skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This sort of scroll behaviour is supposed to be local to the client, not to the website. This sort of stuff breaks accessibility - if the user likes it, the browser (most likely an extension) can implement it.
I don't understand this article. Unless its author can predict the future, or knows a lot of things that nobody else in the public knows, they can't possibly draw conclusions about exactly what Snowden did.

Snowden himself has made it clear that he took documents from NSA en masse, far more documents than have ever been disclosed in the media.

How many of those documents have been released to the press? We don't know. But what we do know is, of the documents he gave to the press, only a subset have been released. In Greenwald's case, that's because it was decided that a titrating drip of stories would keep the narrative alive in the media and, not coincidentally, better serve the interests of the publications releasing the stories. In other cases it's because journalists have resisted full disclosure out of concern for its propriety.

What's been done with the zero to a billion documents that haven't been provided to the press? Who knows? Have they been encrypted and stuck on the Internet as an insurance policy? Have they been provided to Russian intelligence? Were they stolen from Snowden in an embassy in China? Are they vouchsafed with his acquaintances? Does Wikileaks have them? Nobody knows. Including the author of this blog post.

There are places those documents can go that will alter history's judgement on Snowden. For instance, if he offered wholesale access to US intelligence secrets to Russia, a country which painstakingly and overtly spies on its own citizens and routinely kills journalists (Barton Gellman is not in hiding in the US, for what it's worth), there aren't going to be any adoring spreads about him my grandkid's history book.

You can tell by the questions that jump to my mind what I generally think of Snowden. But nobody who (a) is skeptical of Snowden and (b) posts on Internet message boards could possibly be unaware of how out-on-a-limb that impression must be, because Snowden skepticism invariably whips up a frothy swell of criticism. Unfortunately, the author of this blog post doesn't seem to have the benefit of a critical readership; it's clear that he hasn't actually thought through what's happened.
Weekend hack project. Source is here. https://github.com/owainlewis/hackerlinks
40K Designers Taking The Lead With Webydo, Find Out Why
> 4. qwerty

> 23. azerty

Thank you france.
He may be mining Bitcoin. If you're able to issue Facebook stock, let's talk :)
Do you have a way to tell how many of your paid installs are legitimate?
"If the govt said if you get even 1 cent of grant money from us, you can't patent your drug. Well .. few researchers will take that money"

I doubt that -- researchers do not have many sources of funding available to them. Grant money basically dictates the direction of research in the majority of fields. Grants come with all kinds of annoying strings attached (in grad school, I was once paid from a grant that specifically forbade us from purchasing desktops or laptops; we could, however, purchase rack mounted servers) and researchers still take them.

What you need to understand is that researchers are usually more interested in padding their CVs than in getting patent rights. A professor trying to get tenure needs to bring in grant money, publish papers, and graduate some PhD students (who in turn need to be publish papers, etc.). There is not much room for turning down funding, just like there is not much room for pursuing lines of work that the government is not willing to fund.
I thought "lies..." was unambiguous. My bad. Next time... well, no jokes next time.
"In this sense programming is like writing a poetry - it must emerge and form in ones mind before it could be written down. The best poetry is written exactly like this - committed to the paper suddenly as it emerges, without any later changes."

Are you sure that's true? Can you cite some examples?

Lisp is famous for its interactivity: the read-eval-print loop, SLIME, Lisp Machines, Emacs, etc. Avid Lisp hackers even edit code inside of running systems. The "bottom-up approach" to programming (as advocated by Paul Graham) is almost the opposite of what you describe, isn't it?

Generally speaking, I think both programmers and poets work in a dynamic way with their texts: moving stuff around, seeing what works, doing experiments, asking others, etc.

That's one reason why Knuth's idea of literate programming seems so academic and remote for most programmers: how are you going to keep all of that text up-to-date when you start refactoring?
How did you manage to compete against google analytics (which does conversion tracking and a lot more, for free) ? Conversion tracking is something that i thought became a dead market at least 5 years ago (at that time i developed an analytics and conversion tracking solution myself).
> netbsd is not "virtual insignifance"

Who uses NetBSD?
I'm sorry to break the eco-parade, but this just doesn't fit with my work. At all.

I wouldn't put my company's documents in the cloud. Google, are you kidding me? Then again most of my work is security orientated. So my experience might differ.

Second, as a developer, I wouldn't give-up pen and paper for doing mathematics and for doodling algorithms and attempts at solving daily problems. I tried to do it on the computer a lot of times but it's just a waste of time and I always end-up focusing on the tools rather on the problem at hand.

From my experience these paperless speeches come from SUV drivers that read about it in this months Corporate Magazine's issue.

Now, unleash the downvotes!
While that's the theory, it hasn't actually worked in practice on most distros for many years -- rather than having "core stuff in root, extra stuff in /usr", we now have "core stuff in initrd, some extra stuff in root, different extra stuff in /usr, with different distros splitting the latter two up differently", the usr merge actually brings us back to the original clean design of having one "core" place and one "extras" place
A stupid app, called That's Not Funny, that I wrote in 2008 or so to teach myself Android programming (when v1 came out) continues to make around $40 a month from ads.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vbrad.andr...

I wrote it, released it, then to my surprise, it got a pretty massive amount of downloads. Over the years, I've updated it to new versions of the OS, but very minimal work.

Not a lot of money, but it wasn't a whole lot of effort either. It covers the internet bill.
I have 2 iOS apps that are selling something like 5 copies per day each.

One is an iOS text clipboard manager (with iCloud sync)
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/copycopy-clipboard-manager/i...

The other one, for the lazy students in the italian market, is a database you can use also offline of recaps from books you study in school, with in app purchases..
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/iriassunti-riassunti-di-ital...

They are both in the 4/5 star ratings
Transit costs an ISP (who buys 40+ gigabit circuits) about $1/megabit @ 95th percentile. 1 Terabyte is about 3 megabits/second fully loaded for a month - So, presuming that DO has to pay for their pipe, that 1 TB costs them $3.

Amazon is probably charging a bit much, but DO's costs are probably unsustainable if people actually used their 1TB (much like any service that offers people a "huge amount" with the hope that nobody actually uses it.
Google Nexus 8 Powered by Intel Chip Expected in Mid-2014
What does an inactive Glass look like under infrared light? It probably glinted a ton on some recording device, someone noticed, he was detained. And they did say, word for word: "You were caught recording the movie".

Advice: Don't point what's basically a cheap webcam at a theater screen for the duration of a movie and not expect to get yelled at.

The legal side of this that everyone is discussing is the result of a failure on the technical side which hasn't even been figured out yet.
The NSA doesn't create vulnerabilities in software. (If you think they do, you can argue equally persuasively for the NSA's role in hiding aliens at Area 51).

The strongest argument you can make about NSA's malign role in software security is that, by buying vulnerabilities from people who would otherwise sell them to vendors, NSA is retarding third-party security research and slowing the mean time to discovery for new vulnerabilities.

I'm disquieted by that notion too (it's been a little while since I found the kind of vulnerability that sells for real money --- those are very particular kinds of flaws, contrary to popular opinion --- but I've had a "no selling vulnerabilities" rule for a long time). But I'm not naive. Most of the people who would sell vulnerabilities to NSA probably weren't in a hurry to share them with vendors anyways. And part of the reason for that is, vendors feel entitled to security research about their products, even though they refuse to pay for it. They were outbid even before NSA came along.
This scrolling is horrible on devices that already implement momentum scrolling (mac).
Where I have a hard time with the "Snowden as hero" storyline is my nagging suspicion that he make very clear and deliberate attempts to place himself in a position to have access to these materials for the express purpose of stealing them.

He was essentially fired from the employ of the CIA only to find another position at NSA. Apparently the CIA got wise to his attempts and shut him off. The NSA wasn't so lucky.

None of this detracts from the disclosures of NSA overreach. But we would be foolish to discount the possibility that all of this is a huge smokescreen for a concerted and consistent attempt to weaken or expose US intelligence operations. The fact that an impingement of our sources and methods helps our adversaries cannot be understated.
British university accepts course fees in Bitcoin
It seems nothing ever really changes.

In the 90s people would put totally unnecessary ActiveX and Java applets on their sites that would slow down already slow web browsers.

Then came the era of unnecessary "javascripts" downloaded from sites having 1000s of those.

Then came flash, entire websites were made in it, and they were full of bells and whistles that nobody wanted.

Now we have HTML5 and CSS3, and people are still doing stupid unnecessary stuff with it. It never changes, and it never will.

I guess creating gimmicks is just human nature.
Raspberry Pi: Everything You Need To Know
Dots and Perl
Plagarism detection software like Turnitin certainly catches some people, based on my experience sitting next to someone who used it at a major university. If anything it produced too many false positives.

I don't know how big their corpus of poems is though.
Hackers access 16 million email accounts
Can Shape Security revolutionize Web defense?
3 Myths that block progress for the poor
Paper or no paper is not the real problem. It's to archive* or not to archive that is the issue with most.

From my experience running a web design and development company is that paper files a lot like email archives are kept but not accessed. I have 1 drawer filled with paper files related to a handful of my clients, and I can't say I access them enough to warrant keeping or even scanning them (akin to moving your paper files to a storage locker). Mostly they become paper "todos" which need to be kept so I can address them later.

I had the same experience when I moved from Thunderbird to GMail. At first I was concerned I wouldn't have easy access to my dozens and dozens of archived email folders, diligently filled with all client emails from the past 5+ years. Fast forward to 3 months of using Gmail and I can count on one hand the number of times I booted up Thunderbird to find an old email.

Papers, notes, files and (even)digital archives are safety blankets, future tasks and baggage weighing us down and keeping us from the important work at hand.

Don't go paperless, go archive-less.
Ah I actually ended up using that a few months ago when trying to determine cost of living between various European countries. I was pretty shocked and saddened (as a naive university student) when I realised the full extent of taxation in the UK for graduate job salaries but soon realised it was still less than those of Europe, especially the nordic countries.
IANAL, etc., but I believe there's lot's of good legal precedent around the legitimacy of FAX, and a lot of doubt and uncertainty about other electronic transfers of documents. So FAX is the safe choice.
I can't imagine how horrible it must be on there. I have a Logitech MX (free-wheel mouse) and smooth scrolling enabled. I'm still dizzy.
Are You a Star at Work?
It is pretty offensive to the memory of MLK to suggest that the treatment that awaited Snowden at the hands of the DOJ was in any way comparable to what faced the Montgomery Improvement Association. MIA activists were beaten, raped, lynched, and tortured in public with clubs, dogs, and firehoses.
It's a long position that pays dividends. Why care about volatility?
Sure, but why not mandate that everyone tunes the same compiler?...
But is that a clear pattern in history or just confirmation bias? For some Snowden is a traitor and history is full of traitors. Those terms are not neutral.

It's like saying terrorists are on the wrong side of history while the resistance are on the good side. Ok, now it's just about deciding which is which.

I'm not arguing against Snowden or whistleblowers here, I share the general sentiment here that what he did was for the greater good, but I find the argument of "the good side of history" particularly weak.

Since the consensus around these parts is that Snowden is a hero we better be careful not to devolve into mindless circlejerking à la reddit and try to keep interesting and insightful discussions.

At this rate tomorrow we'll read "snowden = good; NSA = bad" on the frontpage. That's just preaching to the choir.
Yes. Since it probably needs to be said: several (not all) of the Snowden disclosures were important, valuable, and necessary: the Verizon metadata, BULLRUN.
For comparison: I made an app called Joke Effects (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ctrlplusz....), in early 2011. The free version has around 70 000 downloads, and has made me about 25$ - in total.

Paid version (0.99$) has sold about 200 copies.
"The obvious way to prevent auto updating is to simply disallow an extension from modifying its own storage and to prevent it from running any code it manages to download."

You can remove eval() (In fact eval() is disallowed in Chrome extensions, for different reasons).

But how do you prevent an extension from including an interpreter for some other language and simply downloading and interpreting code in that language? This isn't crazy. It's common for games to include interpreters, for example.

Including an interpreter for a simple language is just one step in complexity beyond downloading configuration files. Is downloading configuration files that change the behavior of the code forbidden in your proposed system too? How is that accomplished?

"If Google can manage to allow machine code downloaded over the internet to run securely like it claims, I'm sure it can handle a little javascript."

NaCL has the same properties I'm describing. NaCL enforces a sandbox on what a hunk of code has access to; it doesn't enforce that that code won't change its behavior over time, possibly in response to data from the network. That is not possible to do.
> People have pointed out that the "Intel" code is faster than the "AMD" code even on AMD chips, so the stuff about performance being difficult to achieve across different CPUs, while true, does not seem to be relevant.

It is relevant, if you consider that optimization isn't just counting cycles at individual instructions. Some optimization pass may be CPU agnostic (and the difference of performances between compilers on AMD probably show that aspect), and some very well depend on CPU peculiarities.

Also, if Intel must provide good support for all AMD chips, then they will have to do the same for any other competitor (and there are some iirc).

> they generate code that checks for an AMD CPU

Is it really what they do? Are they checking for "GenuineIntel" CPU, or for "AuthenticAMD" ones? There's a slight difference, even if AMD is their only real competitor atm.
A good alternative outside the US is http://www.jottacloud.com/. Servers in Norway.
See also: Doxie (http://getdoxie.com/)

Aside from the scanner itself, their software is very good and optimised for document scanning. It also has built in OCR.
Nice project! I recently thought a lot about how to blend web & desktop apps and currently my stack consists mostly of Qt and Python (e.g. via PySide or PyQt). Qt is a really awesome toolkit and allows me to make a cross-platform app with native look and feel. At the same time, I can integrate dynamic web pages via QWebKit and make them exchange data with my application. In addition, Qt makes it really easy to integrate custom Qt widgets into the content displayed by QWebkit, roughly like you can with ActiveX components. Also, you can make an executable via py2exe or similar packages.
the site won't even show it's content without javascript. probably because of the wordpress theme they use...
> It turns out people like Woz need people like Steve Jobs, and people like Steve Jobs need people like Woz.

The former is truly unlikely and the latter is desperately true but omits the context completely and paints things in an almost pleasant light which frankly seems wrong to me.

It turns out that people like Woz have a completely different metric for things like happiness and success than people like Jobs. If Jobs had been hit by a bus before Woz met him, Woz would have gone on to have as long and happy a life as he's had because he'd still have made cool stuff and that makes him happy (something most of us, I would guess, can grok). He wouldn't, in all likelihood, ever have had a problem getting work doing fun stuff because talented people are rare and so tend not to have that problem. And he'd probably have made enough money to be comfortably well-off, he might even have struck it rich, but it wouldn't have been a necessary condition for him to be happy and fulfilled.

On the other hand, had Woz been hit by a bus, Jobs probably wouldn't even be a footnote in history at this point and would have died miserable because his metric appears to have used the accumulation of wealth as the definition of success and happiness; and he wasn't capable of building things without guys like Woz. Guys like Jobs, without guys like Woz, are generally just unproductive drains on society. Wooo, you had a long-term vision for a new product. Yes, you're special. Because nobody else ever watched star trek and then thought a tablet computer would be neat. Nobody ever read or watched science fiction and thought to try to make the gadgets described in there.

Yeah, right. I know who I'd point my son at as a role model, and it's not Jobs.
Christopher Alexander, the architect who introduced the theory of "pattern languages," wrote the introduction to Richard P. Gabriel's "Patterns of Software." He says:

"In my life as an architect, I find that the single thing which inhibits young professionals, new students most severely, is their acceptance of standards that are too low. If I ask a student whether her design is as good as Chartres, she often smiles tolerantly at me as if to say, 'Of course not, that isn't what I am trying to do. I could never do that.'"

Then: "That standard must be our standard. If you are going to be a builder, no other standard is worthwhile."

And so he asks the same thing about programming.

"But at once I run into a problem. For a programmer, what is a comparable goal? What is the Chartres of programming? What task is at a high enough level to inspire people writing programs, to reach for the stars? Can you write a computer program on the same level as Fermat's last theorem? Can you write a program which has the enabling power of Dr. Johnson's dictionary? Can you write a program which has the productive power of Watt's steam engine? Can you write a program which overcomes the gulf between the technical culture of our civilization, and which inserts itself into our human life as deeply as Eliot's poems of the wasteland or Virginia Woolf's The Waves?"

Maybe code is just bad literature?
(First, you can not learn 10 languages in a year.)

Well, this is only a list of the 10 most “popular” languages according to someone. It’s interesting to compare this to the TIOBE Index: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... (that is only a list of the 10 most “popular” languages according to someone). It’s not the same order and they skipped VB6 and VB.Net, so Ruby entered the list.
The dream of all sysadmin's is that all fax machines everywhere would suddenly fail forever.
Where's the national interest in revealing how the US and its allies' intelligence services target adversaries like China and Russia, international drug cartels and terrorist networks?
Blogging Awesomeness with a Static Generator and Markdown
I make some passive income off affiliate link blogs. Not a lot, varies widely per month.

I've been making extra cash lately by running bandit algorithms to optimize the click through rate, basically choosing the optimal call to action. I've got a wordpress plugin which does that automatically which I've just made public:

http://bayesianwitch.com/wordpress/index.html
That's a pretty nice app. I think with these simple apps you have to be at the right time in the right place. When I wrote That's Not Funny, there was only one Android phone on the market (HTC G1) and the App Store was fairly tiny. So the app made a bigger splash.
Let's hope your office is secure since your security model relies on preventing physical access.

Your point about focusing too much on the tools when going digital is important. Often I get sucked into some fancy ToDo app for my short lists of personal tasks. Down I go into the rabbit hole of productivity apps and soon enough I realize I should have just scribbled it on a piece of paper and be done with it instead of buying into a whole ecosystem of digital tools to manage tasks that will be thought of, recorded and completed in minutes or hours.
I have no reason to doubt that you're there. But trust me, we're not all there. There's no way an office of our size could go through the paper we do without printers and copiers (unless we were all flat-out copy typists). This has been true wherever I've worked.
The MOOC revolution: How to earn an elite MBA for free
At first I started with a Blogspot with a bunch of cat gifs and a couple of Google ads. Once I earned enough money to buy a domain name for this project, I bought http://catgifpage.com and designed a cheap-but-fun interface for the visitors I targeted.

As I am more a “dog” person, I decided one year (and about 1000€) later to open http://doggifpage.com. It increased a bit my incomes but not so much. As you may know, the Internet loves cats, cats and cats!
In 2013, I earned almost 4000€ for about 10 fun hours of gif gathering!

I have some plans for 2014 but I want to keep this project fun and certainly not time-consuming.