosting company was being kicked out of their data center because one of their clients had been the victim of a DDoS attack, and they were in the process of overnight shipping all of their servers across the country to a new data center. Luckily I was just hosting some non-critical personal projects, so I wasn't adversely affected. In the end they were down for 5 days, which under the circumstances is actually pretty impressive.
Link to course: https://www.coursera.org/course/wh1300
As far as I can tell the FISMA certification is done by the agency itself, in accordance with the guidelines laid out by NIST and OMB directives. As long as the confidentiality, integrity and availability requirements are all "low" I don't see why the agency CIO couldn't simply deem GitHub as an acceptable information system for the purposes of posting files that are already cleared for unlimited public release.
Excerpt from updated S-1 filing [1]:

We intend to list the common stock on the New York Stock Exchange
under the symbol “TWTR”.

[1]: http://edgar.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/00011931251...
One way for him to take advantage of his current popularity (which he acquired through loyalty) would be to create a pastebin-like blog for classified sources and material. I wonder if this is among his intentions.
Yes, at least for the way he presets himself. He is able to put a serious argument forward and able to discuss things head to head with conventional journalists. If you compare the video where Greenwald gets some hard questions by some BBC reporter in comparison to how Jones handled the interview with Piers Morgan it feels like two completely different worlds.
Oracle has some JRuby apps on production
Paint the Streets: Explore SF’s Outdoor Art
I'm not entirely sure what this is, is it a rewrite/syntax clean up of the existing ruby language that runs on the Rubinus VM?
That's possible. WordPress and of course Yandex.ru use them, I think, almost exclusively (there may be a few edge cases where they need to use something else). That's a pretty sizable chunk of traffic right there.
> But I'd wager that 95% of the HN (and the population at large) did not recognise his name.

I'll take a bet at window max for the population of HN. Greenwald was very well known.
He's created a Woodward and Bernstein-ish reputation for himself due to the courage he's shown reporting these stories. I suspect that he'll be the first stop for anyone who has a potentially dangerous story to publish. Those also happen to be the most explosive and attention-getting.

I think he'll be just fine. At a minimum.
Software is the modern sweatshop job. It's mostly dead end. Oh, and non-technical managers.
git-annex is explicitly designed to avoid putting file contents under version control because git doesn't handle large files (like videos) very well. It seems like this system is running headlong into that problem. I'm probably going to be sticking with duplicity for now.
Open Source Web Framework on Linux?
Hi everyone, we are embarking on a new journey here. Everyone, is, for the most part, are windows developers. We made the decision to go the linux/open source route for our new project (maybe?). We are trying to decide on a framework to go with and having a hard time coming up with a decision. One of the biggest requirements we are want is to have similar executing speed to c# & asp.net mvc. This requirement kind of throws out RoR & Django/python. We “prefer” a statically typed language but it’s not a hard set requirement. We dabbled with go & rust and enjoy both languages but I don’t think rust is ready for prime time. We also worry about the ecosystem with go. If you base your business off the language and then google decided it was a “toy” project and drops its resources (ala google reader). Sure its open source which is all fine and dandy just as long someone decides to pick it up (death of ironpython & ironruby). If the community was as vibrant as RoR/Django/Node we probably wouldn’t worry but it isn’t. The only option I see left is either java or a language based on the JVM. Any help would be appreciated.
No need to hack anything. I'm going to release server edition which will give users multi-user access without putting data into cloud storage. That will settle this matter.
> VirtualBox doesn't work. VMware does.

I haven't tried Virtualbox 4.3 but Virtualbox 4.2 sort of works on Mavericks. The kernel extensions don't load on boot, but can be loaded manually. I blogged about that here http://asquera.de/development/2013/06/20/vagrant-on-maverick...
Interesting reading for someone that just applied to YC a few minutes ago.

That confirms to me that saying of PG that goes something like this "95% of the applications have no chance at all to get in and there is 5% that have really good chances", in oposition to thinking that everyone has the same, tiny chance of getting in.

That haunts me. I sure ain't not in the 5% with really good chances - solo founder, not a developer, not working on a hot startup, not sold my own startup. But I like to think I am not in the 95% either - I am smart, I make things happen, I create things, people believe in my success, I really consider myself relentlessly resourceful, even if good code is not among these resources yet. What haunts me is that maybe this later part is only wishful thinking.
Very interesting blog post. It definitely leaves a seed in mind about the potential opportunity of a creating a startup and allows one to contemplate the fact that everyone is nervous at first and it's ok.
Casting Spels in Lisp [Tutorial]
> Surely they don't see themselves as an authoritarian control-monger.

Why do you believe this? There's a very long chinese tradition of vesting control in the social hierarchy. "Authoritarian control-monger" may be dirty language in the US, but not everywhere.
Anecdotally, Amazon's pay scale is only competitive with other companies in the area if you ignore on-call and only look at starting salary/bonus (including stock compensation).
This is a pretty ironic timing considering the fact that there's no government in the US for now :)
Googler here.

If you want to seek a promotion, you can nominate yourself or others can nominate you. When that happens, a packet is assembled for you. It includes your self-review, and reviews from a number of your peers as well as your managers.

That packet goes to a committee likely made up of people who don't know you who then reach a decision about your promotion.

That's a simplification, but that's the basic idea. Your manager has a large influence on your success: to get promoted you need to show accomplishments, and that depends on you being given important work to do. But, compared to other companies, the process is much less biased by your manager. Your peers have a huge influence on your ability to get promoted.
You can change the URL live by using pushState[1].

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/API/DOM/M...
this is getting ridiculous, first mongo.db next nginx.

HEADLINES FROM NEXT WEEK:

cat raises $750M at valuation of $25B

The venerable gnu shell program 'cat', which is an integral part of 70 million developers' toolchains and helps power shell scripts on 70% of the world's Internet servers, has completed raising a seed round of $750M at a valuation of $25B.

"We could have raised more", said Richard Stallman, "but by only parting with 3.3% we are leaving ourselves room to grow. More and more people are starting to use Gnu/GNU utilities, and our eventual market base is 7 billion people. We have no plans to monetize."
That doesn't refute the original argument. Amazon might very well be a low-margin business that pays competitively (they gotta attract that talent) while working at a "grinding pace" (as in the article).
I've done an AI course at Udacity - https://www.udacity.com/course/cs271 - I found it pretty good if you are interested in learning the very basics of AI
This could make for a fun amusement park ride: hang from a tower a few feet off the ground using a bungee cord; detach bungee cord while simultaneously pushing horizonally; bam you're Superman until the bungee cord comes crashing on your head. Actually that last part needs work :)
Moonberry, a geodesic dome/hexayurt hybrid
Ok, RTFM
Hence Finance companies call everyone Vice President, because they know their only asset are people.
> the developers of popular Bitcoin software have tremendous power over Bitcoin (e.g. they can trigger block chain forks).

If Bitcoin developers do something that miners don't like, they lose their base. Developers are as invested as miners are and don't want to risk a drop in the value of their bitcoins.

The balance is that developers are accountable to miners and users, unlike central banks that aren't accountable to us.
It depends on the situation.

If your spouse is a source of drama, chaos, and fights, then it will detract from your startup goals. If your spouse is highly supportive, hard working, and believes in your startup, then it will assist your startup goals.

If you're single and have a reasonable social life, it can add to your startup goals. If you're single and out closing down the bar every night, then it will subtract from your startup goals.
If you want books you can try these old books:

Dynamical Systems and Fractals (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dynamical-Systems-Fractals-Computer-...)

Mathographics (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mathographics-Robert-Dixon/dp/048626...)

Computers Pattern Chaos & Beauty (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Computers-Pattern-Beauty-Clifford-Pi...)

Fractals Images of Chaos (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fractals-Images-Chaos-Penguin-Scienc...)

I suggest these because they all contain some kind of code.
> If a country is big enough to have an air force then it is big enough to do something on its own about securing government communications.

If that was really the case then the U.S. government (which has effectively 2 separate air forces which are each 10x bigger than any other nation's) should be kicking ass at delivering IT projects of all sorts.
Elon has also spoken of thinking from first principles of physics for getting humans into space, particularly in developing the Grasshopper reusable launch vehicle.
I think he's different. Polarizing on given stories, sure, but also non-partisan.

I appreciate Greenwald's journalism because he doesn't play favorites when it comes to calling people out. People seem to think he's a liberal but over the past decade he's been just as likely to call out Obama, Krugman, et al., as Bush/Cheney & Co.
The new venture, described by a source familiar with it as "rather extraordinary," will be web-based and funded by a philanthropist, POLITICO has learned.

In his interview with Smith, Greenwald said it would have major financial backing and would have hubs in New York City, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. He disclosed no further details, but called the venture "momentous" and said it will be "be unveiled very shortly.”
Some great hints and tips for this promising new blogging platform
I'd assume wherever he's going (some people are saying it's his own organization) will be well funded -- he'll need a good team of lawyers watching his back. Now probably isn't the time to "go it alone" for him.

The Guardian sent lawyers to take care of the Miranda airport incident, and I presume they've been working around the clock to keep him protected with the Snowden stuff.

EDIT: he'll be head of building an "entire journalism unit" for a general-interest (sports, etc) organization, and it is well funded by a "particular backer": http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2013/10/1...
And The Daily Granite too!
It's not about being entirely anonymous. It's about not having individual pieces of data being trivially linked together and pointing at you.

That is, it's about avoiding a situation where a yelp review can be trivially linked to your identity from which your home address, work address, children's school, and probably a bunch of purchases or service activity from some website that got (or gets) hacked.

EDIT: And it's the future-tense "gets hacked" that ought to be particularly concerning. Considering government contractors and online services leak user data left and right, anything they know will eventually become tantamount to publicly accessible. Managing ones footprint (e.g. putting their toll device in a cage) is a mitigation against not only what is currently happening to that data, but what may happen and what it can be cross-referenced.
It depends on the device - each device has different hardware and may use proprietary drivers to access that hardware.
Having a quick poke around and I notice that they are storing all exceptions in an SQL database. I've been looking at storing all the errors we get in our various applications in a central repository and was wondering what the general consensus was?

Currently I'm going a centralised logstash server and using a logstash shipper on each of my servers to push the exceptions, from a standard logfile to it. I was toying with the idea of pushing all my errors at source to an SQL database but figured if I was having database problems I'd be missing all the exceptions that I could be using to trigger the alerts that I'm having database problems!
I worked at EA when they tried a similar model. It was astonishingly effective at slaughtering any technology shared across game teams. Large companies get economies of scale by being able to reuse technology across multiple revenue generating products. If your compensation system can't accommodate that, you'll lose it.
Good catch. I updated that. Thanks!
He was well-known to anyone with an interest in privacy, pre-Snowden. Judging by the interest the subject of privacy gets on HN, more than 5% of HN readers are interested in it and knew about Greenwald pre-Snowden.

Whether he can handle leaks on his own, who knows. I'm sure WikiLeaks, who has some experience in dealing with leaks, wouldn't hesitate to assist him.
What do you suggest to be able to have the <title> element on a blog post while using a layout?
Easy to deploy as it's written in C# :)
Path cuts 20% of staff, says layoffs will 'support continued innovation'