skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Those larger tech companies you mention are on the other side of the fence when it comes to surveillance and privacy.

And I'm not even talking about the accusations of complicity (or have we forgotten that was the opening salvo in the NSA revelations, followed by a boilerplate non-denial and an eery silence?), but the fact that these companies regularly violate privacy laws (at least outside the US) and lobby against privacy protection.

Especially for me as a non-American, the US government and US tech companies like Google and Facebook are two sides of the same coin.

Of course they (or their employees) don't get involved, and they shouldn't. That would be like Elsevier getting involved with supporting Open Access.
How to cancel a Google+ account (2011)
I wasn't contesting the original article's workflow (which is rather like the one I use most often), but picking one of the hotly contested battlegrounds of the Git Workflow Wars – To Rebase or Not To Rebase – and using it as an example.
Incompatible? Do you mean with libav?
A general comment on the nature of activism and the political process: one of the goals of activism in the political area is to move both public sentiment (awareness / consciousness raising) and public policy. Now, one of the things to realize here is that this is a never-ending back and forth process, and sometimes the same battles are fought in different forms over time - and this can be incredibly frustrating unless you realize that this is the case. It's easy to believe that it's like fixing a bug; once you've patched policy/changed the mind of society on a topic, that it's fixed forever. Not so. New forms of an idea pick up; your favored policy falls out of favor due to changing events/other beliefs/ideologies/cultures that become popular; a new generation is born that has none of the bad experiences you had, and can have bad policies foisted on them; zombie ideas rise from the grave once more.

This can be disheartening, frustrating, even despondency-inducing. I've been there more than once, and activists across the world have probably been experiencing this since the first protest happened outside the first town hall.

For those stating "it will do nothing" - it can sometimes be hard to see the distant / second-order effects, but they do matter. Registering dissent matters. Now, I would add that there is a threshold beyond which activism loses its potency (for a variety of possible reasons) and you need to go to the next level (everything from non-violent resistance to revolutions.) In this particular case, we're nowhere near that, and by the looks of it, the tide is firmly against the anti-surveillance bloc, so pile on.

Finally, I'd say that the idea that the arc of the universe bends towards justice is wrong; people bend societies towards it.
Android-based Google Glass competitor on track for 2014 release
What every game developer needs to know about Story (2005)
Do you talk to your team members for 8 hours a day? I don't. I may catch up with them in the morning for something, perhaps go out for a coffee, or do some pairing when debugging etc but 80-90% of the time I am working on something alone. I can work far more efficiently in a private space. I cannot concentrate when I know that there are people around me all day who can interrupt me or distract me at any point in time without warning.
These are interesting hacks and there should probably be some ways to help users avoid being deceived in this way.

However they don't have much to do with the introduction of the vibrate API. What this assumes is that the phone vibration is something the user should or could generally rely on to distinguish between genuine system functions and fakes. That's just not true for many reasons.
Ok. Peace!
Tuna salad is the least bad of the problems

Really
Target Says Up to 110 Million Potential Victims in Data Breach
> The government could have easily paid 10% of what they did to a tech start-up

And when it failed, the government would be criticized for hiring a start-up to do a job that was obviously so enormous that only a big established contractor could take it on. And rightfully so.
Admittedly 30 Hz sucks and the colors are not up to par with an IPS panel, but overall the Seiki offer a great deal for the price.

The brightness is great (only terrible if you like it really low), the 112 pixel density is higher than on 2x23 inch monitors, for example;

The colors can be calibrated from within the OS so it's not as much of an issue;

And as the black levels - if you found them horrible, it may be because you were using an nVidia card on Windows - the drivers are set to limited RGB range (because it thinks it's connected to a TV), giving you horrible black levels (and colors).

I spent a month wondering why my brand new monitors look like crap when every review said they were the best bang for the buck :-D.

Or maybe you just got a bad panel and/or the new revisions were improved...
Google Maps Mistakenly Identifies Berlin Square as Adolf Hitler Platz
Hands-on with Toshiba’s high-resolution 4K laptops (and more)
>US citizens are only 313 millions and the US law protects you against surveillance.

This actually isn't true. The USA PATRIOT Act, Title II expanded surveillance procedures greatly so that pretty much anything is covered under it, it is so broad and encompassing. Someone on TV even quoted from it that it said it allowed surveillance for "any reason whatsoever" or some words to that effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_PATRIOT_Act
How about a look into how much more money you spend by going out to lunch everyday?
How the College Bubble Will Pop
Obama to announce NSA decisions on Jan. 17
Court to Yelp: Reveal names of negative reviewers
Chrome is probably using a subset that represents 2% of FFMpeg. I'd guess they have thoroughly audited the code paths that are actually used to decode about 10 media different that chrome supports.

For instance, one fix mentioned was a fix the demuxer for .4xm files. 4xm is a proprietary container format for a now defunct company. Chrome would never have to worry about this bug, because it doesn't need to support playback of .4xm files.
I call my version of this function 'enter'.
So their about page tells us they are douchebags that like to mess with epileptics.
People v. Carboni - picking up your spouse's prescription is a crime
This is stated to be a puzzle. But, when does this actually get used? Are there use cases of bit manipulation in JS? I've never understood when using bit operators could be necessary or even useful. Of course, I'm speaking from my experience building web apps; ruby, python, js, php, etc. I don't have much other programming experience
I think the "leaving the windows open" argument is wrong. As far as what's right and wrong is concerned, I should be able to leave the door wide open if I so choose. It's my car. If someone comes along and steals my car, however, I would call that wrong and the thief is at fault. Obviously, I don't want my car stolen (because I need its utility) so I take preventative insurance measures to avoid the potential burden of losing use of my car, talking to the police, and hunting down the thief. But, imho, that's my choice and I don't think I'm actively causing others harm by leaving my windows down.

To add some genderism to the fire: if a woman choses to wear clothes that some would consider "provocative" is it her fault that she gets raped because she was inviting undue male attention? Is she simply "asking for it"? I don't think so. And I think it's a human's right to freely express him or herself as s/he choses. If I want to leave the window to my car down, that's up to me, the owner of the car. If someone steals my car, that's their fault.

As far as software security is concerned, I think there are definitely reasonable and unreasonable steps that can be taken in the development of it. But I don't expect the developers of the software I use to be on the edge of their seats watching the internet for the every single security exploit that pops up so that they can instantly apply a patch. I do expect them to take reasonable steps to reasonably secure the software, and when something becomes obvious, to deal with it. When I entrust the storage of my personal details with a website, I have certain expectations about how that information is handled, but I don't expect it to be 100% impervious to attack.

I also think there lies some responsibility with the user to choose to use software they trust (trust being a spectrum, not a binary distinction). For example, I wouldn't expect a lot of security from some kind of seedy porn software, and would actually expect the software to actively compromise my system. If I chose to install such software, I think I'd be partly liable for installing something that is obviously insecure. But I have different expectations from my banking software. I think those expectations, which are relative to particular industries and markets, and which are fuzzy and ill-defined, are partly a user's responsibility (but not wholly... I still expect my bank to reimburse me if someone breaks into their database and steals my money).

My point is that liability in software security, to me, is a fluctuating grey area, and that the areas are defined differently for different kinds of software which should, at least partially, be apparent (and avoidable) to the end user.

I'm not trying to defend Snapchat or say that you should leave your car unlocked, just that I think these kinds of issues are not black and white, nor that one party is 100% wrong and another party is 100% right.
Is the Universe Made of Math? [Excerpt]
Really interesting, though it may really vary for most based on what skill sets their immediate relations have.
Thank you. This is very considerate

Coming from a culture where no, people don't eat at their desks, this is really weird for me.

I go and have lunch somewhere (and this has not been a problem in any country I worked). If I really can't go I starve, or go later.

This would be only an exception in "We're saving Apollo 13" kind of stuff.
Preservation of knowledge itself is insufficient to prevent things from being lost.

It's something the US is dealing with, particularly in military and aerospace. You stop doing something long enough and, despite having schematics and documentation around, nobody is left that actually knows how to do it. See for example the retirement of the Space Shuttle and the resumption of classical capsule-based spacecraft, we're still in the process of re-learning a lot of knowledge we already gained during the Apollo era. And that's merely a few decades.

Not to mention "dark ages" aren't necessarily the loss of knowledge, but rather the loss of governance. Neither China or Europe ever lost the ability to build roads, but yet the infrastructure deteriorated and was not replaced. This suggests economic, political, and/or religious causes, not the loss of knowledge.

I don't think we've figured this governance thing out to the point where we're safe from regressing to a state where public infrastructure breaks down in a massive way.
Let me know what you find. Still haven't been able to figure out the pattern for why some folks have been able to reproduce this and others can't.
I'm Not a spokesperson for ZAGG. But I love this keyboard
Online Banking Sites Suck
Show HN: Hacker News is much more enjoyable via Gizoogle
Would the police fine a convertible owner who leaves the top down? interesting concept and incredibly flawed.
Always? Why do so many people insist in absolute work/life separation? It certainly hasn't been true throughout history. If you have to draw these clear lines it really just indicates an unhealthy understanding of the purpose of work, family, or both.
>Aaron, on the other hand, entered a networking closet, configured his computer in such a way to bypass the network's security/authorization protocols and then violated the terms of service of JSTOR to download all their content.

If you think that's all Aaron did with his life, or that this is what his life should be defined by, then that is a tragedy.
> They're concerned with they want Americans to think about surveillance. That's markedly different from caring what we actually think.

Having a desire for somone to think a particular thing about a subject is exactly caring what they actually think about a subject.

I think the distinction you want to draw is more between being influenced by what Americans actually think, on the one hand, and attempting to influence what Americans actually think, on the other.

But then, again, the only rational reason for members of Congress to try to influence what Americans think is because they think that what Americans actually think impacts the prospects for their political agenda, e.g., by influencing their likelihood of getting elected or influencing the behavior of other members of Congress or the President (perhaps by influencing those actors electoral prospects), so, really, I think that even that distinction is somewhat false. The reason politicians want to shape opinions is because politicians actions do respond to opinions.
I was on their beta for awhile, and it was really cool until they started the later versions that were mainly focused on selling electronics - seemed like there was never anything available - anytime I opened it it was just a list of sold items. Hopefully this public launch changes that, but I will say their emails to me were always interesting enough that I never unsubscribed!
Ruby 2.1.0 is out.
Its always great stepping out for lunches. Welcome to the real world!
It could also do the exact opposite, especially when contact is rare.
How does this compare to the latest HHVM?
Do you have a link that doesn't require a subscription?
Manage your firewall with Gufw
Would you take that contract? I sure wouldn't. Something this big, and this failure prone, and which is being used as a political football besides...no amount of money is worth that.
If the sound of a bag rustling sends you into such a tailspin what does an overheard conversation do?

At some point you simply have to develop the power of concentration. Try focusing intently on your work rather than focusing intently on your surroundings.
> Why aren't you using a terminal that can handle UTF-8?

Perhaps they're still on RHEL5. Many of us are.
Well, I have only worked at two places in my career so far but this kind of thing has worked out extremely well in both cases.
I pack a lunch nearly every day. I tend to get hungry 30-45 minutes before most of my coworkers, and I eat lunch at my desk because I don't want to sit by myself in the empty break room. Off topic: the amount of money I save by packing a lunch versus going out is awesome. I also tend to eat a bit healthier as a result.
"reajure" sounds like it is about asking for something to be done twice ("re-" + "adjure".)
>And if it failed

Fixed that for you.
Huh? He said money and family/friends, not work and family/friends.
This company sold Google a quantum computer. Here’s how it works.
That might be the case for some teams, but a lot of NFL teams have trouble consistently selling out the smaller stadiums that they already have.
A Google programmer blew off a $500k job offer because he is already making $3M
A good entry on this, for those interested: http://blog.pkh.me/p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html
>"The positive response has encouraged us to plan a crowd funding campaign around a substantially simplified (think “all in one PC” with a battery) case design"

It sounds like the design of the case will be changed if these are going to hit larger scale production, so I don't think that's going to be an issue. It will still likely be expensive though, unless you do a very large run of them.
The Linux Graphics Stack [2012]
Sorry for the noob question, but: does this take the place of Hiccup? Or, would one use both at the same time?
If GPL people are concerned about restrictive licenses why not use BSD or MIT which contain fewer restrictions?
My delivery is: "I like telling UDP jokes because I don't care if you don't get them" then immediately walk away.
Excellent question, and probably the most popular we're getting. We're currently having discussions with a lot of retailers and the ones that react do so positively. Surely there will be some backlash from some of the big players and we'll remove support for them if they explicitly ask us to. We expect that much.

Then again here's a quote from a merchant that reached out just this morning: "How do we get our store added, what you guys are doing is rad! [redacted] I've actually already been talking to a handful of app photo app developers about integrating our store into their app as a way to create incremental revenue -- I'd love to be able to have them use your API instead of having to build something ourselves."

If they're around maybe they can publicly contribute to the discussion.
I'm fine with people making polar switches but there's no need to write about it as though the thing they switched from is the "wrong" choice. Can't it just be wrong sometimes and/or for some people? Of course, "Sometimes Going Back - A Week of Sometimes Not Eating Lunch at My Desk " doesn't play as well as the original title..
Some things in the constitution apply only to citizens, most don't. When it says person, it means person, not citizen. Educating people that this prevalent view is false would already go a long way.
This is really cool.

eCommerce on mobile is still way too much work and I could see people building marketplaces or purchase-enabled wishlisting/product bookmarking apps really quickly with this.
Very interesting. The scraping aspect of it scares me a bit if they don't stay up on the various changes a retailer might make to their store. But all in all, this could shake some shit up.
I'd be willing to try for 20M.

Worth a shot.
I can imagine the Onion article - "Man Leaves Dark Building During Day, Is Surprised He Likes Sunshine"
I think he is referring to family businesses throughout history.
> Ownership of the private key(s) is equivalent to ownership of the funds.

You don't hold the private keys when using a third party service, including this insured storage.
A company focused on enabling users to report their own locations... knows the locations of their users.

I am not surprised.
> Ownership of the private key(s) is equivalent to ownership of the funds.

You don't hold the private keys when using a third party service.
I rather think that depends on what technological expertise the the start-up brought to bear on the problem.

I understand it's chic to think that Healtcare.gov is "just another website", especially among a certain crowd who think that all development is web development, and best done on a MacbookPro using RoR/node/<functional language Y>/Go + <insert fad-of-the-day JS framework here>. It's a mistaken impression, though, because we aren't talking about some from-scratch system. We're talking about communication with and between a lot of legacy systems requiring what is almost certainly a frankenstein-like nightmare of patchwork APIs that dive into programming languages and styles hipster 20-somethings at hot S.F. Start Up X wouldn't understand because it's beneath them (I'm exaggerating and generalizing here for effect--this isn't to impugn all 20-somethings, start-ups, etc.).

Honestly I don't think there is any contractor who could have pulled this project off flawlessly, or even very much better than the group of misfits who did Healthcare.gov did, just because of the sheer complexity of the project compounded with the increased politically-motivated interference from government officials that comes with such high-profile projects.
Thanks a lot! This appears to be an issue with the Frida build system and the Linux buildbot slave. We're investigating and will hopefully have a bugfix release out in the next few hours.

Hope we'll get the pip issue sorted in the near future, need to do some more research into what's possible when not relying on eggs for binary releases (ran into issues when we tried to use bdist_dumb, so we postponed it for later).
How Twitter Helps My Writing Skills
Nyan cat bookmarklet helps you destroy a webpage
Accenture is Arthur Andersen, and they've got a long history of extracting maximum value for shareholders from government contracts (state and local).

EDIT:

Arthur Andersen spawned Andersen Consulting spawned Arthur Anderson Business Consulting spawned Accenture. Some of AABC splintered off and joined Hitachi Consulting, some went elsewhere.

The history of computer consulting is varied, interesting, and tragic.
I'm surprised he doesn't mention what I think is the #1 reason for going out for lunch: spending time with your coworkers that is not necessarily work focused.

All the reasons he gives seem pretty weak: if you need a break, you can step outside the office for a walk or a coffee or even go read on a bench for 20mn without the activity being necessarily lunch.

Eating lunch at your desk has benefits, such as allowing you to go home sooner or doing things at your computer that are not work related but which you enjoy doing (e.g. reading HN).

The moral here is not "Always eat at your desk" or "Always eat outside" but "Don't always do the same thing".
Same here. Perhaps it's my exceptionally wry (and inappropriate sense of humor), but I rather wish it were cloaca. Just imagine the logo opportunities!

A startled pigeon, looking over its wing, tail up in the air, clearly exposing its backside...

...this is why I'd never get hired as a marketer or designer, never mind the fact I'm no artist.
The only time I find myself using bit manipulations in production code is when I am writing a library that uses an int to represent a set of option flags (where each bit is a boolean flag). It's pretty common in C libs to define some constants like

int FLAG_1 = 1;
int FLAG_2 = 2;
int FLAG_3 = 4; //These would actually probably be formatted like (1 << N)
...

And then pass in your options to a function like f(... FLAG_1+FLAG_2) so you can have an optional number of flags in a single argument.
This shouldn't even be about politics. Amazon serves millions of people a day and their site works perfectly (even if it is horribly designed) every time I've tried to use it. Healthcare.gov is used once by everyone (that needs coverage) to pick a plan and pay for it.

People are fucking dying because they can't get coverage.
This must be one of the reasons it seems like there's a new update to VLC every time I launch it...
Like any fashionable word, "growth hack" is being assigned to all sorts of things that it wasn't meant to mean. This article attacks those other things, and not the core of what 'growth hacking' means.

A code hacker is doing things creatively and differently and coming up with a unique way to accomplish something that is difficult to accomplish following standard protocols like 'coder' would. A growth hacker is the same thing -- but for marketing and/or sales. By definition, once someone else shows the way, it's no longer hacking to do it; but the first one to do it, was a hacker.

I would argue that airBnb's cross-posting was hacking. The first person to some up with "give away the razor and charge for the blades" was a growth hacker even though that term didn't exist for another 100 years. Plain and simple, new and innovative ways to build brand awareness or increase sales is growth hacking.

Call it marketing hacking if it makes you feel better.

Edit: to add to my point: why use the term hacker at all if growth hacker is BS term for a certain kind of marketer, isn't 'hacker' a BS term for a certain kind of technologist? /rant
Depositing your money in a bank...
>
Basically, it seems like the government sourcing process has shrunk the pool of potential bidders too small to provide a properly competitive marketplace for software for USGov customers.

And don't think for a second that this is unintentional.
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