skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know you have a background in this, and I understand the intelligence agencies COULD have monitored anyone they wanted to in the past, but they couldn't automate it to create the scope of surveillance now in place.

A phone tap in the 1950s would require recording and someone listening to it, would it not? How many people could the NSA employ to listen to conversations? Millions?

Either way, just because they have been doing disgusting things for so long does not make it something we should stop getting upset about.
It keeps all messages in a log(sorted) and each client has a position of where they are in the log. So they can restart some parts, or skip some. This makes it very fast.

And it has sharding, which no-other messagequeue has (i think).
Probably not that much, to be honest. Most people here in the UK neither know nor care about him. Which is a real tragedy, but people just don't understand the technology side of it, and probably don't care anyway as they think it doesn't apply to them.

These stories have been popular with the Guardian's standard readership, but inside the UK at least, I doubt it has increased its market.
Quora discussion: http://www.quora.com/RabbitMQ/RabbitMQ-vs-Kafka-which-one-fo...

RabbitMQ developer on the kafka-users list: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/kafka-users/201306....

SO discussion on several queuing systems: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/731233/activemq-or-rabbit...
Great advice, but:

"- Talk as little as possible. Even if you have a very transparent, honest relationship with you boss. If your boss might find detrimental you to have a startup, don't talk at all."

I think it is better to talk about the possibility of a startup on your own time during the interview process. This has the side effect of filtering out jobs with controlling bosses. (You may not have this luxury, though.)

Our tech agreement lets someone list a set of technologies they own that they are bringing with them, and explicitly renounces the company's ownership of them. It's also useful to understand and review any agreements you sign when accepting employment.

I have a side project that I told my boss about when accepting employment. And I started another one while employed.

I guess it depends on whether you think forgiveness is better than permission, and how your boss is, but as a manager I would rather know someone has a startup project.

You shouldn't consider a startup on the side without reading and understanding this onstartups.com q&a: http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/19422/if-im-working-...

One other important point: if your startup is orthogonal to your current work, everyone is probably going to be more comfortable. If not, I'd seriously consider postponing the startup, just to avoid a sticky situation where your employer is concerned you took domain knowledge/contacts from your day job to improve your startup.

All the rest of this advice is fantastic. A clear separation of startup and day job is important.
I would LOVEEEEE to get paid by the government to play video games. Sign me up!
Opscode Rebrands as Chef, Raises $32 Million
I think the site is good. I have no problem with the technology ultimately but to put a fine point on it, I'm not paying the government lots of money to invent their own infrastructure components when perfectly good ones exist already.

The same applies to people working under me.
The only thing I'm dismissing here is Groupon's codebase. (BTW I'm impressed by Meteor and Derby)
I choose to live in a safe place. Every other security tool/tactic/risk mitigation is a response to the security environment. By choosing a safe environment, you make all those easier.
Software Criticism
If not targets, an idea not discussed so far is bribery victims?

"Sure, I can op you... but we like to know when ops will be around, you know, for coverage so there's always one online, so if you could just let us know when you'll be working (embassy driver) overtime hours..."
Creator of Blackhole exploit kit 'Paunch' arrested
I would suggest that "a horde of undercover Orcs" in WoW no longer qualifies as "the path of least resistance"...
I still read !important as "not important" sometimes. Was probably a poor choice of a keyword for that purpose.
It was an early source of amazement for me to learn that we could actually calculate the colours of certain substances from their electron transitions (albeit with some empirically determined constants). A diagram, an equation, a few constants, and boom, you have the actual colour of a substance that matches your real-life observations. For reasons like this, I was quite into chemistry for a few years in high school.

It's a demonstration of our ability to discover the principles of reality and make meaningful predictions, rather than merely observe and catalog nature as our ancestors did. It's one of the wondrous aspects of science for me.
Pursuing A Computer Based Career - How To Overcome The Health Hazards
The most inspiring web video of the year!
That's a matter of terminal configuration, not configuring Emacs.
Can you recommend any? Snow Crash was awesome :)
Not all SaaS are equal. The answers for this question are extremely different between Spotify and Basecamp, for example. The scaling path is rarely identical for any two applications.

That said, there are common things that can be done, many of which have already been mentioned.

For AWS, make sure that you have at least two EC2 instances running, and they're configured to sit behind an elastic load balancer, then make sure that autoscaling has been set up.

As dirktheman says, Make sure that you're sitting behind Cloudfront for caching benefits. Also, make sure that your static files are all being hosted appropriately on a static server (Nginx, Apache, etc) and not by the application server.

Consider implementing memcache. This may or may not fit every applications, but if you have some common queries that are likely to be hit during a traffic spurt, having them resident in memory takes some of the load off of the database, if there is one.

Assuming RDS, definitely be using Multi-AZ instances, and also consider setting up read replicas. If your application is more likely to be read than written to, read replicas are an easy way to ensure that the application will still work for those writing to it (generally, paying customers) while mitigating traffic spikes typically common to media blitzes. Also, having an architecture that supports the easy addition of read replicas affords greater scale-up-ability.

Above and beyond that, everything's pretty application-specific. If you wrote the app in Rails, try to find a Rails-production-ready checklist. Same thing if Django, Java, whatever.

Good luck.
How to Improve Your Website’s Google Ranking
Google uses a variety of methods to determine which pages are displayed first in the results. There are a few things you can do to improve your positioning
Actually I could think of some nasty disutopias post Scottish independence if there's a hung election and the hardline nats get their way.
The Temptations Cover
My dad have done a awesome cover!!!
Chrome probably should support APNG. But I'm not sure it would be wise to use APNG even if Chrome did support it.
I disagree. I see a number of hard-won lessons here.

I just spent the weekend volunteering as a mentor for an entrepreneurship event, and first-time entrepreneurs really need a lot of education in basics. I can see this being useful as a checklist of common anti-patterns. In particular, I've recently seen people getting 6, 9, 10, 11, and 13 wrong.

I do strongly dislike the title of the blog, and the hype-filled headlines make me twitch. It has so much marketing and glibness to it that yes, it's the kind of thing that makes programmers insane.

But I think it's worth listening respectfully to people who have accomplished things, even if they're very different than you. Take what you find useful, and leave the rest.
There is every reason. It's the same whether you're running over ssh or screen, on OS X, Linux or Windows. A consistent environment is worth a lot more than the idiosyncratic (and hideous) Emacs GUI. A mouse doesn't add a lot to the editing experience.

It also helps with integration in Windows. I run Cygwin emacs so that I get sane shell commands. There is no native Win32 version of emacs that also links into Cygwin, as far as I'm aware. I'd have to run the Cygwin X server (or some other X server) in order to get a GUI emacs with working M-| and friends.

I rather struggle to think of a good reason to run Emacs outside a terminal. It gets you more colors and marginally better support for keyboard shortcuts. That's about it; not enough to counter the downsides.
Fortunately, the mega corps haven't started hiring their own police forces and locking people up who break whatever rules they decide are appropriate. If they did that, then I might reconsider what data I shared with them.

The state is in a very different (privileged) position to commercial companies and we need an additional layer of protection from the state that is not necessary with companies.
Thanks for the feedback, we deliberated over it quite a bit. There were a few who felt that typical horizontal homepage search box was a little overused, and we wanted to do something different. But obviously if it confuses people, that's bad too.
I like the naming trend and expect releases of Apache Ionesco, Apache Lovecraft, and Apache Poe real soon now.
</obligatory-joke>
Tech giants band together for NSA reform
They were all collaborators. They collaborated. Lavabit was not a collaborator and Lavabit did not collaborate--in case it needs to be more clearly stated.
It seems odd because Russia always gets demonized in the media. It's always the same: mafia, corruption, hackers... I can't remember the last time a positive story was published in the English speaking press.

The Thai government have just dissolved parliament and called new elections due to protests. Can you imagine that happening in many so-called "democratic" Western states? You can't even get a crack-smoking mayor to resign these days!
I came here largely to say this, but once again you've expressed my thoughts more completely, clearly, and authoritatively than I ever could.

Thank you. Again.
I don't think changing laws without changing capabilities is going to convince many people.

Shutting down the giant NSA center in Utah might do the job.
I grew up in a world in which the Stasi infiltrating church groups was seen as state security going beyond the pale.

This is just beyond insanity.

These agencies should not just be reined in anymore, the need to be abolished and replaced if we are ever to return to an acceptable level of state surveillance.
I was looking at the resources on the actual BBC news website. My point being, I wonder if the BEEB might be better off using webfonts for icons since every other image can be a jpeg. And if it can be a JPEG, the aggressive compression technique might be a better approach since it doesn't require any JS or additional HTTP connections.

Are you saying that the BEEB has a policy of not using web fonts? If so, why?
Is "inefficiencies in government regulation" code for taxes?
Not adding to the discussion in any way, but I really enjoyed scanning through this, knowing the information had already been decoded, and seeing people post 'you're all morons, it's just a jpg artifact!'
Wow never would have thought of that - for some reason thinking of a bad guy playing Runescape to discuss their evil plans makes me laugh
How to Write a Monthly Update (Hint: Use Numbers)
Could you say more about this?

I went to a 1-day Scala unconference and generally liked it, but this guy was a giant dick to me when I asked what I thought was a pretty reasonable question.

The experience definitely made me wonder about the Scala community.
I've gotta say, organizing the code in terms of EBBs instead of calls makes lot of the features in earlier videos make a lot more sense. I have no idea how they'll be able to handle interrupts or avoid having to deal with interrupts, but I'm sure they have a story for that. Really gotta re-watch the memory video now.

Hand coding assembly for this would be really painful, but we already knew this with the belt. The Mill really seems to have been designed with compilers in mind.
Try doing something with it (eg apply for a tax disk). At that point it always hands back control to the old site(s) it "replaced".
If Scala and Go were the only two technologies mentioned you would have a point. But this is a monstrous fad bloated lineup of technologies they have there. Integrating this mess is way way more complex than any individual language.

There are good arguments for trying new technologies, but this particular instance seems to be a very good example of how such a strategy can go terribly wrong.

[Edit]
On second thought, I might be jumping to conslusions as I don't know anything about how successful they are in actually achieving their goals, doing it on budget or how fun it is to work there. Their actual approach may be less confused than the blog post makes it sound.
Having the decision tree helps fight bias. It also can help frame decisions. "Are we saying no because we don't believe in the founder, or don't believe in the market?"
Just to add to my previous reply, one of the venue I would like to see more from content providers is micro-tipping. Provide a way for the readers to micro-tip for an article they liked, etc. There are a lot of new ideas out there with a lot of potential. Let people connect as directly as possible with authors.
I'm thinking the Guardian picked up some U.S. readers, but have no evidence.
Quikio service shutting down
Dear QuikIO users,

Thank you very much for being a QuikIO user. We want to let you know that we'll be shutting down QuikIO service at the end of the year.
You'll be able to use QuikIO service through December 31, 2013. After that, we will stop offering app download and support. Your QuikIO app will continue to operate only with the LAN discovery mode. You can find the instructions on the steps to set up LAN discovery mode from the link below:

http://quikio.tumblr.com/post/68987864788/using-quikio-with-lan-discovervy

We recommend you check out one of the following streaming services:
- Plex
- Tonido
- Air Video
- AirPlayit

Thank you for being a QukIO user. We are grateful for your support and hope you enjoyed the QuikIO app.

Sincerely,
The QuikIO Team
Police Requests for Cellphone Data Surge
Bandits and Stocks
Some poor NSA analyst was caught playing WoW in work and had to develop this enormous ploy to explain his actions as a way to capture chat terrorist traffic in-game. It just blew up from there.
Mashup of the Complete Works of HP Lovecraft and the King James Bible
Aside from overspending you might want to look into existing BATF sting operations. If the majority of the criminal activity in an area is law enforcement sting operations trying to catch the small fraction of actual criminals, then you need a deconfliction group or the vast majority of arrests will be law enforcement agents arresting each other.

Imagine if the city cops decide to crack down on prostitution by posing as johns in a sting, the same night that county sheriffs decide to crack down on prostitution as prostitutes in a sting, and the streets are 90% full of cops arresting each other. LOL all you want, this has happened IRL, also with drug trafficking. There is also something of a meme that the majority of underage girls on chat services are creepy FBI agents.
> and some not-so-good ones:

> tramprugby.com (I would pay to see this)

Sounds like a good idea!
Could you say more about the background here? Scala's been on my "maybe" list for years, and I'm still trying to figure out how popular it's going to end up being.
I simply do not believe that the NSA actually catches anyone using these advanced methods. The few terrorist prosecutions we've seen released almost always involve some low-hanging nut soliciting someone online for bomb materials with zero "gnome morse code" or other gimmicks. The idea that you can datamine everything running over the internet is a fool's errand and this errand is costing us billions in wasted tax dollars and millions of instances of violated human rights. Meanwhile, organizations like NASA are clearly underfunded.

Terrorism is the root password to everything from our constitution to our tax load. Playing up these charlatans and lifelong federal bureaucrats as some kind of saviors against the mythical hacker terrorist is a little much in my book. These are pork programs that go nowhere and do nothing but enrich the inside players and connected defense contractors.
Square announces the new Square Reader
As far as I remember all battery breakthroughs in last 20 years were sad stories.
Try opening maps and enabling GPS with no data connection - the map images won't be downloaded, but your location will still be pinpointed and will move. Wifi/cell triangulation will usually seem more accurate initially as it can take a minute to get a GPS fix.
If nothing else, radioactive decay is a quantum random process that has a biological effect when it alters DNA.
"That in turn is because you can't start from 300 million people who couldn't read/write 60 years ago and somehow magically produce the hundreds of millions of people in a highly trained and educated workforce,..."
Didn't china do exactly that?
I like that this article doesn't say this is the best solution for everything. no way you can have one solution for all problems
Another component here is that it might not even be their intellectual property per se; my understanding (from what I've heard from friends who've worked at graphics card companies) is that some of the hardware / OpenGL driver may contain IP that the graphics company has licensed and isn't even allowed to release as F/OSS if they wanted to.

IIRC, certain "Intel Integrated Graphics" variants suffered from this problem, and to this day lack good 3D F/OSS drivers.
He is talking about the fundamental problem of VLIW architectures. They rely on the static scheduling of programs to enable instruction level parallelism -- which is critical to performance. Scheduling is an NP Complete problem.
Apple Tells Gliph to Remove App's Bitcoin Transfer Function
This is precisely why VCs will miss truly disruptive founders. Tech entrepreneurship is still fairly young, but in that short time, we've already invented our own unique brand of cool: young, credentialed, hot, saying the right things.

Oh wait: those are the values of society at large.

We've already abandoned all pretense of disruption. This is just the next iteration of the elite, where your value as a person hinges on how well you project your own narcissism.
Google's browser already supports WebM, which should compress better than GIF even in lossless mode.
Quora link where you don't have to register/log-in: http://www.quora.com/RabbitMQ/RabbitMQ-vs-Kafka-which-one-fo...
Teenagers make fun of Facebook in a Christmas song
Have read a bit of the intro material, but I'm still not grokking what makes Kafka fundamentally different from ActiveMQ / Apollo. Can anyone sum up where and why one might need Kafka?
Yeah it's old, but it's still one of LZ types. ZIP is archaic too, but you can only improve it so much, even with very modern methods.
This post made the rounds recently when reporters got a hold of it. "Millions! Millions of googles! Compute!"

It's basically meaningless. They start off with C10k which is about handling 10k concurrent clients on one machine, then they go on to say "a million requests on our cloud!" (which they later mention is a 64-server virtual load balancer cluster pointing to 200 backend virtual thingamajiggers)

But, like, Eurovision. Totally.

While I'm yelling at them: your problem isn't nobody knows about your performance. Your problem is nobody knows what google Compute Engine is. Is it an EC2 competitor? Is it one of those things you have where you give it data, a query, and you crunch the numbers for the client?

Google means well, but here they suffer from their typical "we know it, so why don't you know it?" style without much useful intro material (which tends to get written by fans, which Google Compute Load Balancer Data Ingestion doesn't have).

</rant>
Android powered device is probably sending the MAC address of the WiFi router along location information back home.
IANAL, but preventing commercial usage might prevent a lot of journalists from adopting the use of your product.
When you hire en-masse, it's virtually impossible to test for quality. A lot of these large firms (and major US consultancies follow this too) wind up waving 1000s of people in, and then relentlessly culling those who don't perform. The industry winds up with a lot of turnover too.

The strange thing about this system is that while individual people can underperform, if there's a lot of weeding out (let's say 1 of 5 makes manager, 1 of 25 makes partner) you can wind up with some exceptional people at the end. That's part of why the partners at many consulting firms can achieve so much relatively early in their careers.

Of course this type of arrangement requires a lot of process, and is better for well defined tasks without algorithmic complexity (say building a custom telecom billing system) but it does work in some places.
That users must have one and only one account is something that belongs more to the real world than to the virtual one. And probably for that you will need government cooperation, maybe from all of them for this to work.
GCHQ is not well paid ;-)
It wasn't the NSA who did it. It was the GCHQ in Britain, who later shared data with the NSA.
He's just using the P4 because it has the longest mis-predict penalty of any recent mass produced CPU. I'd guess that the Mill is going to be clocked fairly slow given the cycle latency numbers I'm seeing so I wouldn't be surprised if the Mill's 5 cycle mis predict penalty came out to the same time delay as a 10 cycle penalty on a Sandy Bridge.
You can send bits of information like that, but not that many. Sending a message like a time or gps coordinates would be easy, but having a full conversation would be very time consuming and require a ton of those short messages. It is also difficult to decode, especially manually.
Previously on HN... :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6804897
I agree! There's nothing in the "Reform Internet Surveillance" platform that I disagree with at all, including the need for such a platform.
It doesn't look that way to me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_special_relativity

In particular, the Lorentz transformation at the heart of relativity was derived from experiments years before.
Kafka is an integral part of Shopify's infrastructure. It's brilliant but under appreciated technology.

A full company, scalable event bus like this can totally revolutionize the way you build services.
Low-cost titanium powders used in 3D printing for the first time
The message is very clear: Charlie, you must write faster. Because of your lazy ways, you're not keeping up with reality, and reality has just caught up with you (in the sf writer world that is a bad thing, remember).

So crank it up already.
Hm, I've found at least a couple of these that link to Chinese sites that 404.

My guess is that not all of the books here are free. Some might just be available online if you're willing to perpetrate copyright infringement.
4 Virtual Environments for Data Science
Have the NSA checked out Call of Duty?

When I used to play it on the PS3, I swear it was filled with depraved devil worshippers who wanted to skin me alive.

One guy said to a mate of mine "I would love to shit in your mouth" (I think it was in a sexual context).
Or the laundry verse where the external assets experimented with using WOW to communicate.

Persephone has a "WWLJD" bracelet. When she's trying to infiltrate Schiller's compound, everyone naturally assumes it stands for "What would Lord Jesus do?" Actually, it's "What would Leeroy Jenkins do?"
Opportunity costs are a real thing. It's a legitimate argument. See using dead children as a unit of currency:

http://www.raikoth.net/deadchild.html