skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Forgot to post the link to the original citing article.

http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/training-the-obese...
I think you misread the point of my post. The statement about Facebook being great for intelligence gathering is accurate. My point was that the statement was obvious, and didn't present a new or interesting view on the subject.

That one line however, get's published across the web and because of the context (Snowden/NSA) and mention of Facebook, it will grab eyeballs.

I generally discount things people say in interviews while promoting something like a book, movie, product etc.
This may or may not be something that would interest him, but OpenStack is written in Python (no Django, but parts of it use MongoDB), and pretty much nobody who is deeply involved in OpenStack development has any shortage of recruiters trying to employ them.

http://www.openstack.org/community/
Another nice thing for these agencies is that being on facebook already indicates certain things about you(as does not being on facebook). I know for a fact that here in the Netherlands, during a standard security check, our intelligence agency checks if you do or don't have a social network account.

If even 'regular' security checks take this into account, then I'll bet you dollars to donuts that it's certainly looked at when they suspect you of something, or as dragnet profiling/surveillance.
You don't have to be paranoid about Facebook's intent to realize that it's a huge storehouse of personal data. Nobody with a brain thinks that Facebook strategizes every morning about how to collect the most data for intelligence agencies. However, a side effect of their business model makes it an unprecedented treasure trove of data about hundreds of millions of people and their relationships/interactions with each other.
https://www.academia.edu/5327317/A_Low-Cost_Open-Source_Meta...
I would argue that no permission should be "implied". For each example you list in that category, I can find an argument to not make it implied. For example: Many people are on plans with capped data per month and are therefore concerned about how much data an app uses. As such a user I would want to make sure apps like a flashlight app do not use internet connectivity at all. Likewise if you are concerned about privacy and want to know when an app connects to the internet and thereby automatically reveals your location, possibly usage pattern, etc.
> While it's great FTI reversed their decision (I'd hate to see this sort of thing become wide-spread), it's a little off-putting that so many non-users of the chip could force a company into something.

A wide variety of non-users of the chip have a very strong interest in Windows Update not becoming a vector for malware. I doubt this situation would have gained the quick public notice it did if it had been the work of a driver available for download on FTDI's website.
My personal beef is with curling HTTP (no -s) URLs - getting an installation shell script over HTTPS is not unreasonable (unless instructed to provide a no-SSL-confirmation flag, such as -k for curl, in which case it is more or less the same thing).

By default, `curl https://blah.blah/` will only work if the TLS certs are proper & validated. This isn't about trusting the author (you'll be running their code anyway, one way or another) but the transport medium (HTTP!s).

If I had your show-and-shame tumblr, I'd only include http:// links.
Perhaps ColinWright[1], a prolific HN user who is a mathematician, may have some referrals for you.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ColinWright
Intelligence agencies don't exist solely for the purpose of monitoring Islamic extremism.
More importantly, how did the government certify the terrible encryption scheme?
And that's only in the left-to-right parts.
> most of them likely made from much better materials.

Unfortunately lots of lead paint as well. It is still a very real issue.
Facebook onboarded to PRISM program and reporting to FISA ("Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act") Courts.

Comments in here skeptical that they engage in any foreign surveillance.
On proper typing
Why is there no mention of Frank Lloyd Wright?

The man is one of the most celebrated architects in the history of the field, and he created his masterwork (Fallingwater) when he was 71. Furthermore, his output over the last 20 years of his life accounted for more than half of his lifetime output. He died while in the middle of creating the Guggenheim - simply did not stop.

Interestingly enough his life arc was quite similar to Steve Jobs.
I'm currently living in Mexico City. I'm surprised to see these many startups in Gudalajara, and yours are not certainly the first ones that I read about. Is Guadalajara becoming the Silicon Valley/SF of Mexico? What are the reasons to establish your startups there?
Looking for Personal Finance Info? Look No Further
Really hate the Microsoft standard here of "unknown error" everywhere. Is it really that hard to give a name to those, MS? "File signature verification issue" would be a million times more helpful. This has always bothered me deeply with MS software; that it's almost impossible to tell what's happening from logs / error messages.
Ok. This looks like media coverage to me: http://www.zdnet.com/ftdi-admits-to-bricking-innocent-users-...

The line of argument "I, as some random anonymous person on the internet, can't see X" doesn't do much for me. Lots of people can't see lots of things, but most of the time that turns out to be about failures of knowledge or imagination, not evidence that that what they're talking about is impossible.

Further, I don't think it's really my job to make people see things. (Well, actually, it is, but I charge by the day for that.) If you don't see it, I can live with that.
Intelligence agencies don't have to hack Facebook to get massively useful intelligence from it. They just have to read it.

edit: And no one even claimed that they do in the interview. This is a stupid thread.

-----

"L.P.: Sure, don't you think? It totally does. Facebook is a gift to intelligence agencies. People volunteer all their social information."

...is the entirety of the discussion of facebook.
It's so cool that it's an inverse delta! Sadly this is probably because they had to find a way to circumvent patents.
Show HN: Akumuli – time-series database
Be shared by influencers. Get 42 shares a week on Facebook and Twitter
Great product! I wanted to signup but please enable https. Accepting password over http is not acceptable.
Buying High: How to Get Rich on Pot Stocks
Put yourself in situations where "I can do the impossible" overconfidence leads to running up against the brick wall of the impossible and having to start over. Usually that means some form of consulting. A lot of older developers have a lot of luck specializing in fixing problems that have previously been fucked up by junior developers, often using older more-stable technologies or working in tricky problem domains where there are a lot of gotchas.
This is great stuff. I kind of wish they would hire you to run this. Another idea I've had would be for the user to be able to install an app without giving it the perms it "requires" (perhaps by unchecking some boxes in the dialog). Then apps would be responsible for handling a "no you can't see the contact DB" API response. Or they could crash I guess. The point is that users could effectively renegotiate with apps, e.g. "yes I'd like to use NFC to pay, no I don't want you to be able to record everything that's going on around my phone".
Legendary special FX artist Peter Kuran on work restoring atomic bomb footage
That works only if the system is always capturing 360 degree video, and Rift users are using their own head-tracking to select which portion of the spherical view they're seeing. If they're actually using the head-tracking to send movement commands to the lunar camera, then the latency is unavoidable.
Apps can seemingly call external ones: for example, Google Authenticator hands QR code reading off to Barcode Reader, and thus doesn't require the permission for itself.

Having a PayPal "Till" app to augment the main one for microphone/QR users would be ideal, and not violate the permissions.

So there is some blame, though I agree: Android's permission model being fixed is more important.
Well not in my safari. It crashes as soon as I try to click on the particles.
No because I'm turning my head. The reason to use 360° cameras is that they capture the full range of the image in a single frame. This allows things like taking one stream of 360° video, and allow you to look around while watching the video, without requiring a mechanical panorama to be taken for each frame. However this is a problem with stereography since you need a particular distance between the two views to achieve depth — the cameras have to be positioned similarly to the eyes in your head to achieve realistic depth. In software this is trivial, but on a robot, it's more difficult.
> Geo-Eye high res imagery. Everyone who owns an imagery satellite is pretty much forced to give the government preferential access, and offer lower resolution to the public. This is not Eric Schmidt wanting to do favors for the government, I'm sure all of the competing mapping companies want to offer the best, highest resolution maps, but are often regulated by the state from doing so.

> Kerry ad on front page.

Seriously? So when YouTube hosts President Obama in a Hangout, you think this is some quid-pro-quo for foreign missions? You think Twitter hosting Presidential or Candidate questions, or Facebook doing the same mean something is going on? Red Bull's epic stratosphere sky dive also was promoted in the same way. Google wants to promote their services, like G+/Hangouts/YouTube and the government wants free advertising it's a win-win, and you don't need to concoct a story that this is payback for Eric Schmidt delivering a message to Kim Jong Un, or for Google getting a free-pass from the FTC.

This is what I mean by guilty by association. If YouTube hosts a Whitehouse press conference, there's a product manager in YouTube is supremely happy, but it is extremely unlikely they had to hand over the keys of their servers to the NSA to get it. YouTube audience size and demographics alone are reason enough. In the same manner, Obama went on "Between Two Ferns" not as a favor to the show because of a State Department mission.

Not every relationship between the government and the private sector needs a conspiracy. The government needs to buy toilet paper like everyone else.

"Defense Industrial Base"? Oh, you mean, if the US military opens a Google Apps account, uses Docs, Gmail, and Maps for it's internal planning, suddenly it's no different than Lockheed Martin? The military and government uses Powerpoint like crazy, does this make Microsoft part of the "defense industrial base"? It's a pretty meaningless label then.
As someone who have spent a lot of time with a friend of mine doing facebook apps and trying out various things I can say that there is a lot of information that can be gained just by knowing a few tricks of the trade without doing anything wrong or against terms.

So I have no doubt that a much more powerful agency like the NSA etc will have even better abilities to snoop around.
Facebook manipulates content to sway populations and generations.

http://minerva.dtic.mil/

Terrorists have faces too. When they take their masks off they engage in social networking just like everyone else. It is very useful to know their sleeping, and waking patterns, who they are 'friends' with, where their support comes from and what they like and dislike.

Remember that Facebook, Google and others are trying to create at-scale automated psychological profiling - so that they can create better ads. All of this amounts to a huge amount of information they have about where you browse, what you by, when you comment.

But yeah... those be TLA agencies aren't exclusively anti-terrorist. They deal with many international actors through which they can gain an advantage for the United States.
Good remark. I didn't think about that, because I use a real USB chip for USB, I don't try to convert it to serial (I like the idea of having various communications going at once, the stall, etc.)
The Science of Crawl, Part 2: Content Freshness
Slight correction, Android used to use PBKDF2. They've moved to scrypt recently. Cool article and good read. Thanks.
Current approaches are a bit of a hack. You have multiple stereo camera pairs and to handle intermediate directions you do some software interpolation between them. Despite being a hack it works well enough to be reasonably immersive. The Samsung Gear VR comes with a collection of 360 degree panoramic photos and some 3D videos using the same approach. John Carmack talks about it a bit in his Oculus Connect keynote.

This approach is obviously wrong if you tilt your head but people don't generally do that enough to notice.
Interesting comment:

"I am a travel writer. I was once speaking to a guidebook writer in Thailand who told me under pressure to hit a deadline he wrote a review for a guidebook for a German restaurant, though he had not eaten there. He fabricated a venison dish, describing the sauce in detail. A couple of years later, feeling badly about his fiction, he visited the restaurant. The dish was on the menu and the chef explained so many people came in asking for it he eventually had to add it."
I am moderately sympathetic to the notion that airport security checkpoints cross lines.

However, airport security checkpoints existed before the creation of the TSA - it wasn't "the creation of the TSA" that started it.

Further, the mandate of the TSA is much broader than running airport security checkpoints. Removing the unconstitutional pieces would not leave us with "an agency that did nothing".
I think it's mildly interesting how these two fake towns were in the once-disputed border region that involved an armed conflict between Ohio and Michigan:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledo_War

An example of sports rivalry subsuming more deadly fighting instincts?
That is a bit of a bold statement given the circumstances.

The "... it's a gift ..." turn of phrase doesn't imply that Facebook (or any specific entity) is doing a conscious act of gift-giving. The outcome can be seen as a "gift" for the desirability of the item and the serendipitous way it is dropped on the receiver's lap.

More than ever Facebook is trying to protect its data from three letter agencies. [...] Trust them for a chance.

They're leverage their power over users to collect data. It is generally to be expected, and is now explicitly known, that collecting data like that is an attractive target for the government to leverage their power over businesses (both Facebook and the communication infrastructure between users and Facebook) to get at the data.

We can bitch and moan about the existence and capabilities of those powers, but at some point facebook is choosing to consolidate data in a world where those powers exist. It's a tightrope balance for Facebook to minimize the collection possible through technical and legal means, and maintaining their business model hoovering up data. And that's fine, that's their business, whatever. It's just not trustworthy.
Another example is when keyboard apps need internet connectivity, it's a no-no for me.
If you want to get into the heads of founders you should read further up where it says that the document delegates powers to the state, rather than granting rights to the citizens.

So what you should be looking for is a delegation of the right to search with out a warrant, it's not there.
A lot of people think that when a local politician has the support of the police, it's a good endorsement.

All that means is that the police union has the politician in their pocket.

Same thing when a politician has the support of the teachers union.

It puzzles me when people vote against their own interest by voting for these endorsed politicians. It's much better to have someone there who will have a better chance of representing the voters rather than the unions.
Crappy Apps and Get Rich Quick Schemes: The Burden of the Craftsperson
I get an error when I try it using BAC

http://www.capp.io/queries/new?query=bac&button=
What's your opinion there on the odds of prosecution for something like this? I have the (possibly media-driven) notion that the UK has a stronger tradition of public service. But then you also have a more explicit class dynamic.
The advanced 7-minute workout
The Great Power Shift
the google inbox announcement made me think of google wave. ahead of its time. maybe they will bring it back modernized...
>Large flocks and communal breeding made the species highly vulnerable to hunting.[28] As the flocks dwindled in size, populations decreased below the threshold necessary to propagate the species.[81][82] Naturalist Paul R. Ehrlich wrote that its extinction "illustrates a very important principle of conservation biology: it is not always necessary to kill the last pair of a species to force it to extinction."

The most important statement on its extinction.
The Simpsons hit with $250m lawsuit from Goodfellas actor Frank Sivero
YC startups have this privilege/boost for job posts
Can Video Games Fend Off Mental Decline?
Someone at the eevblog analyzed the file. It's setting the PID to 0 in a way that on genuine chips it will only buffer the change, and not actually apply it. If it wasn't a manufacturer with signed drivers pushing this on windows update but a guy at DEFCON explaining his trick I would find it very cool.
Why parser extensions are opposed to AST transforms? They work together well, see an example implementation here: https://github.com/combinatorylogic/mbase
In the US there isn't a legal way to purchase counterfeit goods. It may be different in other countries. Similar to stolen property, the person left holding the bag gets in trouble too.

Edit: after actually looking up the issue instead of guessing it turns out that in most places (other than France and Italy) there isn't much at stake for the end user, and almost all of the laws are written to stop the sale or manufacture of counterfeit items.
Terrorists are finding that recruiting via social media can be quite effective. They've made pretty big strides in getting their message out via Twitter, high production quality English-language magazines, etc.
I am fine with police not being able to be fired until found guilty. I personally think it should be that way everywhere for everyone. For instance, the cases of a student being ejected from a university due to unsubstantiated rape claims that never hit court because there's nothing to prosecute with.

Now, whether they are active officers is a completely different matter, and they should not be permitted to active duty until pending cases are resolved.

Finally, settlements are not a legal judgement of guilt nor acquittal. The only thing that can decide that is a court case. Often, they are a pure risk vs reward decision. If the downside of losing a case is $50+ million and they estimate their chances of losing at equal to or more than 5% -- in other words, still very confident of winning -- then it makes financial sense to settle for $2 million instead.
Voting is not generally regarded as direct action, it's representative action.
Dealing with some traffic issues right now. Should work now.
Ok, let's get things straight. Watching this is nothing like walking to the park and standing under a tree. It's cinema. It's a completely different experience. You wouldn't say "why would you watch a Tarkovsky film when you can just go to Russia?"

So, what kind of role could VR play in our lives? Creating more immersive, interactive cinema. This is an old idea from the 60's: http://www.vasulka.org/Kitchen/PDF_ExpandedCinema/ExpandedCi....

What I wish you said, however, is that we have a responsibility to remember what we need to do for people. The argument for standing under a tree rather than watching this could be: you can have a totally enveloping, tranquil experience without burning coal, without fracking, without necessitating the employment of exploited factory workers, without supporting the mass extraction of resources (and corresponding environmental destruction), and without adding another broken gizmo to the landfill in 5 years.

For those working on the technology, rather than building escapist fantasy worlds, you could work to make our actually existing, real, external world (note: fallacy), which is dysfunctional for billions of people, more functional. You could also refuse to build escapist fantasy worlds for people who themselves could be making a difference in the world rather than consuming resources and funneling money to the wealthy corporations in exchange for "virtual goods."

And you could also do this through VR. HMD's don't even necessarily need to display virtual worlds. Virtual worlds don't need to be purely hedonic.

All that said, maybe lying on a tempur-pedic mattress and staring up at an artificial autumn-scape is exactly what someone needs. Who can say.
That's an interesting question. Is the VID a signal of protocol compatibility? Or a brand name?

In a way it's both, but since end users almost never see the VID, I suspect a lawyer would have an easy time that under the law it's more the former than the latter, and therefore not covered under trademark and related laws.
Some more of my favorites, these are not only fantastic coding examples but also artistic or humorous.

Endless Forest: http://oos.moxiecode.com/js_webgl/forest/index.html

Particle Waterfall: http://oos.moxiecode.com/js_webgl/waterfall/index.html

Gold Rays: http://oos.moxiecode.com/js_webgl/godrays/index.html

Spiders 2 (Hammertime): http://oos.moxiecode.com/js_webgl/spiders_2_hammertime/

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening: http://oos.moxiecode.com/js_webgl/woods_xmas/

EDIT:

R-Type on the SNES! http://oos.moxiecode.com/js_webgl/snes_retro/
Doing things not related to interacting with, or "driving", the hardware is the limit for a good device driver. For software in general, not all forms of spyware are illegal (but stealing money is, at least in my jurisdiction).

Whatever the code for changing the PID is, it (supposedly) would work as well for a malfunctioning but real product, as well as a counterfeit.
You could build a 360 degree 3D camera that works for any viewing configuration, but it would involve nontrivial image processing and wouldn't be totally free from small visual glitches/artifacts in some cases.

1. Build an array of a few (let's say 8 or so) cameras pointing outward from the center.

2. Use a stereo matching algorithm to extract a depth map from the perspective of each camera. Keeping track of the position and orientation of each camera in 3D space, these depths become a point cloud associated with each camera.

3. Determine the 3D location and orientation of each "eye" you want to render, then render all point clouds in 3D space to reconstruct a "reprojected" version of the scene from any desired viewpoint. Of course, the farther the eyes deviate from actual camera locations the more stretched/warped the image will appear, but that won't matter much as long as you keep the eye coordinates within the physical space occupied by the camera.

Honestly I'd be kind of disappointed if CMU doesn't actually try this. It's disappointing to think that perhaps all this buzz about "hackathons" (as the article mentions) is encouraging -- even at major research universities -- quickly slapping together components to make something kind of work, as opposed to fundamental algorithm development and proper engineering solutions.
Its open-source. Maybe patents don't apply? They're not selling anything.
This was my idea as well. I also wondered if the owner of the land would attempt to join adjacent lots to create larger plots of land - which could then be drawn together further.

I'm not a city planner and am not very well versed in municipal zoning laws in Detroit so I wonder if its even a possibility.