skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that is fine, personally. Obviously others might not. You have to specifically agree to install/allow PunkBuster, and you can choose to play on servers that don't use PunkBuster. With Lenovo not only is there no opt-out, but you're not even aware of the adware and root CA installation.

The "spyware" only spies on modifications to the game client in any way and tries to detect non-human involvement, which of course includes inspecting the file system and RAM. In theory it could harvest irrelevant information from your hard drive or memory, but no reverse engineer has ever made such a claim to my knowledge.

Valve Anti-Cheat does very similar things, but is run by what many consider to be a trustworthy company, so not that many people take issue with it. If one trusts the company that distributes the spyware, it's not really a problem, in my opinion. If Valve were to ever violate that trust, it would severely harm their business.

I also strongly disagree with DRM, because it only harms other players while providing no benefits. In contrast, online cheaters can completely ruin the playing experience for online games, and have heavily contributed to the death of some games.

I also have no issue if people decide to cheat when in single-player mode. If you pay for the game you should be able to do whatever you want if you're not affecting others. It's only a problem when they're playing with other people over the Internet. PunkBuster and VAC only run when you're playing in online mode.
Hololens? If they can pull it off that'll be a hugely important platform for developers. Businesses also still rely on Windows and will for a long time so there is plenty of financial reason for developers to remain part of that ecosystem.
I tend to swing back and forth with you on this point. Like a lot of us here I don't like the idea to subscribing my entire digital footprint with Google. So I'm currently using a mix of Google products and non-Google products (sometimes redundantly). Some non-Google products work great and fit my needs entirely. That being said, I just can't seem to let go of Google entirely.
If you enjoyed those lectures, the EconTalk conversation with Becky Linddicoat on palliative care may also be of interest to you.

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/11/becky_liddicoat.htm...
The difference being that only Apple (and the us gov) can listen in, not the entire world.
No Graylog3?
Actually, reading the NSA hard drive firmware hack a couple days ago rekindled my suspicions about all the MacBook Pro failures a few years back. Apple claimed the hardware was at fault & nothing short of sending off for a pricey, clean-room extraction would get the data back. Much to my clients' relief I recovered all the data from three MBP drives for a lot less than what the 'geniuses' quoted. *It was the HD controller at fault, I managed to get them to mount and read at an extremely slow rate, but in time all was recovered.
So how exactly do you expect people to find out about your product if you don't advertise it? Even word of mouth requires a first sale, which generally requires... advertising.
Transpilation isn't a hack, all compilation is "transpilation".
This makes me wonder if any of the people working at Superfish actually use their own products regularly, including this one, and like it. I wouldn't be surprised if they do.
Well, regardless of whether it's web-facing or not, it's not unreasonable to want to limit the access to its admin panel (e.g. in a big company with different teams).

I agree however that SOLR is best off doing one thing well, web page security can be implemented e.g. by Apache.
solr is much better
voip.ms offers inbound sms on sip calls. $1 a month for a # and then you can use csipsimple or other voip software
It depends on what you're doing of course. Normal usage (playing music/Youtube, browsing firefox, coding, opening up some PDFs) gives me about 6-8 hours I'd say, I get about 3 hours of (modded) minecraft, which is quite the battery drain. this is on Gentoo (Awesome as WM) so the background drain is pretty low. It's good enough that I never really pay attention to it.

upower says the battery is designed to store up to 48Wh, with a maximum design capacity of 53Wh.
Apple's 30 pin connector was pretty much always superior - it could do Audio/Video output natively, and also had pins for media control,so other manufacturers could add media support according to one established standard. As for the Lightning connector - it's reversible. That's "better" enough for me.
All I see on this page in my browser is a pulsing white circle in the middle of the screen.

HN'ers do you see something else? Is it just me?
+1 for git annex. For the git repo, if you don't have privacy concerns, you can just push to a private bitbucket repository. But I just had a script with:

git clone /my/repo /tmp/backup-git-annex
tar cvf /tmp/backup-git-annex.tar /tmp/backup-git-annex

That way, you're left with a single tar file to backup.
No. Microsoft is still the old Microsoft.Opensourcing a few libraries here and there dont make Microsoft the champion of open source. Microsoft is still forcing people to buy Windows licenses over and over again which each PC,and businesses using MS products are still subject to license audits.

On the other hand, Google is becoming more and more like Microsoft.
WSJ also has an article about this phenomenon with some more details around how each chain approaches the issue; worth a read if you travel... http://www.wsj.com/articles/pay-for-wi-fi-only-at-a-luxury-h... including mention of www.hotelwifitest.com to share wifi quality (or lack thereof) data.
> Users are not tracked nor re-targeted

Have a look at code delivered by Superfish:

https://www.superfish.com/ws/sf_preloader.jsp

https://www.superfish.com/ws/sf_code.jsp

And grep for track and retarget. Just two snippets:

var url = sfDomain + "trackSession.action?userid=" + similarproducts.b.qsObj.userid + "&sessionid=-10&action=ud_host_failed";

and:

function isRetargetingEnabled(){
if( similarproducts.b.enableRetargetingUnit && !isRetargetingBlackList()){
return 1;
} else{
return 0;
}
}
An interesting idea, but it would likely result in the creation of a crap ton of (what in effect would be) umbrella companies.

"Google? No, I technically work for Search Ad Services by Google."
I'm aware, thanks. https://github.com/basak/ddar/wiki contains the content, thanks to a kind contributor. I should probably deprecate the old URL and remove references to it.
> You know that, of course, but comments like that make you feel special I suppose.

Is that tone really necessary, or constructive? The question seemed to me perfectly civil; if it was snark for snark's sake, then it was a pretty harmless instance of that practice. It may have been disingenuous, but automatically to assume so seems more harmful than just answering the question (or even than ignoring it).
If remember correctly their devices were sending back GPS coordinates to a server too?
What I found most interesting is how Google and Microsoft are in the process of swapping places with regards to open source: Microsoft is taking formerly-closed projects open (particularly their compiler and development tools), while Google is taking formerly-open projects closed (particularly Glass, which was a closed-source fork of Android).
i guess I'd be getting fired. I'm surprised the client was cool with that. If I were the client, I'd be firing your business.
If we're talking about motives and proof, then The fact that you understand what you said is harmful and you choose to do it anyway is the legal definition of intent.
I imagine Lenovo wants to tell you the truth but has the CCP's tank barrels pointed at their back. Further evidence that buying from autocratic regimes comes at a risk. I wouldn't run Kaspersky either, especially after Wired exposed their connections to the FSB and Russian military.

http://www.wired.com/2012/07/ff_kaspersky/all/

If this was going on with a US OEM, people would assume the NSA. But with Lenovo (which the US government refuses to buy btw) and Huwai and other non-vendors for the USG, HN'ers have regularly defended them and claimed the US was being paranoid or protectionist. How the hell do you think a fucking MITM gets onto a production image? This is financial suicide for Lenovo and they know it. This has all the telltale signs of government collusion. The CCP has a lot more to gain from stuff like this than Lenovo has to lose. How many people have been compromised from ship date until the day this gets uninstalled? Millions? For how many months? Years? That's a lot of SSL sniffing available to the CCP.
Callbacks? Who uses those? You clearly know SO MUCH about this subject
Does Science Produce Too Many PhD Graduates?
Windows 8 was actually a very brave move by Microsoft, and even if looked upon as a misstep, was really what brought the company to where it is today.

Before Windows 8 we just had years and years of incremental "sameness." Vista was meant to be a big shake-up but instead that got shelved and we got a very modest improvement over XP (driver issues and memory consumption not withstanding), the same with 7, it was a very incremental improvement over Vista (even if coming from XP directly made it look bigger).

Windows 8 was where the company decided to really try something new. It was the largest UI shakeup since Windows 95/NT 4.0. And I think that shakeup helped shake some cobwebs loose because since then Microsoft are continuing to take bigger (welcome) risks.

Even just looking at the Windows 10 technical preview feedback program should tell you this is a new Microsoft. In previous Windows pre-releases, they would fix bugs in alpha/beta releases, but never made UI or functionality changes just based on feedback. They ARE with Windows 10.

If you go look at the feedback Windows 10 has received, several major pieces have been actioned.

Seems like the company has a fire lit under it again. It is welcome.
I wonder how this compares to venti. Being able to mount with FUSE can be an interesting feature, specially if it can work well even over the network (maybe with some kind of cache, like fossil).
I think of Nobel Prize winners as what I will call "single function machines". That is, and this is purely speculative, they are focused on only typically one goal or area of interest maniacally.

The typical HN reader, by contrast, finds many things and almost everything and anything (as PG might say) interesting. [1]

"If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. "

This is not to say that Nobel Prize winners aren't curious of course they are. But somehow I doubt they are all over the place. I find so many things interesting it's hard for me to stay focused some times with the distractions of what is available at your fingertips.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Start the filename with a sortable date (and maybe time), eg. 20150220-whatever.jpg
Show HN: Appvailability – Shows different web services and their app support
Yeah and businesses run their own Windows images. Whatever software is preloaded doesn't matter.
All of Google's development of NaCl and PNaCl is open source. The only thing stopping other browser vendors from working on it is themselves.

It's also worth pointing out (being maybe just a bit too pedantic) that asm.js isn't a standard. It's a subset of ECMAScript, which is a standard, and Mozilla has published a spec for it. The spec is more how to use asm.js, not how to implement asm.js optimizations. I'm not saying this is bad, but if you're arguing that Google's stance is, "hey here's the code for PNaCl and how to use it, good luck!", you can't argue that Mozilla's stance is any different.
Honestly, did you just read the title? Open source was not even a major point in the author's argument.
Can anyone from Heroku comment on Heroku's plans to someday be able to sign BAAs with customers subject to HIPAA compliance, as AWS does? That's the #1 reason my clients are leaving Heroku for AWS.
So limit it to only whitelisted IPs. That's why you have sysadmins.
They actually reference the root certificate in their removal instructions:

"Uninstalling Superfish Visual Discovery

Go to Control Panel > Uninstall a Program

Select Visual Discovery > Uninstall

Superfish will be removed from Program Files and Program Data directories, files in user directory will stay intact for the privacy reason. Registry entry and root certificate will remain as well. The Superfish service will stop working as soon as it is uninstalled via above process, and following reboot."

http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Lenovo-P-Y-and-Z-series/Removal-...
You can forward the work email to a regular gmail account (and set up the reply from feature so you can reply from yor work email address).
100% this. And as a client they'd be losing my business.
I don't know. My experience with the output of marketing and sales people is that they come up with ideas that sound good only to them, and not to anyone with even a miligram of conscience. I try to attribute it to a kind of job-related blindness rather than malice, but seriously - quite often those ideas boil down to "how can we scam those poor schmucks"? It's like no one ever asks themselves the question if the idea is actually good for the end user.

Good business is about providing value for proper compensation. If you're trying to trick your customer into paying more money for less value, you're just scamming them.
Well, I'm a software/CS person, but hey, I just emailed your gmail account (that has this same username). LinkedIn is on my HN profile.

I'd thought that solar companies (anecdata: looked at 1366 Tech's careers page) were more looking for chemical/materials/industrial engineers, less people with my skillset.
I think you're confusing open-source with free.
Tell me about it! Apple is user hostile in much more subtle ways.
Show HN: Free Daily SaaS Growth Goal Tracking for Stripe
Free speech zones are more about how to let different people use public property than speech control. They don't apply to private property. Essentially they are set up to contain protestors who are trying to disrupt major events.

I don't think it's a violation of people's rights to say, no, you can't have a protest that intends to shout down another political speech or convention, at least when it is staged in very close proximity.

I do think we should be pretty dam weary of them, but I don't think they are per se unconstitutional.
Dropbox Pro is same rate (https://www.dropbox.com/plans). You do have to buy a it $10/month at a time, but you can get to it whenever you like without paying 9 cents per GB. AWS is usually worth it but it is never super cheap.
This seems like a perfect opportunity to share some more reflections on death from those who are often closest to it, doctors themselves. It appears that many (most?) doctors choose to spend their final days differently than most of their patients.

http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2011/11/30/how-doctors-die...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/your-money/how-doctors-die...
Analysis on mobile device battery drain
Wow, no reply yet points out that this is part of the whole effort to undermine one of our few open standards (email) and eventually turn everything into siloed walled-garden platforms.

Once Google Inbox is used widely, people will find it that much harder to use other e-mail systems.

I can't seem to find it now, but I read a wonderful article about how Facebook messaging and all sorts of other silos are about these platforms controlling everything and Google wishes they could have that same sort of control and push everything into their own proprietary messaging, although this fragmentation is obviously destructive for the internet and society overall.
I use Amazon Glacier storage for my backups. It's pretty cheap, I backed up 161GB for around $1.70/month. Since I took an Amazon AWS survey, I received a $25 promotion for AWS so my Glacier storage is paid for the next 2 years. :)
I'm willing to bet that the number of people working around region locking was so small (in a financial sense) that it didn't matter.
http://blog.asmartbear.com/virtual-assistant-startup.html

before you launch your product, think about the processes you can avoid automating

you’ll have plenty of time before you need to scale, and you may never need to scale if the idea doesn’t work. Every hour spent writing code is wasted time if that code could be replaced by a human being doing the same task until your product proves itself
The best explanation I ever had was, "It is just a type class." In other words, don't worry about some deep metaphor. A Monad will have a type constructor, bind and the badly named return. There are laws that say how they'll work. The intuitions can come later.
Wow. No it is not reasonable.
No, they can't. The key crime in the antitrust trial was Microsoft preventing OEMs from installing additional software (Netscape).
Class-action lawsuit anyone?
Well, there is a difference between "hey, we have this cool service you'd like but we need to process your voice data; maybe or maybe not we're doing something else with it" and "we're forcing ads down your throat and hey, now everyone can MITM you and rob your bank account clean".
One thing they've gotten better at is exactly that: it's no longer "their" ecosystem. They're much more heavily into standard HTML5 now than Google, for example.

They don't need people to build for their ecosystem anymore because they are making their ecosystem the same as everyone elses and beating them on quality.
No. It'd be like preferring memcache over redis. You'll find warriors in both camps, but most people have forgotten there was a debate.
Hm... I'm pretty sure that if you can actually MITM their connection (i.e. you can intercept and modify the packages, e.g. by setting up a rogue Wi-Fi hotspot), you can also fake the DNS and/or IP addresses, so you shouldn't have a problem compromising visitors of https://bankofamerica.com.
A better analogy than lock-picking: the door has a sign that says "turn knob to the right to enter", he was arrested for unsuccessfully turning the knob to the left to see if it would opened into another room.
Me too. Maybe 30+. I have alternately thought that it was procrastinating, ADD, FOMO, the distraction of shiny objects, etc.--new terms keep appearing.

In the past this has been "useful", because I learned a number of tools
before I had need for them. "Useful" in quotes because I might not have been most productive
at that moment but maybe it amortizes over time (ie, maybe I "10x" for spurts at later time),
and it got me skills and opportunities that I wouldn't have otherwise.

If I don't a creatively productive day in doing what I'm "supposed" to be doing, I need to feed that hunger by learning something new. Sometimes it's shopping for shiny things, other times it's going deeper into something... still looking for the balance.
What competition? Microsoft may be shunned by startups/hackers (that could change quickly if they keep turning the ship the way they've been), but in your average boring old cube farm they are absolutely ahead of other sellers in both product quality and revenue.
I've also heard that there's service-quality expectations at play: if the wifi is free and it sucks, you're still happy while the hotels that charge for wifi to simply reduce demand (congestion) in order to have a better experience (speed/bandwidth) for those who actually pay.

And it's further complicated by the value of ppv entertainment to the hotel - if Netflix/Hulu/whatever works just fine on the hotel wifi, the hotel is losing revenue. Cheap hotels with crapy free internet don't have to worry about that, but hotels that charge are also trying to recoup lost ppv entertainment revenue.
"We have thoroughly investigated this technology and do not find any evidence to substantiate security concerns."

One way to read this is they have not seen any evidence that people have actually been hacked in the wild. They may understand perfectly well that it is now trivial to do this but no one's actually reported yet that they had thousands of dollars stolen due to using online banking on a compromised Lenovo machine on public Wi-Fi.

Roll on the class action lawsuits.
Free hot desking with London coffee startup
I've been a ThinkPad customer for ages, and have recommended them to others many times. I'm fuming mad over this.

What's the best way to tell Lenovo they fucked up? I mean, I can vent over social media all day but will they even pay attention?
Well to be honest I've worked with OEM's before.

They are so big and bureaucratic, half the time they don't know who is working on what.

This behavior is still inexcusable.

Somebody should be fired for putting this garbage on computers to "enhance the users experience."
Well, if you look at what the SDK could do - that isn't too far out of reach:

http://www.komodia.com/products/komodia-redirector/
Yeah this is fucking hilarious! Be sure to read the Extracting SuperFish Certificate article first for full affect though lol
Lenovo “uninstall” instructions leave behind Superfish root certificate
> This is not indifference but detachment — I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future.

This quote sticks out to me, I feel everyone acts, by and large, like this towards these issues (or most issues) regardless of age or health. Probably my pessimistic view of the world, very interesting to read from him.
"Hey siri" is only enabled when your phone is plugged in, and it processes that particular phrase on device, not across a network.
>Callbacks? Who uses those?

...your preferred javascript framework.
Big companies making small mistakes is good for little guys :)
Legit? Care to elaborate? I am really interested.
That's what they're trying to do in THEORY but let's be frank, Windows 8's app ecosystem has flopped even if they're using HTML5/CSS and other standards.
So they're basically telling you how to get rid of ads and call it solved, while still leaving you vulnerable to getting robbed by any script kiddie that gets his hands on the certificate key?
Have you heard about .NET? It's one of the best frameworks out there, very well supported, has been improving steadly for the last years and now that it's open source, I only expect more.

Yes, there are some minor things that other new frameworks do better, but this is normal, any framework needs time to adapt. But in general, there is not a single thing that .NET is not attacking in all the current trends of development.

In fact, a lot of things are being based on .NET, including javascript 7 features like async functions and Netflix's RxJava that is a port of .NET Rx.

I'm not saying it's the absolute best framework out there, but it is pretty good. Saying Microsoft is doing nothing in this area is just crazy.
Stephan Boyer teaches about them in a peculiarly pragmatic way. Haskell programmers often abstract application-specific computations into monads and use them as a sort of interface—a functional API.

http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/9/monads-part-1-a-design-pa...
I got so used to pronouncing "cache" like "kaysh" because I'd never heard it spoken aloud until I started working as a web dev... all my coworkers yelled at me. I eventually changed my pronunciation but it wasn't easy!
In contrast, I've been refusing to opt-in to my banks online statements for a long time now, simply because I want to have important stuff (e.g. my money) printed black-on-white. Email can be easily faked.
How We Determine Priorities in Our Startup
Return it as DOA.
So git-annex now has support for efficiently deduplicating backends? Might be time for me to give it another look.
Why is a press release undated? You have to go back to the "News releases" page to see that it is dated today. The PDF version doesn't have the date, either.