skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I work in web analytics. Recently, one of our clients decided that they wanted to track visitors across multiple domains. After much hemming and hawing, and research proposals, and industry comparisons, the ultimate solution that was decided upon was... third-party cookies.

The change is extremely simple, and the data loss from people who block third-party cookies is like 5%.

So what prevents sites from deploying these technologies? Economics. To your point, there are no insolvable technical barriers. But right now the marginal return return on these technologies in no way stacks up to the marginal effort required to deploy them. Considering the fraction of the population that even knows what a cookie even is, I do not anticipate this changing in the near future. If everyone starts blocking third-party cookies, then yes we'll see an uptick in use, but I don't see that happening this decade.
In many countries, fist fights in parliament are not unheard of.
The Future of Virtual Private Networks VPNs: 2014 and Beyond
Scary Compiler Code Motion
God forbid anybody gives to republican or libertarian causes, right?
> A private institution censoring its own is very different than an outside entity forcing censorship via threats of lawsuits.

But the lawsuit here is private also though right? How do you separate an incorporated entity from a community? I don't know that this can be reasonably done.
I think it depends on how many compiler bugs you've previously encountered. I'm starting to suspect them more easily, these days. Practice at tracking them down has also made it easier to act on that suspicion. The thought of a compiler bug often gets people to throw up their hands in despair, but it's not so bad: just carefully verify the assembly output and see if it's actually correct. If it's not, then figure out some reasonably reliable way to tweak your code to avoid the bug (after you file a bug with the compiler people).

Blaming the compiler (or the hardware or the OS or...) is only a problem if you do so without investigating to see if your blame is well placed. Once you can investigate properly, then it's just another possibility in your bag of tricks.
> Linux will often still schedule kernel threads to run on those cores so they are not totally isolated.

Have a look at cpuset[0]. You can forcibly move kernel threads into a given set (even pinned threads), and then force that set onto whatever cores you want.

[0] http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/online/pages/man7/cpuset...
Not that I disagree with the sentiment, but days is a bit much.

If I'm that low level I'll probably take a look at the generated assembly, even if I think it is my fault. I don't think that's too uncommon either. It helps filter through the abstractions.
A beautifully carved chair may display excellent craftsmanship, but if you spend three months carving the world's most beautiful chair when the client asked for a dozen basic ladderbacks for a dinner party next Friday, you're not a very wise craftsman.

Similarly, if your software runs in 1% of CPU on a typical customer's machine, spending 10x the time and resources to make it run in 0.1% is not laudable. Context is everything.
OpenSecrets.org tallied the top donors in federal elections between 1989 and 2014. Koch Industries -- privately owned by the Evil Koch Bros -- is on the list, to be sure, but doesn't appear until the 59th slot, with $18 million in donations, 90 percent of which went to Republicans.

So who occupies the 58 spots ahead of the Evil Koch Bros? Six of the top 10 are ... wait for it ... unions. They gave more than $278 million, with most of it going to Democrats.

These are familiar names: AFSCME ($60.6 million), NEA ($53.5 million), IBEW ($44.4 million), UAW ($41.6 million), Carpenters & Joiners ($39.2 million) and SEIU ($38.3 million).

In other words, the six biggest union donors in American politics gave 15 times more to mostly Democrats than the Evil Koch Bros.

Three of the remaining four slots in the top 10 were taken by AT&T ($56.4 million), National Association of Realtors ($51.2 million) and Goldman Sachs ($44.8 million).

So, if money is the measure of evil in American politics and the Evil Koch Bros only come in 59th, who is really the most evil donor ever?

Turns out it's the left-wing group, Act Blue, with just short of $100 million in contributions during its lifetime, which only started in 2004, 15 years after the Evil Koch Bros in the OpenSecrets.org compilation.
I just tested this and it's simply not true. Cookie headers to an iframe from a third-party domain are suppressed when third-party cookie blocking is on, and sent when cookie blocking is off.

Google whitelists their own third-party cookies by default in Chrome and it's possible other browsers come with a preset whitelist as well, maybe that's what you encountered.
It is wasteful to spend time doing something that benefits nobody, or where the benefits outweigh the cost. Your time is worth something.
SpeakMouthWords was describing the origin of the white bars shown here (i.e. originally separating gifs).

These style gifs came later (i.e. gifs with 3d effect from the addition of the bars), integrating the white bars that had come to be expected from Tumblr posts.
This article is 15 years old. There wasn't much in the way of CSS back then, much less responsive design. But the brilliant thing is it still works perfectly, because it's so simple! Pop your tab to a window and resize, or use a readability browser extension/website. Oh, you just did that.
I will certainly not recommend it as a first book on Hinduism. For that I would probably go with http://www.amazon.com/Philosophies-Religions-India-Yogi-Rama... . It's a short and concise read and the treatment is a good mix of outsider (the writer is originally a westerner) and insider (he also happens to be a hindu).

As a second book, The Hindus is pretty accessible if you're used to reading slightly technical books. Her style is good, and she's absorbed the Indian philosophical writing tradition of using far too many analogies :)
Vizicities: Opensource 3D city and data visualisation platform
Even in the UK. Which is regarded as a civilized country. And even in Japan, too. Well, it confirms my views that politicians are usually just a bunch of monkeys in suits.
Did you ever try to take naps and compare the effects to taking Modafinil? I nap about for about 20-40 minutes right after lunch and have a RedBull immediately before laying down.
I did not intend my posts to be of the "here is what is actually going on" variety. My concern is that I have seen no attempt in the article or (at the time of my original posting) in the comments even addressing the possibility that this is non-malicious. As the article is making a claim it has a burden of proof that, in my opinion, it has not even come close to meeting.

As a direct response to my concerns, you have actually addressed some these fundamental concerns that should have been dealt with in the original article article allowing me, as an untrained lay-person in this matter, to take this case much more seriously.

I am still not convinced that this is an instance of policy and not individual incentives, but answering that would involve reasearch into many cases, their incentive structure, comparrisons to other groups, ETC, and would need to be written up into a long and in depth article which would get fewer readers and less invigorate the base as these shorter and less logically compelling pieces. I realize that this is a fundemental problem with any type of activism, and the only solution I know of is to call it out and hope that A) someone will provide the information in comments, B) authors will tend to include (or reference) more information in the original article, and C) other people will that these articles may not show what they think they do.
Not at all. I think that it's our perspective shifted, because our every day computers became so fast, with more CPU and more RAM, that the average programmer doesn't feel the pain of inefficient code anymore.
I've seen enough software that is "very fast and scalable", because it wasn't tested at really large deployments.

Of course, that's not always what your software needs or wants, but in the case of internet backend software and hardware, it's a huge difference if your servers have 1, 10 or 100 times the throughput.

Also, many developers are client developers where this is a not the problem it used to be.
In 1990, when a game didn't fit into a few kB of memory or didn't ran fast enough, the developer assembler-optimized the hell out of it, today most of this doesn't matter except for the software everyone uses but noone writes (your ISPs webmail, dropbox, twitter and whatever internet site has enough users).
The combination of RequestPolicy, Ghostery, HTTPS Everywhere and Adblock Plus breaks formatting The Verge for me. I have yet to find a solution.

Looking at the RequestPolicy log does not present an immediately obvious solution.
Small businesses and shoveling snow
Actually I was agreeing to your point that at the time when CVS is used version control is no longer "just a tool" but a PITA.

I'm the one who suggested conversion to a newer system, so when the other developers need to re-learn and lose a week of productivity that way it is my fault, to some extent.

My conversion script is essentially just automating creating cvs2hg config files for a number of CVS modules (and cleaning up before/after conversion) because our CVS repo is a few GiB in size, containing everything that ever existed (and plenty of things beside that) so a 1:1 conversion isn't that ideal, especially because it will lead to frequent (harmless) merges. But to developers with a CVS background merges are scary.

My cvshg PowerShell script is based around https://wiki.mozilla.org/Using_Mercurial_locally_with_CVS and http://pavelchikulaev.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/using-mercuri..., but tailored to how I use the tools. It allows me to commit happily locally and histedit later when I need commits I can actually share with others.
It definitely shouldn't matter, but I would still like to know what he finds objectionable. He's one of the smartest scholars in Indian politics and his opinions are always interesting, if somewhat controversial.
>My biggest issues with hg are that hg's revision numbers aren't synchronized across instances, they are local only[1] making them kind of useless, you can't easily have local branches[2], and it stores changesets instead of objects.

Nope. Revision numbers are just a convenience when you're working locally in a repo. Just like Git, each commit is uniquely identified using a SHA hash.

No again on the local branches. Again, Mercurial is even more flexible when it comes to branching that Git is: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2009/08/a-guide-to-branching-in-me....
Can you elaborate what you meant by the "bs that came along with it"? Was it mostly setting up the system (getting the right folks, script, etc.) that was hard?

Really interested to hear your experience (and the "pain points") as I know someone who is trying to write a book about this and he's always on the lookout for folks with different perspectives.
The question is, what can security agencies do with this information?
How I got $12k in book preorders in 1 month
Reminds me of that story of Target sending marketing material to a pregnant teenage girl before her father knew.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe...
There was at least one beating with a cane related to a speech about US slavery that happened in the senate building, if not while the senate was in session.
The demand for coding jobs leads to another student success
The point I was trying to make is that if you spend your time to make something that works really efficiently, and you take pride in it, then you haven't wasted your time. It doesn't benefit nobody, it benefits yourself, because you can take pride in your work. At least, I believe this idea is part of what's implied in the traditional notion of 'craftsmanship'.

An example might be working nine hours per day rather than eight to produce something that only uses 10% of the resources (and that extra hour is unpaid). For some people, that extra hour would be a waste, but for others, it would bring them greater satisfaction knowing they'd delivered a more efficient product, even if it brought them no extra revenue.
Siteup.io – platform for static web sites backed by Git [pre registration]
Apparently the hijacker(s) wanted political asylum in Switzerland:

http://www.jaunted.com/story/2014/2/17/02325/1000/travel/BRE...
For some of us it's Monday
I'm not sure how linux handles high resolution but osx only makes the display crisper. You have the option of making everything smaller but that's not quite optimized. If rmbp boots into windows, it has the same issue, last time I check.

If you're getting rmbp, I would go with the 15 in model. 13 in only uses integrated graphic which has trouble handling the high resolution.
Web Apps Raise The Ceiling Above HTML5 As Famo.us Recreates Facebook's Paper
Okay, show's over. Everyone came out save and sound.

via http://www.rts.ch/info/suisse/5619177-aeroport-de-cointrin-f...
Well, it's effective, but it's certainly not good. It wastes police resources, can result in your door being kicked down (they don't compensate for repairs), your dogs could be shot, you could be tazed or shot, etc.
Citation for the whitelist claim?
Great story! I remember first time I listened to these .IT tracks on my PC I was truly impressed by the quality of the samplers, awesome stereo effects. There was a song "love to Julua" or "dedication to Juliette" or something like this, it was an absolutely amazing masterpiece. I never mastered IT though, FT2 felt a bit more easier to use...

Thanks for the story!
There is a big difference between what standards you hold yourself to and being imposed upon by an outside entity. Its one thing to realize your wrong and correct, that happens all the time with outside critics. Its another thing to have the outside critics use a broken law system to force you to change against your will.

"How do you separate an incorporated entity from a community?"

An incorporated entity is still a group of people and you shouldn't have to give up your speech rights to get liability protection. So, my answer is the same for a blog as a publisher. You either believe you were right or come to see you might have been wrong. If you believe you are right, but the lack of protection under the law allows others to crush you, then something is seriously wrong.

I think you're mixing the meaning of "private". A lawsuit is a part of the public law system.
What seems scholarly to you looks extremely offensive to most Hindus. And ultimately it should be Hindus who get to decide the meaning of Hinduism. The over-the-top reaction to what is effectively a caricature in the likes of 'Innocence of Muslims' is enabled because such treatment of Hinduism by Christians has a history, a history that still plays its part in everyday life of Indians (not just Hindus). Point in case, the article talks about the 'criminalization of homosexuality', but fails to mention that it was criminalized by British-raj. Indian judiciary just rejected to get involved into executive branch, a very sensible approach IMHO.

The article itself refers to such treatment by naming Edward Said, for example. But then swoops in with personal judgements, calling Rajiv Malhotra's essay as a right-wingist parody and trying to link everything with rise of business-friendly nationalist Modi.

This is to be expected. Economical rise of any non-western country has historically correlated with doom-and-gloom about it in articles in western media, whether it is liberal or conservative. Even now it is hard for me to read an article about China in The Economist. Just today I saw an article about Chinese government cracking down on sex-racket, and how it is fomenting unrest and civil disobedience among Chinese.
Ah good stuff thanks posting that. I'll have to look into it, I haven't tried cpusets yet.

In the past I tried migrating kernel threads, the migration did work but system became unstable, so I gave up on that.
What kind/brand of modafinil? The indian-online-pharmacy deal doesn't seem too trustworthy to me
Why would that page be a "Copyright Concern"?
Interesting, I hadn't really hard about this before. Do you have any links to more info/additional resources?
see my response to einhverfr for further clarification. I have no opinion or desire to learn about this situation to form an opinion.
Hijacker has been arrested according to this:

http://jpupdates.com/2014/02/17/breaking-hijacked-ethiopian-...
>Similarly, if your software runs in 1% of CPU on a typical customer's machine, spending 10x the time and resources to make it run in 0.1% is not laudable.

No, but spending 1.2x the time and resources might be. That's not an unreasonable proposition; something written in Go, C# or Scala can run 10 to 100 times faster than the equivalent code in Ruby, but it certainly doesn't take 10 to 100 times longer to write the code.

It also conserves resources; you're reducing the amount of the world's non-renewable energy that your app consumes by up to 90%. You're also freeing up your users' machines to do more things simultaneously while running your program, potentially increasing the user's enjoyment of the system in the case of a desktop app.
But in wiki-land, that won't be acceptable, because it wasn't published anywhere else first.
mostly conceptual: Computer Science.

mostly empirical: Programming.
Possible hijacking in progress -- ETH 702 squawking 7500 over Mediterranean
" As the article is making a claim it has a burden of proof that, in my opinion, it has not even come close to meeting."

The NYPD has a long history of doing this, not only shown on this site, but others. It's actually quite bad.

Here's another few examples

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-nypd-is-foia-proof,

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/03/ap-nypd-matt-apuzzo...

etc

Muckrock has enough history requesting things from the NYPD that they are probably tired of writing up the same case of this maliciousness, again and again.
Are you sure you can't just increase size of UI elements?

In Linux I live in tmux + emacs + i3 + browser, and they can easily be configured with larger fonts etc.

I would love to move to a quality display with resolution > 2560x1440 to get crispier fonts (although many other aspects of a display are just as important as resolution).
Linksys E-series Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution Exploit
Also with IPv6 you can easily route a whole /64 net (264 IPs!) onto a single machine.
> There is a big difference between what standards you hold yourself to and being imposed upon by an outside entity.

And which of these is a local community? I would argue that the local community, generally has far less power over individuals than their employers and therefore such restrictions are likely to be far less intrusive.

For example, if you are a salaried employee and your employer fires you for speech you make on, say, a political cause that goes against your employer's interests, that's quite possible and if that's ok, that is far more threatening IMO to free speech generally than allowing lawsuits in court over defamation. If it is solely an employer's prerogative, then this means it is something that the wealthy upper classes can hold unilaterally over everyone else, without any political constraints.
Humans And Monkeys Share Machiavellian Intelligence (2007)
@cubancigar11
"And ultimately it should Hindus who get to decide the meaning of Hinduism."

Why? Cause I doubt they would agree. To say unless you are X then you can't comment on X is foolish.
I like Dominion, it's got some of the same mechanics and is a an easier game to set up and explain.

But it's missing one key thing that Puerto Rico has -- the depth of subtle interaction. Yes, there's some interaction cards in Dominion, but with PR there's this level of play that goes beyond blocking other players and into providing incentives for them to do things with a timing that's advantageous for you (and slightly less advantageous for them, but not so much that they can resist :).

Not a whole lot of games like that.
Its a hijacking:
Live reddit thread with updates from /r/Aviation

http://np.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1y46mi/possible_hij...
+ elopements,adultery and the like.
One more problem is cloud. We host on cloud. cloud service providers might be using old hardware. Newest hardware or specific OS might be winner but no options on cloud. How do you tackle that ?
> And which of these is a local community?

You lost me. I have no idea what you're trying to get at or maybe I have no idea what you mean by "local community"?

The article says a book was published then a group of people used threats made possible by a broken law system to get the book censored.
Yeah. And then you find out exactly why social sciences are progressing so slowly and have such a tough time of getting definite results.

I envy everyone working in natural sciences. Their jobs are immensely challenging, no doubt, but at least they have a clear path forward, more or less. But they are making impressive progress all the time.

Looking at human behaviour is much more challenging (so challenging that hardly anyone has an idea how to do it and most stick with boring unreliable ways that have somewhat kind of worked in the past), fraught with ethical issues, and so on.

Measuring everything is not a realistic goal. Measuring should be done whenever possible and is an awesome tool every designer should be using but it is impossible to employ it for every little change. And it has so far not been possible to develop a general theory of design that would help you decide small things without testing that specific instance of the design.
HN got me the first 260 users for http://crushify.org
(Reddit was a no show.)
Bah. Nothing new here. This stuff has been going on forever. You didn't need the "Citizens United" ruling to enable this.

One of my favorite instances involved the inventor of the Internet drinking too much iced tea, back in 1996:

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/hart101900.asp

Gore "lost his memory" some 85 times - 85 times - when he was questioned by the FBI about his role in various fundraising scandals, including "Chinagate," an illegal scheme that raised millions of dollars in campaign-cash from communist Chinese for the Clinton-Gore reelection effort in 1996.

Gore claimed that at one pivotal meeting at the White House where illegal fundraising was discussed, he must have missed the illegal parts because he was frequently in the bathroom thanks to drinking too much iced tea. But senior White House officials say the meetings were stopped whenever the president or vice president left, and one of these officials remembers Gore "attentively listening."
> If you want to buy the book... too late! Preorders are now closed

What the hell?

I'd be interested to see a preview or something. I'm sure I could learn a thing or two about marketing, but I guess I'm too late... oh well.
> You lost me. I have no idea what you're trying to get at or maybe I have no idea what you mean by "local community"?

Are we members of communities? Are states "outside entities" any more than employers are? Why or why not? Does it matter if there is a general sense of ownership over the state?

Let's put it another way: Suppose the State of Ohio issues a charter to the New Saigon Initiaitve (name pulled out of thin air) to set up an incorporated, not for profit municipality with full self-governance with all the powers the state can lawfully delegate. Let's say that the charter specifies that all residents shall have an equal share of ownership and an equal say in the running of New Saigon. Suppose New Saigon starts banning books. Suppose the penalty for possessing a banned book is $500 and abatement by destroying or sending the book away, or being exiled from the town (but given an opportunity to sell your residence at market prices).

1. How is this different from a city doing it?

2. How is this different from an employer doing it?