skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hmmm, I don't know if I'm being outrageously paranoid, but I'm resisting the temptation to put my PGP private key on my iPhone - because it'd be _way_ too easy for Apple to extract the key/passphrase if they were coerced by someone powerful enough, and those "powerful enough" have shown that they consider a court order granting them the private key used to secure 400,000 people's email is an appropriate tool when targeting a single individual.

Once that's known, is it really such a stretch to assume that an already complicit PRISM partner might be convinced/coerced to monitor downloads of crypto-capablea app from their respective app-stores, and provide or allow backdoors to their OS that leak private keys?

Maybe that's being overly paranoid, but in the "post Snowden" era, it might just be a sensible and pragmatic view…
Timely post, considering the insanity I was just handed by my campus Social Justice society on my way inside the student union building. It's full of newspeak, and openly calls for the suppression and censorship of speech, literature and music on campus and contains unclear/vague threats of punishment to anybody "who benefits from promoting patriarchal attitudes and relations of power that were inflicted here by colonists."
I find a lot of this somewhat objectionable, but find one piece particularly objectionable:

> Do not send PHP developers for a Rails position.

Possibly this company is placing the engineer on-site at a client location, or something like that. But generally, I think a label like "PHP developer" and "Rails position" really silos the talent/job market and is not good for our industry.
The utter pedantry ;)
Ask HN: I'm done with Gmail (a.k.a. NSA-Mail). What's the best alternative?
With the NSA infiltrating Google and Yahoo. I'm ready to drop Gmail. What's the best alternative?
Well, anybody can build from source and compare to the Cisco-distributed binary, no?
I get the feeling that people are outraged by this not necessarily for the fact that spy agencies spy on everyone they can, but that they do it in such a blatant, efficient, and all encompassing way.

I know I feel a bad gut reaction to the mass collection of data, but when you think about it that is exactly what a country wants from its spy agency, to know others' secrets. Hence they're doing the most optimal thing from the countries point of view. Therefore it is just the brazen scale, the automation of the whole operation, and the fact that it is now officially public that gives me (and us in general) the sick feeling.

Like the breakdown of forgetting (anything on the Internet is there forever), and the rapid dissemination of information through the social network (Facebook status etc), an adjustment needs to be made either in us or the system.
I got my Surface RT before I was an MVP. I bought the Surface Pro after I became an MVP. I'm going to buy the Surface 2 now.

You're saying I can't be enthusiastic about the Surface because I am an MVP?
Fellas. The answer is clearly 100 years. Some of you will burn out, some of you will get divorced, but in the end, you'll have a shitty facebook.
If you generally solicit, under Section 201 of the JOBS Act, all of your investors have to be accredited.

If you don't generally solicit, theoretically, under Rule 506(b), you can have up to 35 non-accredited investors. BUT, if you even take one you have to provide IPO level disclosure. Ridiculously expensive. See this blog post: http://www.startuplawblog.com/2013/01/14/cant-i-let-non-accr...
With the news that the NSA is tapping Google's internal fibre links, local encryption of Google is the way to go.

The problem is that it makes it harder to use, and to share, especially on multiple devices.

Perhaps the innocent days of the early Internet are over, and we now always need to consider that Big Brother is watching.
That's just the modern PC landscape for you. My Mac Pro is on the high end of that age range and it still does what it needs to do.
lavabit before it went down.
As of now, PGP.

Privacy is dead, long live security!
Ashton Kutcher Ditches His iPhone, iPad in New Role as Lenovo Product Engineer
Tekpub Has Been Acquired
Ah yes. The "that guy failed so bad that my guy gets a free pass". Our bad. Move along people, nothing to see here.
Yes, the socket thrashing by Intel is a bigger problem.

You'll probably have an interesting time updating an LGA2011 in 2015, never mind the RAM.
I love how every quote from the NSA stresses that "we don't have access to their servers. Fine. Let's say they don't. But that means nothing in this context. If they can see every piece of data that is sent between servers at various google data centers, they don't need access to the servers to gather a ton of information
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/518941/intels-laser-chi...

It's out of R&D and entering production.
Horrific is really stretching it too though. I know it's Halloween or whatever but let's just discuss it on technical merits before passing misinformation like that.
Arguably vimeo could make an effort here too, and do automatic transcoding and delivery to eg: webm and html5. It certainly wouldn't be trivial, but also not impossible.

Has anyone seen any recent news on why Google/youtube doesn't do this btw? The already do transcoding for different quality? And/or if they have any plans for a html5-based viewer that supports ads etc?
Awesome. I thought "this is exactly the kind of thing my former colleagues would find hilarious". Then I scrolled down.

They wrote it.
I always miss my bus in the morning. I've had the idea to stuff a remote tracker in one of the bus seats for a while... this makes it possible.
> Perhaps the innocent days of the early Internet are over, and we now always need to consider that Big Brother is watching.

You have always had to assume that your data is available to Big Brother.
It will be just another H.264 decoder and encoder, like in libavcodec and x264 respectively. It's actually pretty exciting since no competing (with x264) open source H.264 encoder ever managed to reach maturity. And it's licensed more liberally than x264's GPL+commercial.

> You certainly can't use that source code in your own binaries.

Obviously you can, but then it's up to you to work it out with the MPEG-LA. Or not, depending on where you live.
Very cool! I'll add it to tomorrow's issue of Ansible Weekly: http://devopsu.com/newsletters/ansible-weekly-newsletter.htm...
Fixing Unix Filenames (2012)
Signet: Sign your work in the development console
You already had cables everywhere if you were a professional. I don't know any professional photographer, video editor or audio professional that doesn't use tons of external storage.

It's mainly non pros that argue that a few internal 2TB bays would be enough, which is laughable for pro use.
> I agree. This is just a move by Cisco to prevent the adoption of free codecs.

Well, yes. From Cisco's point of view, I'm guessing it's just ensuring that it can sell it's video conferencing gear (that users will be able to use them via webrtc etc). Much better for them than having to invest in hardware accelerated webm or whatever. Sad, but true.
Super rare color footage of WWI
The keyspacing is identical on all pianos?
Seems like you have an axe to grind? Because I, for one, liked Intel before AND after Apple switched to it just fine.

Who are these mythical people that only liked Intel (or external peripherals) after Apple adopted them? Are they from straw-man land?
If by best you mean stopping the NSA from getting your communication, the best alternative is paper letters in an envelope or face to face speech away from any devices like your phone or laptop that can be hacked.

Any and all email providers can be subverted (and probably are). You could run your own email, but most email and all metadata is cleartext in transit. You could use encrypted email, but except for the one or two of your friends who would put up with encryption, all your comms are going out clear on the open internet.

You can secure specific communication between specific pairs, but as a practical matter you cannot secure email today because almost no one you know will cooperate with you. If you were to reverse engineer email and the internet you would have to conclude that it was designed for surveillance.

If it really matters, don't use the internet or the phone.

P.S. I use fastmail.
Somewhere in America, Harper Reed is breathing a massive sigh of relief.
A lot of things that were practically impossible 50 (or even 5) years ago are commonplace today.
And start using ... ?
You are not making any sense.

First, MTI votes in IETF are tricky to predict, but here is a safe bet: VPx was never going to win sole MTI. Not ever.

Second, if we had not been fighting -- and holding to only WebM for HTML5 video until last year -- while our competition was shipping H.264 for HTML video, you might be able to say that we didn't fight. If we had not tried to make s/w VP8 perform on lower-end mobile phones ahead of others including Google, you might make that charge.

But we did those things and failed. We learned from those negative results. What have you done? What have you learned? Where is your skin in the game?

Third, MPEG LA has not thrown us a bone. Cisco != MPEG LA. Taking H.264 to zero price is a net public good and a prerequisite for getting RF licensing of part or all of H.264 for all desktop systems (since rents there, as opposed to on mobile devices, are running low).

When we do that in the next year (or sooner) based on taking the price to zero, and gain free as in speech licensing, will you thank us? Not likely.

Fourth, MPEG LA was not terrified of HTML5 standardizing on a truly RF codec, because HTML5 was never going to do any such thing. Now you're just confabulating. Again, read

http://brendaneich.com/2012/03/video-mobile-and-the-open-web...

and wake up and smell last year's coffee.

As for "they got you cheap", if I were about money, I would have gone to Google ages ago. If Mozilla were about money we would have sold out in any number of ways.

This is not about money, it is about interoperation and zero-price ceiling for H.264 now, and RF licensing for desktop next -- and after that, better codecs that are defensibly unencumbered and/or downloadable in JS and WebGL2 or better (probably both).

None of this is easy to pull off. Rejecting interoperation is a sure way to die fast for no good end. Shouting about betrayal on HN is cheap and easy by comparison. Try doing something productive for a change.

/be
This is fairly standard practice, esp in the UK. Sometimes a candidate might be asking more than you are offering, but if the candidate is good enough you may increase your budget. It happens.
It's the UK, 15% is standard finders fee there.
The bar for accreditation is extremely low - investor signs a piece of paper making a claim about their net income or personal wealth, but no actual validation must occur.

SEC wants to strengthen the validation requirements, which would increase compliance costs a lot, and so generally business world is against this.

The more striking limitations are around solicitation - how you actually find your investors. "General solicitation" is vaguely defined (here's looking at you, angel.co). But basically, it's like the first rule of Fight Club, no one ever talks about it, yet somehow more people keep showing up!
Exactly. Does anyone know if there are any cheap solutions to capture in vp9 on devices such as cell phones?

I'm guessing this is Cisco's motive as well -- they want to sell video conferencing and ip video/voice-chat stuff -- and that'll have to work with cellphones and tablets. As long as almost all devices (including PCs via video hardware) have hw support for h.264 -- and no support for anything else -- we'll be stuck on h.264 for "cross platform" video.
Charlie.js: A small framework for synchronizing video and CSS3 animations
Step 3: PROFIT!!!
I don't know about you, but the Internet was innovated long before my time. So Bitcoin actually has a better claim to that pretension than the Internet because it was invented well after I was born.
They also regulated away spoiled beef in stores, non smoke detectors equipped bedrooms and poisoned tap water. You can't have it. Minimum floor.
Makes one wonder about the cost of bandwidth vs. the licence cost...
Donner 3500 - an early portable {analog} computer
Pretty cool! Any plans to expand into other cities such as Denver/Boulder?
> we can't determine if a computed result is actually a sought result or its reflection/negative

That's not how I'd explain it. The 'sought result' and its reflection are not two different things. They are the same thing, differing only in a trivial detail of orientation. The 'negative' of the result conveys exactly the same information as the result.
Seeing that computer running from inside the mobo box is like seeing pictures of frightened, malnourished animals in those Humane Society ads. Get a case, you cheap bastard! One coffee spill away from disaster...
Just make sure to buy 3 or 4, they probably switch busses every now and then.
"Donner's Model 3500 is a full-fledged analog computer weighing just 28 lbs. Designed for engineers, educators and scientists, it can be used to study almost any physical system that can be described by differential equations. It can be operated on desk tops and benches by anyone who can run a slide rule. The standard 3500 contains 10 amplifiers, stabilized or unstabilized as the user chooses. The computer performs accurately with 1% or 0.1% computing components, and is furnished ready-to-work for $1850, depending upon specific equipment desired."

$1850 dollars from 1965 are worth about $13,700 today.
So you can't put your own SIM in this and ping your own server?
A few years ago the cable that connects Pakistan to the Internet was mysteriously cut. I wonder where the Jimmy Carter was at that time.
3.5%? By my last count they had less than 2% of currently issued coins and less than 1% of the eventual 21 million?
> which (...) is impossible on iOS.

But surely h.264 is provided by Apple for iOS/OS X? I'm not familiar with either platform (as a developer) -- but with Apple's investment in h.264 on iTunes and via Quicktime -- I would've thought this was one of the benefits of the walled garden? Please enlighten me if I'm wrong.
> Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that the President and the Congress eliminate these programs...

> How would you or I... or any foreign person validate that?

How would the President validate that?
In most cases each variable is standardized to put them all on a comparable scale.
I'm thinking of setting up a wall of shame for sites that won't load w/ cookies off.
There is rather an unpopular opinion, that we need less piles-upon-piles of J* crap do serve a web-page, not more.)
So this is what he does with his time now?
For the most part, with the exception of toys and some compact synthesizers and MIDI input devices.

Edit: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_keyboard#Size_and_hist...
Go-webkit2: WebKit bindings for Go (w/headless support & JavaScript evaluation)
I tried to search in App Store on my iPad, it showed me no result ?
Don't forget about Firefox OS! Imagine what impact H.264 would do there. Firefox OS and Tizen are the BigBets now, because TelCo's manufacturers don't like to rely on Google for delayed OS updates anymore. That's why these OS have a good chance of becoming as popular as android in a few years. But that's only valid, when Firefox OS and Tizen get their shit together and finally create a robust, independent, secure and most importantly not only beautiful, but usable user interface.

(Firefox does silent upgrades, just so you know. Luckily on Windows only.)
Robby Leonardi | heyrleonardi.com
aoh SNAAAPP
I built go-webkit2 to make it easy to run a headless WebKit on a Web server to serve static HTML pages (generated from an AngularJS app) to search engines and other clients without JavaScript support. Right now it supports the most common operations and works well for headless browsing and GTK+ widget embedding. I will be implementing the rest of the WebKitGTK+ v2 API in the coming weeks.

go-webkit2 also hooks into https://github.com/crazy2be/gojs to enable execution of JavaScript in the context of the browser window. The README at https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/sourcegraph/go-webkit2/re... has an example of this.

I have a full project demonstrating the usage of go-webkit2 to run a headless browser and expose operations in a more friendly, Go-idiomatic API: https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/sourcegraph/webloop/readm.... It's called WebLoop and is like PhantomJS for Go. It's not ready for release, but if you are playing around with go-webkit2, it might be helpful.

Thanks to https://github.com/crazy2be for CRing my gojs patches and the Conformal folks for making https://github.com/conformal/gotk3.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6488822
As a relative newcomer to web dev, I find Meteor very challenging to work with. It's got too much magic going on. Part of that is the simple fact that the documentation, while sufficient for pros, simply doesn't hold your hand. At all. And beyond the documentation there's a dearth of other resources for finding out how to do things. The community is too small to be effective, and any books which have been written are out-of-date already. Answers to questions on StackOverflow normally don't even apply anymore because the platform has changed so much. This is all very typical pre-1.0 stuff, so the point is that I'm not sure Meteor is maturing fast enough. It might be too late to the party once it finally stabilizes.

Either way, I strongly dispute the implied claim that Meteor is easy to learn. It certainly is not. Rails makes a lot of intuitive sense--at least to me--whereas Meteor doesn't. As the author mentions it has the whole kitchen sink approach going on, and that makes it very unapproachable to someone like me...because it's difficult to make sense of unless I understand all the components on which it's built.

So is Meteor cool? Absolutely. And it could be great if it matures fast enough to still be relevant, and if it manages to be associated with some truly tremendous learning resources which not only display its potential, but assist in learning the intricacies of the platform. I worked my way through the Discover Meteor book and was impressed by all the magic Meteor slings, but I didn't really understand much of why and how it worked.

So we'll see. But for now, Rails is untouchable.
I think that's a good point. If the fixed radius is an important feature you keep it. It sounds like it's the reason the app exists, and to change it would simply turn the app into something it's not.
What about long-term maintainability of a large application? Rails has its issues there, but a body of best practices has grown up around maintaining long-lived rails apps. I wonder what the author's opinion would look like were it building the single app that is core to their business, and maintaining it for 3 years, instead of spitting out a Meteor app for a client every 6 weeks?
APRS has been used for vehicle tracking for a while (it was first devised in the 80s).

It is dependent on independently operated base stations to relay data to the internet, and since all transmitters contend for the same frequency it may not be feasible in high-use areas. You also need a Ham technician license (35-question written exam).

On the plus side, it's totally free to use.

Wiki on APRS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Packet_Reporting_Syst...

Live feed of beacons in the SF Bay Area: http://aprs.fi/#!lat=37.87810&lng=-122.27100
This. I secretly harbor this fantasy that the next Edward Snowden will be a future American president. They do everything right, cross all the t's, dot all the i's, the perfect politician, then after their first 100 days in office, they come out and publicly address all the ways that the US is hypocritical and could be the model World citizen it pretends to be.

At the end of the day, the presidency is the only position that is beyond the reproach of anyone behind the scenes that may be using their powers to pull strings. If he has ever been coerced by hidden powers, he alone could unveil them and be believed by all the non-believers. Alternatively, he could choose to promise exercise his pardon rights for people who want to expose wrongdoing but are afraid. He had the power to protect people from jail. That's the power to allow people to expose wrongdoing without fear of retaliation (unless we've gone so far down the rabbit hole that someone can make the whistleblower just disappear.)
I think you are right about wanting to know that people you are talking to you are nearby being important. I also think if you allowed a larger radius option in the form of 10 miles or whatever, you would NEVER be able to remove it without complaints. That said, I'd consider promoting the app in a specific large city.

Alternatively, a neighborhood/borough mode might be an interesting adaption that would let you shrink as you scale. In New York, maybe you only talk to people who are also in Brooklyn. Or just Nearby parts of Brooklyn (mash up with that app that allows you to see how far you can get in a time period). In North Dakota, you might have a much much bigger region.

This would also avoid the issue I have playing a game with a geolocation based chat on android, wherein I am in the Financial district in SF, and see "nearby" people in Oakland, when I would have to cross the bridge/take bart there.
Half of these problems are problems with the shell and have nothing to do with the filesystem. The shell is really, really, really bad about doing things like expanding spaces in filenames or environment variables into separate arguments. Notice that every example here about how it's "wrong" is a small shell script that has unexpected behaviour. That's mostly because the shell is wrong!

> Oh, and don’t display filenames. Filenames could contain control characters that control the terminal (and X-windows), causing nasty side-effects on display

That's the fault of the terminal, mostly. If it's an otherwise "reasonable" name containing, say, encoded unicode, that's everyone's fault from the filesystem to the terminal to (sometimes) the shell. But the fault is spread out over more than just the fact that the filesystem lets you name files however you like.

But now, Linus' quote there:

> "...filesystem people should aim to make "badly written" code "just work" unless people are really really unlucky. Because like it or not, that’s what 99% of all code is... Crying that it’s an application bug is like crying over the speed of light: you should deal with reality, not what you wish reality was." — Linus Torvalds, on a slightly different topic (but I like the sentiment) (http://lwn.net/Articles/326505/)

speaks to both "sides" here: there are applications in the real world that create filenames with special characters in them. The simplest most obvious of these is the space, but yes, in the real world we have applications that do this. So neither alternate reality ("restrict filesystems' names" or "keep doing what we're doing but have bug-free applications") exists, so which "reality" are you proposing that we deal with here?
So why not use multiple brands? I don't think the name is to be taken lightly at all, and naming it in such a way that doesn't make it such an easy target could do some real good. They just need to bring the tech, and then we can have a whole laundry list of names suitable for different languages/cultures.
An interesting aspect of this announcement is that it has the potential to cut into x264's bottom line. For several years now the authors have dual licensed the encoder under the GPL and a commercial license[1], meanwhile enjoying an uncontested position among H.264 implementations. I don't expect Cisco's offering to be able to compete on speed or quality of implementation, but the BSD license also means that it may be "good enough" for some potential x264 licensees. I'm curious to see how this plays out.

[1] http://x264licensing.com
Microsoft terminates Leftronic Azure VMs without notice causing 9 hour outage