skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With some basic science training, you should be able to read the paper itself, see how they constructed the experiment, and have some idea if they did a good job. And this is without knowing much about the specific field. Did they have a big enough sample size, etc.

The press that reports on science could help with this too, but it is unfortunate they seem mostly useless in helping to provide a critical eye.
Remove the PS.
But my issue is that very little in the slides released by Der Spiegel talks about the actual targets where devices were employed. There is the Internet dragnet stuff which is rightly worrisome, but the vast majority of the slides are similar to the one about the iPhone and detail targeted exploits: specific phones, specific servers, specific routers. Targeted spying on real threats requires those capabilities. Unfortunately, if deployed at scale they could be used for large scale spying. But there is no evidence here that these methods are used in this way (in contrast to stuff like PRISM). I think that's what makes me uncomfortable here. There is a bit of sloppiness going on where people are trying to conflate techniques for targeted spying with mass surveillance. I think it's important to be careful to make the distinctions.
>Enter the fake email (e.g. "user@server.fake") and click "Add"

Rather than a fake email, you could set it to "your_username@users.noreply.github.com" -- That's the email address used when you make edits from the web.
'Thirty years after the Khmer Rouge declared war on "the Garden of the individual", Silicon Valley was lauding the collective "hive mind" while stealthily dismantling the rights that protect the individual.' A statement at once both ridiculous and true. This article is a pretty good way to provoke discussion about using intellectual property regimes to protect privacy.
I want to shine some light on one side problem, scratched here:

The problem today is (out of the perspective of a developer): To many companies rely on just "hire any (cheap) developer" to ramp up the product. I see it all the time: Quality is not asked for, many companies (specially in the web business) just want the cheapest developers. They search for a student (at best), because he is cheap and will just make a small time estimation and an even smaller fixed price offer for the project. The student will happily work overtime that is not covered by the initial estimation.

Than the companies go mad, when either the programmer is running away or the whole project runs into a blind alley (or both at the same time), because the "totally expensive" programmer had not enough experience e.g. with database development and the database structure just lets you shiver. Then the shouting and anger is big: "Damn programmers -- all are liars and lazy!"

What went wrong, stated Uncle Bob correctly in his Blog: http://blog.8thlight.com/uncle-bob/2013/11/19/HoardsOfNovice...

But the "cheap, cheap!" culture seams to be unstoppable. If you tell people in advance about "quality" and "professionalism", they don't listen or just laugh at you. It seams, all the people just have to find out the hard way -- but I guess, even than most of them will not learn at all.
Validating Presence of Associations and Foreign Keys in Rails
There are many more avenues for the non specialist to get a substantiated opinion. In this case, not just doctors, but the general press, scientific vulgarisation sites and blogs, facts surrounding the publication (all the authors but one rejected the study) etc. It's the combination of all these factors - these "evidences" - and not just one, that should convince people.
A friend just asked me about doing a website for her bicycle repair business, and after thinking about it I thought that what I would like is a docker container that runs a lightweight httpd for serving static pages, a git server to allow her to push updates, and probably a simple web interface for deploying them. That way after the initial deployment my involvement should be pretty minimal. Maybe something like it already exists?

Edit: http://hyde.github.io/ looks like it might be a good starting point for something like the above, with bonus static site generation, markdown etc.
I think the important point missing from that is that Challenges was a free multiplayer add-on given to the owners of the base game. That really changes the nature of them removing the game from user libraries from they removed software that users paid for to they removed a free program that's useless now.
Yeah I think the main omission was the whole trend towards markdown/git/api based "CMS" which basically means that most tech people have junked the whole idea of a traditional CMS, few of which have an API though there is CMIS.
Copyright reform has been vigorously opposed by Big Media and mostly successfully so far

Actually no. Big Media is very much in favour of copyright reform (such as extending the period of copyright) if it benefits them. They are very opposed to copyright reform that benefits the customer/little guy.
Jacob made this assertion in his talk but presented no evidence. He explicitly said he wanted to call out the companies because they should be held accountable if they were complicit in this.

But no evidence was presented that any of the hardware companies were coordinating with the NSA. Given that jail breaking continues to exist, it is entirely possible that Apple and other companies are victims of security exploits identified by the NSA.

That being said, it would be good to get some companies on record on this.
Thanks for this release. Learning SQL before ever touching an ORM, SQLAlchemy's approach makes a lot more sense to me than something "simplier" like Django's ORM.

Anyone know, is there any chance Django would pull in SQLAlchemy core as a dependency and implement their ORM on top of it?
I'm founder and lead developer of a ML startup where we trained our system to do realistic 3D modeling for human 3D animation. From my perspective, I think it will be less than 20 years before the vast majority of longer surgeries will be automated. We already have robotic assistance, and remote robotic surgical hands for when the doctor and patient are in separate locations. There is too much money to be made for this to remain non-main stream.
The absolute, fundamental founding principle of the US constitution is the limitation of powers of the government. Such power is limited by splitting it three ways and having separate institutions keeping each other in check, through the will of the people via voting electing representatives and the president, and through the very strong protections of individual liberty embodied in the bill of rights.

And yet today we find ourselves in a situation where bit by bit those limitations have been eroded so severely that they might as well not exist. We have organizations, such as the NSA, who have multi-billion dollar budgets with limited oversight and little public transparency. Who similarly operate with limited oversight in conditions of near utter secrecy. Who, through those conditions, have essentially unfettered ability to undertake any conceivable surveillance effort imaginable and much else besides.

It is simply untenable to have so many people with such power and no accountability and also maintain democratic institutions and preserve individual liberty. We should be thankful that, so far as I am aware, there has not been an individual with an excess of competence and ambition combined with a scarcity of morals or we would be in a much worse place today. But realistically it is only a matter of time before this power falls into the wrong hands. We have already been dangerously close in relatively recent history, such as with J. Edgar Hoover, we should not be courting fate again.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that how we handle this crisis will greatly affect the near-future history of the United States and significantly affect the future of all mankind in the 21st century and beyond. This is potentially a defining moment for this generation.
I find Jooq to be similiar in some ways.

http://www.jooq.org
This case is clearly SquareEnix's fault and not Valve's. When are gamers going to finally wake up and start voting with their dollars against DRM? This couldn't happen in a market where the consumer doesn't just swallow whatever shit is flung their way.
Pretty cool. Hopefully some of the "lol acadmics" folks on HN will see how good research practices are very similar to startups (and yes that would be the biggest asset of any good academic you hire) :)
I think the biggest hurdle we still face when it comes to online publishing is the clash between WYSIWYG and structured markup. Editors, in my experience, don't like working with structured content. But the web is not WYSIWYG. Tools like markdown attempt a compromise, but are still not suitable for many non-technical editors. Do we need a mind-shift, or a new piece of technology to solve this?
"largely uninterested in your take on the world" is far from "couldn't possibly add any value"

Now I am 33 and I tend to ignore what most people my age and younger think about things like global politics or new programming languages. This has less to do with intelligence than perspective. Basically, if the 'Arab Spring seemed like a new and good thing you don't know enough about the situation to make informed commentary.
I appreciate where you are coming from, however, from my childhood reading of Das Kapital I cannot recall a great deal about Peak Oil, the merits of a surveillance state and much else that is pertinent to today's world. That is what I mean by 'not having all the answers'.
I always thought the C stood for compromise because that's almost always what you have to do when you use a CMS.

I don't think the future is drag/drop codeless systems. Good luck when your clients ask for very specific work flows that you can't bundle up in a pretty little draggable box!

Then get sad when you realize you have to dive deep into the code except now you're dealing with a 100,000+ line codebase that you didn't write or even worse a large plugin that some random dude wrote which has the worst coding practices possible.
Correct - there is no right/wrong exactly, and I learned a while back to not work to those 'rules' too closely. There's an etiquette that always seemed 'common sense' to me, and now, it's generally easier to learn a lot more about a company, even a small one, before even getting to an interview stage.

I've asked about vacation and such during a 'first interview' a couple of times, mostly because in my view I was already satisfied about some of the other more 'important' stuff. Some of that came from the interview time itself, other info came from doing research on the company, staff, work, etc before the first interview.

And by the same token, I've had to shut down a couple of interview dances short because the company would not disclose salary range at all until I'd flown out to their HQ and met the team. "We don't discuss that this early in the process" was the standard response. Well... I wasn't about to reshuffle multiple days (affecting 2-3 weeks of existing stuff) without any idea if this would be worth my time 4 weeks later.
Time seems ripe for open source networking equipment movement. Can't trust closed source solutions.
Common sense is not always wrong.
I stopped reading this partway through because PG doesn't really need to explain himself here. Don't attribute to malice what you can attribute to your own misunderstanding.
Right-o. I don't understand why people latched onto shipping carriers as being the most likely suspect for hardware bugging by operations like NSA's TAO. They have very slim timelines to hand over a package without someone noticing it's been in Reston, VA for two days.

Really, to me at least, the most probable corporate suspect would be the hardware vendors themselves. Dude you're getting a Dell.™
Mars One Narrows List Of Wannabe Martians For 2025 Colony
O'Reilly - Top 2013 ebooks and videos for 50% off
Requires a .net backend.
Thankfully the community still has an active group of modders so even if Rockstar doesn't fix it, we should eventually get a patch.
Steady comrade.
2013 was the year of...
I have high(er) profile project on github. It started as opensource and latter turned to full-time job. Every week I get about 50 viagra emails, but also some job offers.

I would recommend everyone to use multiple emails. One personal for friends, one for open-source (perhaps commercial) activities and third provided by your employer. Hiding your email is not really long term solution.
I just love the brutal honesty expressed compactly. Full of useful information for all startup-founders. I'm sure many are currently making the exact same mistakes.
Almost anyone can sell anything to anyone, if the bargaining space is unrestrained.

"Would you work for me for a billion dollars a year and six months holiday?" Lots of people are going to say yes.

But are they the people you want? Do you have those sorts of resources to throw around? What about other perks of working with you to fill in the intermediate space?

Extreme example, granted. But the point is that there are things you can't solve, at least not in an immediately relevant sense, just by throwing money at them. Getting a developer's probably relatively easy. Getting one you'd want; at a price you can afford... knowing next to nothing about the technical area of the business yourself?

That may still be easier than selling something that doesn't exist, but it's not clear that it's orders of magnitude easier.
"Who really thought the NSA would try to subvert the cryptographic standards they pretend to create"

I first encountered speculation that this was the case in a textbook from 1986, in a chapter discussing encryption algorithms in wide use that were contributed to by the NSA.

"Who really thought they'd go to US service and hardware companies and ask them to implement backdoors"

The fascinating book The Puzzle Palace, from 1982, describes the precursors to the NSA setting up shop in telegraph offices and copying all traffic with the collusion of the new industry.

None of this is new, and none of it is in the least bit surprising.
I'm a big fan of Middleman too. Means I can use Haml, Sass, CoffeeScript etc. along with various Ruby view helpers to keep the templates tidy, then build the whole thing as part of the deployment process. Blog posts are in Markdown, which is even better, and the whole thing has live reloading. Very slick development process.

I wonder if it would be possible to build a CMS-alike on top of Middleman - something with a web interface to manage the content, edit templates and scripts etc., but using Middleman to generate a static site when changes are pushed. I guess it's another thing to add to the list…
What's difficult about this problem is that it's nobody's fault. There's no conspiracy behind this trend.

Well, it's not really any one person's fault who set everything up. But we can change it. There are tools to undo the "death by a million cuts" that make it this way.

I would say that the people who don't do these things are partially at fault for not attempting to fix a broken system.
Is it just me or does this seem to be a tortured argument - the US suggested that huawei might be implementing backdoors in their product out of the box, is not the same thing as the US security agency actively searching for exploits for the product. One is a collaborative effort to sell someone a defective product (could be fraud) the other is a adversarial effort that is a natural part of the security industry cycle.
I've noticed this before. They start sounding the trumpet about some dangers, after they already do them themselves - like when they said that cyber-attacks should be considered acts of war because they can put infrastructures in danger, basically months before they launched Stuxnet against Iran, or when they started warning about cyber-attacks putting banks in danger, and then we found out this year that NSA can access bank accounts and even modify them.

So next time when they warn about some other danger, I think we can assume they've already done it themselves to others. As for the "IP stealing" that they keep accusing China of, it may be true, but NSA probably steals information from other corporations more than anyone, since they have access to everything, and I'm not so sure China does, too. Most of the world's Internet traffic goes through US, and they have access to that, and as we've seen to the private networks of the world's largest service companies, too, like Google, Yahoo and so on. They also have access to most of Europe's data through UK/Sweden cables. China doesn't have any of this, and could only dream of such access.
Are there advantages of this over MPIR or GMP? (If I don't care about the different licenses).
The liar's punishment is they can trust no one
Agreed...but what I think improvement has to come from both sides, not just in the software, but in the content creators.

Is it so hard for people to learn Markdown? Not just geeks, but anyone? How hard is it compared to learning the myriad of word processing tools that you're expected to know by high school? How much time does it take to learn Markdown compared to the minutes per day that you spend trying to debug the hidden markup of Rich Text/WYSIWYG editors (e.g., why is this text have the same font-weight as the headings now)?

Once the average person learns how to disassociate content from presentation and how markup is the key thing, then static site generators, and the real power of simplicity, become obvious.
i use old mac and am looking to migrate to linux, now i can, markdown is important for my work and Uberwriter seem great.
If smartphones are maturing and being commoditized that's a good thing. I no longer upgrade my PC every 18 months; I'd quite like to stop doing that with my phone too.
Time to switch all your wireless devices to 802.11a to prevent signal leakage outside your home.
The consistently frustrating thing about all these 'revelations' is that the US government allegedly do it only for national security concerns where as other nations does it for corporate espionage.
I don't understand people's (not necessarily the OPs)utter obsession with philosophies. Especially in the startup world when being adaptive and surviving is key.

Lean Startup, great book, decent ideas, not the religion that it's become. I'm sick of hearing, hey do this the lean way and it'll "significantly improve" how well you do, after all it's the blueprint for success. Personally, I don't buy into that. Here's my view of success in reality: do whatever works (that's legal & up to your moral standards), be opportunistic and get lucky (yes, hard work and measuring metrics alone don't do crap).

MVP and idea validation are great concepts & helpful common language. In hindsight all "successful" startups seem to have a "pattern", but in all seriousness, there isn't a friggin algorithm for success in startups, otherwise algorithms would've replaced entrepreneurs a long time ago. (Although selling success patterns & software based on such to wantreprenuers is a great idea)

I'm sorry the Sergio's experience happened. It's easy force cause and effect onto a narrative. It very well could have been that the developer Sregio met was at a point in his life where he really just wanted to build something great and did end up building the awesomest thing. Instead of trying to dissect the reasons his startup failed, had luck been a little more favorable, we might be trying to analyze how it became a huge success.

Bottom line, my heartfelt congratulations to Sergio on being successful at stepping up, despite the risks and having a crack at it. If you had never stepped up and we all gave in to our negative biases and overanalyzed the crap out of everything before we started we'd still be polishing stone wheels.

I know how shitty it feels. But remember, hindsight is 20-20 and cause and effect should really be cause+luck and effect. Hope you're a better entrepreneur and will be back in the game soon.
static html websites
It's been my worry for a while that we will achieve the marxist workers utopia technically, where the vast majority of work is done by robot, but culturally we will be stuck with a small group of people enjoying the rewards of capital and technology and an enormous group of miserable poor fighting each other to get the rare chance to work.

Even if you think that such an outcome is 'deserved' for the capitalist and technologist in the short term, in the long term, as the divide grows sharper, I believe most people will come to see that there's something appalling about giving all of the wealth of the world to the descendants of the few and nothing to the rest. Already one family in the USA control more wealth than approximately half the population. And this will get starker.

Technology enhances power, and we are currently stuck with a system where much more worrying than the 'rich getting richer', the 'powerful get more powerful'. And the technological concentration of power in the hands of capital goes alongside the concentration of military and political power too. In the past, when capital got too far ahead of labour, there was always the spectacle of revolution to act as a last ditch moderator and equaliser, but the future will give those in power unprecedented access to surveillance, intelligence and military ability to allow the divide to grow bigger than ever before.

We need to find a way to share the amazing gains that technology brings with labour as well as with capital, and do so in a way that doesn't disincentivise the creation of new technology, and we need to start coming up with this really soon to have any chance of heading off a disaster. I think this is one of the most serious issues facing us as people who care about technology and the world.
I didn't mean no disrespect to the great pain that stalin inflicted.

And my view is based upon this thread in reddit /r/askhistorians which is managed by professional historians and is generally a reliable source for historical analysis :

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1sxp7k/russia...
His examples are exactly what's wrong with content management systems. They're too complex. I'm trying to build an insanely simple system at http://markdawn.com/ which emphasis content in a very strong way — content and only content.

I'm really working to make the interface as invisible as possible and mobile (iPhone) first. I hope I can get an API out in 2014, then it can be integrate with all Markdown editors and apps out there. It's cloud hosting for your Markdown files.
An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth
Is there a tool that will take a requirements.txt file and let you know whether all the packages in that file are already Python 3 compatible (by looking up corresponding packages on PyPI)?

If not, that tool seems worth writing, and then we can do a poll of some major production codebases and see whether Python 3 support is actually missing.

As for "Python 2.8": meh. I think we should just support the development of tulip / asyncio in Python 3.4 (see docs, this is looking awesome already: http://docs.python.org/3.4/library/asyncio.html), then use our blog platforms as Pythonistas to promote all the new async programming you can do using asyncio + Futures + yield from, port over important async frameworks like Tornado/Twisted, etc.

In that case, Python 3.4 becomes the Python release that gives you all the power / convenience of Python 2.x with a complete cleanup of callback spaghetti code as demonstrated in the "hello, world" co-routine example: http://docs.python.org/3.4/library/asyncio-task.html#example... -- I think async programming is mainstream enough, especially in web/mobile/API applications, that this will be a compelling draw for people.

I think the only thing GvR and crew got wrong is the timing -- it probably won't take 5 years from release for everyone to migrate to Python 3, but it will take more like 8-10. But it'll happen.