skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Being a professional writer doesn't mean that your first draft is always perfect. News writers in particular are operating under deadlines; the whole reason that editors exist is to deal with the inevitable flaws that creep into writing.
I'm laughing because I found that very post great. The reason is, I also enjoy Arxiv and that comment topped all other news sources. It like when someone asks for a the definition of a word and you plonk the entire collection of human wisdom on his head. :D

All other news sources are merely news, where that post contained hard science news, but it was overkill.
think of all the bitcoins you could mine in that Utah facility. Satoshi Nakamoto - are you in there?
Great idea!

I've also just added EFF as a charity option on my activism site [1]. I donated as a bounty for my favorite task championing Score Voting for national elections, which I incidentally feel is a necessary reform to get some alternative voices heard and potentially elected.

[1] https://www.brianstaskforce.com/blog/electronic-frontier-fou...
It would be so dead simple to do it right - just ask the people if they are willing to accept a certain amount of surveillance for more safety or if they are willing to take the additional risk but keep their privacy. And everybody could live happily.
Does $20M include the cost that was borne by the companies?
> If you -- Hacker News reader -- decided to run for congress tomorrow, you might not win, but you won't be killed, sabotaged, or secretly blocked.

Yes, because those things are all entirely unknown in the history of Senate races in the US.
> (and to a lesser extent Google) have done a remarkable job in wresting control away from the carriers.

Seriously? In order to get Android out on the market, Google pretty much allowed the carriers to keep all the control they had back in the flip-phone era. Their attempts to counteract that with the Nexus line has been unsuccessful, if you look at the relative sales numbers.

My friend's HTC Evo 3D on Verizon was filled with uninstallable bloatware - I think my favorite was the Nascar Fantasy League app.
I think the implication was that Al-Jazeera does little coverage of the US.
I really like the concept of PC, however what puts me off ever so slightly is the use of a .co.uk domain whilst all the currency is USD, surely either a .com or £GBP would make it more uniform?
So.. I never really understood why we need tmux/screen beyond some vanity things like running irc clients. Most applications should have sufficient log output to a file. Editing a document, want to return to it later? Save the thing.

Not sure I understand why people would be so excited about this tool?
<quote>"Even in my early designs, SMP was a big system. [...] just wanted to go ahead and implement it. [...] and bought every book I could find on computer science—the whole half shelf of them. And proceeded to read them all.

I was working at Caltech back then. And I invited everyone I could find [...] put together a little “working group”"</quote>

How on earth does people find the time to do those things while "working"? What do they mean by Work?
It is also just barely too incoherent to argue against.

I guess some skills do improve with age.
The Determination and Passion of LT3′s Cheryl “ZomgACrayon” Wong
I totally understand that regarding the petitions and everything else - but John Q Public may not and seeing millions sign a petition that is ignored will hopefully cause a further awakening in people.
I'm reasonably certain that archive.org must be using some differential encoding of pages. Otherwise the archiving process would waste a lot of space. They're just not making it visible.

EDIT: Also: http://www.changedetection.com
Microsoft, Stop Trying To Make Windows RT Happen
The latest Sedgewick is better than Cormen for self study. Especially if the goal is to get through a tech interview.
>> You mean it has experienced reporters who editorialize the leaks.

You mean like @wikileaks, the official Wikileaks twitter?
You are wrong in generalizing all coders.
You may be a "coder" designing web sites, doing repetitive work. But there are many out there working towards improvising the workflow in Healthcare, Manufacturing, Entertainment/Gaming, etc.

And as for comparing a coal miner to a coder (personally find that as the best comparison to make when mocking someone who undervalues coders); there is no special added value the miner brings to his workplace compared to a "coder" aka software engineer, whose 1hr's work can make processes efficient and increase productivity for 1000 more people.

Overall, I like your style of writing from your perspective. There is the reality part you have added. But as for generalizing coders. Don't. Specially here on HN.
If I am parsing your comment correctly, is it accurate to say that there are 5 justices who agree that surveillance of cell phone location data violates the 4th Amendment based solely on the level of information collected, regardless of how it was physically obtained?
The tools.
"Front door" is court orders and warrants: these are far less problematic.
Email	: GPG/PGP (The End!)
Web	: Tor (Browser bundle)
Voice/Txt	: RedPhone, Silent Circle, Cellcrypt, TrustCall, TextSecure
Data	: TrueCrypt, Scramdisk, PGPDisk

We can all pretend this is still a Democracy (it's not and never has been; it's a Representative Republic and our representatives are mostly evil and/or stupid) and think those who have power will relinquish it voluntarily or you can actually do something about your own privacy.

Edit: Dear God, I feel like I'm turning into Stallman! (Which, on closer inspection, may be a good thing)
More specifically, narrow warrants. From a no longer operative document:

"... and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Google, Facebook, Bing under fire for not enough anti-child porn funding
Not true for newspapers and never has been. Even in the days when print was predominant stories would get edited between printings as new material came to light.

As earlier commenters have noted the original story was pushed out quickly, and later refined. This is totally normal in all newsrooms, and if you diff boring, non-controversial stories, you'll see the same thing--though perhaps to a lesser degree due to the fact that there's less of a rush to get out, say, a travel piece, compared to one with national import.

Full disclosure: I worked at the NYTimes for two years as a developer in the newsroom. NYT editors and reporters are, almost universally, smart, careful, well-intentioned people.
Definitely agree with this. Currently, I am running a side project with a friend (which we hope to turn into a company). On our roadmap, we have Product/Market Fit and after that, Product Optimization.

We have released mobile apps for iOS and Android but they are 100% mobile web views. We want to be able to prototype quickly and figure using web views is the best way to do this (no approval waits, cross platform). Registration conversion rates are bad and the UX is what you get with a non-optimized mobile web view.

Despite that, the data we are gathering from initial testing is valuable. We've been able to gather that users find the base product interesting but our engagement at the end of the funnel is not as high as we like.

For us, we consider moving from web to native would be the highest form of optimization but we want to get the product right first.
Little known Java feature: Joint union in type parameter
Used Pivotal Tracker?
What really makes me suspicious is this passage:

> “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” said the “career intelligence officer” who gave documents describing PRISM to the Washington Post.

Think of the engineering needed at multiple endpoints to allow something like this...I can believe the NSA has some of the best cryptoanalysts, but our best front-end hackers as well (do they have their own Meteor.js)? I'm only being slightly pedantic here. If this is "literally" possible, then the amount of work needed for the collaborating companies is non-trivial. It's one thing to pass along uber-authentication credentials allowing an NSA-agent Zuckerberg-like privileges...that could be something implemented with as few as a couple people. But to bake in something right out of a hacker movie?

It just makes a few of the claims sound a bit suspect...because what is terribly frightening is the government's ability to aggregate and analyze this information in bulk, not to peep in on you as you're typing in real-time, which would be one of the least efficient ways ever to spy on the general American public's online activity.

And no, I'm not being an apologist for federal expansion of powers. I'm pointing out that some of what this source is leaking seems to be beyond reality, not because of technological sophistication, but because of the number of mundane moving parts and actors that would seemingly have to be involved (theoretically, wouldn't they have to have as many datacenters as all the companies they're vacuuming from?). The entire PowerPoint slide set looks like something a get-rich-quick contractor would whip up to win a fat contract that would never actually be scrutinized for viability.

But still, even if the government doesn't actually have the capability as described, it is wrong for them to not disavow it...it's not any good if their mindset is: "Oh we're not doing that...yet...but we would love to, some day)
I don't know what quote you are referring to, but here is my favourite one.

"You don’t know what order with freedom means! You only know what revolt against oppression is! You don’t know that the rod, discipline, violence, the state and government can only be sustained because of you and because of your lack of socially creative powers that develop order within liberty!" --- Gustav Landauer

It humbles me every time I read it, because to resist or to rebel against existing things is easy, at least for me.. but to actually put thought and effort into things "building a better world" in a sustainable and organized way, to be creative in co-operation and compromising with others, to get out of all these comfort zones, etc. It's a lifetime effort, and none of us will see all the fruits of it, or ever be sure the fruit won't be snatched up, so the default is to not even try, except a little bit here and there. It's like living hand to mouth, but in a political sense. It's all just reaction, and that sucks.
Nice. Feminist bullies use the same tactics and insults that kids use in middle school.

What's so wrong with asking someone in an elevator? I'm all ears. Is it because you think women will cower in terror because they're an enclosed box with a man?
Sorry, I just don't believe a line like that goes out unknowingly. It's the obvious pull quote from the whole thing, not a minor sentence that no one noticed.
Total dick move too trying to corner the issue while it's hot without consulting with Wyden and Udall who've been working on this for years.
Nope. I certainly used ad hominem, but it wasn't central to my argument. To ignore the rest of my post would be an example of the following:

> they want avoid responding to one or more points they know the other person is trying to make, so they lazily hide behind extraneous non-arguments to avoid confronting any substance.
Automatic patch generation learned from human-written patches
This also implies he has vested interest in convincing people more catastrophes are on the way to sell more insurance.
Reading suggestion: "Flat Earth News" by Nick Davies. Essential to understand how the modern news room really works.
Re-Engineering The Way Your City Works, startup style
Microsoft CIO Tony Scott Resigns
ImageOptim CLI
Obama Fundraising in Palo Alto Tonight
I wish I could take that much credit, but I simply saw the link here: http://www.newsdiffs.org/
There was an interesting analysis at one point correlating what CEOs said when presenting their financial statements with whether those statements later suffered major negative revisions.

It would be interesting to have this automated and available in real time. (Of course people would learn the value of making it trigger level. But you can include whether the person by virtue of their position likely has that level of awareness...)
One difference is that I can email or call the Times and they are generally responsive. I couldn't contact Wikileaks.

Yes, at first journalists from reputable publications guided the redaction process. However, Wikileaks also gave access to unredacted documents to some very dodgy people, including Israel Shamir, who may have shared documents with the Belarusian dictatorship, leading to arrests of activists (c.f. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/02/why-i-had-to-lea...)

Of course the unredacted documents were ultimately released. This was done, as I understand it, by a combination of a Guardian journalist revealing the password to a file that he thought was not public and WikiLeaks putting that same file on a server.

To quote from The Guardian:
>>The newly published archive contains more than 1,000 cables identifying individual activists; several thousand labelled with a tag used by the US to mark sources it believes could be placed in danger; and more than 150 specifically mentioning whistleblowers.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/02/julian-assange-a...

I'm not suggesting that The New York Times or The Guardian are perfect - they aren't - but they have decades of experience balancing the costs and benefits of leaks and overall they do a good job (from the Pentagon Papers to today's report). By comparison, what have we learned from the leaks of the diplomatic cables that was worth people getting arrested by dictatorial regimes or getting killed?
I find the posts and discussion in G+ communities (in general, I am no referring any specfic community) to be in general to be terrible in quality.

For programming related communities, there are too many newbies who don't bother googling asking the same stupid question over and over. For some others, many are reposting the same thing that made it to the front page of HN or Reddit, to earn 'creds' I guess. There are a few obscure ones that post high quality content that I wouldn't discover otherwise, they usually lack lively discussions.
Bullshit, 'the Stasi"? Go talk to somebody who lived in East Germany. And they catch people all the time trying to get bomb materials, how did you think they were doing it, luck? (In the case of the car bomb in Times Square you're right, it was dumb luck, the timer malfunctioned.) If the average person didn't freak out and start yelling retarded things like 'Stasi!' I'd say fine, maybe my fucking Facebook is worth people's lives but they do freak out and then they pass things like the Patriot Act, or worse. So to prevent mindless fear I say fine, scoop up whatever crap you need, if I want something kept secret I know how to do it.
Indian tech world mourns death of open source software guru Atul Chitnis
How the feds are using Silicon Valley data scientists to track you
In general, you put both the
McDonald's and Wendy's close
together in the best location
on Main Street so that they
can each get a good shot at
half the business. Else one
of those two is out at one
end or the other of Main Street
and gets only about 1/4th business.

Much the same for political parties:
They look like there's not much
difference. Some of the Dems are
a bit left of Mao, and some of the
Repubs are a bit to the right of
Genghis Khan, still the actual
parties want to look close to the
center.

But where is the 'center'? And
what issues are hot in the center?
That depends a lot on the voting
citizens and what the media thinks
they can get away with pushing.

I contend that with better informed
citizens, we would have had political
debates on a much higher level,
have just avoided The Great Recession
because we never would have done
something as dumb as the bubble
blowing, and done much better on
addressing the issues in foreign
policy that got us to throw away
a few trillion dollars, etc.

Clinton was paying off the national
debt; without the costs of the wars
and with the taxes from full
employment instead of the
unemployment from The Great
Recession, we could have had
the debt paid off by now or nearly
so. Why would it be good to
pay off the debt? Because
then the US Treasury is not borrowing
so much money and, then, interest
rates are lower for the rest of us
and, in effect, our economy has more
'seed corn', investment capital for
growth.

For all those years since
Clinton, we
could have the economy
charging ahead, without inflation,
so fast that companies would be
recruiting in the poor areas,
providing buses from the
poor areas to the offices,
paid training in the offices,
etc. It was happening in the
1960s.

Let's take one issue: Abortion.
I claim that in reality, in practice,
no matter what you believe about
abortion, good, bad, or indifferent,
actually there's no real issue.
Why? Because Roe v Wade was decided
about 40 years ago, and there's
no chance it will be changed. When
we are well on the way to getting
2/3rds of the House, 2/3rds of the
Senate, and 3/4ths of the states
ready to change Roe v Wade, abortion
can be an issue again.

In the
meanwhile, what is abortion in
politics? Sure, a way to get
some people all wound up over
something that's not going to
change. Why? Because some
Repubs feel strongly that abortion
is really bad and want to hear that
some politician is 'against it'.
Because a lot of Dems believe that
someday they might need an
abortion and want that option
open to them so want to hear
some politician is 'for it'.
Either way, Roe v Wade's not
going to be changed. So,
with better informed voters,
just informed enough to realize
that Roe v Wade is 40 years old
and a constitutional amendment
takes the 2/3rds, 2/3rds, and 3/4ths,
we could just quit talking about
abortion and move on to, say,
how to get the economy going
and how to say out of absurd
foreign adventures.

In our democracy, the voters get
the government they deserve.
Better informed voters stand to
get better government. If the
voters get smarter, then the
two seemingly dumb-dumb parties
will keep up with the voters.
Not my life. Fuck Facebook I never joined. I did join Google though, and now I regret it. So it is a personal shortcoming.

I am not good/disciplined enough to maintain my own mail server.
Let me guess, next you'll demand that we not refer to chiropractors or psychics as "quacks"...
US University leverages Linux for high performance computing (Part I)
We do not provide direct access to our servers. We just have a system that sends copies of our data to their servers. We really do care about your privacy!

Lest people think this is a joke, this is EXACTLY what the telecoms did under Bush that lead to Congress passing retroactive telecom immunity. Predictable outrage this time looks to me like outrage then, and I have no reason to believe that we won't see a similar legislative response.

That said, in Google's case I believe them. This is the company that is going to court to stop the government from trying to get information about Google users with warrantless national security letters.

FB on the other hand, I would expect to see providing technical support to the FBI about how to use their in house tools to more quickly analyze the dumps...
I wager they have control of many root CAs. They could literally MITM any connection they want to.
I just found it ironic that you tell someone to get educated, when you don't have a degree, which is pretty obvious given your inability to ignore rhetoric and respond to the merits of an argument. U mad
I don't think the government has done that to any US citizen regarding NSA wiretapping or data collections under FISA. Please don't conflate secret national security courts and closed meetings with fantasy. It doesn't help any discussion.
"Innovation thrives on the serendipitous collision of ideas."
I put up a petition along those lines a little while ago here:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/cease-overbroad-su...

Enough signatures would be able to put pressure on the White House and gain an official response.
Warrants AND due process. It is very easy to get a warrant through a due process, with independent judges and registered probable cause and evidences for it.

Eventual access to these documents are necessary so law enforcement agents must be liable for any possible mischief.

Without the proper checks and balances, it becomes very easy to game the system and put us in a kafkian situation, or worse.
Here is hoping that there is zero.zero percent corruption in the FBI, NSA, and CIA. A lot of disruptive start-ups and research institutions use Google business[1] and education[2] apps...

[1] https://www.google.com/intx/en/enterprise/apps/business/
[2] http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/education/customers.ht...
Gag orders don't require them to deny it, the require them not to confirm it.
Sources: NSA sucks in data from 50 companies (more Prism details)
The existence of this program is classified top secret. I doubt a spokesperson has the security clearance to even know about the program. Even if he did have such a clearance, it would be illegal for him to disclose any information about the program.
Of course its doublespeak. Knowingly stating the exact opposite of what is true as fact. The only way it would be more obviously doublespeak is to say "Spying is privacy".
Glad to help. I hear you, we'd love to put out more benchmarks, but honestly we just don't have enough peopletime to do as much benchmarking as the software deserves, and if you can only put out k benchmarks/month, you'd better be putting out your best k benchmarks.

Tim, our VP of Engineering, does most of our official benchmarking, in between project management, support, and testing (and a million other things). Just today (after we posted the TokuMX vs. MongoDB iibench blog), he said something about how he can't do many more of them, it just takes too long for MongoDB to finish the whole benchmark. That's time our servers can't spend testing the new software we're trying to ship.

My hope is that now that the code is open, more users will start pounding on it and publishing benchmarks. Justin Swanhart recently posted some great benchmark results where he showed us in a less-than-flattering light: http://shardquery.com/2013/05/25/tokudb-vs-percona-xtradb-us.... I haven't studied the workload he ran, but it looked like he may be pointing out some bad query planning behavior and slow cache warmup properties that we should probably address at some point. And that's good for the product and good for the ecosystem, so I am thrilled* that he posted it. I just hope we get 50 more just like it.

Anyway, I'm glad you've got a better understanding. Hope you can find a use case for it!
I don't agree with that statement at all.
They also allow PayPal, which I recently changed to with Hetzner. 99% of my payments to websites are PayPal, for this very reason.
Will it be taped? Would be interested in seeing it :)
The "Algebra will never be the same again" ad is awesome. It's like an artist's conception of a mathematician. Or alternately, it looks like that black-and-white freezeframe in every informercial right before they introduce the product that solves the problem.
Huh. Never had any trouble there and I stayed out every night. Maybe I just looked like a enough of a sloppy backpacker, although I don't think I was traveling with valuables and it's hard to store a laptop in board shorts and a v-neck. I'm pretty big too, so even having lived in rough areas and wandering around in the "bad" parts of cities/the world, I've never had any trouble.
Am I the only one to think this is too good to be true? I mean, this can have the exact opposite effect, and become a big "don't trust what you read on the Internet, kids".

NSA doesn't even have to deny anything. Let the other interested parties wash their hands, and leave with a "told ya" smile.

Not sure if it was intentional or not, but seems a very convenient prank. I know, Conspiracy theory^-1. We'll see.