skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I pulled everything down and started to play with it. it looks really interesting. I put it up on github so you can go check it out there http://github.com/ryankshaw/PastryKit

(remember, dont actually use that code for your own website, I'm sure apple wouldn't like that), the only reason I put it up on github is because I found it interesting to learn from and thought others might too.

Some interesting notes:

1. the redirect if you are not coming from an iphone does not happen in this code. it is something done on the server. it has nothing to do with these PastryKit javascript files.

2. I took all of the minified css files and js files and made an uncompressed version next to it with the name <filename>.uncompressed.js for the css files I converted it to SASS because I like that and I can see better visually what they are doing with it. (ps, if nothing else, look at the css they are using, there is some awseome webkit-proprietary stuff you can do with your styles if you are targeting only the iPhone)

Some cool things:

1. check out the stuff they are doing with the html5 databases in classes/datacontroller-database-uncompressed.js that is pretty cool.
2. the loading image they do with pure css ( @-webkit-keyframes loadingImageAnimation ) in stylesheet.css is pretty cool.
Just downloaded the lite version.
It is easier and more intuitive to use than I initially had thought from watching his YouTube demo.

Nice app. A tad sluggish on my 3G, but definitely usable and readable when writing at almost full speed.
I really hate to admit it, but Hotlanta has a real startup scene. Maybe part of what's happening is:

* Many of the other major CS/EE research universities are in cow towns like Ann Arbor, Chambana, and Madison.

* Many of the other non-Valley tech centers happen to be in places, like Atlanta, Seattle, and Austin, where a research university coincides with a thriving metro area.

* The few places that don't have startup scenes proportional to their population size and University caliber are, like NYC and LA, prohibitively expensive.

I like the work you're doing. I'm just pointing out that there's a huge biasing effect with ISS. It's the first successful IT security startup (the Netscape of its field), which sets you up for post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc. Even its GATech roots are easy to overstate (much of its original talent came from Arizona and California).
I recall a children's book in the "boy detective" genre, in which the villain was stealing the used typewriter ribbons from the dumpster of some businesses and reading the information on them.

The "it must be some computer whiz breaking our database!" plot was a major red herring, but the characters believed it, because computer security was under closer scrutiny. This seems to be the same sort of problem: digital data is insecure and people will try to steal it, but paper isn't.
OP referred to it, and pointed out it has no momentum scrolling.
In my personal lexicon, I call this the "Waffle House Method". WH values efficiency above all else. They are all-cash stores, with an occasional ATM machine in the store. Every single element of the store has an efficiency study behind it. But the single biggest efficiency point they cover is complete failure to do any market research. Instead, they just build a store on the same block as a McDonald's. If McDonald's did the market research to say that this location was good, then it's good enough for WH too.

I use the WH Method for my choices on fashion (when I bother to care about fashion): I pick a celebrity who looks rather well put together and similar to me in build, reason that celebrities are required to spend an inordinate amount of attention on fashion in order to maintain their marketability, and then wear/style however they do. It works out rather well.

I've also used the WH Method for doing basic site design in a documentation-happy environment. "Look, every other site with a similar purpose outside your market does their site design like this. You should have those elements as well, or users will be confused."
what would you use? tantalums? ive have the joy of recovering old equipment with dried tant caps on the power rails. (23 of 'em!) maybe tants are made better these days...
Google Fusion Tables API
He even went as far as to claim that everything Dr. Epstein and co. published is a myth with the only evidence being one article on which the author is now correcting.

No he didn't. He claimed that Epstein publishes primarily opinion pieces in scientific journals, which are then cited by activists as if they are actual research.

A quick perusal of Epstein's CV suggests the first part of this claim is true: http://chge.med.harvard.edu/about/faculty/epstein.html

I imagine he focuses on the actual movement of malaria because he is a medical entomologist and didn't want to make claims he was uncertain of.
Nope. Unrelated.
Yes, it will be a free upgrade.
Explain again how this is evil? If you can protect a computer from a virus, you can protect it from a DVD ripper.
Designing for the Switch: @font-face and the Flash Of UnTypeset Text
The fact that this guy is an epidemiologist doesn't impress me worth a nilly bit. What I do know is that some of Gore's science is spotty, but that malaria may indeed be affected by any sort of climate pattern changes. I've done only a bit of traveling in my life, but I think it can hardly be disputed that there are more mosquitoes in Florida than there are in NY, and more in NY than there are in California.

The question then is: will global warming increase the primary factor and secondary factors that contribute to mosquito breeding? Those factors are clearly water/humidity first, and warmth second. California has few mosquitoes because it's cold when it's wet and it's dry when it's warm, and Florida has a lot because it's got warmth and water aplenty.

So then, the answer is complicated. Some places will see an increase in malaria prevalence and some places will see a decrease, due to the varying effects of climate change. California is set to be drier and warmer, so we shouldn't have any increase.

But that's the twist. Some places are poised to become wetter and warmer, as opposed to drier and warmer. Thus, places that don't normally experience it will experience it (or at least be plagued by mosquitoes). The authorities in those places won't be prepared for it. So either way you play it, global warming will cause some issues.
Glad you're excited. :) It's on the way.
How Facebook Is Making Friending Obsolete
I'm not arguing that these things aren't useful or driven by real problem; I'm arguing that they're wrong. As are the actions of employees in harming the companies they work for.

But the American stubbornness in me goes back to the same logic of the Fourth Amendment, that despite the no doubt usefulness from a policing perspective of being able to search people without jumping through a lot of hoops, it is still wrong.

The issue of Germany and entrepreneurship is a whole different rant, and there are legal barriers here which I believe stifle entrepreneurship. (The essence of the real rant though is that it's a deeper cultural issue.) But Germany sans privacy laws wouldn't suddenly be an entrepreneurial hotbed. If we're talking easing incorporation, sure. Making it easier to hire and fire people? Once again, I'd be on board. But I don't think privacy is a significant component of the equation.
it should be continued at least for basic information needs. it just is easy to use.
What does the Fourth Amendment have to do with a company searching it's own property? I just don't understand why you think that's wrong! I'm an ACLU-giving privacy nut (and I have real problems with how IT security is often managed), and I recoil from the idea that company employees should somehow have some claim on company property simply because they've been allowed to touch it.
Generally when I hear the term "deniable" used with something security related, I think of something like the hidden volumes in True Crypt: something that I can't be proved to have.

Does your product provide this level of deniability? I would venture a guess that the answer is no (after all, there is a box with a big "DV" on it). If not, what do you mean by the word deniable?
The Roman economy was based on slavery, it collapsed when they ran out of slaves. When we get machines which are equivalent to human slaves, we'll still have rich people and politicians, and a large under class on social welfare. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Harvesters are in a sort of legal grey area, from what I can tell. If the information is publicly available, then why shouldn't anyone be allowed to access it, or use technology to automate access? I'm sure that Google has millions of email addresses from crawling sites alone.

Of course there are more obvious methods that are clearly illegal, and I agree that the governments should enforce the laws more actively.
.5% of the world's population, stored in plain text. Bravo.
Sure does. See the use of mercenaries in Iraq and other places.
The people doing that just turn on encryption. The people that get in trouble for using encryption just encode the cyphertext as codewords in their email.

Monitoring communication is mathematically impossible these days.

The deep problem is that employees have a lot less to lose than employers. If you leak a picture of the next iPhone to your competitor, you lose, at most, everything you own. For most people, that's a few thousand dollars. The employer, on the other hand, can lose the entire market for their products.
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/5/24646-api-design-matter...
I'm not sure what's new here.

We've known for a very long time vitamin D is produced when the skin is exposed to UV light. We've known how important vitamin D is. Northern Europe dark and cold, yep we've known that too for a while.

Innuit get their vitamin D from the seafood based diet, we've also known that too. Northern Europe being unusually warm thanks to the gulf stream, that is also old news.
What happens to my video if the DV unit is stolen or destroyed?
It is also not a great epicenter of tech entrepreneurship.

Perhaps a stable society where people are protected from overbearing authority is more valuable than making a couple of extra dollars today. It is definitely more valuable than a slightly smaller cell phone or a website where you can share 140 character messages with your friend.

There are bigger risks to business than some employees posting a few internal word documents to Yahoo Finance. The worldwide financial crisis was not due to inadequate monitoring of employees' personal e-mail, after all.
Ditto. I'm a grad student studying security, and I'm not convinced that this is deniable. How will you deny the DV box (or even unlabeled camera & microphone) in your meeting area when the feds suddenly raid the place? How will you deny the private key on that USB drive you are very very careful to store securely, lest you lose the ability to view the video? I believe that history predicts that once the existing of these things have been proven to a court, you'll be either producing the passphrase or getting thrown in jail for contempt of court.

http://xkcd.com/538/
Yes, Atlanta has a real startup scene across several clusters. It doesn't have one across all clusters - and many people are in denial about this, and what it means to them personally.

ISS is just a starting point. As a writer, its easier to approach a complicated topic with a hook - ISS is the hook. But I don't think its coincidence that ISS was the netscape of its field, and the fact that we have a sustaining cluster in security.

I agree that bringing in talent from afar happened - that seems to have been key to many of the offspring.
XMLHttpRequest : XML :: JavaScript : Java :: Hamster : Ham

They never had anything to do with one another, it's just the module that Microsoft happened to dump it in.
University of Toronto physicists lay the groundwork for cooler, faster computing
Isn't that kind of like SAT no longer standing for anything and it just being the name of the test now? Or, was that movie just making that up?
This is answered directly on their website. They record the video in a way that supposedly makes it impossible to determine if video has actually been recorded at all.

Thus, you can simply say, "Well, sure, I've got the box, but it hasn't been recording anything", and nobody can prove otherwise.

I'm still reading the site to see if I can understand the technical basis for their claims.
Technical countermeasures increase the cost of violating contracts. In the real world, DLP systems routinely catch violations, despite the fact that they are all (currently) trivially bypassable.

Your logic says, "wiretaps are meaningless, because monitoring voice is mathematically impossible". Leaving aside the fact that many things that are mathematically possible (such as undetectably encoding high-entropy data as a greater volume of low-entropy data) are practically infeasible, what's your point? Wiretaps, for instance, are clearly incredibly valuable.
Presumably, you lose access to it, but nobody else is able to access your video either.
Founder of Visa: Rules of management and hiring.
Oh, I agree completely. I much prefer a link to a paper and a self-comment to a confusing news item. I just couldn't resist the cheap laugh. Sorry!
Rumours that first dark matter particle found
He certainly had some facts about the actual movement of malaria, but most of the piece was dedicated to attacking specific climate-change proponents on one small issue.

Well, it's the one small issue he's an expert on.
How long until someone needs medical attention during one of these lockdowns, and they are fired for leaving to go to the doctor, or feel that they must endure the problem (and risk complications) in order to keep their job?

Not long, I bet, and I imagine that this practice will remain legal for ... oh ... about 3 months after that first case.

I hope Apple increases the frequency of this practice so that it attracts the attention of legislators sooner, and so that their brightest employees seek employment elsewhere. The beginning of the end is near.
Yeah I read a little more and realized that the video is actually stored on the device. For some reason I didn't get that immediately.

I would have concerns using something like this, if someone ransacked my place of business or whatever (and it looks like this is targeted towards people who might have that sort of problem), it would be problematic if I couldn't view the video it recorded just because I didn't have the USB key anymore.

It would also bug me that I couldn't store an encrypted version of my videos for backup (of course I could encrypt them myself, but that kind of defeats the purpose of this device). So if I wanted to have some redundancy I'd have to store un-encrypted backups of my data, or be at the mercy of someone stealing my device.

For $6,000, I'm afraid I'd pass on this.
Luyt was pointing out a mistake in the Press release :)
The ram spec is mentioned as "256 GB"

Also, here's the direct product link: http://www.cherrypal.com/openstore/product_info.php?products...

Only caveat is that battery lasts only for 4hrs. Would have been good if that was expandable to 6hrs or 8hrs (maybe for an extra sum). But it's value for money.

Specs offered sound a lot better than the Wikireader which is also $99 and does lesser than this
They are banking on continued business or addon features so they aren't necessarily taking it at a loss for reasons like to get their name out.

Personally I dislike godaddy and prefer not to buy from them.
I simply disagree that privacy on workplace computers is worth more than money or smaller phones. I see no greater good being traded for the drag on businesses. If you want workplace privacy, you can provide it for yourself, and you can avoid jobs where intense monitoring is a reasonable condition, such as R&D on the industry's most secret products.

I don't know what the worldwide financial crisis has to do with this, but intensive workplace privacy laws would have hurt the investigation and wind-down of fraudulently priced contracts, not helped it. Hey, you brought it up.
Reminds me of a cool idea I once thought of. It's more a nerd-fantasy than something practical. A surveillance system that not only encrypts the video, but also digitally signs it, so James Bond-style thieves can't switch cameras.
Somehow I doubt that Malaria ever was the same big problem in Europe as it was in Africa. Wasn't Malaria the main thing impeding Europeans in Africa? They should have been used to Malaria if it had been so common in Europe.

If Malaria was in Europe, perhaps it was at a much smaller scale?
Ok. So, if it's not a coincidence that ISS was the Netscape of security in Atlanta, what do you think the reason is?

(If you can't tell, I'm somewhat closer to the history of ISS than most HN readers, and not just because I'm in security).
For now. This sort of thing just encourages active development and deployment of countermeasures. "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
The layout is good, however, I have one suggestion:

Left align your text. Follow the advice of this book by Robin Williams:

"Find a strong alignment and stick to it."

"Avoid using more than one text alignment on the page (that is, don't center some text and right-align other text).

And please try very hard to break away from a centered alignment unless you are consciously trying to create a more formal, sedate presentation. Choose a centered alignment consciously, not by default."

- The Non-Designer's Design Book: Design and Typographic Principles for the Visual Novice. http://books.google.com/books?id=n1AuwXafMO8C&lpg=PT42&#....

Take a look at the chapter above she shows some good examples of how to integrate images into a layout.
Ah, I see. They've separated the storage of software and the storage of video into two separate devices. The unit arrives with its video storage area filled with "random" data, and then the encryption process for the video writes into the video storage area.

As long as the encryption methods used produce data which cannot be differentiated from pseudo-random data, then it's impossible to tell whether there's any video on there at all.

Pretty neat. :-)
I think it's pretty ridiculous to imply that Apple would accept spectacular corporate liability by dissuading someone from seeking emergency medical attention during an IT investigation. So my guess as to the answer to your question is: it will never happen.

Apple's brightest employees (on the high-security projects) have been aware of extreme security measures for many years now, and positions on those teams are sought after.
If you want workplace privacy, you can provide it for yourself, and you can avoid jobs where intense monitoring is a reasonable condition, such as R&D on the industry's most secret products.

Can you? Can the majority of people make the right decision here?

It's illegal to sell your child to someone. Why is it legal to sell your privacy?
My guess is that it's the exhaust for the Auxiliary Power Unit [1]. The APU is essentially a small gas turbine generator, so the exhaust temperature is approximately 1000°C. This is way above the melting temperature of composites, and even aluminum.

This site [2] has a very good discussion about the Boeing 737 APU and APU exhaust (which they call an "Educator").

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auxiliary_power_unit
[2] http://www.b737.org.uk/apu.htm
With basically any argument, the skeptical position should be your default one. The person presenting the argument should be the one charged with convincing you of their point. It doesn't work the other way around.

So, the fact that there are raving hordes of neo-religious freaks claiming that climate change science is bunk does not mean that those supporting the assertion that we are doing irreparable harm to our planet are absolved of all responsibility to actually prove that.
Neat idea, but I think (certainly not) the only way you'll ever see a substantial return is if you were you marketing this to the obviously most vile demographic of pornographer(s) out there.
I don't see how remote attestation helps against malware.
Those are fair points.

It looks like there's no reason why the camera and the device have to be within a certain number of feet of each-other, other than limitations in cable and such. So, you could lock the device inside of a safe constructed specifically for it, or inside a wall, or something. (I actually have a client with a real "false bookcase", and that would be an idea storage area.)

I bet they could upgrade their software to allow you to download a copy of your encrypted video. They've yet to release their specific algorithms used, but I don't see anything that would prevent that based on their diagrams and text.
claiming to make all pages load faster is an unachievable goal & clearly an exaggeration.

No, it is not. This is a claim which is testable and measurable, and for reasonable assumptions, you can predictably, measurably, and in a reproducible fashion improve page load times by implementing the YSlow recommendations.

If you have the following line of code in application.rhtml:

javascript_tag "prototype", "scriptaculous", "shopping-cart", "color-picker", "mysite-functions"

and you add these 16 characters

, :cache => true

then every page on your site now loads faster.

P.S. Explanation for non-Rails users: the above code causes the five specified Javascript files to be concatenated into "all.js" the first time any page on the Rails site is rendered, and all pages load all.js rather than loading the five Javascript files. This cuts the overhead of four HTTP request/response cycles from the page. It gives an obvious, measurable impact to page load times, and plays well with another braindead easy optimization "set your HTTP server to gzip outgoing textual content (including Javascript)".
Tetrapharmakos - Epicurus's remedy for leading the happiest possible life.
Robert Greene on 50 Cent and being a hustler.
$6000 is quite a fair amount of money and for that I only get one year of warranty on the hardware and one year of software updates?

Not sure what the software updates include but for the hardware I would expect live-time warranty or at least something reasonable, like 5 to 10 years.

Other than that. Nice product.
Sounds like it solves the "Oh noes they stole our sex tape" concern most celebrities seem to have these days...
I'm not saying that the right is guaranteed by the fourth amendment, just that the logic is similar.

Trying to boil down our disagreement: I don't believe that ownership of a device or communications medium entitles one to all of the information which passes through it. It seems we differ there.

So for me that leaves no conflict between something not being my property, but the things which are on it still being mine. "What should a company be able to monitor?" is separate, where both utility and privacy are part of the formula. I believe, morally, not from a utilitarian perspective, that personal privacy trumps corporate utility in this particular case and that a reasonable set of privacy laws encode that.
Yeah, so this is basically awesome. I've written a LaTeX-based markup language that I'm using for my Ruby on Rails Tutorial book (http://www.railstutorial.org/book), but it's really designed for putting math & physics books on the web as HTML while still making nice PDFs. One big challenge I've faced is making nice HTML math typesetting, which I solved using texvc (the secret of Wikipedia's math typesetting), but unfortunately texvc is no good at inline math. I was not looking forward to solving that problem. Along comes MathJax, and now I don't have to!

N.B. Being able to benefit from unexpected advances like this is exactly why I standardized on LaTeX, even though it's kind of a pain to convert it to HTML. If you're trying to solve the math typesetting problem and not using LaTeX, you're on the wrong (coughMathMLcough) track.