skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's no such thing as an unbiased report and you are being disingenuous here as the article is clearly a personal account. As such, it obviously wouldn't and shouldn't aim to be a broad survey on the pros and cons of the utility and ethics of various approaches. On the contrary, the aim is clearly to add new first-hand information to the public debate, which has hitherto been deliberately biased by extensive and coordinated efforts to repress that info.
Why must war be against countries? The types of activities being carried out in Yemen, Pakistan, etc, if state sanctioned, would be justification for war. Does the fact that Yemen and Pakistan can't police themselves internally enough to stop these activities make military retaliation unjustified? Would you feel better if we just declared war on Yemen and Pakistan?
Does journalism have a future?
His point is what proof does Google have that this was done by Expedia and not some competitor doing negative SEO?

This doesn't justify the spam, it just makes it much more difficult for Google to detect and penalize due to the mostly natural link profile that Expedia has earned legitimately by building a household brand.

If you had 99% signals saying this is a strong brand worth ranking high, or even only 85% of the signals are positive, and you have a few shady backlinks, wouldn't you give them the benefit of the doubt? Even if you wouldn't can you risk penalizing them without a smoking gun and proof of spam?

The only real question here is why Expedia even bothers with these efforts...Most big brands can get more than enough natural backlinks by launching new programs and services and having all the press pick up the story.
In practice, though, I've never seen a situation with a single server running more than a thousand kernel threads end well.

My experience may be limited, though.
To hell with "military objectives", what "national interest"?
Changing pixels on the screen (usually?) only matters because it let's us get at the results of the program. Even if the program is a video decoder + video, I don't care about pixels, I care about the picture. Pixels are just more implementation details.
The question is not whether the US military is murdering on a consistent, timely basis. It's a question of why the murdering is happening in the first place.

I have no power to change any aspect of the US military, but that doesn't mean I can't decry it as evil.
I'm not comfortable with microloans for a number of reasons, most importantly because I don't want to be a usurer. (forex: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/world/14microfinance.html)
It's not a book but rather a course. There is also a recommended reading list.

https://www.coursera.org/course/insidetheinternet
What are our objectives, exactly, and how do the UAVs support them?
Ah ok, it is just getting all of the info that a website could potentially get from your browser.
The world is more peaceful:

"The number of conflicts (both international and civil) fell from over 50 at the start of the 1990s to just over 30 in 2005 (definitions are obviously fluid; these are the ones used by scholars at the universities of Uppsala and British Columbia for a project called the “Human Security Report”). On their definitions, the number of international wars peaked during the 1970s and has been falling slowly since. The number of civil wars continued to rise until about 1990 and then fell precipitately. In total, the death toll in battle fell from over 200,000 a year in the mid-1980s to below 20,000 in the mid-2000s."

The Economist, 28 June 2008: http://www.economist.com/node/10564141
Radian is a scalable AngularJS framework
Python isn't a "pure" functional language, but it is general purpose, and it does accommodate functional programming (although it isn't strict).

You get the additional benefit of having well-developed numerical and graphing libraries (scipy, numpy, matplotlib, etc.)
> This surprises me because commenters here likely have higher IQs than most other public internet forums.

That should only surprise you if you assume higher IQs correlate to better spelling. Have you seen studies that indicate a correlation exists?
For the cost of a single Hellfire, many Afghanistan villages could've been given power, for the first time, to charge their phones, making it possible for them to communicate, to educate themselves.

A nice thought, but anyone who has spent time in rural AFG/PAK or Yemen/Somalia (where most of this is happening) will tell you that that is not what would happen. More typical, the power would be diverted to or ripped out by the local warlords to maintain their own power over the population - and most of the "regular" citizens go along with it because it meets cultural demands of the religiosity and tribalism that has been baked in for.

Liberalism (classic) can't be forced on a region or a group of people.
The U.S countryside is strewn with men and women fitting this description. I bet it would be even more true if foreign soldiers were occupying america and routinely bombing its citizens.
These soldiers are facing a huge personal price for the part they played in this war. The psychological impact of "just following orders" is huge and could damage them for the rest of their lives. We should respect veterans because of the personal cost, not because of the benefits (imagined or otherwise). You may see it a good vs evil, but I doubt that many of the victims do.
Proof Im leaving? Check the date on this post on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mogmartin/posts/10151730878862337

As for pinning blame on the author?

Hardly...

Im not debating anything he said, other than calling my name out.

Its not my place to deny OR corroborate any claims against a division that I NEVER worked for, of a company that I no longer work for! ;)
I just wished she questioned further. The more the better.
Somebody took a careful look at that set of predictions. It's a reasonably good record: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/12/pau...

Your apparent heuristic of "they said one wrong thing so we can ignore them" is faulty. It just encourages the typical pundit's trick of never saying anything. I'd much rather hear from people who state things clearly and are sometimes wrong.
this perplexes me, last time i checked extortion is a crime. If ethics were at play, wouldn't you be duty bound to press charges and keep a criminal from extorting others?
I thought this would be an anti-drone confession, but in reality it looks mostly manipulative.

Most of it is the impact of using drones on drone operators and the soldiers who have them on THEIR side. How about the impact of drones to the OTHER side? You know, the one under attack? Even giving them both 50% share of the article is a disservice to them, and here it's even worse.
How about them breaking international law? How about them being used for murder operations in a no-war situation? How about them used already and even more down the road against a country's own citizens?

Another part of the article is about how they have low fidelity screens and radars and such. As if, if they had better tech (which they'll get down the road) all would be well with them.

Not much touching the actual ethical, human, political and diplomatic implications of their use.
TAO: the NSA's hacker plumber-wunderkinds
Thats absolutely true - Google do have the power, and often use it, to make human decisions on the quality of websites and often ban those that break they TOS. As for whether Google should take action against any particular website, its not for me to say.
So now my microSD card has as CPU 100x faster than my first computer (C64), and access to storage at least 10^5 times larger. Amazing.
Would you feel better if we just declared war on Yemen and Pakistan?

Yes! I for one would love to live in a nation that required public informed consent, after public debate of public information, by elected representatives of an informed public, before killing people on the other side of the globe.
Burke's "Connections" series is free online: (http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL734BAB2B716CC777)

You may also be interested in the forces in society which make technological progress possible — and which kill it. Mariana Mazzucato wrote _The Entrepreneurial State_. David F. Noble wrote a couple books.

Also anthropologist David Graeber's essay _Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit_ (http://www.thebaffler.com/past/of_flying_cars) ; you may prefer his talk "On Bureaucratic Technologies & the Future as Dream-Time" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QgSJkk1tng). His video makes the interesting point that since the 1970's, we've focussed on bureaucratic technologies like IT (we fill out forms on the net all day), instead of more imaginative technologies. To compensate, we're good at merely simulating imaginative technologies, like in movies.
NSA reportedly intercepting laptops purchased online to install spy malware
NSA reportedly intercepting laptops purchased online to install spy malware
He hasn't been charged or arrested per se, but he quite regularly talks about other forms of intimidation he undergoes. Laptops confiscated, apartment broken into, phone calls, border detainments.

Also, there were two other reporters who filed that story, and it is showing up in a reputable journalistic source - Der Spiegel. I am inclined to believe it, given the very specific details they have highlighted about TAO and ANT.
thanks to you and @alpeper, i appreciate you reserving judgement i used to be embarrassed of my poor maths skills, but now i do not have the time for silly feel.
seems a little far fetched... but i'll stick to building my own machine from now on thanks :/
Why did you even bother making this comment?

As an aside, I don't see how needless typing is involved. s-tab will still go to the "source" folder.
The Launch Weeks Ahead at Parabolic Arc
Kiva loans have a negative expected (financial) return with no possibility of making back your money in real terms - you cannot, by definition, "invest" in a Kiva loan. Kiva is a fun place to do some good. I do not think, however, that it is any kind of training for investing.
I'd like to have more control over the Javascript runtime in the browser. Defeating this identification trick is only one of the reasons.

Suppose you had a list of options and could selectively disable, for example, monitoring of mouse movements on one site, or ajax on another. And for this in particular, something that would feed the site random values from a particular range for fonts installed, plugins installed, screen size and other such information.

Using that data in development would still work because 99% would keep the default "true" values, and the few geeks who would change them would get what they should/would expect on sites that rely on those values. But everyone should have the power to control what info they're giving out, and what Javascript is allowed to do on their own device.
locally we can expect a positive correlation exists. don't see too many dull kids winning selling bees
>Why must war be against countries?

Because that's it's very definition.

>The types of activities being carried out in Yemen, Pakistan, etc, if state sanctioned, would be justification for war.

Activities like weddings, hospital operations and schooling?

>Does the fact that Yemen and Pakistan can't police themselves internally enough to stop these activities make military retaliation unjustified?

Is there anything concrete about those activities except "person X met person Y there, and person X is a terrorist" type of "intel", filtered and produced by various military agencies?

Or, let me put it another way: would it be ok to bomb some part of Oklahoma to kill Timothy McVey? Or are third world lives cheaper?
Everything old is new again. The 'Five Paragraph Essay' is not a 'Decker Grid', nor is it new. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_paragraph_essay
BIT: a programming language that represents all data like C strings
That is a separate and more targeted activity. It is very different from what the title here suggests; which is that these companies add backdoors to their hardware.
I agree with most of what Kalleth says. However there is just no way that you can trust a North American company to keep your passwords safe, especially when the code is closed source.

I've built https://elipsis.io and if you are tech savvy I recommend that you host your own service. Don't do it on a VM but on a dedicated box.

An alternative is to use use https://www.clipperz.com/ since they are also open source but I really hate their user interface.

Like @kalleth said, you can also use keepassx with dropbox.
> The two primary audio APIs available on Windows have very high latency, to the point where they make tracking with effects virtually unusable.

My understanding is that pro audio software on Windows generally bypasses the Microsoft audio stack. Instead, they use ASIO to access the sound card directly.

Thus, the Windows ecosystem is not at a disadvantage when it comes to audio latency.
Yeah, Microsoft's ORM solutions are pretty horrible but then... so is NHibernate. But NHibernate was better and five years earlier, so it was really hard to see why Microsoft even bothered with EF.

Only ORM I use is the wonderful Dapper.NET.
The Year in Crypto (Nadia Heninger, DJB, Tanja Lange)
Show HN: WebRTC Photostrip in the browser
So how are they putting proposal to buyback shares worth of $150B when Apple only has $146 cash pile? Pull everything from the overseas or just borrow from another financial institute? If they opt for borrowing route then is this a good thing or a bad thing for investors? I mean long-term investors. Just curious.
This article could just as well describing how war is conducted since we switched from all cotton to cotton-polyester blend utilities uniforms. It lets the reader assume that in some way drones are worse than non-drone warfare, without advancing any argument in that direction.
December 25th, santa flies across the sky at midnight. I loved this game.
USA and its allies are occupying two countries and they are fighting the local resistance. The occupied countries never threatened the offensive forces. Does it reminde you of anything similar that happened 70 years ago? And btw when was the last time that USA was in a war as a defensive force? When did the American soldiers defend their homes and their American soil?
Another bug: one can rapidly tap the documentation boxes, launching multiple copies of the docs, each needing to be dismissed separately. Worse still, once the final copy is dismissed, the documentation launcher boxes are misplaced.

One can do this with the editors, too, and eventually one is lacking the "Done" link to dismiss the editor, forcing the user to kill Raskell and restart it.

Thank you for creating this, though!

edit: here's one more...open a file like Spices, then pless play, then close the file by pressing the greyed-out "Done". The play window will not be dismissed, but the file window will be.
Except Apples app store (or iTunes store?) isn't a browser window!
airplanes are vastly more expensive to fly in terms of monitary risk and investment, and possible personel loss.
32 Beautiful Moments When Humans Chose Compassion Over Violence
Any links to substantiate the rumor that jake pulled a talk? More info please?
>Why is is okay to repeatedly kill the wrong person in another country? Can you imagine if that happened even just once in the USA?

Third world lives are cheaper. They are dark skinned and have different customs. They also dont value democracy. It serves them right.

/s
You say your questions are genuine, and then you obtusely interpret the answers you're given to suit the attitude you wish to project on your interlocutors. You could've saved everybody a lot of time if you didn't lie about your defensive intentions from the start.
Thanks for the thoughtful response! You bring up some good points - I hadn't considered the weight of the charger.
At the moment, Python is the language I am most proficient with and my go-to language. I definitely appreciate the functional aspects that it has incorporated (list/dictionary comprehensions, functions like map, zip, reduce, and anonymous functions with lambda.) In 2014, however, I'm planning to gain some proficiency with something close to a Haskell, OCaml, or Lisp dialect. Hoping to hear back from someone who has done some "heavy lifting" with one of those...
People have tried submitting it a handful of times through the mentions of other sites, but they all get censored from the frontpage.
> "I think that doing something to protect your society from evil must count for something. Do you really see it as black and white as you describe it?"

There is something ironic in there.
I had some similar experiences in OCaml recently, so I might be able to shed some light on this. I found that that when compiling code, the result was often one of three things: one, type checking failed (or I got an inexhaustive match warning), and I got a useful message, two, it worked, and three, it failed but the problem was fairly obvious when I saw it. Functional programming, for me, is a fairly direct way of expressing the algorithm in my head, so the basic idea tends to be much more fully fleshed out the first time I write it down in code.

Sometimes I got a type error from some bizzare syntax mistake, usually failing to correctly delineate an expression, and sometimes the algorithm in my head was just wrong and I had to fix it. At that point, the cycle starts over, and the same benefits I mentioned above help in debugging. FWIW, the problem I was working on was fairly simple, but novel. I was a very happy camper this Christmas, working with OCaml, despite its syntax.

Out of curiosity, what language do you do your "math and parsing" in? OCaml might be a good fit.
They didn't use any JavaScript to get this information. Most of it is sent by your browser in the request headers, and the font detection used Flash and Java. They could have used JavaScript to detect fonts as a fall-back when Java and Flash are disabled, but it's relatively complicated to do so (requiring you to know the rendered width of a string for each font you're trying to detect), and it was not included in this example.

Sending incorrect information for Java or Flash fonts is an interesting idea, and likely would not affect user experience, as non-standard fonts are often served with the animations. Sending the wrong screen size might get you a mobile site served when you were wanting non-mobile or vice-versa. IP address and ISP are valuable bits of identifying information as well, and those are more difficult to address without using a proxy. But I would bet that randomizing your screen size for each request would break most fingerprinting code, since that would be assumed to be static.
All this criticism against drones. Drones are awesome.

I've worked on the ground in Afghanistan on a Mechanized Infantry Platoon. There's nothing more calming than hearing the buzz from a drone keeping an eye on the terrain from above and reporting to the TACP while you're on the ground. We where saved multiple times from running into ambushes and IEDs thanks to drones. Sure, Apache's could do the job as-well, but when they run out of fuel, and they do more often than a drone, you're on your own.

Sure, that's another mission from flying a drone to a compound in Pakistan and dropping some explosive on it, that I can not comment on since I have not seen the Intel behind those missions.
>We used to napalm people. Lots of "wrong people" get killed in all wars. Flying in B-17's and B-52's was pretty ugly too, we just couldn't record the carnage on video. There's probably never going to be a war where innocent people aren't killed. Precision weapons probably kill fewer people but if you want a "clean" war, I don't think that's possible.

I don't war a war at all. I want sovereign countries to be left to their own.

If there is a cross-country attack, then it can be handled either by the country's police (if it was by individuals acting on their own) or by a proper war operation.
But at the same time we can't go to war with a group that consists of very weakly affiliated individuals who don't actively threaten us at home.

The concept that Al Qaeda is a homogeneous group with a structured hierarchy ("#3 Al-qaeda leader killed") that threatens America has mostly been manufactured by the military and media:

http://c.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/reawakening-libert...
The data on both are pretty much impossible to find. Having looked at a number of civilian think tank studies into the issue, even if you come up with a statistic like 3 militants killed per civilian (as reported in some studies) it is very hard to say how that compares to other methods, or if alternatives even exist. Most of the comparisons in support of drone ops are to the wholesale target:CIVCAS for the entire ground forces, which of course is inflated by actual engagements with enemies.

I think we should look at this in terms of whether or not we should even be operating with outright force in the hinterlands of Yemen or AfPak, where there are very high concentrations of civilians. "Kinetic operations" with high explosives are, in my opinion, highly inappropriate for dealing with insurgents hidden among the population. Our intelligence isn't good enough, and is often gleaned from huge leaps of SIGINT logic, leading to entire families being killed over nameless metadata correlations to suspected terrorist nodes.
> In what universe is striking a convoy carrying a suspect but also carrying innocent (or even if not innocent, not deserving a death sentence) civilians, deemed acceptable?

During war, as accepted by every politician going back to the dawn of civilization. On the plus side, for the past several hundred years, we've started to make efforts to minimize.

> there are no qualms around civilian collateral damage.

Really? That seems to be all anyone is talking about when it comes to drones. From the perspective of anyone from more than a century ago, we're obsessed with it (and conversely, from the perspective of today, Dresden and Hiroshima would be war crimes.)
Probably because the author knew libRocket better than unity3d or cocos2dx
NSA Toolbox.
Background, Argentina is having a record hot summer right now and the electricity companies have been unable to keep up with demand. I have heard speculation that this is due varyingly to mismanagement/incompetence and rent-seeking behavior on the part of the electric companies (some of which are foreign)
One question I have in mind: Will Safari be able to keep up, or will Apple become complacent because they're satisfied with being the best option for OS X? (Which they can achieve by being insiders on that OS, and not by being more awesome.)
> The feed is so pixelated,...

I read that but farther down I read "but I watched parts of the conflict in great detail on a screen for days on end." seems to contradict. I understand what's meant, pixels and detail are different, but it's a poor choice of phrasing.