skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The US has something similar:

There was something called the Commodity Credit Corporation, which was a wholly owned government organization; still exists; sometimes called the CCC, which is a New Deal-sounding acronym, and it was. And that corporation, run by USDA, bought corn. Just went out and acquired corn, through a complicated loan process. They would loan money to a farmer at harvest time, or actually well before harvest, at planting time, based on a price guarantee at harvest. If the farmer decided not to sell or had a price below that loan rate, the farmer had the right to turn that corn over to the government. Which they did. And the government owned warehouses but they also contracted with private people who had warehouses. They did this--in the case of milk, the government didn't buy raw milk from the farm. They promised to buy cheese and butter and dry milk powder, so that we had, outside of Kansas City, caves full of government-owned cheese at one point. As well as piles and piles of dry milk powder.

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/02/daniel_sumner_o.htm...
The subconscious also seems smart enough to fool modern medicine into believing that something's physically wrong with your body when in fact there's just emotional turmoil in the brain, see TMS.
That took me to the German version, you can get to the English version (which is at the same url) through this page: http://wwwlgis.informatik.uni-kl.de/cms/courses/informations...
I like Haskell for the same reasons I like VIM:

- It needs some brain melting to learn but it ultimately makes you a better coder. Time is not wasted on learning it.
- A new exciting mindset !

- When you feel you're doing something repetitive, it's nearly sure there is a way to do it effortless.

- Advanced stuff
The NSA doesn't need this amateur-hour backdoor. They surely have control of one or more genuine certificate authorities already.
The page says that all issues are resolved now.
Some notes on SuperFish
(project and article co-author here)

Thank you scott_s for quoting _these_ words from the post. They are our most sincere attempt to express why we even put so much effort developing the idea. It is great and humbling that they come across as such.
Alternatively the most stressful thing for team leads is telling management that it can't be done before the arbitrary deadline.
Because you call it "enhanced functionality featuring cloud services", not a "man in the middle attack".

And calling it enhanced is not always an unreasonable interpretation. For instance, take the case of a cheap mobile phone with a very limited bandwidth. You can increase the end user satisfaction considerably if you move some of the functionality to a server layer so that when you browse, the things actually happen somewhere in a cloud and your phone is just displaying the result, without being the actual browser as seen by the site you visit.

Nokia did this with some of the cheaper devices, and I think it was quite OK. It comes down to how much you trust that party, of course, and how critical your communication is.
I'm starting to think we need an equivalent of UL certification or even the old "BABT approved" stickers for consumer protection.

UL provides a bunch of non-obvious to the user but critical for safety rules for mains-connected devices. Likewise users are subject to non-obvious privacy threats from internet-connected devices (leakage of personal information, injected advertising or referral links). These should be at least clearly labelled.

So Android devices would get a "yellow" rating for "transmits personal information securely to Google" and these Lenovo laptops and Samsung TVs would get "red" for "transmits personal information in cleartext".
And, I did it again :)
> For example there is almost no information about how to write a smartphone videogame in haskell, even if it possible to trasnpile it to C or to Javascript.

These guys are doing it pretty seriously: http://keera.co.uk/blog/all-posts/

And frankly a smartphone videogame is a pretty specialized use case; a lot of pretty mainstream languages (perl?) don't have a good story for how to do that. In fact I've never heard of anyone writing a smartphone game in Clojure - I guess you could do one for Android since it's just java bytecode, but does anyone?

"Practical" for most programmers is server-side business apps, and Haskell is very very good at those.

> Does it perform well for high performance activities?

Yes, very much so.
Coding sounds like a monotonous task of slapping together stuff until it works without any thought about architecture, testing, or anything 'big picture'.
This is a bit off-topic, I'm sincerely wondering what they were going for by framing Obama the way they did in the thumbnails for the interview. It's too consistent and notable to be an accident - it's a conscious choice.

Are they trying to make Obama himself look ominous? Or more like make it look like there's an invisible threat of potential cyber-war looming over his shoulder?

It's a very thought-provoking way of framing him (for me, obviously), and I can't quite answer the question what the thought behind it must have been. Maybe that was what they were going for.
Reminds me of this joke:

A wealthy man walks into a bank New York City and asks for the loan officer. He says he's going to Europe on business for two weeks and needs to borrow $5000. The bank officer says the bank will need some kind of security for the loan, so the man hands over the keys to a new Rolls Royce, which costs quarter of a million dollars.

“The car is parked on the street in front of the bank,” says the man, “and I have all the necessary papers.”

The bank officer agrees to accept the car as collateral for the loan. After the man leaves, the loan officer, the bank's president and all their colleagues enjoy a good laugh at the man for using a $250,000 Rolls Royce as collateral against a $5,000 loan.

One of the employees drives the Rolls into the bank's underground garage and parks it there. Two weeks later, the wealthy man man returns, repays the $5000 and the interest, which comes to $15.41.

The loan officer says, "Sir, I must tell you, we’re all a little puzzled. While you were away, we checked you out and discovered that you’re a multimillionaire. Why would you bother to borrow $5,000?"

The man replies, "Where else in New York City can I park my car for two weeks for only $15.41?"
Speaking about AI, is it really that hard to do the OCR'ing of the images?
I'm no expert, but I was under the impression hat this was a solved problem.
One thing that makes CodeAcademy successful is an attention to gamification. I think sketching some of that out is a priority for the next iteration. Clear game mechanics is what keeps people coming back to a platform like this.
Mh on my settings it was english by default. With this parameter it should work: http://wwwlgis.informatik.uni-kl.de/extra/game/?lang=en
That's not the same.

What you're mentioning are basically random subsidies to farmers not based on true market demand.

Never ends well.
They don't want in to just your machine though, they want a backdoor in to everyones machine, by default, without cause.
> A search of LinkedIn profiles turns up more than 60 former Tesla employees now employed by Apple.

I can't tell - is this a lot or hardly anything?
This is a good idea, and I've watched that guy on youtube develop his game from the groundup for couple of episodes, but the last thing I want to do after coding all day is to watch somebody else code.. so maybe it would be nice to have some kind of "best of" compilations after people have done these.
Fantastic demo and the source code is concise and clean. Thanks.
The first time I saw this kind of thing was watching Notch on the Ludum Dare challenge. I don't really see it as a way to learn much about programming, it's more entertaining and a fascinating insight into how other people work.

For example, realising that other people find listening to trance music also helps them code. Or finding out that other people use MS Paint as a level building tool. Or perhaps discovering that it's even possible to use MS Paint as a level building tool!
The User Illusion by Norretranders is a fantastic read on the power of the subconscious vs consciousness. Well worth a read.
It's not complicated. Elements within the FDA redacted key data from the FDA's own Advisory Committee.
Not if the proxy checks the certificate of the site it's connecting to and doesn't trust it's own self-signed cert (there is no point in doing so if it's pure adware). But yeah... I have no idea what it does...
When I was a child I became a member of a cracking group of friends that disassembled and broke protections just for fun(we did not share or sell our cracks although we published info about how to do it).

The other day I met them again, now as an adults. It seems like one of the members of the old group took the bait and now is working for secret services or something shady. His life is miserable.

You start selling vulnerabilities for easy money and you could end badly. Those entities have so much power and too few scruples.
I can't imagine watching anyone code realtime. Unless it has explanatory voiceover it's not very informative and it's far slower than just waiting for them to finish and reading the code afterwards?
Works absolutely fine for me in Firefox. Top job.

It shows the banner in IE but then it is actually very slow.
Interesting new Android app
I found this cool app on the Play store about Taoism, but I think the most impressive bits are the technical aspects. What do you guys think of it?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ftt.taoteching&hl=en
Yes there are. What made monads eventually "click" for me was the incredibly detailed, eight-part Mike Vanier's tutorial on monads in general and in Haskell in particular. First part: http://mvanier.livejournal.com/3917.html
Isn't IE 10/11 still the most popular browser?
No, it's a free put option to farmers, a form of insurance.
Microsoft Open Technologies Group
In this case, the charges were clearly bogus, and they were dropped in the end (except for 1). It's not the same as facing a real conviction threat for something you are clearly guilty of.
Cool! One should be able to run his code by pressing something like Ctrl/Alt-Enter, instead of reaching for mouse all the time.
Finding palindromes in C strings. The most important problem in computer science. If software engineering job interviews are to be believed.
So CSS can do 3D, but still not vertically center multiline text in a straightforward way?
It's the same and still troubling and improper.
I don't understand the downvotes. The gp probably asked why not just zero-out the bytes. Sure, there's the firmware modification issue. But what I was responding to is why replace. This is the easiest option.
In the Arduino source, it seems that each sensor has a token that has been hardcoded into the query to send data to the API.

Wouldn't this make it way too easy for somebody to fudge your data by sending fake API requests?
I was citing the FBI for the 8% estimate.

> On the other hand, we have actual scientific data from the CDC showing that 20% of women have been raped: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss6308a1.htm?s_cid=.... What we need is an equivalent study that asks men if they have ever been falsely charged with rape. My guess is that the number is quite small.

What are you arguing? Since false rape accusations can't be measured well, they shouldn't be considered a problem and they should be ignored?
Do you trust a hardware vendor that installs MITM stuff on your machine per default to keep the firmware untampered?

There is almost no machine out there running openly auditable code on all components.
Definition of Nuclear Energy
I have a X230 and I'm super happy with it. The quality is beyond everything I have experienced with laptops. I have a newer Dell E-series at work now and it's ok, but lack the same quality feel imo.

I suspect the cheaper Lenovo laptops are shitty though.
Lenovo PCs ship with man-in-the-middle adware that breaks HTTPS connections
Some more URLs...

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

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

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

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

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

https://www.superfish.com/ws/getCouponsSupportedSites.action

https://www.superfish.com/ws/getSupportedSitesJSON.action
Rainbows and unicorns
True story. Too many hacks are needed for that:
http://css-tricks.com/vertically-center-multi-lined-text/

Anyways, centered stuff is evil!
http://uxmovement.com/content/why-you-should-never-center-al...
> Can you offer an example of specific situation, in any OO-language with reasonable amount of available libraries, where deep knowledge of design and analysis of algorithms is actually required?

Interviews :)
Impersonating a CA is not transparent and risks losing that CA if anyone finds out it's forging certs. They probably can do that, but it's a risky nuclear option.

This is a transparent dragnet that can easily be blamed away, which has been shown to be much more preferable in the NSA's M.O.
As an Apple investor I'm not sure what to think of this.

On the one hand Apple has so much cash on hand that they can do just about anything that they want.

On the other hand I can see developing a car being a huge time and money sink with very little payoff in the end. Apple has huge margins on their computers/idevices while the automakers have razor thin margins on their cars.

I think I would feel better about this if they spun off a separate company to do this.
4 Challenges Web Designers Face in 2015
How about just waiting 'till Apple launches the thing, and seeing whether the congregation will take it for its blessings? What sense is there in endlessly speculating on whatever Apple may be up to, and how insanely great it surely will be, or maybe less so but then yet so it'll surely be a success?

Take that company from its pedestal and put it back where it belongs - on the ground, like any other commercial entity, out there to lighten your wallet.
I used the XPS 13 as my main machine from 2013 to late 2014 (when I switched to a MBPr). It was a nice machine initially but I found that it ended up looking pretty tattered (particularly the plastic edge, which looks and feels cheap and a bit fragile in the long run). Most annoyingly, it had a tendency to overheat, particularly when dual booting into Ubuntu. After about 20 minutes, I couldn't leave the thing on my knees - had to find a table. Both the "tablet/screen" and the base were affected.

It was portable and powerful enough, but the MBPr gives me a much better overall experience. At half, perhaps 2/3 of the price of the 13" MBPr, it might still be worth it.
My dad took my brother and I there back in the late 70's or early 80's. My impression at the time was that it seemed to be falling apart faster than it was being built.

Over the years it is the place I point out to my kids as we are headed up or down I-17. But I've never been inclined to go back.
The Growth of Cloud Computing in Emerging Asian Market
The treat of financial ruin is the same though. Regardless of how bogus the charges may be lawyers are expensive and it's not like if 44 out of 45 charges are bogus they need to pay 44/45 of the defendants attorneys fees.

This is just like throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. It should be illegal.
And, more importantly, how many of those Former Tesla Employees are actually Former Apple Employees who became Tesla Employees, and then decided they would rather go back to work for Apple?
Businesses Lose $3.8 Mn Annually to Cyber Attacks. What Are Most Prone Sectors?
I bought my last laptop this way, and it's been very satisfying to own. There was no funny business, it's just straight-up Windows. It didn't even have any stickers on it except for a tiny Intel sticker.
Audio compression and encoding is such an interesting area, and I'd recommend anyone to read up on the basics. I had a naive idea about compression being something-about-cutting-waveforms or something like that, and had no idea that principles of vocoding was used to encode phone conversations - we're essentially encoding speech by passing artificial air through a software model of an artificial human speech system, and decoding it by blowing the air back out the other way! The compressed data is essentially not even the sound itself, but parameters about the artificial tongue, mouth etc.

I know this is extremely dumbed down, but every once in a while you realise there's a subject out there you know nothing about, that's just so interesting to learn a bit about - and speech encoding definitely checks that box for me!
> "achieved positive growth" is pretty self-explanatory.

Sure, but it's Corporatese for "grew".
OK, this is epic. Well done guys!
I especially like this: https://undo.meteor.com/

I sometimes worry about the privacy implications of making this data public but aggregating by hour seems to alleviate some of this. How do you get staff buy-in? e.g. the undo is effectively a key logger.

I thought monitoring door locks [0], power usage [1] and temperature [2] was fairly advanced. What are you using for the power monitoring?

--

[0] https://unop.uk/dev/spark-core-shower-room-door-sensor/ (v2 write-up with Blinkytape coming soon)
[1] https://unop.uk/dev/raspberry-pi-electricity-monitor/
[2] I use a https://twitter.com/myjoulo (their main site is down)
Good stuff!

You might want to be a little careful with ensuring an aggressive query timeout. I ran the following:

select * from family_members f1, family_members f2, family_members f3, family_members f4, family_members f5, family_members f6, family_members f7, family_members f8

This took a while to run - I didn't go any further as I didn't want to damage the site during your launch, but add a few more cartesian products in there and it could hurt.
Click many times on the switch button in the bottom left, you could get a reward.
I don't see why people should spend money auditing it, instead of building maintainable alternatives

When someone builds a new one (as happens every other day), we'll have to start again, right back at the beginning, fixing all the bugs in it and auditing it. About halfway through that process, someone will come along and say "I don't see why people should spend money auditing it, instead of building maintainable alternatives"...

There will always be new projects doing things in different ways. That's no reason not to make sure that something we have now works properly.
How to Start a Laundry Service Business?
I said similar because of the government caves filled with cheese, not the economics of the situation :)

In any case, I recommend listening to the whole episode to anyone interested in the agricultural policies of the US federal government.
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK.

Never buying Lenovo again.
What other purpose beyond the development of drive-by installs of iOS rootkits can such a job position have in a company like that?! :(
Breaking the bank: Bitcoins hit Africa's money transfer traditions
I love my Thinkpad and couldn't think of using anything else. I value it for the hardware and buy it without pre-installed OS, so this wouldn't affect me anyway. Superfish is however an absolute clusterfuck on behalf of Lenovo, though at least it was caught rather fast unlike the Sony rootkit. One thing I really value in Lenovo is their customer service and as a long-time customer, I'd expect some people to get fired, a heartfelt apology and a compensation for those affected. It's their PR image on the line. Just don't be f*ing Sony.
Weird. It did not want to be in English for me on Chrome or IE. Thanks for the link.
ASCII messages in prime numbers
Apple has huge margins on their computers/idevices while the automakers have razor thin margins on their cars.

Apple's profit margin is 24%

Porsche's profit margin is 18%

I'm unsure it's a great idea, but it's quite possible to make good margins on cars.
> Ive is a car snob of the highest order, applying the same kind of withering put-downs it’s easy to imagine his former boss would toss out. "There are some shocking cars on the road," he says about the Toyota Echo, adding that, "One person’s car is another person’s scenery." He refers to the same car as "nothing … just insipid." Later he expresses his disgust at the fact that another senior Apple executive drives a Toyota Camry.

Jony Ive was one of the few high level people at Apple I respected. Those comments just lost him most of that respect.

There's being a snob, and there's being a dick. Seriously, "disgust"? At someone driving a Camry? From someone who "totaled" a DB9 a month after getting it? Maybe he should get a Camry...
Read the actual interview, those are misquotes at best.
Building iOS-like transparency effects in CSS with backdrop-filter
something wrong with flex box?
>Yes, they already are. That framework is called the DOM. People keep complaining about it and trying to come up with replacement frameworks that end up slower and less capable...

The ones I've seen are actually faster -- Flipboard for one gets to 60fps scrolling on mobile, IIRC. And of course all WebGL based interfaces on native mobile apps that re-implement parts of Cocoa Touch et al, are not that shabby either.

Sure, it doesn't have as much accesibility, but that's something that can be fixed in the future (and of course people needing more accessibility can always use more conservative alternatives).
Improving the design is part of a rewrite, which would make it faster, even if the rewrite was in C++. Sufficiently large, old projects (and Firefox certainly qualifies) tend to accumulate a lot of gunk and design choices that used to make sense, but don't any more.

Rust also allows one to safely use patterns that one couldn't use in C++ without screwing things up, thanks to the borrow checker. And quite a lot of Firefox is written in Javascript, which definitely would be faster when rewritten in a compiled language.
I did the same, worked flawlessly. The only PITA was to put the ISO image on an USB stick.
Sure, shoot me an email: jesse at glean.net
Firefox ESR 31.3.0
I think since IE6 Microsoft should be banned from touching anything related to the internet.
Steve Jobs was Apple's parents. Apple is realizing that their parents are gone. No rules, they are starting to realize they can do anything they want. Within the limits of their $0.2T cash on hand, of course.
Thanks for the heads up. I actually use Sql.js (SQLite in JavaScript), so there is currently no server-side component of the website.
As an Apple investor I'm not sure what to think of this.

On the one hand Apple has so much cash on hand that they can do just about anything that they want.

On the other hand I can see developing a phone being a huge time and money sink with very little payoff in the end. Apple has huge margins on their computers/idevices while the mobile phone manufacturers have razor thin margins on their products.

I think I would feel better about this if they spun off a separate company to do this.
You assume it's very little pay off. You never really know what Apple would bring to the table if they did. Honestly I still can't believe they are trying to make a car. If they do it's very likely they know exactly what there doing.
>I agree that they didn't change shit but it's precisely because they are still built on the DOM and cannot really go below that in the abstraction layer.

There exist UIs done in Canvas and WebGL that are arguably below the DOM in the "abstraction layer" and don't need to use much more DOM nodes besides opening a canvas/gl panel...

(Most full screen 2G/3G web games fall into this, for starters, and those are in the tens of thousands. But there are also lotsa apps).
Like looking over Shakespeare's shoulder, hoping to absorb some genius through osmosis ;-)
Some random title saying nothing in a news feed?

How about the fuck not and why the fuck this keeps happening?