skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The script outputs the following data, in CSV format, from the active (focused) application in Mac OS X:

- name of the application

- name of the active window

- active url, if the application is Chrome

- (current date and time)

It's obviously very quick and dirty and tailored for my needs, but I'm glad if someone benefits from this.

Inspired by RescueTime, some code stolen from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/480866/get-the-title-of-t...
Sounds like it's faster. And allows to reattach to a certain session.
Ford CEO says auto industry needs privacy rules set by law
The fact that so many people are looking to get drugs without a prescription makes me reflect on the accessibility to healthcare in this country....
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Yes this. Actually the first time I came across a (variation of) this idea, it was years ago and brought up by a co-worker.
I have been tinkering with the idea, and also came to the same conclusion, that virality / marketing in general were probably going to play the part hugely, as like you've stated, this has been done a lot..

Maybe it's something that people do not want.

I could see this having great potential in the dating/flirt sectors obvously ;) But you could also imagine things like "shit I think I left my jacket at x/y, anyone found it? " at a festival.
Anonimity would probably be mandatory for success.

Remember how well Latitude faired?
I don't see what's so horrible about how Apple handles resolutions for retina Macs. It lets me have a HiDPI screen that either 1) shows the app in HiDPI the way it was meant to be or 2) (worst case) doubles all the pixels, making it about the same quality as 1x screens before. It also gives me flexibility in getting more space than native retina resolution without having too much blur. Furthermore, something that is great for accessibility reasons, it finally allows lower resolutions without having a blurry picture. A killer feature for my father - the upgrade in screen quality from his old Lenovo running at 2/3 native resolution and his 15' Retina is insane.
I have an example in another comment of how I can buy stock with it:

CTRL @robinhoodapp buy $FB USD100

And then apart from making the transaction I can start convert with my followers about this deal. What do u think of such scenario?
Looks nice, but IOS only...
I meant it's the foundation for most things, only understood by a small number of people. Can be obfuscated.

It was a weak analogy anyway.
ShowHN:  ScaleSimple - An Open Source CDN platform
New Now Serving Tex-Mex: Add a Thick Layer of Redis to Your IBM SoftLayer Cloud
I wonder if that's an error, 10 hours, 100 minutes each, with each minute 1000 seconds would mean 1 million seconds a day. Further on the article says there are 100k such seconds a day though.
And why are multiplication tables in school typically taught up to 12x12? Historically in the UK, there were 12 pence in a shilling, 240 pence in the pound, 12 inches in a foot, etc, but I'm not sure of the value nowadays.
It was theorised/known the Earth was round a lot earlier than Galileo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth
Uh, what? They knew the earth was a sphere:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes#Measurement_of_th...
I loved it when they asked for my full name to keep me informed.
Wouldn't it have been cheaper to buy Facebook instead of trying to build your own
Will it make my client more unique (so identifiable) for a third-party passive attacker (who can sniff traffic) if I tune my browser's settings for example to support only TLS 1.2 and by removing all the RC4 encryption methods?
The ancient greeks, among others, had that knowledge.

What makes no sense is the perpetuation of the myth that spherical earth is "new" concept.

The concept of a spherical Earth dates back to ancient Greek philosophy from around the 6th century BC -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/09/21/who-disco...
It is also worth noting that countries that are alleged to have spiralled downwards in terms of economic freedom are now far more pleasant places to live. From personal experience, I would cite Ecuador. The same streets of Quito that were mortally perilous are now must-see features of package tourism; the bus journeys that would have taken 14 hours across the country now take 8. Income taxes are still far lower than many who make the top of the index and even the wealthiest have enjoyed the benefits of sustained growth and a relatively stable political climate (given the country's previous history).

Yes, it is starting to look like these 'crony-populist regimes' that threaten economic freedom actually make people a good deal freer in material terms.
I wonder if there is a way to automate this using Google maps and places data...
Automatically testing all possible states caused by (pseudo-)random behaviour
Also consider the limits of human vision. For most people, at a half meter viewing distance, something around 300 PPI is the limit of perception for most people. At a meter (where most people view the 27 - 30" big screens) it drops lower than that, probably to 200 PPI.

Eventually it doesn't make sense to make denser panels because you don't see the difference anymore. This next generation of displays definitely isn't there yet, but it is "high" as in "we're getting there".

I personally can't wait until we cap out pixel density, because then we can get variable refresh rate and color accuracy back. I want my 300 PPI vbr up to 120hz 10 bit color panel monitor for $300!
There may be terms of use/service when using (agreeing to use and access) data/fact providers. You might be violating a contract but not copyright.
What you're describing is a fiction, a fiction that only exists because of the status quo. At the end of the day, the internet is just very expensive physical infrastructure in the form of coaxial and fiber optic cables and wireless base stations all over the country. Right now, the companies that own the physical infrastructure are happy to sell bandwidth on a non-discriminatory basis, but there is nothing inherent in the technology that requires them to do this. There is nothing inherent in the technology that prevents them from giving better service to the big company that is willing to pay a lot of money than to the start-up that can't afford to pay a lot of money.

Imagine an urban parking lot that's near a number of stores. For awhile, it operates on a non-discriminatory basis. Everyone pays to park, and then goes wherever they want. One day, Wal-Mart moves in and cuts a deal with the parking lot. In return for a giant check each month, the parking lot will let Wal-Mart customers park for free. Now, Wal-Mart has a huge edge over the neighboring mom and pop stores. Is this wrong? Or is this just how the world works?

What you're doing is making a normative point: nobody should need leverage on the internet. That's a fine thing to believe, but it's just a belief. It's nothing inherent in the architecture of the internet.
Text- in a similar way TextSecure did it, would be my guess. They have something called Silent Text, and they're using the ideas here I believe:

http://eprint.iacr.org/2014/036.pdf

Email? They've announced the DarkMail protocol last year, and should be coming soon:

http://darkmail.info/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgV_Z6V_llk
The article didn't say they hacked routers.

> The NSA calls the effort an "active defence" and has used the technology to monitor units of the Chinese and Russian armies, drug cartels, trade institutions inside the European Union, and US allies including Saudi Arabia, India and Pakistan, the Times reported.

From the viewpoint of an American: hacking the EU trade institutions, and India, bothers me. The rest is exactly what the NSA et al /should/ be doing. Saudi and Pakistan are "allies" out of necessity -- there is no history of genuine mutual trust and support.

There certainly needs to be more control of who the NSA targets, and better constraints keeping them from targeting others, but pretending that all spying is bad is silly.
...many utility plugins (like CtrlP and Syntastic) and bundles/ftplugins (vim-python, my own vim-pantondoc) would be improved by this functionality.

Thanks for the correction; clearly I mischaracterized the use-case.
>If I have 1.73 miles, I have to do the math to figure out how many feet that is, 1.73*5280~=9134, which is not something that's easy for me to do in my head.

How often do you need to do this in reality? Most people in their day-to-day have no need to these conversions.
The OpenBSD Foundation - Funding for OpenBSD and related Projects
Shuttersong Announces Additional $500K to Bring Seed Round to $2.2M
like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units ?
Kids Can't Compute - And That's A Problem
The infamous sun.misc.Unsafe explained
Seems like bullshit. Australia has ludicrous regulations on competition, including a massive minimum wage, with all sorts of knock-on distortionary problems, yet it makes the top five.
Unless someone forks it, and builds support for your phone's drivers in it - then it's not possible.
Why not limit the amount of messages people can send per day? 3 for instance? Wouldn't that make you think before sending a message? Maybe users could choose to only receive messages from people who send less than N messages per day.

It would be funny if messages from users who are reported as annoying get redirected to a horny bot which keeps them "entertained" :)
So what you’re saying is that Brazilian pharmacists are more corrupt than others.
Request for Funding our Electricity
Not the point of the article, but is anyone else annoyed by these "entrepreneur-sounding" ideas? I'm so sick of low-tech, solve-first-world-problem ideas and conflating that with entrepreneurship. If I were the VC, I'd tell them to get the fuck out, and it'd have nothing to do with Telcos.
As long as I don't have active reinforcement to remind me you aren't just randomly generated text by a machine somewhere, I'm good.

Which also means I'd prefer my creepy stalker AI to speak in a monotone machine voice. More relatable that way.
MSR 2014 Mining Challenge Dataset
the sub-OS was my immediate thought when I saw it is an android device.
The US Government has regulated telecommunications for nigh a century now. AT&T had cleverly figured out that the right way to avoid scrutiny for their monopoly was initially to provide a very good service and start a two-way relationship with the government.

I'll clarify two things here. First: this actually had a net-positive effect on telephone communications in the US. Regulators were initially more informed, and Vail was able to grow AT&T by making legitimate concessions and demonstrating universal access and service. Second, we know in hindsight that this was also the start of a practice of regulatory capture, but regardless, that the history of regulating telecommunications has often-times been beneficial even when the regulators were biased.
What does this gadget do?
RedHack Exposes Wrongdoings of Ankara Mayor After Hacking Transport Department
Iron Man.. Made of Legos?
In fact I’d say that the harm to the trust in your parent that comes from such censorship pretty much outweighs the risk of reading stuff. It’s important to know what the kids do, but that’s to be achieved by having real contact with them and having them tell you that.

Which happens in many families I know, so before anyone says that’s impossible because of the „teenage rebellion”: too bad all the kids that can assert their independence while still talking to their parents about pretty much everything exist.
Dogecoin Is Now More Popular Than All Other Cryptocurrencies Combined
"Quality geographic data helps empower killing drones ... I mean, organizations and communities!"
That's the definition of a compiler though, "A compiler is a computer program (or set of programs) that transforms source code written in a programming language (the source language) into another computer language (the target language)."

All a compiler is is a combination of a translator and (possibly - but not necessarily) an optimiser.
>And I've found no benefit to Celsius's 0 and 100 coinciding with water's state changing.

I agree, I like how Fahrenheit degrees are smaller and therefore degrees in Fahrenheit are more exact.
A slight rephrasing of the headline allows us to apply Betteridge's law[1]: "Have we solved the mystery of why a minute is divided into 60 seconds...?"

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
Bipedal creatures optimize their muscles and learn how to walk.
For those curious about whether this is a repost -- this link goes to the actual blog entry instead of the blog's homepage. It would probably be best of the other submission[1] went to the linked article.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7059548
> Universities are a bastion of free speech.

Incorrect - universities are now a business, nothing more. You can have your free speech so long as it makes the shareholders happy. Having students confused and lost (or being unable to chose the best education for themselves) is a fantastic way to have them repeat courses in the long run.

Tertiary education is no longer what it used to be. It is now exactly the same type of delusion that women face in terms of having to be slim; or consumers face in terms of having to have the latest iPhone or what have you.
I really enjoy the types of problems on PuzzleNode[1]. My local coder meetup does one each month for code reviews. Their puzzles are just deep enough to where you need to think through how you'll design the system. They're really fun for exploring different programming techniques.

[1]http://www.puzzlenode.com/
As I saw it popping up, I thought "wow that looks like a sex toy." Freudian slip, whoops.

"Sense Mother is at the head of a family of small connected sensors that blend into your daily life to make it serene, healthy and pleasurable."

You never know.
July 18, 2002

Has anything changed?
Why post an Al Jazeera summary of an NYT article that has already been posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7061012
Activist hedge fund wants to reduce salaries at Juniper Networks
The mind-boggling amount of money Google is making on their current businessmodel. How are they ever going to "top" that? Is it even possible to come close to anything so successful?

I think it's more circumstance that has lead to this success: the right people working on the right project in the right time: Google is born. But now? It's more about survival in the long run, the way I look at it.
Ask HN: How do I install the Root CA "Positive SSL CA 2"?
I deleted some Root CAs from Firefox. Now I can't connect to https://news.ycombinator.com in Firefox. (I'm using Chromium now as a workaround.)

When I look at the certificate details for https://news.ycombinator.com, I see that it was signed by a CA named "Positive SSL CA 2".

My question is, how can I find the that root certificate so I can import it back into Firefox?
Ask HN: Weekend project got a lot of press, stupid not to put more work in?
I recently created a Facebook app that allows you to separate the comments from your family and friends. This was a typical sunday evening project for me and it is in a very rough form right now.

The app got immediately picked up by The Huffington Post, Yahoo and lots of other news sites.

Is it stupid that I don't wan't to allocate time (that I'm currently spending on my main project) for fine-tuning and marketing this, apparently very wanted, app?

List with articles about the app: http://mindloop.be/portfolio/items/facebook-familymatters-application/

URL of the app: https://apps.facebook.com/familymattersprivacy/
Anyone know how the latest versions of NTFS stand up against these?
Has anyone used both xpra and x2go that could give a comparison?
This is specifically refuted in the article:

> ‘interpreted’ and ‘compiled’ are properties of an implementation
I was expecting some UX/HCI article but instead saw an interesting look into the past of Apple, very neat either way.
Is that actually a vestige of a hexadec system, or just a strange quirk? Note that 2 sounds similar to 12, 3 to 13, and so on. That implies there's a relationship between those numbers, which only exists in decimal.
NextView Ventures' David Beisel on The VC Fundraising Timing Paradox
Three also offered free access to Skype. It used (uses?) a Three-specific Skype client (available for many, but not all, models of phone) to do the presence and signalling over data, and the voice over the normal mobile voice channel:

https://support.skype.com/en/faq/fa10976/how-can-i-get-skype...

To protect revenue, SkypeIn was blocked, and SkypeOut was restricted to non-UK numbers.
I just think of a script program as one where textual source code is involved at runtime.

If I can throw a thing over the wall to you that's runnable and doesn't contain textual source code then that's a compiled program.
They did.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth
I enjoy the time I spend doing actual programming. Though I am a programmer that is not what I spend most of my time doing.
It is extremely inconvenient that time is base-24 and base-60 while everything else in the metric system is base-10; it leads, for example, to a difficult conversion between the "meters per second" of the physics class and the "km/hr" of the highway. One surprisingly frustrating thing is that if you view a day as a million "instants" then an instant is actually a very human number, about the human reaction time or so; and a kiloinstant is a very human timescale too; 86.4 seconds or just shy of a minute and a half. We already know that when someone says "be there in five minutes" they mean 7-8; if they said "be there in five ki" they would be more accurate.

Fun things:

1. I wrote an HTML5 base-10 clock here with some togglable layers. Try out base-10 time: http://drostie.org/time/ . It's actually much easier than reading a normal clock because it's a digital readout, "8, 5, 6" rather than "two past a quarter after 8, that's 8:17." (It might not seem that way at first -- but that's because we spent long hours learning to tell time.)

2. For the exactly opposite view, that the number system should be base-12, see http://www.dozenal.org/ . It's actually a good way to work with numbers, and I've used the "counting on the joints/pads of your proper fingers" trick a number of times; sometimes you only have one hand free and want to count to something that's less than 48 (you can encode 2 extra bits with "hand facing up, hand facing down, hand facing up again, hand facing down again"; I've found it gets confusing after 4 or 5 of these though.)

3. I am very sympathetic to Feynman's "we don't need more units!" claim, but the reason we use various units is because we have different interests -- masses in eV/c^2 for example reflect someone who is interested in the atomic interaction energies (eV) of relativistic particles (c^2); energies in Kelvin reflect someone who is interested in how much they need to cool their experimental apparatus to see certain effects; energies in inverse centimeters reflect people who have spectrometers. Following this, I've tried to think whether the base-10 clock could be used to construct a set of "rational units" which would try to get the "human scale things" right while making all of these other units amount to a power-of-10 difference. I've not condensed these speculations to a final form yet but the speculations are themselves at: https://github.com/drostie/essay-seeds/blob/master/misc/rati... .
The most interesting part of page 2, in my opinion, was the below quote:

Each degree was divided into 60 parts, each of which was again subdivided into 60 smaller parts. The first division, partes minutae primae, or first minute, became known simply as the "minute." The second segmentation, partes minutae secundae, or "second minute," became known as the second.
The snarky parent was probably trying to say that „theft protection” might be a better term.
There are two different connotations of 'privacy' that are often conflated in discussions about Facebook, Google, etc. Conflating them probably obscures the more important connotation to the benefit of such companies' bottom lines.

The first connotation is the one my mother warned me about. It's Facebook photos of that tequila weekend in Tijuana and those two PM Tuesday tweets from the beach bar when I called in sick to work. These are things that require personal judgement in regard to what I say. Self-control addresses this type of privacy.

The second connotation of privacy is newer, but still nearly twenty years old. It entails concerns regarding information collected about my actions beyond what I explicitly choose to broadcast. It's cookies in the browser [and their more sophisticated descendants]. It's my browser linking my Google+ account to my browsing history at lesbiandwarffurries.com.

Privacy issues of this second type are assumed to be normal when they are considered at all - why doesn't my browser sandbox cookies for each website? Or rather why isn't there a browser that does so? The same logic underpins the Blackphone - sand boxing unrelated parts of the system so that privacy is a matter of personal judgement rather a battle against a technically sophisticated adversary.
Metric mils? Ha!
Google+ Mobile App Grows by 15% in Q4 2013 [Infographic] • vlogg.com
In Latin America too, and Facebook was part of that.

I don't know why this issue was not discussed earlier. If I remember well, it started with the facebook applications for mobiles more than 3 years ago.

Just a few times less developed countries predict what will happen in US (technologically speaking!)
By the way, I looked in the list of trusted root CAs in Chromium, and I didn't see anything called "Positive SSL CA 2" there. If I had seen it, I could have just exported it from Chromium and imported to Firefox.
First of all, Columbus rediscovered America a good century before Galileo.

Secondly, the idea that people believed in a flat earth before Columbus is entirely a 19th Century conceit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus#Geographi...

In fact, the fact that the earth is (essentially) spherical was well-known to basically everybody since ancient times. For example, any sailor could have told you that when approaching land, the tops of mountains appear first over the horizon.
"I wish 3dfx would drop Glide and focus on OpenGL already, and stop having such a Not Invented Here mentality" - Nvidia in the end of 90's.

I still remember their rhetoric about open standards and how they are good for consumer and that's why we should purchase their GPU's and that's why game developers shouldn't use just Glide.

Somehow I feel like I was tricked by them. As I was in my early teens back then I was somewhat naïve and thought they were serious. Oh how wrong I was.
Great link, thanks!

I think my current job will be my last salaried position, at least for awhile. I have a broad range of technical skills and can talk to potential clients, but have always been a bit nervous about taking the plunge (Where will my next client come from? Will I just find cheapskates who want some website for $500 total? Etc.)
Since NSA/FBI can reroute shipping boxes and install malware in them - do they have any plans against that?
Active duty special forces is likely more worried about keeping a clean medical history than expense or inconvenience.
How many personnel does it require to physically compromise 100,000 machines?

1,000 people gaining access to 100 machines a piece? 100 people, breaking into 1,000 machines? Is that per year or in general?

If one targeted individual owns 10 machines, then it's 10,000 people targeted by the program.

If this includes organizations, bussinesses, institutional computer labs and offices, then maybe it's 1,000 offices with 100 work stations each.

So, perhaps a rough estimate of the scope of the program 100 to 1,000 staff attacking between 20,000 and 1,000 targets?