skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With open source, I am `forced' to figure out how to do things on my own without canned functions. I could be wrong, not having looked at Mathematica for twenty years, but I believe my pattern searching among hundreds of millions of long string filtered generated expressions and their respective digit expansions, requires regular expression processing which takes a lot of
practice before it becomes easy but likely necessary, as I don't see how this regular expression processing could be eliminated.

Perl is deservedly famous for intrinsically integrating its regex engine, so with other's reference material to grow with, eg, all the good bioinformatics books and perl modules -CPAN open source- everything moving ahead directly and often wonderfully, exploring many novel threads derived off whatever I'm primarily currently focused on.
I know this is reductio at hitlerum, but about 70 years ago, you had to be 49% foreign or less not to be filtered out...
If the NSA were specifically interested in YOUR communications, MITM would be the least of your problems.
Are we moving away from good "at scale" programming?
So I was watching a video that recently came out about developing in python: http://vimeo.com/63377197

Watch the guy who talks a bit later. He works for disney and explains about his project called fastpipe that he developed addressing many of the concerns of modern day code usage of parrallelism.

He makes a lot of notions about how software developers are moving away from developing on their single developer machines and instead are getting a large headache from doing so by using node-based multicpu programming!

Hadoop is horribly inefficient at best it seems for it's overhead. And reliability seems to be becoming more and more of an issue.

He was able to achieve decent results computing using python which is known to be a slow language by finding good reliable ways of doing the parallel code development. He makes a lot of assumptions about reliability that also are very interesting decision wise that show that he has programmed for years.

I was wondering what other people think of some of the things he is saying. Are we moving away from the right decisions for developing parallel code?

It seems like we are getting away from the learning how to split things up into processes right without conflicts. And we don't really know how to always pick the more reliable code.
Many of us with some (Bayesian) statistics/game-theory backgrounds are familiar with these kinds of puzzles. There are many (many) such anecdotes littered through math textbooks (HIV +/- testing comes to mind) as well as some real-life scenarios (UC Berkeley hiring practices and women comes to mind -- 1970s case).

HOWEVER, let me just say that two metrics in this little puzzle are simply wrong (or at the very least unfair):

P(+ | bad guy) is simply a LOT larger than 0.99 if you want to play the game correctly. The + comes from a POSITIVE outcome -- that is, a terrorist attack is thwarted and someone is thrown in jail. Some noise in the system (i.e. pizza orders) does NOT skew the positives down. After all, discerning between pizza orders and terrorist activity is part of the algorithmic process -- the automated system may flag both cases, but the buck doesn't stop there (or anywhere close).

P(+ | good guy), again, suffers from the same problems as P(+ | bad guy). Unless there is evidence of 1% of the people being monitored being thrown in jail for terrorism charges, that number is a lot (lot) less than 1%.

There have been plenty of bogus terrorism charges (see Guantanamo) and I think there may be something here. But if we want to play this game correctly, we need to be careful. To do this simulation, we need numbers that we will simply never have access to: e.g. how many terrorist threats did PRISM avert?
S. 1037: Being introduced tomorrow by Rand Paul
Work without E-mail: Is it Possible?
If Obama knew about that - maybe there are grounds for impeachment (seems like bigger than watergate and a blowjob combined).

If he didn't he is just incompetent and unfit to lead the "free" world.
LibreWRT: FSF's newest fully free GNU/Linux distribution
Please note that the current flap is about the NSA spying on Americans.

America collecting each and ever bit of data they can about foreign entities is old news and readily acknowledged.

There are fleets of spy-planes and other signal gathering gear that are declared and on the books. Typically those will respect the relevant stand-off boundaries of the countries of interest.

If you make use of American hosted websites then you can assume that each and every packet is intercepted and monitored either for traffic analysis or even the content of the packet itself.

The only way to stop this is to block out each and every network range that belongs to the United States and each and every range that belongs to an American company abroad.

Good luck with that.
That's not the point.

While we should hold everyone involved - even peripherally - responsible, it's not appropriate or productive to compare Obama to Bush.

We need to frame the objection as, "This is wrong!" not, "This is worse than/just like $OTHER_PERSON." It's implicitly partisan.
Very well voiced! ...`we' wholeheartedly agree with you bro'
It's good to reward the media with pageviews when they write about important topics.
Ask HN: Help flag the NSA stories
Every once in a while, an off topic story will come by that is so inflammatory that people think they need to discuss it over and over everywhere on the internet.

When that spills over here, it drowns out interesting stories, but worse it attracts the sort of users who really like to fight about things on discussion groups. Seeing a homepage filled with 20 flavors of a single story, all of which are off topic for the site, all of which are full of bad behavior, just makes this a worse place.

So please, help out by flagging a dozen or so copies of the same off-topic NSA story that's on the homepage right now. They're the exact reason the "flag" button exists.
I'm going to go way left field. If by being an immigrant (I assume you are having trouble getting residency) you are being bound into slavery (that's my term for working on something you hate, just to earn money) then have you considered relocating to somewhere else where you can have more freedom and possible pursue something truly innovative?

As much as many people will argue otherwise, startups by their very nature are demanding, exhausting and exciting places to work. With strong family commitments you might find it hard to find a mutually acceptable lifestyle balance.
I don't really believe in ethics or principles. Those are just words people use to dress up their preferences about how the world should work.

Where do you draw the line therefore zero is a standard approach from the nays in almost any policy debate, but it is easily defeated. I draw the line somewhere. Not sure where. I'd have to figure it out if I ever heard evidence that Convinced me torture is useful.
http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/community/

http://nodejs.org/community/
What worries me most is that they don't even deny spying on foreigners. With so many international websites and services located in the US, what does that mean for us in Europe? What difference do our European privacy laws make, if we use websites with servers in the US?
Obama was elected on a promise to stop this bullshit. That promise was a lie.

For all his faults, George W. Bush never campaigned as a civil libertarian.
This implies he was chucked into prison for refusing to hand over data to the US government, which is misleading at best.

He was imprisoned for insider trading, appealed on the basis that a witness's testimony (relating to the data-grab) was excluded from his defence, and won a re-trial where he had his conviction and sentence re-instated.

My understanding of this sequence of events is that while the witness was improperly excluded from his trial (thereby allowing him a re-trial), it did not materially alter anything about the 19 counts of insider trading of which he was convicted. So basically he did a good thing, then did a bad thing, and went to prison for the bad thing. Seems all right.
Linear Vs Binary Search (2010, SSE2)
The "everybody does it" defense? OMG.
It's perfectly appropriate to compare them, as there is no longer anything left to contrast between the two.
Well it's definitely possible to hide all of the content from people you aren't very fond of.
Various news sources say they've confirmed it with a number of sources. So it's not a hoax.

The details and implications may not be what we think, but the program is real.
How to be completely Anonymous on the internet:

http://www.slashgeek.net/2012/06/15/how-to-be-completely-ano...
So the Washington Post "leak" was disinformation to distract everyone from the Verizon phone records story?

Karl Rove was alleged to have done something similar during one of Bush's campaigns: Leak a false version of a true story (I believe it was his draft avoidance, but I can't remember ...) and then provide documentation which discredits the inaccurate version, so no publication was willing to cover the story later, regardless of facts.

Is that what's going on here?
Jitsi is another option:

https://jitsi.org
Very well said. I wholeheartedly agree.

The original poster seems more confused about the news being about being a hate towards other countries from fear of terrorism, but in fact it seems more of an overzealous government just trying to overpolice it's own country.

Other countries have just as bad or worse for privacy/internet regulation laws.

The only difference is the US government seems to be talked about more in the news because of it's blatent use of the monitoring where the american citizens and news sites have a bit of a problem with the information coming to light about how much the government is allowed to analyze and collect.
It doesn't look bitter to me. Proud, yes, but not bitter. Seems like Zoho is playing a long game seeking to be profitable for years to come instead of sell-out for immediate cash.

That being said, I used Zoho before, but left for Google Apps. Recently I revisited Zoho, but decided to keep looking for Google alternatives. Zoho has great a checklist feature set, but somehow it feels too web 1.0. They offer a bunch of services, but the ones I care about mostly like basic PIM (mail, contacts, calendar, tasks) are nood integrated deeply enough and feel like they require an effort to use.

Anyways, good luck to Zoho.
The data net was there and doing great, they just didn't have enough personnel and bandwidth to stop it in time. This is actually great news, it means there's a great demand for talented, technologically-minded individuals.
just got the link sent around today - wow! how has this not gained more attention?? bad bad bad linkedin!
ah, ha.. I thought Zoho Creator, a drag and drop app/script builder (or Paas) was their unique idea. Am I misunderstood?

ps: Zoho may prune the garden at any time too.
I think the core problem he was talking about is that people use tools that are bigger than they need to use.

If you have 100TB+ of data, you might need a cluster. Think about it, Google has to deal with all of the pages on the internet; pretty much no one else has that data. So why are we using their methodologies?
@Re EDIT: If I had downvote right I would automatically anyone that brags about downvotes. It just doesn't add anything to the discussion.
I am flagging you down... :) If the front page is filled with same story, it is because people wants that. That is the logic of the HN.
He's not the guy his constituents want. He is the guy 51.5% of his constituents want.

Giving the people what a majority of those people want is a very dangerous thing to do. Part of the theory being having constitutions is to limit the tyranny of the majority, though it is plain to see that in Joe Arpaio's case the limitations are not sufficient. What 51% of voters in Maricopa County apparently want is unacceptable.
Apple #1 on Google for app
Cheers, I'll be sure to keep that in mind next time
Hardcore refactoring. Step by step on a case study.
I think I will try posting this again if this does not get more traction. I really think this is Hacker News material. It explains about a lot of what is going on with a bunch of the major tech companies and involves programming both of which are very attune to the subject of most of the posts on this discussion site.

Maybe i'll try reddit in r/programming if I can't get more tommorrow.
Consider the following from the article:

"Eventually Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III wrote Wyden a letter stating that it would violate the privacy of Americans in NSA data banks to try to estimate their number."

It would violate your privacy to find out if your privacy is violated. This sort of double-think should be in an Orwell novel, not in real life!
Thank you for this hour's Redmond schadenfreude fix! From `Devices' to `Services' the entire retreating front looks like Microsoft's Stalingrad. Anything left intact in Ballmer's bunker?! Hoorah!
Can you prove that Google doesn't gather that data for themselves?
> The U.S. government is on a secrecy binge ... We need whistle-blowers.

Q: What's the difference between the kind of transparency that Wikileaks et al. tries to promote, and the kind of transparency that Mark Zuckerberg wants Facebook users to adopt?

A: The former asks transparency of powerful entities, helping to check their power. The latter asks transparency of relatively powerless individuals, enabling the modern surveillance state and making individuals even more powerless.

The most important thing that we should keep in mind when we talk about any sort of justice in the context of information is how possession of information alters the balance of power in the world. Because politics, ultimately, boils down to who has how much power over whom. It's not about embarrassment. It's all about the loss of authority that public scrutiny and embarrassment can cause.

"Knowledge is power": knowing something about somebody gives you power over that somebody. This rule of thumb even works when we interact with physical objects (if you know how something works, you have the power to use it to your advantage), and it works just as well when we interact with other people. Asymmetric transparency leads to asymmetric power because they know enough about you to take advantage of you but you don't know enough about them to take advantage of them.

This is why I firmly believe that powerful entities should be required to be several orders of magnitude more transparent, and therefore open to public scrutiny, than the average chump would ever need to be. The only thing that can balance off the asymmetry of power that complex social organization usually entails is an asymmetry of knowledge in the other direction. Example: Who I talked with on the phone last night is none of your fucking business. But if you're in a position of considerable power, every meeting you ever have with every lobbyist in the Universe should be damn well everyone's business. This is not unfair at all. Clinton had no right to get secret blowjobs in my opinion. Nobody should be allowed to have both power and privacy, because the combination is a recipe for tyranny.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Even layman people can use their regular computers for more interesting activities like machine learning on decent sized data if it wasn't so focused on just throw your cloud instance up using hadoop and run stuff that way.

There are many people out there that can accomplish some of these tasks with better written code. There is also probably a need for a better hadoop. One that is less about clusters/multiple cpus and more about rented out bigger power computers.
I have read it, twice. Also, I'm not the same person who critiqued the Atlantic in the first place.

Here are my objections to his position:

1. Schneier is calling for people to break the law at great risk to themselves on the ground that the government's current position is immoral (but not illegal).

2. While saying that it's scary what we don't know, he makes no effort to educate his audience on what we do know, such as how this sort of activity comes to be legal and constitutional in the first place, the answers to which lie in the 1970s (see my other comments on Smith v. Maryland today, for example).

3. Schneier has absolutely nothing to say on how this state of affairs might be fixed, or what it is that US citizens should demand of their senators and state representatives to repair the situation through democratic means. My answer to that question is that that we need a constitutional amendment that creates an explicit right to privacy and another that narrows the power of Congress to abdicate its oversight of the Executive branch, which latter is conveniently required to maximize its defensive capabilities. I also think it's high time that the AUMF was rescinded.

4. Schneier has made a fine career out of complaining about the security state but shows no leadership when it comes to rolling it back. We all hate the TSA's instrusive searches and silly rules, yes? But when the TSA proposed loosening the restrictions on what you could take onto a plane, to allow practical exceptions like small pocketknives and so on, airlines lobbied heavily against it on behalf of their staff (who, in fairness, would be facing an elevated risk). Despite years of complaining about the TSA, Schneier did not AFAIK write anything about the proposed changes, let alone express support or encourage others to do so. Although the proposed rule change was pretty small, it would have represented at least a minor victory for common sense instead of security theater. But when it was offered up from public debate, Schneier didn't even consider it worth mentioning to his readers.

Schneier's great at stoking readers' outrage - not so good at educating them or helping them channel it effectively. In my view, his punditry is emotional rather than analytical.
I find myself divided. On one hand I feel like writing this all off as 'well duh' but on the other I feel it's society's responsibility to become indignant about these things. Perhaps it's naive but I feel it should keep some of the worst offenses at bay... That the guys on top at least fear for their jobs if not other forms of punishment.
I wonder how many big-name consulting firms are milking big-name banks for the research.
What makes you guys think they're paying the same price we are for hard drives??

These datacenters are so sophisticated, they are generations beyond the commercial facilities of today. You can imagine the new facility being built will be the cutting-edge, processors and systems years away from commercial use.
248 percent: The increase in 2012 in the number of Skype communications intercepted via PRISM

Is Skype no longer end-to-end encrypted? I'm surprised to see it confirmed (?) that NSA is siphoning up Skype video. How does this MITM work technically?
I agree; a bets minimal option set would be the ones most used on G Reader as far as I can tell:

* Option to hide any unread feeds on sidebar (totally essential for me)
* Unread count on feeds with new items
* Ability to edit and rename folders

If any of these are there already.. I can't find em. Thanks for this great-working and great-looking site though!
Does that somehow make Obama more culpable for the surveillance state?

Or does it just make him a liar?

Look, my point is this: as long as we waste our time bickering over whose fucking fault this mess is, no-one is doing a damned thing to fix it. I'd rather people spend their time and energy on the latter. If you think finger-pointing is a better use of yours, more power to you, and have fun with that.
Antivirus sometimes just blindly detect these free packers as malware! Sigh
We are the Borg. Your differing viewpoint will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.
Book Domino Chain World Record - Seattle Public Library [video]
Comparison Between Solr And Sphinx Search Servers (Solr Vs Sphinx – Fight)
It's even more annoying when you're not from the US. I know this is a big deal, but really ... 20 top posts?
Why isn't Mark Zuckerberg's Twitter Profile verified?
241k+ followers, and only 19 tweets. Is this profile fake? If not, why isn't the profile verified?
> Dropbox, the cloud storage and synchronization service, is described as “coming soon.”

WTF....I don't know why I am surprised by this - but if they get access to Dropbox....wow.

I had let my guard down, but this is just crazy - that there would be nothing I could do to stop it....save for not using Dropbox.

That's an annoying choice to make - but it's a relatively easy one.
A tablet for the wild?
What is up with the names of these bills? "Protect America Act"? Do people not feel their intelligence is being insulted when asked to support something with such a title?
So what happens if you tell them to go away anyway? They take you to court? Raid your datacenter? Good luck getting public support for that. Seems the problem with these secret orders is, you can't actually _enforce_ them without making them public, you can just make threatening gestures.

I'm dissapointed no tech company has decided to play hardball on this...
You let is so broad that it is difficult to answer.
But I'd say that to have to focus on finding differenciation.

Your app maybe wouldn't be bundled, or easier to use, or faster or whatever. I say if there is ONLY one competitor there is definitely some room for you, simply because you would bring a alternative.

I made an app not so long ago that shows the next bus coming to you in real-time in a french city. I competed against the bus company itself.
I got 5 to 10 more users a day currently, simply because I show the results in one click, when 5 are needed for the official app.
I think the ACLU's article was correct when it was written, probably a few years ago. It is no longer correct. In fact, DOJ initiated the second NSL lawsuit. That's the opposite of "withdraw[ing]."

(By way of background, I disclosed the existence of the SF NSL court order last week and also disclosed the existence of the NYC NSL lawsuit.)
All top posts on Hacker News talk about the same thing
How to become a Super Associate
Blogger, With Focus on Surveillance, Is at Center of a Debate
NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls (2006)