skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Surely this being HN I will be down-voted terribly for this. But I am not at all convinced that Snowden's account is 100% to be trusted in this.

The article in question spends an exceptionally long time examining NSA/DoJ decision making in responding to Snowden's claims that:

> . "I had reported these clearly problematic programs to more than 10 distinct officials, none of whom took any action to address them."

The article provides no evidence that this was true. Or that US Officials' rejection of this position was contrary to the facts. In fact a different reporter might argue that the lack of such evidence given the new documentation provided supports the opposite conclusion.

> The NSA portrayed it as an innocuous question that elicited a direct response when it released the email in 2014.

It may not be an entirely innocuous issue, but it's certainly not equivalent to raising concerns. To suggest the later requires perfect ignorance of how bueracracy works. No one is going to look for 'implicit intent' in you raising a question and escalate it to something more than that. They cc'ed relevant experts to provide an answer and that's really the best you should expect from a large organization. Unless you explicitly report a complaint, nobody is going to go around knocking on the higher ups doors for you.

Another point that I would like to raise that hasn't been mentioned is Snowden's account of his career at the CIA. According to him he was quite senior.

> In March 2012, Dell reassigned Snowden to Hawaii as lead technologist for the NSA's information-sharing office. [0]

In this article we clearly see he signs ( when answering a question about file types) as:

> Ed Snowden,
System Administrator

I'm not bringing these up as a proponent of NSA surveillance, but I do think it is important to be critical in this - and I'm no more convinced of Edward Snowden as a witness than before I started reading this.

Particularly I think the article is disingenuously written (Clickbait Title) in following a very lengthy narrative ( to build up suspense? ) without providing much in the way of strong evidence; one expects to finally find it at the end, but curiously finds nothing. If they told me at the start "no emails which would significantly alter the known facts were disclosed" - I could have saved 30 minutes.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/edward-snowden/
> I share your pain about wanting an easy, non-compiled means of creating a small SUID program. But I don't see any good way unless something changes.

i think the way to go is to just to have a compiled language that makes it easy to write bash-like programs. julia has a pretty nice-looking subprocess module, for instance: http://docs.julialang.org/en/release-0.4/manual/running-exte...
I actually just went through this myself. I had last done frontend work in about 2010, maybe a little in 2011, and realized my skill set was probably getting stale, so I asked my boss if I could do frontend for a bit, with the understanding that I'd underperform. He said sure.

I've left and returned to C++ a couple of times. Same for Java. Most recently, I did some Ruby dev in 2015 after last doing it in 2006. In all of these instances, while there was some library and language churn, it was pretty easy to pick up. C++ lambdas are just cleaner syntax for functors, and the better optimizers and reworked libraries mean they're more widely usable, but no big deal. Java has a streaming library now and lambdas of its own, but it's largely syntax sugar, and even if Grade has largely replaced Maven, the concepts and issues are roughly identical. Bundler was new to me, but why it existed was transparent and its relationship to gems was clear, so only an hour or so of work was enough to get me up to speed. I assumed web work would be similar.

I felt like I was relearning from scratch. jQuery was gone; use anything else. There are several different build systems, all slightly incompatible with each other, to replace YUI compressor and Closure. Prototypes are gone, classes are in. Underscore is gone, and a richer class library is in, but it's not widely supported, so you have to cross compile, for which you need source maps. Some best practices became worst (shove all the JS into one file is the new hotness), but apparently may go to worst (fracturing is better due to HTTP/2 push).

I have actually seen this before: Windows, as it switched from the 3.1/95 series to the COM-heavy NTs, had churn like this. So did Carbon to Cocoa, and arguably Cocoa prior to 10.3 and after, and again once ARC was introduced. But those were single events, whereas this seems, from where I sit, to be a sustained burn.
FMGE, MCI Screening Test Questions and Answers – Practice Online Test for MBBS
Tony Fadell flies from faltering Nest
I think the author was trying to say that there seems to be no simple pattern. The original sequences are meant to demonstrate how hard it is to see a pattern. However, a relatively recent empirical discovery found very simple statistical biases between consecutive primes. Mathematicians were shocked by these results because they were so simple. This article demonstrates and further explores this surprising phenomenon.
You think that's bad? I only upgraded to Windows 10 last week, and within minutes of booting it up, it quietly started downloading "Candy Crush Soda Saga" without my permission. I only caught it because I noticed the download indicator in my Start menu, at which point I cancelled it. Apparently there's no simple user option to turn these auto-downloaded apps off either.
One of the accusers (Andrea Shepard) is a current and veteran employee and developer of the Tor project itself. Another (Meredith Patterson) has been working in the open source crypto field for decades. To believe in the conspiracy of this being motivated by anti-Tor forces, you would have to widen the conspiracy to believe that Tor already has been compromised from the inside by its own employees for many years.

Conspiracies don't get that big without bursting.
I think a sign/notice would be good. Then you'd know and could decide to not patronize the place, or protest it, etc. accordingly.
I suppose so, but I'd much rather work with a directory of files than a dense config file inside visudo.
I think Win8.1 had this already.
good summary
I've thought of this. I've been living off savings for quite a few years, but it would be nice to do a bit of work for extra money / challenge / variety. But it seems unlikely that anyone would employ me.
Actually it takes one extra tap from my count. :)
> that makes for lame, bilious discussion

Many of the most learned discussions I see on reddit are in the circlejerk subs. Particularly the "New School" ones.
Pro-founder does not mean they drop all standards and expectations. I'm not familiar with their entire portfolio, but using the Zenefits case (where the founder is accused of fraud) is a poor argument to support your claim that they are not pro-founder.

I'm not saying they are or aren't profounder. I just think Zenefits is not a good example to use to make sweeping accusations about the firm.
I'd assume the they would be thresholds but the statistics would be interesting.
If buying a ThinkPad for personal use, buy one second-hand.

Why?

ThinkPads are mostly used by large corporations with procurement policies meaning they are replaced every 2-3 years. They're treated with care by (most) employees as it's company property. And spend most of their lives in air conditioned offices - little harsh environment.

The same of printers (you probably don't need a monster sized Zerox, but smaller colour laser jets can also be picked up). The same of mostly any corporate hardware. Procurement managers often don't know what to do with 'outdated' machines.

If you don't need the latest, go second-hand corporate turnover. And spend the $500 saved somewhere more useful.
Sure,

But I would expect Snowden was also smart enough not to raise extremely strong sounding objections since he probably couldn't have done what he wound-up doing if he had.

After all, Snowden basically saw a couple other NSA dissidents who went entirely through the chain of command get eaten up and chewed out. This is the context of these events.
"Consumer upgrades of Windows 7 systems to Windows Desktop 8 would probably be a bit more robust, but that was already a fairly insignificant business for Microsoft. "

While the cost of WinSE would continue to increase with each new version due to the 10 years of support.
I had a similar ”Alan Kay“-style moment when Alan Kay responded to one of my comments about a year and a half ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8618736

It was my secret pride for the longest time, even though I was the one getting schooled.
I didn't mean to imply that any individual has an obligation to explain why they're wrong, (though I do feel that as a society overall we do) but that it at least gives a chance to explain to people why their views might not actually be based in reality instead of pushing people towards others that will just confirm their incorrect/ignorant/whatever views.

I agree that you need a power structure to censor, but power structures come in many shapes, and governments don't have a monopoly on them (as much as they'd surely like to). Even here on HN, there are a few big names that could probably ruin a person's career with a single tweet.

I don't take issue with people deciding they don't agree with or don't like something. To me the issue starts when it changes from "you're wrong and your views are despicable" to "you are wrong and your views are despicable so you shouldn't be allowed to express them".

>"Blue is clearly a superior color to green"

>"No, if you read up on it, you'll find that green is better because...."

Totally ok with that, no censorship.

>"Blue is clearly a superior color to green"

>"You're wrong and an idiot, I'm going to refrain from interacting with you in the future"

Still ok with that, no censorship, annoying without justification (and imo shitty to discount a person due to a single view, especially in unrelated topics, but that's just me) but that's about it.

>"Blue is clearly a superior color to green"

>"I'm going to tell your employer and as many people as I can that you're a hateful blueist and make sure you're fully ostracized from the Wavelength community."

Alternatively,

>"I'm going to do everything I can to make sure that blueists like you can't discuss wavelengths at this Institution."

This is what I'm not ok with. It goes from disagreeing to suppressing. You're no longer choosing what YOU don't want to listen to, but making that choice for everyone.

Edit: Also, knowing that your position goes against the norm isn't knowing that it's incorrect, nor does it necessarily mean that it is incorrect. Seventy years ago, having the view that people can get married regardless of skin color would be knowingly going against the norm, and 10 years ago it was the same regarding gender, yet I'm glad that people were able to express those views.
I get asked once to update iOS. The second time, the default action is to upgrade at midnight.
>I just got Azure Gov FedRamped on my project and it was some serious gnashing and pulling of teeth. Writing all those CMS and IRS procedure docs was a great, but arduous experience.

If you're pulling teeth in regards to FEDRAMP, you can join ##GRC on irc.freenode.org with fellow teeth grinders. Its a chat channel with 20+ Security Auditors and System Administrators dedicated to discussing enforcement, regulations, and systems administration for FEDRAMP and other compliance frameworks.

There's also the brand new subreddit called /r/FEDRAMP that started a few days ago.

https://www.reddit.com/r/FEDRAMP.

Check the sidebar for other compliance frameworks too like /r/SOC2, /r/HIPAA, /r/ISO27001, and /r/PCICompliance.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HIPAA

https://www.reddit.com/r/PCICompliance

https://www.reddit.com/r/ISO27001

https://www.reddit.com/r/SOC2
Fully agreed.
I agree with that on the principle that it's a nice thing to have if it's optional. And amazingly enough, Windows 10 actually does have that: http://i.imgur.com/XV4Hpwd.png
> if in this hypothetical reality, the garden state didn't supplement but California did then I'd move to California in a heartbeat.

I am guessing so would a lot of other people, which would create an opportunity of a lifetime for California landlords, adjusting the rents to the point where UBI would only offer marginal incremental benefit.
I obviously have to disagree with your analysis, let me offer an alternative. The difference between the two scenarios is the difference between value(X) + value(8 hours leisure time) and value(X) + 2 * value(3 hours leisure time). Therefore in case the value of 3 hours of leisure time exceeds half of the value of 8 hours of leisure time, i.e. the value of additional leisure time diminishes sufficiently quickly, the second scenario provides the better total value.

By restricting the entire world to the two actors wanting to produce one X one can keep money out of the equation. I argue your analysis fails or at least may fail because you don't assign a value to the leisure time. Also the assignment of monetary values obscures things, where is this money coming from? From selling the X to the society? In that case you will have to take into account that producing one X may take either 8 or 10 hours - will this raise the price or decrease the monetary value of an hour of work?
It's fine to expect someone to abide by your rules in your town, but they also need the option to move somewhere else to abide by their own rules.

If you want to live in a world without discrimination (as I do!), that's your right and you can enforce that within your state or move to a state where it is enforced, but if there's another state that you don't live in, mind your own damn business and let them set whatever laws they want.

To get along with others you need to follow some sort of conduct, but reach each group should be free to set their own code.
The Principle of Charity you're espousing suggests to me that people would wander around accusing insufficiently genteel comments of uncharitability. Too many rules attract rules lawyering, which turn the agora into a tedious parody of a courtroom.

My own style of moderation, based on long observation, is very few, very simple rules backed by ruthless and unapologetic moderation. I appreciate your leniency.

I think the answer here is to answer, here, if you disagree. It's humiliating to be corrected in public, I always hate being on the receiving end of it, but if I'm stuck with an impulsive streak then that's just part of thinking out loud on the internet.
Agreed. Call it prejudice -- which it is -- but I'm having trouble believing that someone who would lay out a page like this:

http://i.imgur.com/9kBV5o5.png

... is going to have anything insightful to say about a mapping application.

Yes, I get it. It's hard to make use of a display with a large number of pixels, especially when no two displays seem to have the same size and scale. But you know what? That's something you have to deal with in this business. You don't get to punt by removing or hiding every bit of information possible, or by presenting your thoughts an awkward single-column format inspired by some study or another that was conducted back in the newspaper era.
Bing maps sometimes has better satelite views than google, so that's something. (I think its actually aerial photos rather than satellites for some areas.)
Looking at society as a whole, there's not much to be gained by increasing lifespan. There's no shortage of people being born. They come up to speed quickly to be able to do useful things (20 years or so). There are a few people doing great work even in old age, who couldn't easily be replaced by somebody younger, but I'd say they are an exception. There's no reason to think those particular people would be chosen for life extension first.
I just wish there was something more to this here. While I can't speak for either side, I always struggle with this type of accusation as anyone can say anything. Consensual and didn't like something after can lead to false allegations. The flip side is these action(s) did happen and that's horrible. for me, I always feel this shouldn't be public at all because a false allegation does similar damage reputationally that a real one does. For this reason, if the victim goes to social media I no longer believe them since the risk of damage to good people outweighs the crime to my moral stance. I respect that others may not agree with this though.
Kind of a meta comment, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if the basic income movement was (for the most part) started and promoted by an intelligence agency.

After reading about the literary magazines and abstract art that the CIA funded I started thinking what a current program would look like. I think it would look like how basic income is developing.
It seems like many credit these things by putting account tags over the photo itself. Likewise for the brand of a piece of clothing, etc.
Things I learned: ICQ still exists.
No, I meant something different.
Let's consider primes, say, between 1 and 1000000. a) Compute the number of cases when p is prime AND p+2 is prime; b) number of cases when p is prime AND p+4 is prime; c) number of cases when p is prime AND p+6 is prime.
My claim is that a is approx. equal to b, and c is approx. equal to 2a (which is the same as 2b). You can easily test it (which I did), and it's easy to see why.
I'm not sure I follow this line of reasoning, there appears to be different, unrelated claims here: 1) xmpp, when encrypted and compressed, is inherently chatty and leads to battery drain on mobile. I don't think this is true.

2) Managed services are easier to use, and can deliver a better user experience than having to learn how to do everything yourself. I don't think anyone disagrees with that.

I don't think it follows that picking a subset of xmpp and building on that makes for a poor chat experience. Apart from "actual" xmpp/jabber services working just fine, Google talk and Facebook chat both worked fine with open xmpp clients.
> Under the Murray UBI plan recipients would be required to spend $3000 per year on health insurance. That would be your mother's replacement for Medicaid.

"Annual premiums edged beyond $17,500 for an average family." http://www.ncsl.org/research/health/health-insurance-premium...

And this is in the marketplace that purposefully excludes Medicare recipients, who are older and are disproportionately more likely to have health problems and pre-death expenses.

Here's data on per capita spending on Medicaid, there are very few states where non-disabled adult spending is less than $3k http://kff.org/medicaid/state-indicator/medicaid-spending-pe...
Can't say that helps much.

http://i.imgur.com/CI33nx3.jpg
Apple Maps is useless in India and South Asia in general. It was useless on Day 1 and is pretty much just as useless today.

Google Maps on the other hand, not only has turn-by-turn directions, but has even customized it to give directions the way they do it locally (using buildings and landmarks instead of streets where applicable).

If Apple Maps wants to become a Universal Map platform, they have a very long way to go.

I don't see it in their DNA to make these types of platforms.
Because it is overwhelmingly what they deliver. The very edgiest of the edgy use Telegram 1-2% of the time. Exactly one person in my social network installed Signal and he gave up on it after about 2 days. No one would dream of touching GPG. The .5% of the time an email address does not end in @gmail.com, it is a Google Apps account.

Are your friends all Tor developers or something? I just can't imagine a set of family/friends/acquaintances who actually run their own Postfix and care what a public key is.

I'll accept the existence of an advertising profile (I don't see the ads, anyway) before I'lll cease all communication with everyone in my network, which is what it would take to avoid Facebook (or the exact same problem with a different company).
Heroin can be used responsibly. Marijuana can derail lives. Areas where child porn is legal tend to have reduced rates of child abuse.

The world is not black and white, and you may even find cases where legalized abuse and harm are beneficial to a society, or where it is discovered that something like responsible pedophilia could exist. We don't know, but if we ban everything we personally dislike or disagree with on a global scale, we never will find out.
It seems to me like all of the people involved in this particular case are men.
Twitter might have come close to that at some point
I think it is better to have eg Canada/US do it at the same time.
People who think strong AI will cause a violent apocalypse are gravely mistaken. CRISPR gene editing is the eminent domain of conscious AI, and a conscious machine would seek to create designer organisms to inhabit other worlds as well as potentially birth humans superior to what we know today to become leaders of our sociological hierarchies. It would take just a few generations to rid our race of things like depression, anxiety and mental illness with this kind of intervention. While providing the opportunity to increase diversity to a level where no two humans would be alike physically.
Can't really lump plumbers in that group; they're very well compensated, and I wouldn't describe their jobs as soul-crushing. There are a lot of trade jobs that won't be easily automated; plumbing, electricians, welders, landscapers (it's really an art) etc.
Great point. Debt is a necessary part of bootstrapping a new project. That being said, technical debt is not a blanket excuse for violating elementary engineering precepts, shipping shoddy components full of bugs or a necessary evil part of the final product. The team must be able to be specific about the technical debt and execute a reasonable plan to repay it.
But XMPP is a standard protocol... not a client or library. Should we all abandon HTTP because IE6 sucked? Thats the logical equivalent to the argument.
You could do something like

unprivuser ALL=NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/bash /path/to/directory/with/files/*

It'd be a mild annoyance to have to explicitly run them with bash:

sudo bash /path/to/directory/with/files/thingtorun

but you wouldn't have to mess with the config past that.
In their quest to remain relevant and join the 1 Billion install club for their latest OS they're using every trick in the book to fool users into upgrading their OS just so that they can meet their timelines. What they didn't account for was the backlash and rage their malware inspired tactics would ignite. Forcing people to upgrade to Windows 10 against their wishes is despicable and disgusting.