skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Beautiful!

The thing that really kills me about this is that 90% of the people who are "doing Agile" (which is not a thing that you can do [1]) really believe that they are an Agile shop. And then I will ask as many as 3 questions to find out what they're doing is waterfall, or mini-waterfall, or code-n-fix. In the old days I could say, "Hey, you should try one of the Agile processes." Now they think they are doing that and doing it well (after all, they have certificates!), so what can I even tell them?

Everybody I talk to who was involved in the Agile movement in the 2000-2004 time frame has this experience now. Common reactions are rage, tears, and philosophical resignation. (I favor quiet rage, but I suspect resignation would be healthier.) That there are some shops doing very well is consolation, but the early Agile people were hoping for more.

For the whippersnappers who are curious about now-ancient history, my theory on how we went wrong is here: http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how... A big lesson I learned was that if you don't have a trademark and use it to keep quality high, your popular term will get buzzworded to death.

[1] Agile is an umbrella for actual processes, like Extreme Programming. There is no process called Agile to do. Saying you are "doing Agile" is like somebody saying their house is in America, but not in DC or any of the states, just America. If you point out that it's the United States of America and they have to be somewhere; they just shrug.
Eh, depends on what you mean by "incriminating information".

In this case? Yes. A bit crazy.

But in general? If I was using a hidden volume for something "deep" I'd put stuff that was technically borderline illegal (or at least frowned upon / embarrassing) on the "visible" encrypted volume. ISOs of games I own with stripped DRM, (legitimate) ebook copies of adultish graphic novels, chat logs, that sort of thing. It would make it much more deniable that I had a hidden volume.

Nothing that could get me sent to jail for too long, and (probably) nothing that would ruin things long-term, but things that would be relatively embarrassing if they got out.
All right, you convinced me to get in on this. This is hilarious.
If tens of thousands of jobs were at stake, maybe they shouldn't have done it in the first place. The NSA did the crime, Snowden just told us about it.
"myLMP1" - Open Source LMP1 (Enduro Racing) Project Q & A
Yes, terror is certainly in the eye of the beholder, although academic definitions are a bit more nuanced than those being used by the public.

The subtle difference is between using terror to reach a goal and using some action to reach a goal with a side effect that people experience terror. For example:

A group of hackers could hack into the bank accounts of the 1% to distribute their wealth among the other 99%. They don't have any intention to create terror and probably think that the 1% can easily take. Of course, the 1% will see it as an act of terror. And probably journalists, lobbyists, politicians will spin it and use it to create terror among the larger populace.

Another group of hackers is hacking into facebook accounts to make people's secrets public to try to get the public to care about privacy and not to put their trust blindly into social media. In this case, they would use terror consciously as a means to this end.
> What I don't understand is why Mozilla didn't define a bytecode and a to-JS compiler for it

If nothing else, Mozilla does not have nearly as much money as Google, and really cannot afford a "tear down everything and rebuild it" approach like PNaCl. An advantage of OdinMonkey is that it is able to reuse a huge chunk of the SpiderMonkey infrastructure. If you look at the diagram in the article with the red arrow, the "Ion-compile" step is the same size as the others, but in reality is a huge number of line of code, representing multiple engineer-years of ongoing work.

Much of the work the article describes, such as parallel Ion compilation, was carried out mostly for the benefit of non-asm.js compilation, but because OdinMonkey shares the infrastructure, it was able to benefit from it without having to create a new implementation from scratch.

Beyond the engineering of the implementation itself, asm.js itself is a natural evolution of Emscripten-style JS, which had already successfully demonstrated that it can be used for large applications, and that other non-Mozilla browsers are interested in it enough to have done optimization work for it. This reduces the risk that the design itself is technically broken in some way that wouldn't be apparent until people try to run large production-ready applications, as well as the risk that only Firefox will ever be able to run asm.js code at a decent speed.
Why isn't the sky purple, daddy?
Some servers used to have a resettable "case has been opened" flag in the BIOS - the pieces that was based on could be leveraged against the DMA attacks. Overwrite certain items in memory, or maybe just power off the system, when the box is opened, and obstruct opening of the box (a lot of glue? or somesuch) to extend the time past the "recover memory" window.

Yes, I realize this would still be susceptible to coercion of the humans involved, and other issues, but it could be a building block of some degree of NSA-proofing.
So it is your understanding that the US has only now just started spying on foreign countries? Capable nations have been spying on friends and foes for a long time, and they will continue to do so, exposed attempts will only change implementation. If countries decided they were not going to buy foreign technology, the majority of those countries would have no technology. You think Saudi, for example, will just start manufacturing their own hardware?
In my experience "agile" isn't really a thing, more an excuse or reason to not follow any rules at all. Devs get to play at building whatever they like, solving the problems that interest them in a haphazard way and leaving behind a trail of half-written, semi-functional code with little or no documentation to allow anyone to work with them. As soon as anyone suggests that there's a plan, or god-forbid, an objective or expected outcome from the invested money, everyone suddenly scream, "AGILE" and that, apparently, is enough to shutdown any and all detractors.

But then, try to suggest that there's a requirement that has changed or come to light and suddenly the "agile is open to new requirements" part of the approach is forgotten as the "progress" that's been made so far is too precious to change.

/rant
Are there any instances of this being used in the field?
The Al Jazeera English article that sparked this thread was summarizing yesterday's New York Times article, which mentioned Edward Snowden's name five times.
"the bugs I would catch would be from other people and would have built up resistances to whatever I took"

This seems to imply an assumption that all bacteria are resistant, when it's my understanding that this is actually a small [in relative terms] but growing phenomenon.
Nice Q&A with law professor regarding what the FCC can/can't do related to this:
http://recode.net/2014/01/15/whats-net-neutrality-what-happe...
You could have linked directly to the file containing the tutorial[1], it's quite readable. I quite like this sort of 'code prose' style, which reminds me of Learn Lua in 15 Minutes [2]. Light Table particularly lends itself to this style, however, as you can go through and selectively evaluate each block of code with CMD+Enter as you read. That said, one could argue that having to manually type into a console would do more for making those bits of code stick around in your brain.

Looking forward to the rest of it!

[1] https://github.com/swannodette/lt-cljs-tutorial/blob/master/...

[2] http://tylerneylon.com/a/learn-lua/
We have no evidence that detritus has been convicted of any crime, so is not in the same situation as the subject of the article.

Under UK law (RIPA), I think he is. If he is accused of a crime, and the police want him to decode information, he has no recourse and will be sent to jail for not doing so.

Don't equate the term "accused" with the term "convicted". They mean totally different things.

What I was trying to get at was that the word terrorism has been used to scare people into judging others when in fact there is no solid proof - for example in the case of David Miranda, his rights were infringed on the basis of an accusation of association with terrorism. Sorry I didn't meant to imply that in this particular case the man was only accused, not convicted, though it was not an act of terror, only being involved (how involved?) in planning an attack.

There are degrees of evil when it comes to attacking other people, from association, through proven plans, through actually carrying out an attack (which is far worse). I think it's important to distinguish these degrees and not switch off all judgement when the word terrorism is mentioned, and I don't think that your rights should vary depending on which category of person you are - everyone should be equal under the law. The most evil criminal in our country should have the same rights as everyone else, because otherwise everyone's rights will gradually be eroded.
Steve Blank: Do Pivots Matter?
And one of those sigils has effectively been deprecated, it's just & and ~ now. And ~ might turn into `box`.
That seems like a lowball estimate even today. If you go shopping for a new Windows computer or tablet in Best Buy or Staples or some other american store, maybe 1/3rd to 1/2 of what's on shelves is high DPI now, from the $400 tablets up to $1200 ultrabooks. Lenovo, Samsung, Asus, HP, all the big manufacturers have 2560x1440 or 3200x1800 ultrabooks and hybrids out, and even 1920x1080 tablets are set to 1.5x or 2x DPI scaling because those pixels are packed into 10" or smaller screens.
Wedding Trend Alert: Save the Date Videos - JetMag.com
Someone else mentioned future, http://python-future.org but I thought I would give it another shout out.

> future is the missing compatibility layer between Python 2
> and Python 3. It allows you to use a single, clean
> Python 3.x-compatible codebase to support both Python 2
> and Python 3 with minimal overhead.

So in effect, you can run with some Python3 isms on Python2. All your Python is now 3 like and you can start migrating without losing the underlying infrastructure.
Try to get as much RAM as possible, that will end up being your bottleneck for upgrading down the line.

Retina vs. non-retina is not a huge deal, especially if you're trying to keep it under budget.

Definitely go laptop!

Good luck.
On the upside, my 5 year old PC probably doesn't have this tech. I bet old PC's are going to become valuable because of this.
Finding Peace in an Age-Obsessed Profession
And if you don't want to do it manually, use solutions that already do this along with other nice stuff: I'm thinking about Snapraid[0] for instance.

[0] http://snapraid.sourceforge.net/compare.html
This is something I've been building for the last couple months. It originally started as a Startup Weekend Ottawa project, now I'm trying to bring it into the "real world". Any feedback would be appreciated :)
>The NSA wouldn't spy on Americans, would it?

How about domestic U.S. law enforcement? FBI, DEA, U.S. Marshals, etc.? It would be interesting to know what technologies they're using, especially when there's a long-running surveillance operation.
Like this technology?

https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity12/technical...
Smart hack! Where did you get those places from?
Git Repo in a MySQL db
Sure, to be more precise... "real pirates are disproportionately more likely to kill people by virtue of being real pirates; the same is not true of music pirates."
Have a look at some of the relevant subreddits.

TwoX is bafflingly aggressive to just about everyone. There are MRAs there from their sub reddits.
My favorite was this nice redesign I did where the form fields had no labels. Instead the designer cleverly used placeholders on input elements to identify them. Moreover they had a great deal of customization for each form to make them look nice and compact. At first glance this looked fantastic, until you try to add an error message to it.

I pointed this out to them, and their first inclination was to highlight the border of the errored out elements in red. Great, except for the large minority of users who are color blind. Also, this doesn't indicate what the error is, just that there is one. On top of that, form-wide (vs field-specific) errors still don't have a place.

This drives me crazy, because it's not like I can logically extend their design and say "let's put the errors here. What do you think?" Their design was so tight (in a good way I suppose) that it left no room for this kind of thing.

My suggestion is to make your version so ugly that it cannot be overlooked. Put the errors in size 72 font in neon green right over the fields. No way for it to go into production that way.
Could the it be that the u.s. decided to be focused on signals intelligence ,since they are so good at it, and it's very effective?
FWIW, if that's all you want you can do it with plain old X11.
I just realized that all programs have types and type systems. Some dynamically typed programs have hairy n-dimensional fractal type systems that no human would ever figure out (usually from bad code).

The inferred languages just have this dude that watches your code and says, "yeah, I understand what is going on, your stuff is internally consistent"
I think the next generation file system has CoW, are based on erasure codes and are internet distributed. For example your home NAS have InternetFS, now you can reach all your files where ever you are, all files in the home directory are always in sync. Failure of a hard drive does not matter. If your house burns down, your friends or someone else on the internet
has the pieces you need to reconstruct your data. The next gen filesystem also have built in versioning via the CoW so you can always revert to an earlier version of an file.

InternetFS(Encrypted, distributed, always in sync, cheap snapshots, p2p)

Want to share Photos or movies with your friends and family? No problem just right click on the file, select the friend from a list, they see the file and they can view it on their computer.

This next gen file system will be incredibly easy to use, cross platform. As simple to use as Facebook, Skype, Email.
Went to PFSense and never looked back.
Symbols have been systematically stripped from the language. There really aren't a significantly large number of them anymore, at least in comparison to other curly-brace languages.
What does it do?

I scrolled to the bottom of the page expecting some kind of explanation of what it is and why I would want it or what need or want it solves. Nothing that I could find.
What about scaling instants up to a year?
A kiloday would be 2.74 years. Which doesn't seem to mean anything in human terms.
Bret Victor's "The Future of Programming"
For more information, see:
http://worrydream.com/dbx/
As someone that has and is teaching public speaking my number one tip: sound like you care.

I can't tell you how many terrible speeches I've sat through where the person was saying "this is really important and means the world to me" but sounded like they didn't care at all.

Number two: don't write out ever word of your speech. It is public speaking not public reading. Being able to read a text out loud without sounding like you are reading is a skill and you should learn to speak from notes/outlines first because that is easier to sound like you are talking with us rather than at us.
That would be bridge-on-bridge technology and I have a patent for that.
This reminds me that anything "Agile" and enterprise business is fundamentally incompatible thanks to the quarterly earnings report (for public companies at least).
Is it just me, or are fake page turning presentations of book and magazine style content just a terrible idea?

I must admit it annoys me although it seems to appeal to the "dead tree" publishers venturing into the scary on line world.

The worst bit is when you are on a magazine style page and the article exceeds the current page length and you need to flip several pages to get to the continuation - just like in all those terrible paper based formats where advertising pressures set the page format and the overall layout.

There must be a better way to present a mix of curated content.
Vertical align anything with just 3 lines of CSS
I don't think blowing away CSS completely would be a good solution

Sure, it's not all bad, it got off to a pretty flawed start, but has been steadily improving.
In this case, I agree they are justified. Though if it really was a serious terrorist investigation, and they suspected plans for other attacks, I would hope that they could crack the password if they wanted to. My concern is the underlying precedent. What does it mean for me and you?

And it seems to mean that any password can now be presumed to be incriminating evidence. What happens if my company gets investigated for some financial fraud and they find a forgotten password protected usb stick in the back of a drawer. Now the prosecutors can threaten me with jail time unless I prove that I do not know the password to that usb stick. How can I begin to mount a defence to that? That presumption of guilty until proven innocent is whats wrong here.
Yes and no. Getting shot is terrifying to you, but the other army isn't shooting to terrify you, but to incapacitate you and your colleagues to reach some (strategical) goal. The terror is just a happy side effect. On the other hand, armies could also use acts of terror to reach some goal. For example, instead of just taking soldiers prisoner of war, you could just cut off their heads and put them on a stake at the front. Or raping all the women in the occupied territory (although that could also be a way to 'lay claim to the land and people' by creating a generation of mixed bloods, I suppose. In that case, it wouldn't be an act of terror, although everyone on the receiving end would be plenty of terrified)
You can't even say that about languages _with_ a GC. At least not as long as you use the practical definition of "leaks memory", which is that the memory remains alive until the application shuts down. Here's a simple example of a memory leak in JS in that sense (modulo nontrivial manual cleanup, obviously):

window[Math.random()] = new Array(100000);

A much more interesting question, in some ways, is what guarantees you have about not accessing no-longer-alive objects. That's where Rust has some serious advantages over C++, say.
8 Sass mixins you must have in your toolbox
Ask HN: best music to code to?
Wondering what music people listen to in order to maintain focus whilst coding.

Personally a fan of the TRON: Legacy soundtrack, Justice etc.

Look forward to listening to your suggestions!
It seems very likely that the FCC will be slapped down a third time in court if they try to "rewrite their regulations" a third time. They're 0 for 2 so far before the DC Circuit.

"General authority to regulate" is a legal term of art. It probably won't take you as far as you like.
I think that was a joke. Nest's terms haven't been changed (has the acquisition even completed yet?), and neither the web or mobile app has asked me to agree to anything new. The app is just a remote control -- so the "to heat my house" is hyperbole. The thermostat doesn't require internet at all, let alone an app, to heat the house.

Even if it were true though, why would that change your opinion? A TOS revision is inevitable if only to change the company name and address. Do you think that Nest didn't require agreeing to terms of service before using their app in the past? Or that any manufacturer makes a mobile app for a connected thermostat that doesn't require agreeing to terms of service to use?
The NYTimes Had a Mistake on Its Front Page Every Day for More Than a Century
This post gave me flashbacks.

I once had to sit through an 8 hour pre-kickoff meeting detailing in excruciating detail how our team was going to be "agile". It involved at least 400 slides, described a weeks long change request process, and two-month long "sprints". Even as a junior dev I know I am lucky I never had to suffer through the rest of that contract.
The Day Uber Conquered France.
How about showing the equivalent Google map when editing an OSM map?
Apache Foundation and Linux Foundation join forces for ApacheCon
C++ const doesn't actually provide constness for purposes of concurrent access unless you follow a bunch of other rules (no const_cast, no use of "mutable", no use of mutable class statics, no use of mutable file-level statics, no use of mutable globals) that in practice people violate all the time even with const objects.
I'd really like a phone that had the following features:

* physical switches for GPS, WIFI, Radio, Camera, Mic, write/read access to disk (go diskless),

* a secondary low power eInk display that is wired directly into the hardware that shows when the last time GPS, mic, camera were turned on (and for how long) and how much data has been sent over the radio and read from disk,

* a FS which encrypts certain files with a key that is stored remotely. If your phone is stolen you can delete this remote key. The key is changed on every decrypt. You also get a remote log of all times this remote key was accessed.

* hardware support for read-only, write-only files,

* hardware support for real secure delete on the SSD,

* the ability to change all my HW identifiers at will (IMEI, SIM, etc),

* a log, stored on a separate SD card, of all data sent and received using a HW tap on the radio/WIFI. The log should be encrypted such that only someone with the private key can read it (public key used to encrypt an AES session key which is rotated out every 5 minutes). If you think someone has compromised your phone you can audit this log for both exploitation and data exfiltration. Since the log is implemented in HW, no rootkit can alter it.
Argument-level filtering would be awesome, but I don't know, the existing app+function level filtering seems to be working fine for me so far. The only real complaint I have with xprivacy now is the atrocious UI, and I'd really like some way for it to automatically fetch filters from somewhere so I don't have to bother with the permissions every time an app updates.
Yes, I'm inclined to take this news with a grain of salt (a very tiny one, mind, given the incredibleness of this entire situation) until we see some examples. As you say, you can't keep 100k devices secret.

(Although the truly paranoid might doubt the veracity of a claimed "tear down". It has become incredibly easy to accuse the NSA of doing anything, and at least be partly believed. Which, ironically, is actually a pretty good cloak of secrecy in itself!)
See What Made These Kids Sing?
We finish shooting our Kickstarter video and our focus group kids started singing a catchy tune in this unused outtake!
It's not irrelevant. Female programmers were hindered and the story focuses on those female programmers. The goal is not to be controversial but to raise awareness.
HP to Re-Enter Smartphone Market With “Phablets” in India
Why is that hilarious? The Chinese DO that.
Build a GPS tracker that is discreetly installed on your bike and launch it on Kickstarter.

Won't get this bike back, but this is a problem for millions of people out there....
That's not fair at all. I enjoyed reading about ancient timekeeping and the theories that powered them. I had no idea how they tracked time at night, for example; now I do.
Either that or your concept of his MO is wrong.
I agree. It was also really bad timing. No news organization should break anything major between X-mas and New Years. People are offline...
Find me an example of an IED roadside bomb being used in Sudan.
Would Tile work the same? I thought of buying one in the Summer when they're out.