skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Your examples of changing weapons to be untraceable or more lethal are not apropos because these are violations of legal restrictions passed by congress into law.
"

So is the DMCA?

I'm not understanding what distinction you are making. They became federal crimes identically.

"You can not saw off a shotgun not because Browning doesn't want you to saw it off, but because sawed off shotguns are not legal."

I'm not sure how this is relevant, particularly?
What relevance does who wants you to not touch your property matter to your notion you should free to do with your property what you want.

"What the DMCA does is take a manufacturer's prerogative and elevate it to the status of federal crime as soon as the manufacturer decides to create a "digital rights management" scheme to enforce that prerogative.
"
I'm quite aware of what the DMCA says (and in fact, have been directly involved in pushing back on large numbers of crappy DMCA requests).

I'm trying to understand why you think this is special somehow, compared to all the other things that folks have made it illegal to do with your property, which span the gamut from government saying you can't do this directly, to government saying you can't do what this other guy says you can't do, to etc.
I think Congress needs their own dedicated ELI5 hotline :)
Do you humorously pretend in your comment that you don't know about Bernie Sanders?
I recently started coming to grips little by little with J. The best way I found was doing /r/dailyprogrammer "easy" problems.

You need to treat it as a conversation with the REPL and build up little parts.

Also, reading other people's solutions to problems you've solved yourself is enlightening.
It's really bizarre that there are so many Desktop Markdown Editors. And they even cost money!

Really bizarre.
> you'll be surprised how effective can a crackdown be once a government sets its mind to it.

Effective like prohibition was? Or the war on drugs? All that will happen is people will stop using macOS and Windows because that is all the US government can pressure.
If there was ever a stupid and despicable human being who managed to become relatively powerful, it's John McCain.
Mid-air accidents are a tiny fraction of plane crashes.
I am not sure this article leads to that conclusion. Most of this money comes from drug busts. You can argue about whether or not heavily addicting drugs like cocaine should be legal, but that $12 billion was not seized from John and Jane Doe for no reason. Is the rule misused? It sure seems like it is, occasionally. Should we as a nation abolish it? Maybe. but most of the funds are confiscated from drug dealers who would use the money... to sell more drugs. And to buy tigers and mansions, of course, but also to distribute drugs. Also, drug cartels have a penchant to murder a ton of people. Sometimes 20,000+ a year. Leaving the money with them seems like a poor choice.

Money seized in drug busts: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9149048...

Drug cartels and homicide: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/foreign-affairs-defe...
This sure sounds like an argument that the truth can be bad for you.

Maybe having a reason can lead to complacency, but is a person like that going to be a huge success otherwise? With the right attitude, having a reason can lead to better understanding, greater drive, more success.

I don't think it's about having a label. It's about understanding what's going on so you can better accommodate it. Once you have a diagnosis, you automatically have access to a vast wealth of knowledge which can help you to cope.

Think of breaking your leg. Is getting it diagnosed as "broken leg" just a search for a label which will lead to complacency? Are you better off thinking your broken leg is an eccentricity which is some unique part of who you are? Of course not, you want to get it diagnosed as "broken leg" so you can bring all modern medical science to bear on it and get it fixed up so you can heal, and cope with it in the meantime.

Mental disorders are not the same as a broken leg, but they aren't so different, either. I think we'd be better off if we'd stop drawing this fairly arbitrary line between "physical" and "mental" problems.
Brilliant on so many levels, thank you for this...I can't count the number of times I've tried to explain a snippet of code via GMail...it's already painful enough to highlight the text and convert it to monospace (which an annoying number of people fail to do)...nevermind also producing human-readable colors.

I actually think I'll stick to the command-line/pipeable script you link to...for teaching purposes, I've wanted to make myself a utility that converts syntax-higlighted code into a PNG...so that I can show the code but make it much more difficult to just copy/paste.

edit: And of course, the thing that I want, someone has already made and yet I couldn't even bother to RTFM. From running `highlight --h` at the command line:

SVG output options:

--height set image height (units allowed)
--width set image width (see --height)
Why would they want to do that?
Keep in mind that McCain is up for re-election next year. Some of this is overstated, although I figure he probably does believe the government should have a backdoor and doesn't fully understand the implications of that.
Can we have a new rule when laws are proposed? Whenever you see the headline "(name of politician) wants to pass a law which will do ____" it should be rewritten to "Lobbyists have convinced (name of politician) that they need a law which will do _____".

From opensecrets.org:

Industry Favorite

John McCain is a top recipient from the following industries in 2015-2016:

Cable & satellite TV production (#1)
Defense Aerospace (#1)
Defense Electronics (#1)
For-profit Education (#1)
Misc Defense (#1)

Total PAC Money for 2015-2016: $700,600

Ideological/Single-Issue	$185,900
Defense	$116,800
Communications/Electronics	$61,600
Energy & Natural Resources	$75,300
Finance, Insurance & Real Estate	$71,500
Lawyers & Lobbyists	$51,400
> This is only compelling if you start with the axiom that the bible (or whatever text) is correct.

Which would perhaps be a serious problem with criticizing biblical literalism with that argument if the literalism being criticized ever failed to included a strong form of inerrantism; since, as a doctrine, Biblical literalism is always tied to strong-form inerrantism (which is the axiom that the Bible is, in every particular, both moral and factual, correct), and subsidiary doctrines on matters of fact and/or morals can only be derived from it through its intersection with inerrantism, it really isn't a problem that challenges to literalism rely on arguments that are valid in the presence of inerrantism.

> If you don't take correctness as an axiom

Without inerrantism, whether something is a correct or incorrect interpretation of the Bible doesn't have any significance. Literalism or not only has any meaning in the context of inerrantism.
They are also protected by the goodwill of the general population. Voters in the USA have real power, but by and large believe that delegating that power to law enforcement without any real checks and balances is a good thing. "Tough on crime" wins elections. If America is a police state, it is one imposed more by your fellow citizens than from some dictator on top.
The basic issue is that it asks for R+W access to ALL organizations. This was the reason I backed out of the process. Awesome idea, will end up implementing it in house probably.
The source number isn't even clearly based on seizures in 2014. At least it's linked:

http://www.thecrimereport.org/news/crime-and-justice-news/20...

That says that federal account balances from seizures totaled $4.5 billion in 2014. It also says that Madoff and Toyota each contributed more than $1 billion to those accounts.

edit to add: It seems likely that the seizure is only related to the Madoff case, not that it came from Madoff directly, in another comment I linked a BBC article saying the forfeiture came from JP Morgan.
Measuring Samsung Open Source Group's Upstream Contributions
My first generation Pi was significantly slower at Kodi (things like menu traversal, library updates, API consumption, etc) than a second generation Pi (I tried a friend's). So I was already considering $35-40 for a new Pi when I saw the sale price on the Nexus Player. But the bigger deal for me was Google Cast support. I wanted a single device that could run Kodi and also that the family could cast Youtube, Soundcloud, etc using phones.

Regarding remote - the Nexus Player comes with a simple, bluetooth remote (as does the Shield TV now apparently). It works great for simple Kodi interactions but doesn't work for everything (the biggest one that I've noticed so far is the lack of a context button). But as thoughtpalette mentions - I use Android and iOS remote apps when I need more control over Kodi (Yatse is what I use on Android). Also there is an Android TV control app for Android phones that has the same buttons as the simple Nexus Player bluetooth remote.
Not being from the US, I probably don't know as much about McCain as many of you, but I do recall him making the news for suggesting a murder suspect should be treated as an enemy combatant, which in turn seemed to mean essentially that they were no longer entitled to things like due process. I remember feeling very cold when I read that.
I am also troubled by "asset forfeitures". But if you think that makes the US a police state, it's very clear that you've never lived in a real police state.

Note well: This comment is not a statement that everything is fine with police in the US.
"If all your life you've felt weird and broken and different ..."

Surprise: everybody feels this way.
"For one thing...the pay is often too low."

Sounds like something pretty easy to fix.
A friend of mine told me that politics is the art of getting uninformed people to decide what you want. With that in mind I'd say it's maybe worth having a thoughtful debate about this, probably not about whether or not this law is correct but about how to get politicians to understand the ramifications of this decision even if they have no idea what encryption actually is.

I've got no idea how to do that though so I'll let you guys start...
To be pedantic, that Beach Boys parody dates back to the late 70s during the hostage taking of the U. S. Embassy. (Which causes me to wonder: did his campaign properly secure the rights from the song writer, or did they do like other candidates and "steal" it?)
> Are they also aware that the exact same technology is used to protect their online banking? To protect against attacks like the Sony hack? Do they know that there is a huge segment of the economy that relies on strong encryption to do business?

I'm sure they are.

The problem is, I suspect, more the delusion that if there are backdoors, only MURICA will be able to exploit them because GODDAMN GREATEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD! They would find the idea that there are talented individuals and groups, outside the US, who are capable of exploiting these facilities, absolutely incomprehensible.

Moreover, the civil servants who they should be able to rely on to provide accurate information about why it doesn't work that way (e.g. the NSA) will be actively encouraging that ignorance for their own benefits.
Is this a joke? You actually want people to upload their history to the cloud. People don't even want it on their own computers. That was the point of incognito mode!
> Well, of course, all of us deal with pride and so part of my motivation to type up the story is that I'm proud of what I've accomplished, yeah.

What's there to be proud of? Seems like your "accomplishments" are pretty mediocre, and not anywhere the level of your siblings. More like a story of wasted/neglected born-with talents (smarts).
I am picturing a scene in which few of our ancestors, out of fear for fire, and seeing someone hurt by fire, decided to ban making fire altogether. Since they don't know about "fire", we better educate them.
Toyota? That's a seizure? In what sense? Are fines considered the same as seizures?
Sorry for your loss, but thanks for the reminder that I shouldn't be keeping my spare key in a visible place when I leave home.
r/ELIaEO - Explain like I'm an elected official
This paper is over my head, but in case anyone is wondering what Free monads are I can give a teaser for how they're useful.

Say you're automating a bio lab. You're writing software to control evacuations. The lab machinery can execute two actions (1) Alarm (sets off an evacuation alarm in an area) (2) Sterilize (burns an area with fire). Obviously we would like to call (1) for an area well before we call (2).

To these two actions we can add one of our own: (3) Wait (for some number of seconds).

Now we write a function (using Haskell types, but they're easy to read):

evacuate :: ContaminationInfo -> IO ()

This function takes in the state of a lab (what areas have been contaminated, what areas are at risk, etc.) makes an evacuation plan, and executes it.

Now, the first things you notice is that this is a horrible function. How could we test it? We would need an actual lab (or mocks, but that's no fun).

Let's try again.

makePlan :: ContaminationInfo -> [Action]

(Where action is either `Alarm Area`, `Sterilize Area`, or `Wait Seconds`)

This is way better! Now we can write interpreters for `[Action]`.

testContaminationPlan :: [Action] -> TestResults

prettyPrintContaminationPlan :: [Action] -> String

graphContaminationPlan :: [Action] -> SVG

runContaminationPlan :: [Action] -> IO ()

Note that all of this can be done in Python, which is pretty cool! Sadly we can't write `makePlan :: ContaminationPlan -> [Action]` in Python though. It would have to be `makePlan :: ContaminationPlan -> IO [Action]`, which means that there could be side effecting functions that slip by the programmer and aren't reflected in the return type. If one of these is Sterilize someone could have a bad day:(

Now lets say our wonderful engineers build us an excellent new action: (4) Scan (check an area for risk of contamination).

Now our [Action] plan starts to break down. Before an [Action] was very simple. An example might have been [Alarm Area1, Alarm Area2, Wait 200 Seconds, Sterilize Area1, Sterilize Area2].

But our scanner allows later actions to depend on the result of previous actions! [Action] isn't sufficient to model that -- how would our interpreters know how to thread things together (our goal is to be able to do things like start scanning an at-risk room like crazy, but not actually evacuate it unless contamination appears).

If only we had some way for our data type to reflect that some actions might need to be fed into others? Hmm, I wonder what we could use for that ...
Do you have a real life example of such a criminal, or is this just speculation?
I am a graduate student at MIT, and can second this recommendation. It is a fantastic book for machine learning and nothing else I have seen comes close.
USA to ban too difficult math problems?

Doesn't this mean their citizens would be less safe from foreign (and domestic) spies than foreigners are from their spies? Doesn't this mean that foreign businesses who actually care about their security would abandon their software and IT services? If they can crack it, others can, or will learn soon to, crack it.
These are simply power hungry politicians trying to control our lives. The only way to solve this is to create a strong voter base that cares. What I really love about the 2nd amendment is the kind of public support it enjoys and the politicians are forced to support it in either letter or spirit.
PS Pretty much all my knowledge of this subject (and the pretty printing interpreter example in particular) comes from here: http://www.haskellforall.com/2012/06/you-could-have-invented...
Does it matter? I can hear it now:

"B-b-but they could have, and if they had we wouldn't have been able to intercept it."
Apparently for the purposes of this article.

I got that far and decided I wasn't going to spend any more time looking into the claims as presented in the link and flagged it.
When my (then future) wife was in college, there was some controversy about younger women on campus needing to tell guys who were flirting with them how young they were, because guys in their early 20s would occasionally end up asking a girl out and then finding out she was only 16. My wife agreed with this general sentiment, which led to one of her friends saying "you'd think differently if you were 16!" Her response: "maybe, but that's not for another year."

My younger sister was regularly mistaken for a teacher when she was in 7th grade.

I was pretty obviously an immature punk all through high school, but some people are both academically and socially advanced.

Right now, my five year old son with autism is simultaneously learning the toilet and calculus. Who knows where he'll be socially when he's academically ready for college?
Thought: s/encryption/guns/

Why do politicians not have identical positions on both guns and privacy? The root argument is the same: that citizen can, or can't, be trusted.

Yet almost all the pro guns are anti privacy and vice versa.
If anyone is interested in prior art, take a look at Google Cloud Storage's resumable uploads: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/json_api/v1/how-tos/up...

It's very domain specific and relies on GCP's JSON API so probably isn't suitable to apply broadly.
Well, it's not really a law, but attorney has suggested that CBP normally don't terminate H-1B at border vs TN as H-1B does have a dual intent, so they can't just say you have an "immigration intention" to deny your visa at border.

And that's definitely an advantage over TN.
How many people are waiting in a TSA checkpoint at busy times, unprotected? And yet, we haven't seen those groups of people massacred.
Cap Gemini Report: Blockchain a 'Fundamental' Shift for Finance Industry
It could be because those countries are not letting them in.
Hillay clinton is probably pro-hide-that-hardisk.

Rand Paul is libertarian and mostly anti-gov. We need more people like him in Washington.
Coincidentally, a stack-based concatenative array language is exactly what I'm working on right now.

It combines all the readability of K with... all the readability of Forth.

It's at https://github.com/alpha123/vio if you're interested, but very much WIP. The VM is rather simple if you feel like poking around.

Other notable features would be built-in parser combinators (with an unreadable postfix regex-like syntax). Concatenative parser combinators are pleasantly surprising to use.
For people who are disappointed by the shallowness of it, I recommend supplementing it with the notes to his Stanford class: http://cs229.stanford.edu/materials.html. The combination worked well for me.
You've missed the 2nd half of my post I see, I said that if any even half arsed measures are going to be in place the crackdown will become more effective with time.
If you can stall or slow down the evolution of open encryption sufficiently so state actors can catch up then that's effectively makes that encryption useless.
Today for example the NSA can break weak DSA configurations, and factor weak RSA keys in 2-3 years they'll gain other capabilities.

What will happen if say we do wake up to a post quantum world with much of our asymmetric cryptography being worthless.
Do you really see people being able to develop a new RSA level family of algorithms at a hackaton?

If you can't increase the work that needed to be done to break your encryption at the same rate as your adversary increases their capabilities you are going to lose and lose badly.

And draconian measures and extreme costs is just what they are proposing, I'm not advocating that it's going to be effective at first or cheap, but dismissing it as even if they want too they will never be able too is just as foolish as voting for Trump ironically to give him a sympathy vote.

Go ask people from East Germany, pre-Glasnost Russia and even some countries that exist today how easy it is going to be to evade surveillance enmass.

You should never be dismissive of threats no matter how far fetched or unlikely they are or how incapable your opponent at executing them might be, this is probably one of the more important lessons one can take from history.
Your equivocation of clearly immoral behavior is suggestive.

Is stealing wrong? Yes, yes it is. How many more decades of a failed war on drugs policy do you need before you accept and argue for a change of course?

When bad laws create the incentive which results in 10,000s of murders it is imperative to change those incentives, even the Mexican government is now clamoring for change, but the war on drugs is too convenient for the status quo and justifies all sorts of government empowerment.

But in the face of a murderous institution I'm happy we have some fellow Willing to equivocate and defend senseless murder, torture, and theft, good job dude.
It's true that the title is somewhat overstated, however the statement that really motivated my comment was the one from the head of the NYPD.

> We have a huge operation in New York City working closely with the Joint Terrorism Task Force where we’re monitoring and they go dark, because basically they go onto an encrypted app, they’re going onto sites that we can’t access.
https://twitter.com/torproject/status/664168624467386368
Amazon's 'High Castle' Offers a Chilling Alternate History of Nazi Triumph
> How many people are waiting in a TSA checkpoint at busy times, unprotected?

None; even outside the "secured" areas, airports are one of the most heavily patrolled places open to the public.

Obviously, that doesn't make attacks impossible, but characterizing that locale as "unprotected" is unreasonable.
So, privacy is like guns?

Nice to have, but something we need to give up in order to live in a safer society?
Well informed and in touch does not replace years of life experience.
Just to note: if the copy action brings up a dialog requesting what language to pick, then the menu item's name should end with an ellipsis character, as according to Apple's UI guidelines.
Any assets seized by police should be counted as revenue, and should go to the general fund to be allocated by the legislature. Separation of powers.
TL;DR: Programming is language, not math.

And she's right. We even call them programming languages.
Dude, stuff is way harder for most people with Aspergers than it was for you. You might be the exception not the rule. Getting diagnosed was probably a huge relief for her.
No, just a general comment. My only regret about Bernie is there aren't more people like him running for office. It takes a lot to have a majority in Congress and so IMO we're not close to having enough non-establishment candidates like him to have faith our government will debate civilly and act reasonably.
this would be a good idea if it didn't corner the visa for tech companies in the valley that generally pay much higher wages.

All briliant non-tech scientist would have no chance of getting the visa.
A Large-Scale Evaluation of High-Impact Password Strength Meters [pdf]
The article said their visas were expiring.
You are absolutely right. It's easy for me to think when I'm 43 I'll be past it. But I'm pretty sure my 43 year old self will think otherwise, and will be very glad he made the effort 10 years ago!
I found it very interesting and a few months ago looked out for something like that for sharing interesting content with my team but didn't find anything.

We will give it a try and then I will post a feedback.
"if you do this then I'll give you this campaign donation", is that the kind of explanation it would provide? Otherwise I don't see it getting very far.
>> We need people to be qualified by measurable factors like degrees,

A degree certifies that you can learn to learn what you are aware you don't know. That is all it does.