skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A better article could have been written about how an unwritten rule is broken when the state uses its security apparatus to investigate and discredit its own elected officials.

Crossing that line destroys the plausible deniability surveillance enjoys. You can't make the 'necessary for terrorism' argument when the surveillance directly subverts the domestic government. And of course thats what we were all worried about, and it's the most arresting sort of example for everyone. And how did that 'unwritten rule' become a thing in the first place?

A lot of the wide appeal and scary implications that could be written about gets lost when gloating about how lemmings 'flip-flopped' after they walked into that machine that rips off their heads.
> What Apple owes is clear to me: pay the standard U.S. corporate tax on the standard U.S. profits. Do the same for all countries.

The whole problem is, what are "U.S." profits?

Google pays a bunch of engineer salaries to design Google Docs. Most of the engineers are in the U.S. If they declare that huge expense in the U.S. then it will cancel all the U.S. revenue for Google Docs, which they're happy to do because the U.S. has a high corporate tax rate.

Meanwhile the parent company in Ireland now owns a bunch of valuable new code that can be used world-wide and be licensed to Google UK and Google France etc., creating lots of profits for Google Ireland where taxes are low.

No part of this is doing anything "wrong" -- whichever corporate entity is the one that owns the rights to the code is the one that will make all the profits, because the code generates more revenue than it costs to create. And there is nothing that ties that entity to a particular country, especially when the expenses aren't actually all in the same place. The product is created by huge teams spread all over the world. Which corporate entity in which country "owns" the profits is completely arbitrary. So they choose the one in the country with the lowest taxes. What would you expect?
Given the time it happened (about midnight UK time today), I can't imagine there are many people IN the UK who were exactly hysterical. A lot more people would be in bed at that time than browsing the BBC's website...

Then again, this sort of article is exactly what's wrong with the media at the moment. Forget real stories, let's just take random minor issues and make them sound bigger by quoting random people on social media sites.
Ask HN: Do people actually use the “share” button?
I have recently realized that I have never used "share" button on any website, it is always more convenient to just copy paste url. So I'm wondering - is it just me?

Do you know if there's some data on this?
Who better to surveil than those who may have access to state secrets, and are actively talking with representatives of other countries? Members of Congress should be at the top of the list for NSA surveillance.
> My after-tax salary is less than $100,000 USD/year
The point was about a set of current beliefs which determined the direction which big social events would take. GHC project, like pyramids, is a way to get living for so many people and organizations in the first place.

There is still no consensus among philosophers and, of course, no empirical evidence of existence of time as a phenomena of the Universe, apart from mental concept which could be derived from this or that physical processes using mathematical modeling. But for math models being proven does not imply existence. There are phenomena we call "mass", and hence phenomena we call forces, there is notion of distance, succession, rate of change, but there is no phenomena of time apart from some physical process observable by a mind. The famous clocks being accelerated is mere a mental construct.

How come that we are so convinced that time exist? Well, suppose you have arrived to some big Tibetan Monastery in Lhasa or Shigatse at the beginning of the last century. You will be overwhelmed by the architecture, paintings, buzzing activities, which all seemingly makes perfect sense for those who performs them. All the rituals, offerings, recitation of scriptures, daily duties, strict hierarchy, etc. Much like MIT nowadays.)

Unless you are questioning everything, trying to reduce everything back to first principles, being skeptical and aware of socially constructed dogmas, you will be convinced very quickly that there are various buddhas and other deities which appear and disappear upon their will, that they hide some scriptures in the past, to be revealed when humanity will be ready for the knowledge. You will study cosmology, reasoning, philosophy of emptiness, as a refinement of crude ancient Indian philosophy (which is the only real marvel Tibetan culture produced) and so on. If you are good student you will become very good rimpoche, expert in all the subtle details of the teachings. I am seasonal guide in Tibet, so I know what I am talking about.)

What do we call notions held firmly by society but which cannot be empirically proven? We call it beliefs. How do we call organized beliefs, supported by social institutions? We call it a religion. Modern quantum physics is nothing but a bunch of religious sects.

BTW, traditional Indian philosophy, which goes back to Upanishads, put the human mind in the center, so it could observe itself, how easily and readily it produces chimeras and dogmas. The two almost unbreakable of these is "myself" and "time". Upanishads were the very first systematic discourses which attempted to prove logically non-existence of these mental concepts. Still, no one managed to refute Upanishads. "A priori" established by Kant is related to that mind - an observer, not to the observed Universe.
CBS / Paramount Pull Plug on Crowd-Funded Axanar Star Trek Film
The average citizen doesn't notice or care about the NSA/CIA/whoever.
The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.
Why would you want to upload a file through websockets anyway?
George Lucas Criticizes “The Force Awakens”
Is that because larger MMs will just eat the fees?
Ask HN: What is your New Year Resolution for 2016?
What is your New Year Resolution. What are the things you want to avoid in 2016?
Assuming all of those immigrants want to integrate into German culture and there is no widespread religious backlash against secular culture.
It's not a language feature, but a defacto standard package manager would be a huge boon for C++ development.
I'm guessing this is not OP.
That was my impression as well. I love how, in one anecdote, he talks about how students "don't read" and puts the example that given they know they can get a B without the book, don't bother; some how this is the students' fault. Just the selective blindness to it all, how can anyone be surprised that given no external nor internal motivation any human being is going to be arsed to go out of their way to do things.

He is constantly complaining about "declining academic standards" but provides no quantitative evidence to back his claim. Grade inflation is likely a problem, simply because if one institution does it all are forced to inflate along with it or risk devaluing their degrees, but it's incredibly difficult to quantify. Incoming students have the higher standardized test scores, a huge belt of tools between the internet and computers, and an unprecedented network of peers for when the tools are sufficient. Should we surprised scores tend to rise, is it the university's responsibility to crank up the difficulty and keep averages as they were in the 80s? These are the questions dinosaurs like the OP can't and won't answer.
What's up with kids today?

When I was a kid, maybe I built the instruction thing once, but after that, the actual fun started: modification and building new thing!

Do the kids nowadays only do coloring or connect-the-dot books? How about a blank paper? Blank paper is super cheap and can't be monetized nearly as well, so there's no marketing for that...
> My latest project has...

Taken you a long time to get started. What does it do? I hope the time investment is worth it and you're not trying to make a blog or some CRUD app.
While equal justice before the law is essential, it is well understood that since at least the ancient Greek city states and the Roman Republic, that certain public offices are conferred with with special rights, privileges and responsibilities. That lawmakers, in the process of deliberation and legislation have a greater expectation of privacy is arguable, but not unreasonable.
What isn't normal about it? (Aside from the fact that it's a nominally deep sea creature in a littoral zone in this instance.)
Stupidity is very dangerous in this situation because the CEO may completely believe that he's doing the best for the employees, but then get hoodwinked by institutional investors who will make the deal sweet enough for the CEO so he can be the one to tell you your options are worthless when the liquidation preferences come home to roost.

I would never join a startup where the founder wasn't razor sharp and forthcoming on all these details.
This is roughly how every regular socket based client-server application pair works.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
Proper response would be something like

"You've obviously put a lot of time in to this. Thanks. We actually had found that bug 4 months ago in R1892, and it's patch in R1899. Please upgrade, or let us know that you're, in fact, using R1899 and still experiencing the issue (it's issue #847 on our bug tracker at foobugz.xyz)"

Or maybe...

"You've obviously put a lot of time in to this. Thanks. We actually had found that bug 4 months ago in R1892, and we're planning on a maintenance release next quarter. If you'd like to test out our upgrade version, please contact jaz@balanceco.com and let them know you want to be in the testing group - he'll get you the appropriate documentation and code. Thanks for helping fix and test these issues!"
I don't think Greenwald misses that point, he (like anyone who understands the scope of spying at play) clearly understands the implications of massive spying and how that could play into blackmailing our other branches of government.

The point of the article is pointing and laughing at people who cant make the logical leap of, "if they do it to someone else, they might do it to me.", the political uses are just the MOST obvious thing to do in this scenario.
Just one day ago I had no idea who Ian Murdock was. He's name was not known to me even though I used to develop commercial software that shipped his creation inside. Had used his creation as my operating system for years.

So thank you Ian Murdock for helping me professionally, economically and just making my life better. And here's to all those great minds that do wonderful things to help us all out, even though most do not know you at all.
GopherAcademy 2015 Year in Review
Not a particular project per se, but there are a few technologies that I'm going to devote some serious time towards learning. Elixir/Phoenix is intriguing to me. Going to give TypeScript a serious look - particularly now that it has support for JSX.
I don't think you are using the same definition of software as a service as me! Salesforce.com is a SaaS vendor, it creates a solution that is shared by many users on a cloud...
You can't make the 'necessary for terrorism' argument
when the surveillance directly subverts the domestic
government.

What prevents a member of the domestic government from being a terrorist, or having ties to terrorists?
It won't be anywhere near the end of it. Scammers and trolls invariably find ways to persist through many rounds of public unmasking.
New project: Finish my projects

Weird, it's the same as my 2015 NYE's project.

EDIT: Otherwise, I'll keep bitching at Javascript for being terrible, will try out Mithril, will try to do more FP and will definitely do some Rust. Wanted to write libsavefile to read data from gamesaves and such. Might be fun.
You're probably right.

Edit: average Hacker News citizen.
Of course, that makes it undeniable that the spying program is about internal politics, not external threats.

The hypocrisy happens because doing mass domestic surveillance is enough to make it clear that the program is about internal politics. But those politicians are reacting only after they discover they are not immune to it.
I always feel really bad for pedophiles, but one issue with comparing attitudes towards homosexuality and attitudes towards pedophilia is that the solution to the homosexuality issue was to stop trying to "cure" it and let homosexuals indulge their desires. I find it highly unlikely that that will ever be the desirable solution to the pedophilia problem.

Consider how difficult it would be for a homosexual person to just act straight for their entire life, even if they can openly acknowledge their true selves.
I don't. Most are tied in to some other service and that is just more tracking that I don't appreciate.
You come so close to figuring it out there at the end. The truth, it's always been happening. There were no "good old days". The pecking order has always been: research prof > students > teaching prof.
Interesting article!

Another good way to connect to people is that when the one you're talking with ends a sentence, then you imagine a voice saying “And how does that make you feel?” and you answer that question aloud.
Not just any piece of paper, one thats slightly thicker than your average A4 sheet. But don't worry, with new advancements in academic technology, you will undoubtedly see that certificates thinner and lighter than ever before.

In all seriousness though, this is not a liberal problem. Its just that universities just don't provide the cost to benefit ratio that they once did over alternate mediums of learning.
I seem to have missed the parent, and a couple of siblings.

Yikes. So scratch the 'absent any context'. Context was there I missed it.
> You (presumably) don't know these people that will be the market for this product.

I do know many of them. I don't think it's condescending to say folks will have a "It's free, why not?" attitude because many people (including me) has that attitude -- it wasn't a statement of the attitude of the poor, it was a statement of the attitude of people.

> I don't see your point. Who cares what Facebook is paying for or their involvement.

The point is that Facebook's involvement is an addon to an existing system that could have worked on its own. This point was to support the next bit about "deviously inserting itself".

> Capitalism has done more to lift people out of poverty than any other system in human history.

Another non sequitur. I wasn't saying capitalism can't/won't help poverty. I was saying full capitalism on basic needs is a bad idea. Even in the US these services are government controlled or highly regulated. Market forces aren't magic fix-everything solutions.

> I'm not asking you to do anything.

The "you" here was a general thing directed at Free Basics supporters and Mark.

> By all means, if you and others think there is a better model, implement it as a competitor and allow people chose.

It's been implemented partially (Aircel, Gigato, Grameenphone, not all in India). My point about full capitalism and market forces remains.

Note that Facebook's model requires a sacrifice of net neutrality from the get-go. Even if the market forces decide against Free Basics, net neutrality is long gone by then.
The pyramids are interesting from an engineering and human organization standpoint. You don't need elaborate maths to place stones on the ground in a square-like shape; just a piece of cord as long as the radius, and something smaller and vaguely orthogonal enough to help check the cardinality of the points.
> Sadly, much if not most "economics" research is cargo cult science... often motivated by political, religious, and moralistic ideologies.

Got any data for that, or do you just happen to dislike some of the conclusions?

I agree entirely about science without data not being much good, though.
What I meant here is that you go to the boot camp and then they (what I've been told) assign you to a group.

I don't know how much preference you can have.

As such, I think it's possibly very similar, though I thought with Google you did get to apply for specific groups.
What I meant by "restricted" is that it's a restricted class of common stock. i.e. you don't have the same voting rights as the owner or investors in the company.

Your experience is working with investors. Your advice makes more sense from that point of view. Employees are rarely (read Never) afforded the same privileges as the investors.
One does not exclude the other.

If you have styles of playing A (follow the manual) and B (random fun), both A and B may actually become more fun than either by itself. Variety is good.
They do better work at that wage. You will definitely find well-performing local workers at a higher wage. Responsible and sane local workers won't work for that wage. According to the Wall Street Journal they were paying $750/month plus room and board. That's too low for even the imported workers which is the reason they are "running away." These farmers are essentially recreating serfdom.
FYI, the "Free online" app link on that page still points to the lost domain
So a 1gbit/s connection like google fiber provides is around the same bandwidth as a typical hdd. A typical hdd has around 13ms of latency, which is also easily in the realm of latency to a regional datacenter.

So any technical barriers to making all hdds obsolete are evaporating. I guess with the rise of ssds the only draw of hdds is now price, and I suppose that feature won't be supplanted by some service provider any time soon.
i found at least one blatant typo, and it takes this guy about 1000 words what can be said in a quarter that. no wonder his students are bored.
And it is remarkably true that the Debian project is like a unicorn. Very few projects are truly a community effort, and at the same time truly democratic. Linux has a BDFL (Benevolent Dictator for Life) as Drupal, Wordpress and many other projects.
Seems the main problem here is the high tuition fees, which to some degree give the students the impression that they deserve good service for which they have paid.
Coming from a country where most of university is state funded (minus a nominal fee of about 300€ per semester), I can see that I might have had other expectations of my professors had I paid ten thousands of dollars per year.
Where have you seen the dignity of others being promoted and protected online?
Bonuses based on how well the company does.

I.e. $1,500 bonus per $MM in revenue, each year
First photos of a live specimen snapped in 2005 and only a few sightings since. It really reinforces that not all of nature has been discovered by humans and there is still much need for exploration.
There is ample "profit" to be made in each individual state, so I don't see that happening anytime soon. If you solve the "problems" of protectionism and globalization, then you might just get to a point where the concept of "multiple nation states" could become obsolete.
Looks like in your case you had an overregulating authority that loosened up.

That's not the case in India.

Also, note that India is much larger and setting up a network is a much harder investment to make. If there's an oligopoly already active, they could simply not let new ISPs get a foothold unless you set up all the infrastructure on your own. And part of the problem of low internet usage is low internet connectivity in rural areas (which is probably less of a problem for Romania). That's not going to be solved by Facebook or market forces.
I think the author is wrong to dismiss platform HIGs (or equivalents) so quickly. I'd argue that even the fundamentals are platform specific.

I also think that the situation is not as dire as the author posits wrt tooling. The world is kinda moving away from classic widget based UIs, Qt is moving to QML, on Windows there is XAML, and generally Electron-style solutions seem to increase in popularity and capability (personally I have hopes that Servo could fill a hole there).
Kind of disappointed that HN isn't putting a black top banner to show respect to Ian like they did with Steve Jobs and others. I've been using Debian for more than 15 years and it runs half of the web today, the International Space Station, Tesla motor vehicles and more. Ian's impact on the world and our community is simply incalculable. It also looks like he wanted to use his suicide to grab people's attention on the issues of police brutality, serving humanity even through his death. Thank you Ian.
Barrack Obama – Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee
Is it really surprising that our politicians believe they are above the laws that they create? They believe the laws are for us sheep and not for the wolves. Look at the insider trading laws for Congress as an example.
Most of the Congress/Parliament are not their "masters" per se, so why would they care? If I'm not mistaken Clapper has already admitted the NSA is "inadvertedly" spying on Congress, too, so clearly this isn't such a big issue for them as to not make it possible to spy on them even inadvertedly anymore.
Inside Gitmo: America's Shame
> These aspects from the article sound like US charter schools.

Some charter schools. A minority. Others are run like tiny military academies, or have gone all-in on high-stakes testing, or profit by relying on low-paid short-term teachers with high turnover, or are mainly financial schemes/scams with schools attached (cf. the alternet link a few posts upthread).

All of the bits you listed actually sound precisely like my southern California suburban public elementary school experience in the mid–late 1990s. Unfortunately the school got constant pushback from the school district and state for not being excited enough about letter grades or standardized tests, but was able to mostly persist its culture through support from local parents.
suggested title: 'statistical model of IQ test beats humans at the same IQ test'
I'd disagree with that. I have a lot of experience with web sockets and I'd say the blog post is short sighted in a bunch of ways. Having done a large amount of TCP socket programming in other environments outside of web apps, I don't really have the same issues with debugging that other seem to complain about.
That must be a new feature. When I signed up, there weren't any tests.
Bill Cosby: how tide turned against man once dubbed 'America's Dad'
Hypocrisy is an inevitable consequence of politics. A politicians job in a democratic society is to be an instrument of public will. Well, the public is made up of countless mindsets and ideals, some of which are going to conflict with others. Politicians talk out of both sides of their mouth because the only alternative is silence, and silence is career death.

You judge a politician by which bloc they vote most consistently for, not by what they say.