skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I tried to do an AMA yesterday[1] about my time in the NSA and the CIA that fell flat as far as generating any interest. My main goal was to bring some reality to the security conversation, since the government's voice mostly remains absent and I have a pro-government lean on the security issue. I was a mission manager for the LENA (Levant/North Africa) division for the NSA, so I'm speaking from a very informed opinion on this particular release.

As you can expect, my opinion on information like this being released is: Why? How can this be considered journalism. Militaries keeping track of militaries is exactly what we want happening with taxpayer dollars. From a purely defense perspective, this is a good use of resources as others in this comment section have mentioned. But, releasing documents that actually detail sources/methods of collection are purely harmful -- I see absolutely nothing that can be misconstrued as noble by publishing an article like this.

There is another half to this. These documents that are being released have to stop being cited as if they're the canonical truth. Snowden did the equivalent of scraping a bunch of google pages pulling all documents down willy-nilly, and there are tons of absolute crap documents in there. You can tell that some of these powerpoints were made by E-3's giving briefs to some equally clueless group from the quality of the presentations themselves.

I'm definitely thankful for the people that came out and asked questions, as I tried to give extremely straight-forward, un-political answers. If you have any questions, feel free to reply to the reddit thread and I'll still answer them, so at least there can be a record of it.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4346rc/im_justin_meal... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10989800
The law of diminishing returns needs to applied to unions, so that all perks and benefits are taxed as income, and the tax rate above a maximum should create a ceiling wage.

How else do you limit unions?

I need only point at sports, where their demands have worked in killing cable networks since people will not buy their products - killing the sport in time.
Gone are the days of attending the ballgame - unless rich or small town bushies.
Look at how detroit was killed, how LA is being killed by totally huge wage strikes for simple tasks
submodule can only track a revision, not a branch.

(at least in the git versions distributed with centos/redhat6; I believe later versions can)
Ssshhhhhh. One mustn't speaketh of bitcoin 'round these parts, less you get hanged. Nevermind the fact that this is the exact reason something like bitcoin exists.
<the logic being that spousal privilege prevents you from testifying against them>

In certain limited circumstances, a spouse cannot be compelled to testify against a spouse... but in what jurisdiction are witnesses being called by the prosecution for traffic infractions in the first place??
That could suggest random urls. But it could be anything really depending on the app. I'm coming around to your pov that it is not descriptive. Something about the layer 7 flood was causing the app to respond with 400s and that's what Linode started calling it. But it doesn't help us understand anything about it.
Wolfram (1) points out that Babbage and Lovelace knew Charles Wheatstone - whose telegraphy work should have presented obvious electromechanical opportunities if Babbage had been able to actually finish anything, and perhaps if Lovelace had lived longer.

(1) http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-tale-o...
What's changed is that switching browsers (or even devices) no longer extends the number of WSJ titles you can Google search successfully. 3 or 4 is the limit/day across all.
How big of a problem is getting an apartment when someone moves to the U.S. as a student or for work?
Difference engine, not analytical engine. Just a polynomial sequence calculator, not a computer.
perhaps it's the domain people refer to? For example:

A chair that I make is unique, there is not another exactly like it.

A chair that I make is unique, there is only one in the world made by me.

In this case, the chair is unique in a very specific way.

However, the Babbage engine is unique in more ways. First mechanical computer of a certain complexity. Only mechanical computer with so much funding from the government. Build quality, ability etc...
It wouldn't suggest a flood of random urls, error 400 is generally a response from the webserver when it receives a request it can't understand (e.g not HTTP).

A request like that would never hit the web application as the server wouldn't know what to do with it.

see:

echo ":P"|nc linode.com 80
<html>
<head><title>400 Bad Request</title></head>
<body bgcolor="white">
<center><h1>400 Bad Request</h1></center>
<hr><center>nginx</center>
</body>
</html>
A file maybe, a filesystem no.

You can't 'ls' your network connections.

And for tricky API that does not match the filesystem view we have the fnctls.
Why? The most-prescribed antidepressants are beyond patent protections and are inexpensive generics.
Cambridge Quantum Computing Business’ Top 50 Innovators 2016
You can probably just replace the electrolytic capacitors in it, they probably just dried out.
There are hundreds of studies on increasing the speed limit. Most say increasing the limit causes increased fatalities, others say the effect is negligible. Most of these studies focus on highway speeds, though.

But lowering street level speed limits has a dramatic effect on fatalities. Sweden reduced their street speed limits to 15-20mph and strictly enforced them.[1] This dropped their fatality rate to essentially zero. It didn't reduce accidents significantly, but reduced their severity massively.

1: http://www.visionzeroinitiative.com/
I believe that broad games support and GPU driver support in the past two years has made Linux more viable for a lot of the kind of people who might not install it. I have been running a linux-only household for a year now.

Offices most certainly could run linux only if they weren't chickenshit (I mostly kid, but after seeing how broken the desktop management model is now anyway, I don't see why Linux can't be used more in Corporate.)
FreeBSD has an efi library that's used in early boot to handle this instead. To be honest, with the structure of UEFI, exposing it as a filesystem is problematic at best. A filesystem just hides too much data from you -- errors, the reason a call to setting a variable failed, etc. Not everything is a file, and shoehorning things in to try to pretend just doesn't work.
I think this is more of a mental blacklist.
oh I see you have moved to a graph representation, terrific!
Pro Analysis of Fan Hui vs. AlphaGo Match
People drive themselves into madness
Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) recommends a similar approach as an "Innovation and Planning Iteration" after every 3 – 5 regular development sprints.

http://scaledagileframework.com/innovation-and-planning-iter...
In other words, there are very low risk of death while taking selfies.
readers: The parent poster is saying that it has 2⁶⁴ unique and 2⁶⁵ unique values; the formatting is wonky.

ioquatix: You might want to edit your post to indicate exponentiation. It took me quite a moment to realize you meant that a signed 64-bit int represented in 2s complement has two-to-the-sixty-fourth values, not two hundred and sixty four. I'm guessing you used two asterisks which HN mistook as a zero-length italics?
World Passports and the People Trying to Create a Borderless World
Yahoo and AOL aren't hiring these days.

"To big too fail" isn't a thing.
Believe it or not, I once interviewed for a cryptography firm and they had me look over some code samples to improve them. Some of my improvements were just what you did. But they stopped me mid way through and said that the "standard" they are required to follow only allows one return statement and it had to be at the end of the function... Don't know what standard it was, whether their own or some 3rd party compliance.
Lock up periods. Would apply to the banker too I'd imagine
It would look better if it wasn't all on one line (could be just the way HN is displaying it).

Essentially, awk is a C like syntax with a bit of built in parsing, and a built in loop. It breaks up each input line into fields (by default using whitespace as a delimiter). The fields are dereferenced using the '$' character ($1, $2, etc).

Then, for each line of the input, the entire program gets run. The awk program consists of a conditional (basically the body of an "if" statement -- the if is implied). If that conditional is matched, the C-like program segment following it (enclosed in curly braces) gets executed. And the contents of the curly braces is basically interpreted/scripted C.

Two special conditions exist in awk -- BEGIN and END. They are evaluated (and the contents of their matching curly braces are executed) before, and after (respectively) any lines of input are read.

Hope that helps give you a start on awk -- it is a really powerful tool.

Edit: so as a quick walkthrough:
Before any lines of the input text are read in, RS and FS variables get set. Then, for each line where field 1 matches the regular expression L337.*9$, and field 2 contains the word Honda, etc... it prints (outputs) the contents of field 4 (print $4).

Ok, so in addition to normal C like syntax, this example contains regular expression matching too. But other than that (and some other variables that automatically get set, like NR for number of records, NF for number of fields in the current line), most of awk programs look like C.
I like native part, I like offline support (sometimes have to work without Internet).

I don't like cloud nature (if I understood it correctly, I can't host my own server) and it's probably not open-source which I don't like too (would be too hard to make non-Windows server).

Overall it's a very interesting approach and I'll consider using it. Thanks for making it.
Rent is expensive, but I pay 6-8$ for a good craft beer and ~12 for a nice bowl of pho for lunch. I dont even know where you could go to buy 14$ beer? Some hotel sky bar or a nightclub?
The Declaration of Independence declares a natural right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness[0]." Happiness itself is not enshrined as a right, certainly not by the Constitution[1].

[0] http://www.founding.com/the_declaration_of_i/pageID.2423/def...

[1] https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CDOC-110hdoc50/pdf/CDOC-110hdo...
Whats a typical flag country? You mean Panama, Liberia, Cayman islands? To get those flags costs thousands of dollars per year in incorporation fees. For your typical billion dollar cruise liner, or megayacht, this is a rounding error. My DE corporate taxes are $300/year. Its a bargain in comparison.
Pardon my ignorance... Is CoreOS an alternative to Docker? And if yes, what are the tradeoffs between the two?
to me, your descriptor could perhaps refer to a kind of application virtualization.
@3'40": "99 BYTES FREE"

:)
I've heard this argument (I like a single exit point) before, but I don't really understand it, I'd love for someone to explain why they prefer it, if they do.

I think the main reason returning early works so well is that often times, when you're returning different values, it's because you quickly have an answer (often times that something is invalid) for particular inputs. Generally though, there is "real work" to be done after validating or normalizing your inputs.

If that's not true, you're probably trying to do too many things at once, and the different pieces should be broken into separate functions.
Some type of "normalization" process can probably be used successfully for a while, but more seriously: I think we need to track dependencies; as in, the full supply chain.

Then, perhaps, we try to figure out how to engineer solutions that will guarantee certain certain conditions will be met (e.g. Enough food for every person in an area will make it to that area for everyone there to live satisfactorily).

As the dependencies are mapped out and tracked, it will become obvious which tasks are necessary to fulfill the current economic objectives. Then, it's simply a matter of performing the tasks.
I don't think null is necessarily bad. Sometimes, you either have a type or nothing at all. It's when nullable is the default that undoes us, I think. It should be an explicit choice that your type is <thing|null>, not an implicit one. That's the problem with Java references, or C pointers: it's on by default and you can't opt-out; since null is always a valid value for those types, I can't inform the type checker that null isn't a valid input (or a possible output) from a function, so if someone mistakenly passes one, you won't find out until runtime.

Contrast to Rust's Option<Foo> type; you know when null (None in Rust) is a possibility, because it's in the type. (And in Rust, you're forced to deal with it, too.)
The Extended Phenotype:The Long Reach of the Gene, another author's book is also very interesting.
Althought the book might include too expert knowledge, the core idea is simple as such it can be explained in the book's title.
To think what the idea implies caltivate our view of world.
Yeah the economics of SF just don't work out unless you have a trust fund or your company IPOs, that's why everyone I know who wants to buy a house is moving to Austin and Portland.
Many jobs give you 28% time to do stuff you need. It's called the weekend.
no we aren't, happiness is to nebulous to just be 'solved'
Honestly, I feel the issue is more rm -rf's default behaviour being to cross filesystems. This is almost always not what you want (and tends to result in deleting network drives, to give an example which has nothing to do with systemd), especially considering attempting to delete a mount point fails.
I do see more and more people using Google Docs instead of MS office. The online instant sharing is extremely compelling, and while the features of Docs and Sheets are pale compared to Word and Excel, they are good enough for what most people need.
PURSUIT of happiness.

try going to the police and saying your right to happiness has been thwarted by the company paying your salary... see how far that gets you
Well, I could see a problem occurring if Poettering decided not to represent efivars as files. Many people would claim that Systemd is trying to get rid of the Unix philosophy and force everyone to use the software if they want to keep up. After all, so many people are already complaining that Systemd uses a binary format to store logs.
Well, I think the "better than existing solutions" part is the offline client - mostly I just need a web front end for users to get the issues into the system. I'm happy for all the searching etc to be only in the desktop client.
I know it sucks, and I'm not saying their policy is best. But they do get a huge number of spammers and people self promoting their own websites.

The problem isn't that your site has ads, it's that you aren't supposed to submit links to your own website at all. Or at least not more than 10% of all your posts should be self promotion is the rule now.

I don't agree with this rule at all, but I understand why it exists.
This should be no surprise to those following the years of this national embarrassment. Yes the "potential future war" use case does justify high risk expenditures, but this crossed over into pork barrel fraud long ago. That is also on top of the antics of bidding process in the first place. I can't help but speculate as a laymen that the entire joint strike fighter concept is flawed. Part of the reason for having separate branches of armed forces is, or at least should be, strategic and technical diversity. If you consider that it is a form of investing, it becomes clearer to not put all the eggs in one basket. Cost is most damn sure a factor in warfare. Functioning fighter jets is also pretty high on the list.
No more than 16km to the nearest public elementary school, according to https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Queen+Elizabeth+Public+Schoo... .

The secondary school is further, at about 50km to Belleville.
Just keeping it 100: if you come up with a really good idea, (orthogonal to the companies business) that can make a lot of money in 20% time and give it back to your company rather than starting your own shit with it, you're stupid. Or just have low testosterone.
It is "depreciated" but still supported on 32-bit for compatibility.
One day I broke my laptop's boot list, so I went to add a new efi boot entry. I couldn't and thought it was due to my inability to find a proper usb bootable media with efi support since you can't access efi-vars if you boot from bios.

Turns out linux used to store crash-dumps inside efi-vars, so mine were full and new entries couldn't be written.
Good thing /sys/firmware/efi/vars/ was mounted rw, thus a `rm -rf /sys/firmware/efi/vars/dump-*` fixed it.

Some kind of protection would be nice, but the ability to see and use efi-vars as a filesystem is useful too.
If we listen to security researchers too much, our computers will be no fun.
At least in theory, UEFI intended to avoid the current problem of OS bootloaders taking over (by writing to the MBR) and then needing to know how to boot other OSes. (Or, in practice, Linux bootloaders knowing how to boot everything and all other bootloaders only booting their own OS.) If you install your bootloader via the standard UEFI mechanism, you won't step on any other OS on the same system. And at boot time, you get a menu of OSes, with labels provided by those OSes.

The problem comes in with the small handful of UEFI firmware implementations that get EFI variables so horribly wrong that attempting to write to them in the standard way will cause the EFI firmware to overwrite itself or otherwise brick the machine. Linux does attempt to work around some of those systems through very careful handling of EFI variable writes.
With fuse you certainly can.
Looks like electron could work with FreeBSD as well, so I'd probably give a +1 to that!
Why did new issues stop last June?
I had that for a while, with my croutonized C710 and gave it to my son to play minecraft on it, but one day he pressed space :)
GitHub Canned Responses
Not all good ideas make money
And yet they have become useful far beyond their original intended design.
I believe you hit the nail on the head. Many folk with experience have a different perspective than the folk writing this stuff. Ignoring their perspective dooms you to repeating their mistakes.

The Unix way isnt some holy grail holy shit perfect way. Its the simplest. Simple means its simpler to unfk. Because it will get fk'd.

Rendering someones hardware DOA is a really bad thing. Leaving that as a vector of attack is irresponsible at best.

If Redhat leaves this in expect legal issues.
A lot of ideas fit somewhere between viable startups and obvious new features. If you think in terms of the next 20 years being able to put, developed X could easily be worth a few million. Even if X can't really be done as a startup.

IMO, the biggest benefit from a companies standpoint is people can try out new things without cluttering up the main product. Boring but works is often best for a company and terrible on peoples resumes.
Its a company that develops a bunch of software and some of it makes containers easier to use. There's also their distro coreos. They are working on rkt which is like docker from what ive seen.

The feeling I get from them is their trying to have their own branded container stack.
It would be nice if wages were based on supply and demand. But, it's more like wages are equilibrium points in a dynamic system.

For example, if cool software engineer goes from $100k to $200k, then his boss, Mgr #1, is going to want like $300k, well, just because she's a boss. And, her director is then going to want $400k because people with power titles should make the most.

(Oh, and, by the way, everyone knows that Mgr #1 is probably the best programmer at the company, but she's 40 now, and her salary got too high, and therefore she would have had to move under R&D director PostDoc. But, he only allows PhDs with the title of 'principal' to work for him. So, now she has to be a mediocre manager.)
Have you read the book "The Difference Engine" by Gibson and Sterling? (Kind of what kicked off the whole Steampunk genre). Basically a taste of modern society could have been realized many decades earlier.

But the real bummer, is that Edison's lab essentially invented vacuum tubes, but shelved it as Edison didn't see any profit potential in it. Another missed opportunity for earlier computing.
> You can tell that some of these powerpoints were made by E-3's giving briefs to some equally clueless group from the quality of the presentations themselves.

Indeed. Many are viewing these presentations as if they're official documents like an SOP and what not. The presentations are under the discretion of the creator which can be anybody and say anything. But because it has 'Top Secret' on it many will treat it, as you say, canonical truth. I stopped trying to explain this on the internet. I only explain it personally now.
How did it go? any generally applicable advice?
Another thing we did that really helped - make Monday 20% day not Friday.

On Friday there are always too many things remaining in the sprint, and 20% time gets pushed off and continually forgotten about.
That's a really great idea. Two weeks is just about enough time to see if an idea is going to go anywhere.

I've worked under 6-8 week fail fast R&D regimes before as well and have found they really help provide focus...though in all cases it seems to push the R&D effort much more towards an Applied R&D approach than a theoretical one.
I hope so. The current language translation tools are pretty terrible, especially for non-romance languages.
`rm -rf /` was never safe, even if reinstalling the system. If it worked for you then you were just lucky. In the context doing a reinstall you need to specify --one-file-system, but really you should just reformat the partition, it'll likely be much faster anyways.
That wasn't against the rules for the longest time, and people abused the hell out of it. There were (and still are, sadly) subreddits devoted to digging up comments they disagreed with and downvoting them, shaming them, and sending them hate mail. But even on regular subreddits, there were problems with meta content causing drama and downvote brigades.
I think there are at least three issues here.

One is efivarfs making it too easy to destroy stuff. It should probably identify problematic hardware and prohibit modifications that break that hardware. This is no fun, but hardware-specific workarounds are a fact of life for real-world OSes.

One is, as you say, bad default behavior with rm. Crossing filesystems by default is pretty weird. Preventing that unless it's explicitly requested would largely fix this problem and many others too.

And one is mounting efivarfs read-write by default. It's too dangerous to be that easy to modify.

I don't think it's too useful to try to pin one of these down as "the issue." They're all worth fixing.
Quoty: A WordPress plugin for sharing selected text
It would definitely be something I'd explore if I had sufficient FU money. Drop out, drop off and just do whatever I felt like. I have enough things I'm interested in to keep me self-occupied for at least 20-30 years I'm sure.