skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Greetings. I nearly have the same policy, regarding surfing and my addons.

I would only advise against Ghostery, as they whitelist some trackers, if being paid. With every update I had to reselect these trackers.

And Evidon (Ghostery's mothership) selling usageinformation really bugs me: http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/31/ghostery-a-web-tracking-bl...

I would recommend the FF-addon Diconnect: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disconnect/

Does anybody have an idea, how I could make my own sites secure in a relatively cheap way? Just a personal site with not that much traffic, so spending much money seems a bit off to me.

Ideas?
Enlighten me, why do they keep changing so often?
Laravel 4 Package for Facebook API with helper methods
I wasn't suggesting anything with my original post, merely stating a hypothesis about how the world is. It's possible to have a fact without a value judgment.

...but now that you ask, yes, I do think this is a good thing. It strikes me as a ridiculous injustice that the biggest single determinant of your lifetime income is the geographic location of your birth. Anything that makes that less arbitrary and more under your control will lead to a more just world, in my book.

Yes, that means that the economic system is chaotic at present and some people are getting left behind. However, it's far easier to pick up the skills needed to survive in today's economy than it was to move to the U.S. and get American citizenship in past generations.
Search was easy to replace. Bing and DuckDuckGo are both good. Firefox was an easy switch now that Chrome seems to be much more of a resource hog (and the extensions are better). I don't have an Android phone. For e-mail I've switched to Fastmail but Outlook is also a good alternative if you want something free. I don't use anything else. I'd say e-mail was the hardest friction point of them all, but overall it was pretty easy to leave Google.
Censored By Google
Google's #GOSF Is Turning Out To Be A Great Online Shopping Failure
We don't -- but when we don't, another county will
Tech Giants Demand Government Surveillance Overhaul
Nokia moves ahead with plans for a low-end Android handset
I didn't know that the one of the things we (the U.S.) are pushing for is patents on surgical procedures. The mind boggles. And then it fucking explodes.
New article format aims to prevent ‘sloppiness’ in science
The Intriguing Success of Bitcoin: A Comparative Study
If the app sells on its own merit, great.

However, if people are only buying the app out of charity for Leo, it's no different than any other sad story which gets media attention resulting in charitable donations.

So what would the point have been of learning to code? Heck, the story might as well have been Leo getting taught a foreign language so he could do translation work over the internet via sites like CrowdFlower.

The idea that homeless people can code their way out of a terrible situation, when well-fed, pampered and experienced programmers can't even make decent money from the app store, is simply a farce.
When I am bullied, I step up and speak out. This is a nice posting. I let you know that it is basically invisible. I've been more than once downvoted on HN, but I speak out in an educative way and turn the situation around. It's hard to know what to do, isn't it? Nobody wants to control the way a person responds, even if they respond in a bullying manner. That would ruin the site. Still, I can remember being much more shy than I am now. I think it is more than gender, more than ego, more than ignorance. Whatever it is that makes a conduct policy even be necessary, I don't think we have the tiger by the tail on this. More needs to be done. Much more. Conduct starts in the heart of our thought/impulses. Acting out in comment or in action (at a conference) is a demonstration of how we feel and think. I wish we could reach that part of ourselves and that a "conduct code" wouldn't be necessary.
Switching to Microsoft from Google is not an ethical accomplishment.
By that logic TLS, PGP, etc. should only be available to governments because it can help terrorists to hide their communication in ways that cannot be decrypted or broken into. And let's outlaw pressure cookers, because terrorists have used them as crude bombs so clearly they're a threat to all civilians. Heck, we should all stop wearing clothes and bags because terrorists can use them to conceal weapons.

Governments are to serve the people and we cannot blindly trust them with power regardless of how they're formed. As long as people continue to subscribe to scaremongering for terrorism, the terrorists have already won anyway. The surveillance states of late have powers blown way out of proportion. They ought to save lives in face of threats, not save lives for retrieval by automated data systems. I have no problems with the former, but I do very much have problems with the latter.
They are different. Ubuntu for Android is for running a desktop Ubuntu from a phone plugged into a monitor. Meanwhile Ubuntu Touch is the stand-alone mobile OS.
Materialism: a system that eats us from the inside out
Just like a cartoon where one hole gets plugged and another leak forms.
I'm a rails developer, and it seems really convoluted to me too. But it seems to work for them and to give them some good performance characteristics. To each their own and all that. I do think that there's a good deal of "splitting" going on in the rails community - I don't feel like I am using the same rails as DHH is talking about in this article - but I'm not sure if it's such a bad thing. It's tricky to pull off two (or more) "stacks" without a lot of configuration, but at least from my point of view, configuration hasn't become a pain point.
It turns out that, if you restrict to spaces of finite dimension, then Euclidean space is the only vector space out there, up to your choice of labelling the basis elements and up to a certain linear transformation.

In this sense, vectors can always be written as lists of numbers, but no, they don't have to be this in general. For example, you could have a vector space of smooth functions. It's infinite dimensional, and its elements (its vectors) are functions, not tuples of numbers.
Yes, Ghostery's origin story and reconfigure-on-update dance is bothersome. Thanks for the pointer to Disconnect, I will check it out.

Regarding your sites' security, what sort of advice are you looking for? OS-level hardening? Service config?
Cloud Storage Service SugarSync Abandons Freemium For A Paid Account Model
I knew the answers to these questions :) I'm just saying they belong in a discussion of the topics. Maybe I just like to take math slower than a 4-page summary.
After reading this, it reminded me of Cauchy's integral formula. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauchy%27s_integral_formula):

"In mathematics, Cauchy's integral formula, named after Augustin-Louis Cauchy, is a central statement in complex analysis. It expresses the fact that a holomorphic function defined on a disk is completely determined by its values on the boundary of the disk, and it provides integral formulas for all derivatives of a holomorphic function. Cauchy's formula shows that, in complex analysis, "differentiation is equivalent to integration": complex differentiation, like integration, behaves well under uniform limits – a result denied in real analysis."

Does anyone who knows this stuff better than me know if there's any meaningful connection?
On a similar note but different law, some feel abortion was federally legalized before the states had a chance to fully settle it. Some say the previous abortion battle was never fully litigated and that's why there's a resurgence in anti-abortion laws.

There's an advantage to allowing the states to hash out laws. It's frustrating because it's slow but it also gives people a chance to catch up with the progression.
a viral project
I would replace Ghostery in your list with Disconnect. I would also add the 'Self-destructing Cookies' browser plugin. In its settings, whitelist a very limited set of sites you want to allow persistent (or session) cookies.
Although I agree with you, requirement of 1 GB RAM is not much in these days, so probably it will never be optimized.
>but be sure not to dismiss Firefox based on historical issues.

It's incredible how much inertia there is with that. The majority of the people I know that switched to chrome did it back when firefox was blatantly slower and that's the image that's stuck in their head. It's incredibly hard to remove and to get someone to try it long enough to change their mind again.

Firefox has a tough issue with marketing right now. They need to start a nice "firefox is faster" campaign.
ServletConfig and SevletContext for Java Web Applications
Update: Just got through to tech, they are working late. Apparently our issue is an edge case but there are a bunch of problems with their OS update and automatic rollback. Here's the temporary fix: to reboot a Nest, press it for 10 or 15 seconds. Then, when the Nest is booting up, go into Settings and disconnect the Nest from the Internet so it doesn't try to software update endlessly. That has worked and we thankfully have heat again. I generally like my Nest and have found their support to be excellent, so I'm pretty patient, but it is definitely exasperating to hold a crying baby while calling tech support in the middle of the night because of a failed software update on my thermostat!
You've obviously never met malicious police. How laughable your statement is.
'Rainbow Gravity' Theory Says Our Universe Has No Beginning
The Night Watch - James Mickens [pdf]
It turns out it's really really expensive to enforce laws without the help of local law enforcement. One example (i think) is New York's repeal of prohibition.
Thank you for this link. I've only gotten through part 1 so far, but it's a devastating critique of Murray's framing of the problem.

One particularly interesting bit:

> As I looked backward and forward in time, however, I had to face this awkward fact: America became more culturally stable between 1910 and 1960 as it became less economically and socially libertarian. As it became more economically and socially libertarian after 1970, America became culturally less stable:

> "The greatest generation was also the statist generation. Like them or loathe them, the middle decades of the twentieth century were an entirely anomalous period in American history. Never had the state been so strong, never had people submitted as uncomplainingly, never had the country been more economically equal, never had it been more ethnically homogeneous, seldom was its political consensus more overpowering."
Some reasons why this is becoming so:

Labor laws make it difficult for people in lower income tiers to climb up the income ladder. It's difficult for people who are working less than fulltime jobs to work more hours because of the "40hr = benefits" laws, so instead folks have to work multiple jobs which adds transportation costs and scheduling complexities. The preponderance of regulations and complex taxes has made it more difficult to start many types of companies as an individual, putting them out of reach of folks who don't have significant savings and existing income.

Public education is no longer as much of a guarantor of basic literacy as it once was, so college education is increasingly becoming a necessary credential for many office work, knowledge work, and "professional" jobs, putting those out of the reach of many low income folks who are put off by taking on so much student loan debt or can't afford to support themselves and put themselves through college at the same time.

Similarly, anti-blue-collar sentiment has grown, devaluing such jobs culturally and discouraging people from pursuing such positions, even though many are well paying and can serve as spring boards to even higher paying jobs (e.g. self-employment). Moreover, the reduction in vocational training, shop classes, and so forth in public schooling has pushed a lot of those jobs even farther away from the average American adult.

The War on Drugs: which impacts lower income, blue-collar, and non-white people more. If you get caught with weed as a sub-urban white teen you'll face different consequences than if you're an inner-city black teen.

Some of these trends will hopefully turn around, especially with the help of the internet in terms of education, crowd funding, and so forth, but it's still going to be a pretty difficult problem for some time.
It more relates to the relative size of the service area and the fact that pedestrians have a steeper distance decay function than other modes.
My family came on boat number 2 after the Mayflower. For the first time in my life, it may be time to checkout of the USA for awhile. Maybe it is time? Can always visit, but maybe this is it. This is just insane at this point.
This.

I work on Disconnect. I don't understand why any hacker would still put Ghostery on their machine:

* Ghostery is run by former ad execs (7/9ths of their executive team): http://www.evidon.com/our-team

* They make their money (I've heard tens of millions of dollars per year) selling user data to ad co's and data brokers: http://www.evidon.com/#block-views-from_our_partners-block
70% of Canadians support, at minimum, decriminalizing marijuana yet our government recently increased sentencing for cultivation.
Read Venture Deals by Brad Feld. It will make you more knowledgeable then 99.9% of all the people in venture funded companies and put you on the level playing field with the VC's.
You're right -- Ye olden aristocrats had land, and land produced rents and taxes. Today's plutocrats aren't in as stable a position as a feudal lord, but many are in effect landlords, either literally or figuratively via control of critical businesses.

The postwar US was a totally different story. Europe and Asia's losses were our gain. The government had billions of dollars in off book debt, (ie. social security trust fund) and used that capital to launch the computer revolution.

Will it happen again? I wouldn't dismiss it... No nation is more strategically embedded in the new information economy than the US. At the end of the day, the US is the devil the world knows and needs.
Yeah...that's really not how the CDC works.

Also, if you refer to this map, you'll find that "There's plague in Madagascar" really isn't, well, news to the CDC:

http://www.cdc.gov/plague/images/WorldPlagueMapWebSmall.jpg
Do you realize how much of a performance hit modern desktops would take if a processor that had to freeze the operating system while it wandered through memory first identifying the operating system and then finding the entropy pool and modifying it?

>Presumably using the same skynet tech it uses to look ahead and see where the rdrand is going to be xored into.

There is no such tech. That's why this is not 'checkmate'. A poisoned random number that generates numbers in a predictable manner is orders of magnitude easier to implement and less possible to detect than a magical processor that changes memory it thinks might be entropy for some operating systems it has been pre-programmed to look for under the assumption that kernel will never change ever. Get real.
Going to previous activity by using action bar icon in Android
California and much of the Western U.S. It's actually gotten worse in recent years as urban areas push into formerly wild areas.
The freedom to leave the house and to preserve your battery life is another issue. I often fling videos to my chrome cast for my kids remotely. AirPlay style mirroring is wasteful of bandwidth, battery, it double compresses streams, and adds latency.

It's a fallback of last resort IMHO.
This userscript downloads the video via the browser. I guess YouTube shouldn't be able to tell if the user downloads the video or views it with the html5 player. The script can be used with Firefox (Greasemonkey) and Chrome.
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/98782
Please only use it to download videos that are under a free license or otherwise allow downloads. ;)
Is there a way for mobile browsers to block analytics cookies JS , a la ghostery and adblock?
Midnight till the morning!

The environment at night is so good that makes me productive and ready to face challenges. Helps me stay focused and get a lot of work done :)
My only problem is with this one:

>Undercover Israeli soldiers admitted in 2005 to throwing stones at other Israeli soldiers so they could blame it on Palestinians, as an excuse to crack down on peaceful protests by the Palestinians

2005 was the height of the 2nd intifada, there were nearly daily suicide bombings in Israel there was no need for excuses and undercover agents. Also the source basically says that the soldiers were originally supposed to work undercover and locate the organizers to be arrested (quality arrests, say what you want about that...) but as things appeared to get out of control the undercover agents (who were first timers) took matters into their own hands.
Car Hacking in US [video]
According to [this resarch](http://www.schallerconsult.com/taxi/taxifb.pdf), 57% of the fare (including tip) goes to the driver, 24% to vehicle and gas, 15% to the owner, and 4% to other expenses.

So, the driver is a pretty substantial portion of that. Taking the driver out of the equation would substantially reduce the costs. If you increased medallion availability as well, and the owners were able to work with lower margins (or they were cooperatively owned), you could get the cost down even further, to maybe 1/3 of what taxis currently cost. That would be a huge difference in affordability for everyday use.
You are wrong. Developers should use random if it's for something security sensitive like generating keys. random will block when entropy is too low, urandom will just continue recycling entropy, which is cryptographically dangerous.
I 'dropped out' of my life of making video games this summer, got rid of everything I own and set off on a journey across the US by bicycle. Every day I wake up in my tent and make a conscious decision to climb on the bike, with an awareness that something amazingly bad might happen, however something amazingly good might also happen. I so far have been fortunate for I have enjoyed lots of amazingly good moments, and have learned it is an acceptance of the prospect of very bad things that makes the trip more remarkable.

Your writings of your baddass journey have always been inspiring.. I'm so sorry about your friend.
I don't know about either...

https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/wiki/How-does-HTT...
I think the reason might be a little bit more complex than just whether they have a PhD or not.

Maybe it would make more sense when you consider the person as being 'overqualified', moreso than less hire-able?

Let's say I'm some web startup that focuses on making the best todo list app that has ever been made -- If I get a guy out of college who has little to no experience (but the experience is on the stack that I am using), and I have a PhD with a some specialization like robotics or DSP (vague but bear with me), it might not seem to make as much sense (even given that they have the same experience on the stack that my company uses) to hire the PhD with the robotics/DSP, as he it seems that he is a molded part (specialization), that does NOT go into the hole I'm trying to put him in, whereas the new grad appears to be more pliable (if not incomplete), and will definitely fit, and I can try and build up to expand to fill the role.

Don't know if that analogy made sense, but essentially I mean to say that someone with a PhD might be just as hirable, but from a hiring manager's perspective, hexagon block in a square hole (as opposed to putting a circle block in that square hole)
Bloomberg was trying...
This is very interesting that you don't use React.createClass functionality and yet get most of the advantages of React :)
Basic income or a negative income tax actually generally seem to be libertarian ideas, suggested as a way to radically simplify the welfare system and limit how much discretion the government had over whom and how much to pay. They are also usually coupled with eliminating the minimum wage since everyone is already guaranteed an income.

My understanding is that liberals prefer welfare programs with significantly more oversight and targeting. They want fine control over who gets the money and how they can spend it, promoting specific causes like education or environmentalism.
NWay Raises $5M To Build Out ChronoBlade MMO Game
Extole Raises $5M To Reward Customers For Promoting Products To Their Friends
Depends on your worldview. Do you care about some kid in rural China, or your unborn grandchild?

A globalized economy will eventually pull everyone towards the mean. That's not good news for your descendants if you live in the west.

It's a dark moral place. It's also why realpolitik rules the day.
"And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen- chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city." -- Camus, "The Plague".
Why Profiling is More Important to User Experience than Search
I agree, his lecture deriving the determinant from a few desirable properties is a classic in my mind.
Procedural map generation explained
Selective enforcement of drug laws is only one of many ways that poor and minority communities are abused by the "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" to quote bell hooks. Legalizing drugs won't magically change anything except for rich white kids whose parents would otherwise have to pay a fine when they get arrested.
So this is awesome, Ghostery has been a unsettling compromise for years now. I'm very happy to learn that you guys are doing it right. Thank you!

I've never been able to detect any nefarious network traffic caused by Ghostery (and I've looked), but I don't like the games they play, so I'll be pleased to ditch them without ceremony.
Comcast Tech Support Transcript
I'm a Comcast subscriber and was getting intermittent connection issues. On further investigation I narrowed down the problem within Comcast's network from an mtr run (across several runs, loss % varied from 15% to 100% on that specific IP)- I decided to use the online chat support option on Comcast to see how much help I could get reporting the packet loss in their system. Here is that transcript of an interesting conversation.

My first response was autofilled from the "my issue" summary line. On most all phone conversations (that came from suggestions out of this chat) they were aghast that I'm using Linux which they don't officially support. I tried to explain to them that my problem isn't specific to the OS I'm using; and that I'm calling to report issues within their network. Additionally they tried to sell me something called "signature support" which assumes a problem within the home network (and presumably helps troubleshoot that over phone) ... all at extra charge!

Finally gave up after being put on hold for over 18 minutes. Oh well.
I suspect that's a different threat though – at least to me, "smash and grab" implies opportunistic steal-laptop-from-car-and-fence-in-nearest-bar type problems. If you've "lost" a laptop to people capable of and interested in probing your firewire port for in-memory passphrases, you've got a whole other level of attacker. (A level of attacker against which I suspect _most_ startups can't and won't attempt to defend themselves against.)
No room for false humility here.

The upper middle class are collaborators, taking part in the oppression of the working class in exchange for being lifted above it. The mercenaries of class warfare.