skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For me, the Internet is largely unusable without adblock at the very least. I removed Ghostery and started using Disconnect instead. It does a much better job methinks.

In addition to this on Firefox at least I invoke about:config and make several settings changes:

- I disable prefetch.

- I disable media.peerconnect.

- I disable geo tracking.

- I disable HTTP/S referer.

- I disable DOM storage.

- I disable visited link tracking.

I also use EasyList, EasyPrivacy, and Malware domains adblock subscriptions.

In addition, as a Linux user, I want to use Flash on those sites that use it, but I don't want to deal with LSOs tracking me, so I take advantage of Flash by sending those LSOs to /dev/null. The Website is none the wiser and I get the benefit of the Website.

rm -rf .adobe

rm -rf .macromedia

ln -s /dev/null .adobe

ln -s /dev/null .macromedia

Surf with relative comfort knowing that you've already paid for your Internet connection with cash, no need to give away more of your privacy than needed. Blocking ads is great if you use any social media, as you don't have to see the sodden ads.
Thanks for the feedback. I will definitely keep your point in mind as I evaluate both options.
AND THE CROWD GOES....

"Yawn... what is out? Oh yeah, I think I heard of that..."
Which came first, the chair or the fatty ass?
Yep, I've only scrolled down to the first page and I already know theres no way I'm doing going to read through this.

The whole fading / animating images in and out thing is at least as annoying too, it seems to slow the scroll down even further.

I also find it hilarious how they've paid so much attention to constructing this look and feel and then it's so severely broken with the way they incorporate the ads.
I, too, have the exact same cynicism as you do (and I haven't yet read the article)...however, seeing James Bamford as the author changes things a bit. Bamford is the independent researcher who, back when the NSA was mostly unheard of and beyond reproach, cracked the organization through classic reporting and research. Of all the investigative reporters, Bamford is one that has my highest respect...he didn't have a news organization behind him, or any institutional privileges...this is not to say that someone like Greenwald is a lesser reporter (IMO, Greenwald worked incredibly hard to be in a position, years later, for someone like Snowden to trust)...but Bamford was really working in the wilderness and is not a lightweight in this field.

Some more background here: http://www2.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=17031

Anyway, that's just my bias going into this piece.
It's all in the game
Google and Facebook organize their own contests, I believe. And you can find problem repositories with judges that let you submit your solutions online. These are slightly tricky to use for learning, because they wouldn't tell you what went wrong with any particular solution. Some places, like topcoder and codejam, will post analyses of their contests that explain how to solve the problems. Topcoder also has many of these analyses going far back, so you can read them to learn about algorithm design.

Links:

http://www.topcoder.com/
https://code.google.com/codejam/
https://www.facebook.com/hackercup
http://www.spoj.com/
http://uva.onlinejudge.org/
> I want to FEEL your desire to work with us.

I don't know if I want to work with you. You haven't done excellent job of
selling yourself to me yet (especially with posts like this).

Moreover, most probably it's you who hasn't done your homework when redacting
job post. It's probably another "young company with long traditions" and
"international market leader", requiring "proficiency with Oracle, .NET,
Tomcat/JBoss and ActiveDirectory" and offering "dynamic team, competitive
salary and opportunity for professional development". Why would I feel at this
point the desire to work specifically with you? How do you differ from all
the others in the market?

And if you are too busy to do your job of looking for a good candidate, then
a) you probably should change jobs, and/or b) I don't necessarily want to work
with you. It's possible that there is more people acting incompetently in your
company (either because the people are just incompetent themselves or because
company doesn't give them possibility to act competently).
More likely that he putting more pressure on one than the other without realizing it. We have lots on unconscious habits we are unaware of.
Optimising Small Data Structures in JRuby+Truffle
This particular one had me in splits (:
Would be cool if they supported chip and pin and paypass.
I'm cynically inclined to believe it's there to identify people who can't read the source to discover the cutoff is 300 characters.
My home town is home of the urban 4x4, where the most challenging terrain they will encounter are the speed bumps in the supermarket car park.
Docker is good to run application container, not suitable for virtulizing OS. Therefore, playing with system configuration files such as /etc/hosts of /etc/resolv.conf is not something that you want to do in Docker. You should use LXC, instead.

I agree that Docker is suck sometimes, but most of times are because existing application is not built in a way that docker expects. I am optimistic that more are more applications are designed to be used for container environment.
6 Steps to Building Long-Lasting Client Relationships
Police in America have zero responsibility to protect an individual. They enforce laws. Also, even if they did, check on response times for a 911 call. My wife is a dispatcher with the sheriffs dept here - 20-30 mins is normal where we are at. Tell us again how the cops can protect us?
It works great for the Win8 'Apps', but not regular windows applications (Firefox, Adobe, etc) for my setup. Probably something taking over my shortcuts.
I get an error stating that I can't use my Youtube account, I have to use my Gmail account. When I do that, it automatically creates another Youtube account for me.

Or something like that. I've given up on understanding their accounts logic, it's hard enough to keep up with the changes to the player and site.
Looks like this is just for the US. Do any of you have cashback credit cards that offer >1.75% ?
The TAO killed the internet in Syria not to mention MonsterMind. Just when you thought it was safe to get back on the internet...
One of the many obscurities here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

I used Google to find that.
No credit to the account? Definitely pursue this! Absolutely, definitely pursue this. Find out why the number was wrong, find out why the technical team had to change it, find out how long it was wrong for, establish whose fault it was, tot up how much it cost you, and definitely ask for a refund!

Just think if this was your personal money, what would you do? If you just take the hit, the money doesn't mean enough to you.
Does it really warrant a post here if it is just a cheaper alternative?
I am not sure what part of the story was not already told.
I hate when people do this but totally thirding this. If you don't get the money back from them, something is seriously wrong here.

You have admission of fault. Right there.
I like the idea - I'm not currently using gmail so I can't try it but it's on my todo list. If you would be cool if you could save templates for the draft emails for example "Current Client", "Lead".
To be fair, use and possession of firearms in Britain is also a very strong marker of a distinct rural culture. To some extent this relates to class politics as well because the upper class has traditionally been rural and derived power and wealth from agriculture, it still sees itself that way even if that's not where many people make money any more.

See also the debate over fox-hunting which was seen as both a culture war between urban and rural as well as between the urban upper-middle class and the rural upper class.

One of the reasons for the different class associations of hunting between the UK and the US has to do with land availability. There is and always has been loads of sparsely populated land in the US (publicly or otherwise owned) on which it is possible to hunt inexpensively or for free. That is not true in the UK and many upper-class landowners have historically rented out their land to farmers but retained the hunting, fishing, and shooting rights for themselves.
Honeyd – Hosts Simulator
Please don't downvote - he/she is right.

I'll back this up.

Visual Studio Professional above appears in the start menu as Visual Studio Professional so if you type "Vis" it appears.

However the Express SKUs are called VS Express so you have to type "VS".

This is the inconsistency I assume that is being displayed here.

It's bloody annoying to be honest as I use VS express at home for a couple of things but Pro at work.
There are already strong rumors that multiple desktops will be a feature in the new windows9.
In an interview on the /build/ 2014 some MS devs said that now that they have made a dumb-ui for the common consumer they can finally improve the desktop to the needs of power-users
Candy Swift – Match 3 Game Kit for iOS
Interesting talk. Thanks for sharing!
Nice one :)

I love when people use programming to play with words.

Sad it's english only. I may work on a french version.

But really nice idea.
> At this point I decided it was a bad idea to stand all the time and switched to 2 week standing/sitting cycles.

Well there's your problem. You should alternate every couple hours, not every couple weeks.

Buy a tall stool or drafting chair so you don't need to move your desk up and down.
The AMS commissioned a study a few years ago, and it was in the Notices in early 2011 or 2012.
To own until the studio pulls it ಠ_ಠ. https://torrentfreak.com/amazon-pulls-access-to-purchased-ch...
Given that almost 40% of married couples in the U.S. are 55+, I'd imagine more than 1 in 5 couples is infertile...
Think of Amazon's role as an online merchant: they've built a 3rd party merchant system where other folks can use Amazon's retail and distribution. Then, they gathered centralized data of what sells, at what prices. They stepped in and started carrying more profitable items themselves.

Now, look at their role here: if this takes off, they'll have data on what merchants are selling, for how much, and to whom. These are items that Amazon wouldn't normally get sales data on because people choose local vendors instead.

If Amazon wanted to start pushing more into local markets (or different kinds of products), they can make a fortune off this data, and that's why they can afford to undercut companies like Square. It's a long term play.
I hope you got a refund?

We spend quite a bit of money on AdWords every day, and I started managing the account a few weeks ago (hand-off from an agency) and it's been a fantastic challenge to brush up on that part of my skill-set again. However, it's kind of weird that their numbers never really match up with ours, typically overreported, and I pray that we never run into an issue like the one you have had.

On the bright side, at least AdWords numbers are predictably off (about 15% overreported, on average.) Facebook Ads numbers overreport anywhere from 10% to 100%, so that's the one I worry about on a day to day basis.
An app that promises to change the color of your Facebook is a virus
Study: You Have 'Near-Zero' Impact on U.S. Policy
That's an interesting issue... I've never had an issue on Windows 7 or 8 using the [Start} + arrow key to set a normal window to half-screen.

Do you use any productivity enhancing system tools?
Just a note from me, as I tried one for a week.

Not enough RAM!

My 2011 MBP has 16Gb of RAM and my 2014 HP Z420 has 32Gb of RAM.

I can barely spin up our product on a machine with 8Gb of RAM without killing everything else I'm doing on first. Then SQL Server doesn't give the RAM back inevitably leading to the service being restarted to release it. Granted this is a big product but in this day and age, 8Gb shouldn't be the cap for anything.

Also both the keyboards were shitty and the thing crashed occasionally (blue screen) when I tried plugging it into my desktop monitor - an old 22" Dell TFT.

The big thing for me, is that I actually had a better experience using my Android tablet with a keyboard/mouse plugged in and remote desktop to my workstation in the office. That kills the massively powerful portable computer use case dead for me. Was perfectly usable over a 3G connection as well.
Wow, talk about low expectations. "We're pretty sure the next version will remove the misfeatures the current version added!"
The article seems to be a joke, but it's tasteless and not funny at all. It contains statements that are just plain lies.
I'd count us as a relatively small advertiser, but it works perfectly well for us. Since I've taken over our accounts, I've made quite an impact in terms of traffic and conversions, and we don't spend that much compared to big brands.

That, and I've gotten them on the phone for support a few times already, answering random questions I have, pretty satisfactory.
http://bordeaux.craigslist.fr/res/4616848435.html
I just got a copy of the paper from the researcher. They used 16 study participants. Still not a huge sample size, but big enough for consideration.
Great work as always from CGP Grey. Be sure to check out his other videos - they are well worth the watch.
Tricera Hi-Tops
Can someone explain why manually keyed transactions cost more than swipes? I'm thinking there's more risk involved with those or something along those lines.
VMware + Containers = Containers without Compromise
They're only undercutting Square until 2015, after that the fee is 2.75%, same as Square. Read the fine print.
My favorite tool for quickly grabbing part or all of a screen is SnappyApp. It does what I need, and gets out of the way:

http://snappy-app.com/
Size of business really isn't important, life time value of a customer is really the primary metric when evaluating whether or not a paid channel will work for your business.

If you can convert a lead profitably then it makes sense to advertise in that channel.

If you spend $400 per lead and you convert 1 out of every 10 leads to a paying customer, then it costs you $4,000 to acquire that customer. If the life time value of the customer is $10,000 with a 50% profit margin ($5,000), then you just profited $1K!

PPC is really a game of arbitrage. Where it gets hazy is calculating correct LTV (considering customer turnover, referrals, etc.) and properly tracking conversions. It's not an exact science but good advertisers can get accurate enough.
Fabulous, seriously clever - just needs a markdown to slide converter as somewhere to start. I like to outline my presentations first and md is a great way to do it. Finessing a presentation with something like this would be ideal.
But it also has this warning for plain text files - so it's not just about source code where 300 lines is indeed quite long. However 300 characters is very short for a paragraph of text, if you aren't manually wrapping your plain text.
> I think the problem is a disagreement on what kind of "automation" is the goal. You seem to want to automate all possible math. Sure, we can't do that. But we certainly can try to automate any math a human can do (eventually).

This is a very helpful reply; thanks.

I don't want to automate all math, since it is impossible to do so; and I think that I have clearly indicated in each of my posts in this thread that I am speaking only to that particular, narrow issue—but I can see how that narrow nit-picking might not be of interest. The reason that I brought it up was because it sounded to me like what pnut (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8169453) was suggesting.

Now, I do not believe that computers can automate any math that a human can do, except in the narrow sense that I might be able a posteriori to tell a computer to follow exactly the steps that I took. (Some 'intuitive' processes are presumably not subject to automation even in this very weak sense.) This is a much stronger assertion requiring much stronger demonstration, and I am not prepared to (nor, I think, have I claimed to) address it. Perhaps, with that caveat, that's the discussion that I should have started (with perhaps my weaker point as a footnote).
Seems like a brilliant solution to this problem

Stick it to them! Good work.
> I hope you got a refund?

Seconded; the support people basically did state it was an error on their side, so a full refund sounds obvious. Maybe even a compensation for damages, since you probably lost a lot of potential customers.
Obligatory question: can you maximize console window in Win9? It will be 20 years soon and I am still waiting for bug fix.
I read through all the comments here before beginning to read the article. The comments that say that the usability of the article format is very bad are correct. The online format is too cute by half, and impairs readability. But the article is well worth reading. As Danso points out, the journalist who did the reporting on this article is a renowned independent investigative reporter, James Bamford, who has broken many important stories about NSA in previous years. The writing is worth reading and discussing here, and it's too bad Wired's editors mucked up the reader experience so much with the strange user interface and formatting.

"I confess to feeling some kinship with Snowden. Like him, I was assigned to a National Security Agency unit in Hawaii—in my case, as part of three years of active duty in the Navy during the Vietnam War. Then, as a reservist in law school, I blew the whistle on the NSA when I stumbled across a program that involved illegally eavesdropping on US citizens. I testified about the program in a closed hearing before the Church Committee, the congressional investigation that led to sweeping reforms of US intelligence abuses in the 1970s. Finally, after graduation, I decided to write the first book about the NSA. At several points I was threatened with prosecution under the Espionage Act, the same 1917 law under which Snowden is charged (in my case those threats had no basis and were never carried out). Since then I have written two more books about the NSA, as well as numerous magazine articles (including two previous cover stories about the NSA for WIRED), book reviews, op-eds, and documentaries."

As a substantive comment on the article, let me say that I find it interesting that Snowden himself thinks it is appalling that NSA's internal security auditing is so poor that NSA can't even tell which documents Snowden disclosed to journalists, nor can it tell how many other leakers may still be on its staff. This seems to be a completely plausible claim, and that would be a reason why many American voters or leaders of countries allied to the United States might desire the current leadership of NSA to resign and be replaced with more competent leaders.
> They're only undercutting Square until 2015, after that the fee is 2.75%, same as Square. Read the fine print.

Yes, because Amazon never lowers their prices, do they? Read the news.
What the hell. I start scrolling with my mouse wheel, but nothing moves. I'm thinking my mouse must be broken, until 30 seconds later, I notice the "cover image" fade in and out. I swear, crappy flash intros are alive and well. They just don't use flash anymore.
It'd show as gradually poorer CTR's and less money billed in the adwords campaign.
This.

I'm liking MacOS X. It's had "preview" in it since day one and it just works. It also displays PDF ToC nicely as well and allows annotations.

Ubuntu always confuses the crap out of me from a desktop perspective. Fortunately I only have two machines deployed with it on now and they are headless servers.
>It really bothers me, how bad the Google's support is, especially for the products that make them money

In what way was the support inadequate with regards to this article? It seems to me Google responded pretty quickly and resolved this persons issue.
Puush is fantastic: http://puush.me/
Boston’s Best Company Culture – Cambridge [Slideshow]
It's easier to enter a fake credit card number than to produce a fake credit card.
Direct link to the commit logs: https://code.google.com/p/go/source/list?name=release-branch...
> I'm surprised there isn't an EFF-like non-profit that provides pro-bono patent defense to start-ups, against patent trolls. I would donate to that organization.

I'm sympathetic to the plight of startups having to deal with the trolliest of trolls, but give me a break. There are so many worthier avenues for pro-bono legal work than helping out for-profit companies.
The key difference for small businesses is that the fixed costs of learning and managing the system can skew these numbers.

For bigger advertisers these costs are insignificant in comparison to the media bill
It doesn't go on to say what exactly happens on the routers in question, but I guess they simply close the session and log an error?
“Shocking” IPv6 revelation in South Africa
BattleHack Boston Names Team BUtiful Bois as its Winning App
I actually don't mind this kind of scrolling - I think it can be useful for storytelling. In this example the scrolling over text doesn't seem to be messed with, which is good.

I think what's frustrating about this example in particular is that there is no feedback for scrolling when the page 'pauses' on an image. There should at least be an element moving so that the user knows the page isn't freezing.
Two key 'new' things from this article, that were previously unknown:

1. The NSA exploited the firmware of a Syrian core internet router, and bricked it by mistake. This was an "oh shit" moment (sic). So in it's eagerness to scoop up all digital communications, it killed the majormost way for citizens to communicate while in the midst of a civil war. Great.

2. There is a project called "MonsterMind", which 100% automates adversarial hacking in retaliation to detected attacks. Very Strangelove-ian, as the article says.

EDIT: Typo, thanks to not having had coffee in time.
> Horrible to scroll on mobile as well

That's interesting. I came here to say that it looks and works great on mobile, specifically chrome on android. Sounds like it's wildly inconsistent between devices.
Don't half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.

When your attention is split on two different and identical campaigns, both of them will fail. Choose one and make it count.
My question is, perhaps, a less obvious one.

Why does it matter if you were discriminated against for being male?

If you were, that's an extremely rare occurrence. White cisgendered males in the tech world do not lack for job opportunities.
I wonder if these kind of initiatives slow the adoption of chip and pin credit cards in the US. If Amazon is willing to lower the fees for swipes, pin entered transactions could be even lower.
This discussion topic, which never ends here on HN, of "the correct working position", is pretty silly when properly analogized to "the correct sex position".

Everyone knows there's only one position that feels the best and it should be done the same way for your entire life regardless of temporary or permanent health level or other conditions and the world would be a better place if all diversity were forcibly stomped out and the one true position was legally required for all. Because there can only be one correct answer. You know, just like programming editors. See? Now everyone is happy.
My father-in-law works (and stands) on street market for past 40 years. He is in similar shape as other man in his age. So I think there is no miracle here, just some physical work and exercise.
There are different screen sizes available (14" is common).