skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My apologies for not being clearer, but then again this honestly this strikes me as overly pedantic. By coercion I meant coercion in the broadest sense as anything designed to influence your behavior - eg induce pain or potential hardship so that paying taxes seems more desirable than not paying them. Therefore, while the legal classifications of the particular offenses may vary and be debatated ad nauseum, I don't think they detract from the fundamentally coercive, or even at least perceived coercive, reality underlying them.
I believe that if they admit to using a Stingray, then the Stingray's legality can be challenged. At this point, nobody actually knows that a Stingray was used, so I don't think anybody can bring a case like that. They are trying to avoid giving anyone standing for a case that they might lose.
I've always wondered this... So many organizations do this.
I think that for most purposes 32 bit had worked without much issue so it's a matter of cost vs benefit. Can you think of any issues that people face because Chrome was 32 bit? So far I'm seeing Java 8 integration, which is probably a tiny fraction of their users. Also it's not really breaking since those users can just use Firefox for that purpose. They obviously don't consider this a loss.
Were they actually fancy or cool, maybe. They're rather basic features among statically typed languages.

Also, I'm not trying to say Go is bad or that I dislike it. It's simply not a modern language as far as design goes.
One possible answer: Because tenured faculty can call up the helpdesk and get policies reversed, because they're tenured and the helpdesk isn't.

Another possible answer: Many systems can't prompt for password changes, and will just continue to log you in (because, especially for remote-access systems, that's better than denying access and hoping you find another way to get logged in). Probably the lazier of the users also don't use very many of the computing facilities, and may just use a few legacy systems.
That's a real potential problem, as is the lifetime impairment of childhood malnutrition. But I expect defectors from any regime to be the kind of entrepreneurial misfits that never quite fit in and demand their environment adapt to them.
Yup! Azure websites and Storage are down in multiple regions.
Is www.kaggle.com down?
I don't think you're seeing my point.

You may be coding java, but none of the tangible benefits of java over javascript actually translate, because you're actually writing javascript, with all of the warts and limitations and weirdness therein.

The javascript exported will not be truly type safe, because javascript is not, and cannot be. It may appear to act like it, within the context of the code when run as predicted, but this isn't the same thing as an actual strict language in a runtime which expects and enforces those rules. Highly efficient? Doubtless. Optimized to avoid as many pitfalls of the language as possible? Certainly. But anything more capable than bog-standard javascript? No. Because it can't be.
Tor de-anonymizing through traffic pattern analysis
VMs too... At least for western europe
> With the bill’s defeat, the Senate faces a hard deadline for new legislation since the legal basis for the phone records program, a provision of the Patriot Act, expires in June. After that, when the 90-day orders to phone companies requiring them to turn over their customers’ records expire, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court would be unable to issue a new round of orders.

Given the "rifts between the [GOP's] interventionist and more libertarian-leaning wings," what are the probable endgames? Specifically, what are the odds of–and promoting factors for–an obstructionist minority flipping over the table in June?
> I would love to see the US devote a huge portion of foreign aid to this development.

With one party in Congress opposed to almost all revenue and spending increases, and preferring the current 'sequestration' scheme, it seems there is little chance of this. The best way to help Korea is to solve our internal political problems.

EDIT: And if we don't help, China will, giving them great influence and greatly weakening ours.
The Shazam Effect
You don't happen to be in the Hudson Valley do you? We've got the Hudson Valley Tech Meetup second week of December and there's several folks just like you at that. Several now have distributed workforces.

Happy to introduce you.

PS. I'm totally intrigued now to find out what your WP app is!
Thanks, mate! Made my day!
RubyGems.org Redesign
So, it's an RSS reader with a hard-coded list of sites?
Rust still isn't 1.0. In fact to even use basic syntax such as selecting a range of a slice you need to specify that you are using not yet supported features.

I love the concept of rust, but trying to write a trivial program in it was a pain in the ass.
dm;we (doesn't matter; will encrypt)

Entire consumer stack will go encrypted.
IMHO: It's not too annoying having a long password if you make it a sentence. It's when people try to get a single "word" up to 18 chars that it becomes annoying to type. A sentence is also nice because it's not too hard to work in a capital letter, lower case, and a symbol into the passphrase.
An argument against the blockchain
Brian Fitzpatrick Teaming with Grant Achatz on Alinea Ticketing
I don't see the people of North Korea ever getting rid of their Dear Leader for two reasons:

(1) A significant amount of the working population is part of the government apparatchik especially in Pyongyang which is where any uprising would need to start. (2) There is a pervasive culture of fear. Everyone is well aware of the "we will harm you and your entire family tree" approach to keeping everyone in check. There is a culture of people telling on other people and "someone always watching" which makes it hard to trust anyone.

So I think the ICC/UN will be key to all of it in particular China/Russia who need to be convinced to abstain from any resolutions. China's speech to the Australian parliament at the G20 was promising in that they are trying to be better citizens in Asia. And Russia surely doesn't want the US to be continuing to use North Korea as an excuse to build anti-missile systems in Eastern Europe.
hey glad to help, this is something I've gotten quite interested in lately, and would be glad to help out further.
Well, their status page is telling lies.
Seems weird to fork a compiler like gcc or clang via transpilation, because you split the community. It may be faster to iterate on Go, but will all of the compiler contributors on GCC or Clang/LLVM want to switch to editing the go version?

It seems you'd lose out on picking up improvements from the main compiler branch and have to keep transpiling and gardening in patches. Plus upstreaming improvements would also be irritating.

I'd think a Go frontend to LLVM would be optimal in terms of productivity.
First Marathons and Extramarital Affairs
Fitzpatrick is notable among other things as the lead on the Subversion VCS. HN has covered the Alinea ticketing system before; Nick Kokonas even commented on the thread! Alinea, if you don't follow this stuff, is one of the best restaurants in the country, and an American stronghold of modernist cuisine.

Previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7853786#up_7854954
It is quite likely that there are passive devices that monitor cell phone channels without tricking them into connecting to a phony base station. These technically wouldn't be "stingrays". That is basically what the SIGINT satellites do. It could certainly be miniaturized for local area monitoring. In any case, the cell providers have basic details of what phones communicate with their towers. It doesn't seem like that avenue wasn't used in this case though.
Nice of the article to clearly lay out the partisan divisions here. None of that "blame both sides" bs.

The vote:
All D's voted right except Bill Nelson of Florida.
All R's voted wrong except Cruz, Lee, Heller, Paul, and Murkowski.

Where "right" means "for the overhaul bill" and "wrong" means the opposite.

You'll also notice that this bill got way over 50 votes, but still failed due to the modern filibuster.
Germany just gave a huge gift to ever DDR citizen by trading the Mark and the DDR Mark at 1:1. With a per person limit of a few thousand marks, it wasn't that expensive and really set the unification up to succeed with popular backing.
To focus on an issue that Tufte often addresses, pretend that you are Lawrence Mulloy and it is late on the evening of January 27, 1986. Several engineers from Morton Thiokol have called you and told you that if the Space Shuttle launches tomorrow morning, it will explode, and all of the astronauts will die. But it is expensive to call off a launch, so you ask them what data they have.

Would you say "launch" if you only saw the first 2 charts on this page:

http://www.asktog.com/books/challengerExerpt.html

Would you say "launch" if you saw the 3rd chart on that page?

The decision to launch tomorrow is yours. What do you decide?
Harmony Toolkit by Intuit
I believe the majority opinion is that most of the east german industries were not competitive, as you say. Others suggest that the immediate privatisation gave western companies in the same sectors the opportunity to eliminate competition at a very low price.
Thanks, I remember seeing this a while back but didn't realise it was RequireJS-aware. The demo is pretty great.
Yes! Key continuity is a legitimate identity scheme; the only trick is to implement it scalably, so it actually happens, rather than being a fig leaf (an unworkable variant of key continuity already exists in browsers today).

I think the CA system by itself is inadequate, but unlike unauthenticated TLS, actually does provide some security.
(I worked on Linux Chrome back in the era when this change was made.)

64-bit was important on Linux because the system libraries that Chrome uses were increasingly unavailable in 32-bit versions on 64-bit systems.

On other platforms, while there are advantages to 64-bit binaries, those advantages haven't outweighed the other useful things you could be spending engineering time on.
Cost of getting lean
The error handling stuff more than lack of generics is my single biggest beef with the language. It is basically C-style error handling from the 80s all over again, only you return error codes as a separate multi-return value.

The Maybe monad style is so much cleaner, it also allows Elvis operator-like changing, e.g.

foo().getOrElse(blah).getOrElse(baz)
> China may decide they need to intervene for their own security, or use that as an excuse.

That's definitely something that SK would want to prevent. The last time China "helped" unify a divided Korea, back in the 7th century, they took all the territory north of Pyongyang for themselves. Something similar could happen again unless SK gets the situation under control very quickly. Especially since nukes are involved, and China's been in an expansionist mood lately.
The page cannot be displayed because an internal server error has occurred.

Their error pages are less graceful than mine.
I'm guessing the reason that this site is down I was trying to load ... http://www.dotnetrocks.com/
there may be some hash functions for which H(concat(a, a)) = F(H(a))

If H is secure then F is not computable. If they can do a trick like this then their hashing is no good.

Another possibility would be

Yeah, you can approach it like a puzzle and figure out what crazy set up they could have, but Occam's Razor has to apply at some point. I'm betting they did the dumb thing, not the strange thing that is mostly pointless.
Does anyone have a history of the "60 votes needed" to pass a bill in the Senate?

I could have sworn that within my lifetime, the press talked about "50 votes needed" to pass a bill. Then at some point in the Bush years, threat of filibuster was regularly invoked, making 60 votes the requirement in practice.

Now no one even mentions a filibuster. As a non-American, it's rather strange.
You should signal everything using Lisp S-expressions; no confusing infix where the motorists wonder whether you're being left-associative or right-associative, and what the precedence is.
My VMs are down. This much be something major.
Using Unity for Non-game App Development
This is true for almost any application (very few things NEED 64 bits).
I despise this train of thought. I've heard it before. In essence, it translates to this: "We know it is safer to wear a helmet, but we need to lie to other people about it, so that more people will bike."

You only need 1 highly publicized brain injury to someone who followed this dishonest advice to undo all the gains in biking adoption you (think you) created.
D's lost 8, R's gained 8 in the latest election.

Assuming no new R's vote right, that gets us to a vote of 50 / 50, with Biden getting the deciding vote. However, in the modern filibustering Senate, 41 Senators can kill any bill.

So in theory, if everyone who voted for the bill hangs tight, they could destroy any new legislation, including PATRIOT ACT reauthorization.

However, I'd be quite surprised if neither of these things happen:
1. McConnell decides the filibuster no longer works for him, so he kills it.
2. Obama puts remarkable pressure on fellow D's and they buckle.

But theoretically, we have all the votes we need. And if 1 new R senator joins the anti-NSA caucus (and all the D Senators hang tight, and all the D senators are good on the issue), they wouldn't even be a minority -- they'd have 51 votes.

Hope that makes sense.
Excel spreadsheets are hard to get right
I encourage you to think a bit more about what is meant by center of mass. By definition, it takes into account all the mass of the body. If the force of gravity is pulling you "somewhere off to the side", then the center of mass is also "somewhere off to the side". Think about the extreme case of two identical-size, uniform-density spheres attached at a single point. That point will be the center of mass, despite the fact that little of the mass of the entire object is located near there.
I think because the disks are backed by blob storage.
Will I need to reinstall chrome or will it auto update to a 64bit version?
It's not really in the U.S. best interest to push for unification. A unified Korea makes justifying a large military presence in Korea very difficult especially with large U.S. forces about 1200km south on Okinawa and 500km east on mainland Japan.

The situation in DPRK is a key piece of leverage in our AP policy and without it we lose some amount of influence in the at a time when the US and CN are vying for the region's economic alliances. Given China's recent run-ins over the South China Sea Islands I would also stand to reason that Japan is also not that keen on losing a large U.S. force in Korea either.

These issues will likely only amplify over time as China continues to grow both as an economic and military power -- the U.S. will need to continue to strengthen it's presence in the region and a large part of that is flexing its military clout.
Democrats and a handful of Republicans who supported the measure fell two votes short of the 60 votes they needed to take up the legislation, which sponsors named the U.S.A. Freedom Act.

I'm so sick of procedural abuse in the legislature(s). The notion that you should have to have 60 votes just to hold a debate is stupid. This sort of thing (and arguably also the vote against the Keystone XL pipeline, which has become an absurd political shibboleth for the Democrats) is a big part of why Congress currently has a 12% approval rating (or less, according to some polls).
The threat of filibuster is implicit in the "60 votes needed" language. At 60 votes, the majority side can invoke 'cloture' which moves the bill to an actual vote, after which you only need 50 votes to pass. Prior to 60 votes, the minority side can pretty much endlessly delay the actual vote on the bill through filibusters and other parliamentary tactics.

A good history of how we got to where we are:

http://www.brookings.edu/research/testimony/2010/04/22-filib...

And the more encyclopedic answer:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloture#United_States
It's already getting more enjoyable to me. Things like .forEach and => mean I can write really nice code.
...and then if the fingerprint changes, you get something like this:

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

@@@ WARNING! THIS ADDRESS MAY BE DOING SOMETHING NASTY!! @@@

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
I have to say I was kind of hoping someone had replaced the Helvetica Neue with the old bitmap San Francisco face.
This might be what you're looking for:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/the-histor...

Very briefly:

In the mid years of Bush, the D Senate filibustered more than usual in regards to nominations of non-Supreme Court judges.

In 2006, when Democrats took the Senate, the Republicans started filibustering up a storm. But no one in the press noticed because Bush would have veto'd anyway, so the balance of power didn't shift.

As soon as Obama was elected, the Republican Senate had an internal meeting where they agreed to filibuster everything all the time -- legislation, judges, executive appointments, everything. Even legislation they supported, just to throw a wrench into the plans. It was a momentous change. The press failed to point it out or make an issue out of it. And here we are.
Your understanding is correct. The workings of the US government would make the Byzantines scratch their heads. Hopefully though, it doesn't take one-thousand years for this shit-show to get rubbed out and replaced with something better.
Codeflights
James Fallows, the last of the old guard at The Atlantic, has this as part of his beat: he calls it "false equivalence watch". A lot of the coverage of this fiasco succumbs to it, for instance blaming the failure of the bill to clear the Senate on lack of grassroots support, as if that was going to get it votes from senators elected by rural conservatives.

On the other hand: over the next couple years, the same force is going to work in the other direction as the Democrats assume the minority. Were it not for the filibuster, Social Security might be a block grant to NY financial firms by now.
The next two years are going to be full of "wrong" votes.
Magic tricks created using artificial intelligence for the first time
> You will find that square extends rectangle and setting the length on a square also sets the width.

"setting the length"?? Do you mean "making a copy with the length set to a different value"?

If you have a square, which is-a rectangle, you can of course use the rectangle's copy function, or a rectangle lens or some such, to make a copy with a different length. Which will be a rectangle. Utterly trivial.
With current ram sizes this might be negligible, but 32bit chrome would have to load 32bit versions of all system frameworks, while you have 64bit in memory all the time. The less 32bit apps you have, the better :)
Linking order will affect code and static data order and cache alignment in turn. Similarly, environment variables are pushed on the stack by the kernel. Their size will affect alignment of application data on the stack.

Maybe there are other causes as well.

> Would it be possible to determine ahead of time what order would maximize performance, or would that require profiling?

I think at the very least, you'd need profiling to determine the hot code path, and that can change depending on input...
OS X has supported x86_64 applications since 10.5 (Leopard), so there's no problem there if your CPU supports it; moreover, the last OS X release to support 32-bit-only x86 CPUs was 10.6 (Snow Leopard). However, Chrome does support 10.6, so I guess this release may have the effect of dropping support for some Mac models from 2006 that previously worked.
The helmet really isn't the best place for a video camera anyway; I've ridden quite a bit with a GoPro and found that the chest mount gives the best view of the action.
It's a pretty sad state of affairs: both facebook chat and google support xmpp, but neither support federation.
I'm actually glad there isn't parallelism (well threads/actors/tasks).

I'd go so far as to consider it a feature.
Yes, except even herbivores occasionally show evidence of eating meat. Deers are occasionally seen eating birds, similar has been seen in Cows (IIRC Lal the cow was documented eating its owners chickens from the coop) and in fact all Bovid species occasionally show eating birds.

If there's a world of untapped food, this exceptionally rare behaviour would rapidly become advantageous, especially when the prey isn't adapted to the unusual predator.

Evolution has no guide, but all evidence shows it evolves into almost every available niche and quite specifically that any large available resource will be tapped.
Canada too. :(
Does anyone know the licensing status of the TTFs?
I wonder what the odds are that the Republicans will end the filibuster once they take back the Senate. Seems like the smart play would be to only do that if you have a veto-proof majority or a Republican President, but who knows.
Two? You're awfully optimistic.
What I'm criticizing isn't negative book reviews per se; rather, negative book reviews are just one tangible expression of Skepticism as an ideology.

I'll be the first to admit that negative book reviews are highly useful, and most don't even fall within the realm of the Skeptic community. E.g. economics isn't an issue that the skeptic community has much interest in. (Which really says something about the skeptic community in and of itself.)

The issue is when you get scientists who spend years researching some issue, and then bunch of jackasses come along and publish a bunch of articles criticizing their methodology without having read the paper or having any idea what the methodology even was. That sort of behavior is endemic in the Skeptic community, and whether it's rational or not it absolutely does discourage people from actually learning stuff that might better themselves or society. I'd give specific examples, but it's so ubiquitous it's not even worth it; most people just don't notice because again, they haven't read the actual stuff that's being criticized.
I'm not sure it improves security significantly, but the weak link is using passwords as security in an environment like a university.

Getting users to confirm to good password practices is nearly impossible when they are mature, paid employees with money and valuable IP on the line, and at organizations with legal/regulatory security requirements. Imagine accomplishing that with thousands of college students. (I'm not sure there's a good, cost-effective solution, other than to provide more secure options to users who want them.)
Politics of spite, not logic and reason.
Totally off-topic but I really enjoy this blog. I've discovered it while struggling with ZFS and btrfs and it's a concise opinionated no bullshit honest sysadmin blog from someone far more knowledgeable as myself. You may not agree but the presentation and style is really great.
Storage, Websites and Visual Studio Online - Multiple Regions - Partial Service Interruption
5 mins agoStarting at 19 Nov 2014 00:52 UTC we are experiencing a connectivity issue to Azure Services including Storage, Websites and Visual Studio Online. The next update will be provided in 60 minutes.
That's just abuse. I ride much more than 7000km per annum and never change gears. Also, it's the worn chain that wears down the gears; replace the chain more often the the gears will last many years.
Apple, Microsoft, Google, LinkedIn and Yahoo Back US Freedom Act
TripAdvisor couple fined £100 by hotel for bad review
Probably, but some of the new R's in the Senate would follow Paul / Cruz on this vote.
Typeface designer Tobias Frere-Jones' opinion about Helvetica in Yosemite: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3031432/why-apples-new-font-wont...

It echoes Erik Spiekermann's view as well: Helvetica wasn't designed for small sizes on screen.

http://spiekermann.com/en/helvetica-sucks/