skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The president can't arbitrarily shut things down or have much direct control. Congress both controls the purse strings and requires money to be spent. At best, POTUS can generally enforce the law, but NSA actually has authority to do mass surveillance from Bush era laws.

That said, Obama is clearly in favor of surveillance.
> This week, the countries of the United Nations will sign the most important document they have ever produced.

Glad to see that we jump straight to the incredible hyperbole right with the first sentence.
I think it is very important to understand that the timing of this report is likely no coincidence. With Xi set to have discussions today with Obama, this is effectively a slap across the face to Xi right before an important visit that he can't back out of, and effectively puts china on a lower footing by showing them to be lying directly to the US about their intentions.

Edit: this isn't to say publication/announcement was done at the administration's request, simply that the timing is extremely suspect. Other interests also want to see Xi brought down a few pegs. Politics :-/
Hey, wow, thanks for the protip on Coldturkey! I have to give that a shot :)
On a similar note, The Engineer Guy's walkthrough of Albert Michelson's Harmonic Analyzer gave me a much better understanding of Fourier analysis in general.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0INsTTU1k2UYO9Mck-i5...
And one should think twice about engaging in a war, cultural or other, with the people who supply your food. There are many ugly ways that could end very poorly.
>forced to be subscribed for longer in order to finish shows.

Which is exactly how HBO has been able to keep me subscribed for months on end. I thought I'd cancel it after Silicon Valley finished. HBO comes out with good content every week to keep me hooked.
"The main thing preventing inspect-ability isn't lack of access to the code."

No, I'm pretty sure you can't inspect code that you don't have access too.

I get what you are saying about complexity, but I don't think that's an argument for prohibiting inspection altogether. This story directly illustrates that there was at least for this particular car a group of people will and able to inspect at least a particular part of the code, if they had access to it.
> the mobile site that is constantly pushing content around in the hopes that one of your screen interactions accidentally yields an ad click

I think a lot of the time what you're seeing is shoddy web design (i.e. incompetence and not malice). Not saying it never happens, just that I don't think it's common.

Also, at the risk of stating the obvious, tricking people into clicking on ads is not a good long-term strategy for making money online. Savvy marketers judge ads by conversions, not clicks. Sending a bunch of clicks that don't convert is just going to drive down how much you get paid per click.
Yes it would. Cybercriminals are even more of a threat than spy agencies to most individuals.

[edit: in case it is unclear, I am saying that cybercrime is as strong reason for individuals to use ubiquitous encryption as government snooping not that it is a justification for government snooping]
Thanks for going into greater detail.
Grumpy moods seem to be going around :-)

I want to revisit the earlier point in your context. You say that it goes back 15 years. You are right.

Each of these parties is jointly and severally liable for it. Obama is currently liable. I think it's just and right to criticize him for failure to act. His lack of fortitude is not excused by the lack of fortitude of others.
> ... splitting up encryption keys, a possibility floated by National Security Agency director Michael S. Rogers earlier this year. That would require companies to create a way to unlock encrypted content, but divide the key into several pieces — to be combined only under court order. Exactly how this would work remains unclear, but the memo warned that such a system would be “complex to implement and maintain.”

Actually, this is called a 'lawful escrow', and it is implemented in many enterprise PKI systems specifically to comply with court orders.

So I guess they decided to throw in one sane option, to offset three other fairly insane ones.
In the modern world, fruits and vegetables are mostly about low cost of production, and robustness for transportation, and finally consistent appearance.

Local, seasonal, "heirloom" vegetables are a whole different ballgame. But they're seasonal, they're not always pretty, they don't travel, and they aren't cheap.
Former Volkswagen Chief Martin Winterkorn Could Receive €60m Payoff
I don't think that's a good fit for a person in your situation. It's so unlikely that you'll die in that period. I don't know about if you have kids, a house, or your work situations, but I would consider lowering the the payout and investing the rest in a retirement account. If you dropped it down to $500,000, your wife would still be fine for years after you died. If that freed up $40 that you could invest every month, it would result in over $50,000 that you would have at retirement.
What? Animals do not require much land area if you don't count the space needed to grow their food. They'll scale just as well as your indoor lettuce (that is not at all). You seem to be trying to solve the wrong problem.
WebSockets? That's so-o old fashioned. All the cool guys have already switched to WebRTC!

Bad news: I'm obviously kidding here, but it's based on a true story.
Really? You think cybercriminals do more damage than unbridled governments?
That's the sort of problem that should, ideally, be fixed with regular scheduled communication and making sure there is plenty for people to work on. If I'm blocked on one task, there should be something else I can switch to until Alice is done with her meeting and can explain something.
The core is a killer feature for sure, and essential in some cases. With a bit of pre-planning it doesn't need to be an either-or proposition though.
15? It's arguable that the government's institutional abuse of power to spy on law-abiding citizens began in earnest with J. Edgar Hoover, who began his tenure as the head of the FBI in 1924.
I am using the core i5 setup for TETRA receiving (2MHz sampling rate/1MHz bandwidth, tuning into 4 different channels in that range each with 64 subchannels). The whole pipeline runs just fine, but I would not be able to run a second pipeline for 4 more channels without faster hardware or a second machine.

Largely this is because it's an inefficient proof-of-concept implementation, but in my experience it takes a lot of work to convert such a thing into a performant receiver.
What I mean is that changing that variable would not have much effect.
I've been using vim-go for about one year now. The combination of vim-go, gofmt and YouCompleteMe is all you need for a perfect Go setup. Thanks to Fatih and Val!
I'm not sure about their policies on software development, but they, and other granting bodies (I think NHS was an early pioneer), are increasingly moving towards requiring easy access to the product of publicly funded work: http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/public_access .
Robots will take our jobs but we will adapt
I figured that would be the next step, but there's still a lot of inertia: some stations are bookended by perpendicular streets and would require the train to the parked on the road while loading, which may raise legal or political issues.

I hear they're trying to move all the stations to grade separated ones though, which should alleviate that.

Also, you'd have to get the public accustomed to "want to get out here, have to be in these cars", which, knowing the public, will take a big information campaign and still end up with people frantically charging through cars and screaming at conductors to open the doors...
It's interesting the author points out the effects on the environment and economies, but completely omits how much violent conflicts are direct drivers of poverty.

https://microconflict.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/conflict-trap...

This year’s World Development Report, published a couple of weeks ago, emphasises the fact that one of the biggest drivers of poverty in the developing world is violent conflict. One of the biggest risks for developing countries, it argues, is that of being caught in a conflict trap – a vicious circle whereby poverty stokes conflict, and conflict in turn increases poverty.

Not sure how eating less meat is going to compete with social and religious conflicts which cause and sustain far more poverty.
Clickbait and sensationalism is a thing in journalism. It is morally wrong because it spreads disinformation and is harmful to both individuals and democracy, but it is legal and profitable, and we haven't done enough to shun it, so it happens.
Hmm. I'm not following your logic. It sounds like you're saying that reported loneliness isn't unreliable because we can't externally test it. I'd think it's just the opposite; if we have no external tests, that's a great reason to assume it's unreliable.

That said, I'm not as confident as you that it's not externally testable. These researchers, for example, believe they have found EEG test results that correlate with loneliness. It would seem to me that loneliness could change both self-generated behavior and response to stimuli, which could yield reliable measures. Sociality is a biologically mediated phenomenon, so there could be metabolic measures, like how cortisol is an indicator of stress. We expect loneliness to happen in the brain, so aside from EEG measures, perhaps we could find an FMRI test that exposes it.
Dear Free Software developers, would you mind supplying binaries?
I don't think that optional typing is in general an attempt to solve sucky static type systems -- instead, many researchers and organizations view it as a way of converting programmers who have only seen Java into developers that willingly use the type checker. It's a great motivator when you experience a bug in production that the runtime helpfully reminds you could've been caught if only you'd turned on types in that code :).
You can grow arbitrary veggies locally in a greenhouse for year round consumption. It's not as cheap, but compared to unsubsidized meat prices it's less costly than you might think.

PS: http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/greenhouse/hydroponics/ec... Suggests an extra ~17 - 37c/lb for tomatoes.
XCodeGhost Attack – Is Apple's Biggest Hack Ever Linked to the US Intelligence?
You do have to wonder what exaggerated lies they're told to believe that such surveillance is even necessary. I say lies, because if there were any real threats so many more terrorist attacks would happen than actually do.

The other theory I've seen is that people in power are used to having their life scrutinized publicly, so personally don't really care about privacy, so are the worst people to making decisions about such things.
Where is the center of the ledger?
"Fixing the global food system. The damage this system wreaks is shocking."

If we could only invent a teleportation device...

Also, shipping massive amounts of free grain around the world wreaks havoc in local markets, driving small farmers out of business in poor countries.

We need efficient supply chains, efficient market pricing and efficient crops, such as golden rice.

Instead, we get governments interfering in market prices, blocking food supply chain companies in the name of "tradition" and blocking GMO development and usage in the name of religion and bogus science.
Just to clarify on why people generally dislike ORMs (I think): at one point you find yourself struggling with the abstraction (the ORM) to get at some features that the underlying database engine might allow, or even worse using the abstraction incorrectly, and creating highly inefficient queries. ORMs are often mixed with for loops to bad effect.

They obviously have great value for CRUD applications however, and they prevent you from making mistakes that others have encountered (and fixed).

That said, I really want to try out the Postgres + SQLAlchemy + Flask + Flask-Restless (as mentioned by others) combo. I usually end up writing my own queries
http://faceswap.io/share/zIGvDroL
You're welcome :)
If oh-my-fish properly included the copyright and permission notice of the MIT license, then they are within the bounds of the license. It doesn't matter what the author's requests are, they can use it if they attribute properly. But they failed to do so and the creator's copyright was not credited, so they are in violation of MIT, which is pretty lame considering how easy it is to use MIT code in a compliant way. I am afraid this DMCA is legit.
ASP.NET/C# is eminently employable, and ASP.NET MVC is not even bad. But given free reign, I will choose Django.
This is correct. For an arbitrary and hypothetical example, imagine that Linus woke up yesterday and decided to convert the Linux kernel to an Apache licensed project. The long and almost impossible task would be to contact each and every contributor to the Linux kernel and ask for the permission to change the license of their contribution. The "short" and "easy" task would be to write a new kernel and replace all of Linux with it, applying the new license. The old Linux kernel would still be a GPL project, but moving forward any contributions would need to be Apache licensed.

It appears that the latter example is somewhat like what happened here. The old Oh-My-Fish project was some licensed project. It could have even been a WTF Public License[0] that _did_ allow contributors to fork and remove attribution. At some point, all the code in the repo was replaced with new code under the MIT license that served the same purpose, and the repo's name was changed. Moving forward, someone continued to merge in the new code to the old repo and tried to remove attribution to the new code, breaking the new code's license.

The Oh-My-Fish project could have done a classical fork, severing ties with the Wahoo project just before the merge of the re-written code happened and continue to work in isolation, but it seems that they did not.

[0] http://www.wtfpl.net
I've been willing to about doubling my commute to be able to just sit down on a bus or train the whole way. I treated it as a time saving: Yes, I spent more time commuting, but that time was spent napping or reading, so it was a net gain for me in usable time.

It's also a cost issue for many. An annual Zone 1-2 Travelcard costs GBP 1280,-. A Zone 1-9 Travelcard costs GBP 3336,-. The cheapest single zone annual cards cost 964,-. While a Bus and Tram pass costs 840,-.

Depending on where and how often you need to travel, for many it's worth it to pay the time penalty of taking the bus rather than paying for one or more extra zones, or paying for tube/train at all.

It's not that uncommon for people to do 1-1.5 hour bus commutes that'd have been far shorter, and more expensive, by tube/train.
RESOURCES FOR SAN FRANCISCO ENTREPRENEURS
The GNU gnu blended with nyan cat? What message are they trying to send?
Quantum Compression: Putting the Squeeze on Schrödinger's Cat
Ask HN: Will Apple ever make a drone?
I am curious if there are any rumors or hints that Apple might make drones?
> I think Haskell's type system satisfies your list of requirements.

:) Haskell doesn't even come close. Haskell's type system is pretty much defined to be any property that happens to be inferrable by the (extended) HM algorithm. It's like: "we'll prove what we easily can" rather than "let's prove what's most useful". Sure, it may be useful in some (or perhaps many) circumstances, but it's far from the set of properties I think anyone would list when asked "what properties would you most like to verify about your program?"

For example, the two most basic tests for any formal verification system is verifying a sorting algorithm (like, say, QuickSort) and verifying a distributed algorithm (like, say, Paxos). Haskell's type-system fails to do both. Again: it cannot verify the two most common examples that people want automatic verification for. In fact, it is even too weak to verify that the monads it so depends on are actually monads. Still, it places a non-negligible burden on the developer that many would deem substantial or even onerous. And because types place some burden on the developer, you can then ask whether the set of verifiable properties is worth it or not (BTW, that any form of formal verification requires effort is pretty much a given; if it didn't, that would be a violation of the halting theorem).

OTOH, richer type systems (that include dependent types) can no longer infer everything, and they become (much) harder-yet to use.

Here are some examples of properties of interest:

1. When a request arrives at my server, a response (either a result or an error), is always produced within a given time frame. There can never be deadlocks, livelocks or starvation.

2. X and Y are two columns in my data table that must always satisfy certain invariants, and must never be observed to violate those variants.

3. My O(n) selection algorithm is correct.

4. My (sorting) algorithm requires O(1) space.

5. When a user inputs "X" the system will (or will-never) output "Y" within 5 seconds.

There are many, many more. I picked those because there are formal verification tools today that can verify all those properties (or at least many interesting instances of them). Of course, some proofs would require your computational model to be non-Turing complete, because the halting problem is real...
For a bit of background, here's a link to an sfgate column:

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/S-F-spendi...

"The annual $167 million price tag is $20 million more than the operations budget for the Children, Youth and Family Services department, $6.3 million more than for Public Works and $3.8 million more than for Recreation and Park."

My guess is that in such a politically charged issue, people play games with the numbers, which you can always do with budgets (how do you allocate the fixed cost of maintaining a fleet of ambulances, does an ambulance trip to the ER count as a "homelessness" cost in the first place simply because the person is homeless, should it only show up as a cost if it is related to the condition of being homeless, how would you measure this…).

But however you measure it, SF does spend a tremendous amount of money on homelessness.

My personal feeling is that this problem is unsolvable at a local level, because homeless people come from all over the US (and beyond). SF has a large budget for such a small city, but SF just can't solve this problem for the nation at large. People who are frustrated with these efforts argue that our services will never make things better because we simply attract more homeless people by offering them. I've read that overwhelming majority of the homeless population in SF did not grow up in SF, but then again, you could say the same for the non-homeless residents.

I do see this as a national scale problem. Maybe a state of emergency, qualifying for federal funds, will be a good strategy...
A bit of organizational sociology: most people silently group their employees into two categories: people they pay to do things that they can't do (Type I) and people they pay to do things that they don't want to do (Type II). If you're Type I, you get a lot more respect than if you're Type II.

Managers who can't tell the difference between good and mediocre programmers lump them all together into Type II. Type II employees are evaluated based on their availability rather than their expertise or excellence. Contrary to stereotype, managers know that status pings cost a hell of a lot of time. That doesn't mean they're going to stop doing them. If someone is seen as a Type II employee, then it's seen as better to have that person available but running at 25% speed (you can always hire more people).

The issue isn't that managers are idiots who don't know that interruptions (especially the emotional kind, which status pings often become when a person is asked to justify time) waste time. They aren't idiots, and they do know that. The problem is that managers (and not just them, but everyone in the mainstream business culture) tend to correlate social status and competence at close to +1.0, so they assume that people who are getting hit with frequent interruptions aren't very good anyway.
You mean like private companies inspecting individual cars on a periodic basis as a requirement for that car being street-legal?
>This story directly illustrates that there was at least for this particular car a group of people will and able to inspect at least a particular part of the code, if they had access to it.

How does it illustrate that?

They discovered the scam by doing better emissions testing not by reverse engineering the code.
It's kind of a grey area. The court docs show that they have won. I don't know if they were directly related to the persons daily responsibilities. I think there was some wording about any thing that competes with the company but the company is in basically every market. Honestly, I just weigh the risk of weather or not I think they would actually even care about what I'm working on. I know we have people who make mobile games on the side and no one really cares.

If I'm not directly competing and stealing clients I think that chances are low that they will try to claim ownership.
Writing a Dockerfile and typing "docker run whatever" is a hell of a lot easier than configuring a chroot and LXC container.
Understanding security in IoT: WPAN link layer
It is amazing what a corner encryption has pinned law enforcement into (after the USG of course pinned everyone into a corner by spying on what amounts to nearly the entire globes communications). There are no workable solutions which allow the government to serve a warrant and receive information without compromising the systems of millions of other subscribers to the same networks in some fashion (or reducing faith and trust in those networks).

And the physical port, while an interesting concept, would essentially mean if LEOs jumped the gun by a few days, there warrant would be a bust because there'd be no information of use on the phone and the person obviously wouldn't use that physical device again.

I've never had an issue with warranted communication retrieval. I certainly have an issue with the bulk collection of data on hundreds of millions of Americans at all times (as we all should, this is the sort of stuff you can blackmail politicians with, and when you can blackmail politicians you can control the future of the country, so it's something we need to prevent to maintain the integrity of our democracy).

What tradeoffs should be made? Where should the lines in the sand be drawn? And what solutions exist or can be imagined which allow LEOs acting on good faith and reasonable suspicion to monitor the activities of those worthy of monitoring without compromising the very nature of our nations foundation?