skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So when do we get to read about The Machine in Person of Interest?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series)
The series has to be absolutely convergent. That is, you can rearrange the terms of \sum_{i=0}^\infty a_n freely if and only if \sum_{i=0}^\infty |a_n| converges. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_series_theorem
You've misread me. I didn't say "everyone in sub-Saharan Africa is hankering for a RoR coder of their own".

My point is that everyone who is connected to the global economy is indirectly connected to everyone else in it. The overall system pushes prices, goods and money around in an impossibly large web of interactions. We can see the local factors, but we can't see the whole picture.

Nevertheless, the price of lettuce at the supermarket, the price of a new laptop, the hourly rate I bill, the cost of bullets for an AK-47 being used in a civil war: these are all, ultimately, connected together.
Texas Says It's OK to Shoot an Escort If She Won't Have Sex With You
Matlab is big in my field, and I've avoided it. I use Python instead instead. If I want to do symbolic stuff (like Mathematica does), I can use SymPy.

I think being open is good for several reasons. You can inspect the code, meaning that those weird bugs that pop up eventually are solvable. Additionally, the licenses are a pain in the ass. Not having them encourages more collaboration.
Whistleblower William Binney on NSA Internet surveillance program Stellar Wind
Internet giants deny granting government 'direct access' to servers
Google, Facebook, Microsoft And Apple Deny Participation In NSA PRISM
I take the view that I can change the world. But also that what I can change isn't unlimited.

I change my mind about the boundary line pretty frequently.
What about donations to Wikileaks? Or maybe even the ACLU. I'm not convinced the EFF has been a consistent critic of the administration. The problem is organizations that have a partisan bias which makes their advocacy suspect.
Hgdeal.com
Yeah – This was too quickly worded. What I'm saying is that these middle-size companies are too large to be seen as sexy startups that can make you millions, yet still too small to provide the mentorship needed for jr talent. One or two jr hires can be mentored, but that won't meet the demand, and is super expensive.
The cost comes in the labor of the organization that needs to bootstrap and maintain the network of volunteers - this includes marketing to them that it's safe and worthwhile to load software onto their computer. For instance, SETI@home has a budget in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sah_budget.php . Who would donate to Snapchat@home when it's just as easy to get Snapchat+ads on your phone?
Halo: Spartan Assault Domain Names Previously Used By Microsoft
I Only semi-agree.

To truly understand if your product has hit the mark, you need to have the metrics/analytics to be able to assess those factors, look for tipping points, know what to remove etc. Sure, don't do premature micro optimization.. but massive optimization to get product market fit is still a form of optimization that needs to be done, for example, A/B testing different landing pages to discover what people are actually looking for, each page with different subsets of 'features'.
Hayek is basically saying that seeing ends or purpose in an emergent system is a mistake.

It's like seeing a purpose in the weather. It just is.
That is hyperbole. The number of terrorist incidents is massively low, and the few that the government claims to have stopped were such laughably unrealistic plots that one wonders the government even bothered. Meanwhile, we have a government surveillance program that literally surpasses the level of the Stasi, here in the United States, and simultaneously an administration that will not even reveal the criteria used for deciding when to engage in an extrajudicial killing.

Sorry, but you cannot scare me with terrorism. I would rather see the rare terrorist attack than live in a country where I have to think twice about what I say on the phone.
I've toyed with that idea ever since WinerWatcher [1] , even started a repo or two, but nobody in my circle of friends seemed to believe in it, so I dropped it. More or less like it happened with any personal project I've ever started since 1999...

[1] http://brian.carnell.com/articles/2003/mark-pilgrims-winer-w...
As others have pointed out, you made a quite a sweeping generalisation. What I will add is that what other general groups of people have more emphasis and training on teaching skills and not because it's directly applicable to their career? I'm a Mormon. We have manuals (Publicly available, for example, Preach My Gospel[1] and Teaching, No Greater Call[2]) that focus on asking good questions, empathy and rapport, lesson plans (Interrogation plans?), understanding those you teach, studying and using resources (Scriptures), how to tell if the students are learning, different teaching methods, listening skills, etc. From an early age we have opportunities to teach too and this continues on forever—much to the disdain of some members though haha.

On my mission I spoke with everyone from those in prisons to the general populace to someone running for president of the country. He did become the president too. I/we did quite well in conversing with the apparent equivalent of foreign informants in the context of this discussion.

[1] http://www.lds.org.au/manual/preach-my-gospel-a-guide-to-mis...
[2] http://www.lds.org.au/manual/teaching-no-greater-call-a-reso...
FYI the redactions of the cables as originally published were done with the assistance of several established news organizations. One of which was The Guardian. Therefore the result you criticize was the result of the same editorial process that you extol.

(As for Wikileaks itself, they eventually released all of the cables without redaction.)
Carol Hunt: Violent misogyny on Facebook is no laughing matter
I would be very surprised if at least one foreign agency at least has not already hacked into both Verizon and AT&T ... one could argue that the US govt has at least been trying to do it (semi) legitimately just to keep up.
"You will definitely suffer a terrorist attack" certainly sounds like something that a person who sells insurance would say.
I think it's really weird to say that someone has lost all credibility on this issue. I mean, credibility is something that applies to people and entities, not to issues.
Some glaring wrong points.

knowing the metadata does not only tell them "who you called and when"

since it also include the tower IMEI and trunk, it probably also know your location when you place the call. And if it was to another mobile phone, the location of the other end of the call.
'Government' is too respectful.

'Gumment' has the contempt of
some barefoot guy in the hills of
east Tennessee out in the woods
with a home built still. I
find that contempt very appropriate.

Otherwise your point is well taken.
you need some more supportive friends. Hit me up; I love innovative things like this by passionate people. I even like to work on them in my spare time, collaboratively (remotely of course). Contact info is on the profile page.
Gmail did exactly the same thing. Remember the circles(?) privacy snafu?
No, I was suggesting that the government has touched things that many people don't realize. There might not be an explicit backdoor in the code, but it's quite possible there is a vulnerability that the government can exploit. I'm not saying that there is, but if there was it wouldn't be publicized and they'd be milking it for all it was worth before someone else discovers the hole and fixes it.
I was rather impressed by those little invitation cards. Clever marketing.
The week in cloud: Can Windows Azure disrupt Amazon’s cloud? Stay tuned.
"It's called protecting America," added Senator Dianne Feinstein

The Congressperson who leads the group providing oversight on things like this thinks you're stupid.
Seriously, I have a hard time accepting a lack of editorializing as a serious argument in favor of Wikileaks. Collateral Murder was editorialized to the point that it hurt Wikileaks' credibility, if anything.

Yes, we got the raw information as well, but often after highly publicized, deeply editorialized publicity stunts.

I agree with the premise of the headline: an organization like Wikileaks is incredibly valuable to a functional and transparent democracy. Wikileaks itself, however, suffers from far too many fundamental problems to serve as anything other than a vague outline of what such an organization should be.
NASA to launch equipment for 3D manufacturing in space
I've never been able to figure the gumment/gubmint guys out. Are they making fun of rednecks? Or are they assuming the role of some sort of redneck freedom fighter? Do rednecks even say "gumment?"
Just a follow-up. A day has passed and the import looks stalled. I'll keep checking for the next few days.
Let's see. Besides the scary terrorists they have phone records going back to at least 2006 of reporters talking to sources, government and business whistleblowers, all kinds of business negotiations, powerful people calling prostitutes or drug dealers, political rivals, activists and protesters and on and on. It's every other phone call made. And we are not allowed to know what protections they have on database access or what their data retention is. It's almost guaranteed it will be abused if it hasn't already, which we wouldn't be allowed to know either.
Typically any edit to a published piece, no matter how small, will have some kind of annotation indicating it was edited.
Your expert analysis flies directly in the face of the testimony of former NSA analyst turned whistleblower William Binney. Given he wrote the software that underlies Stellar Wind, I'm going to go with his assessment of the situation.

His claim is that Stellar Wind was originally designed specifically for foreign intelligence gathering, then repurposed by the NSA to do domestic spying. Domestic spying was his motivation for leaving the NSA and becoming a whistleblower in the first place.
Why would FB give the NSA direct access? FB employs plenty of people with sufficient skills to send the desired information over when needed.
HTML5 gaming is doing well
They are not and should not be a consistent critic of any administration. I see them as a non-partisan voice of the people for and against policies which otherwise are without a voice. When the administration issues a call against bad patents, the EFF supports and promotes that call When the administration issues a call to silence all discussion of warrantless wiretapping they denounce that call.

If they were entirely partisan or entirely anti-government they'd be a lot less effectual. By being issue-specific and in helping the government properly codify their own laws in addition to just slamming them for bad laws the EFF is a much more powerful and respectable entity worthy of our support.
Only legal nerd enjoy reading Supreme Court decisions, but here's a quick breakdown of how to read this (you don't have to read the whole thing to get it).

The first paragraph, reproduced below, is the 'summary,' which tells you what the case is about:

The telephone company, at police request, installed at its central offices a pen register to record the numbers dialed from the telephone at petitioner's home. Prior to his robbery trial, petitioner moved to suppress "all fruits derived from" the pen register. The Maryland trial court denied this motion, holding that the warrantless installation of the pen register did not violate the Fourth Amendment. Petitioner was convicted, and the Maryland Court of Appeals affirmed.

Next, the part after the word HELD: is known as the holding, and this is the part of the ruling which has legal force and constitutes precedent designed to guide courts going forward into the future.

Finally, the opinion (beginning with 'Mr. Justice Blackmun delivered the opinion of the court:') is an explanation of what the holding means by one of the judges who was in the majority (which particular judge is assigned at the whim of the Chief Justice, if s/he is with the majority, or otherwise the most senior Justice in the majority group). A concurrence is a supplementary or orthogonal explanation from another justice who supports the decision but for a slightly different legal reason. A dissent is an explanation of how a justice on the losing side thinks the law should have been interpreted, or addressing some perceived flaw in the opinion.

The opinion, concurrences, and dissent are (of course) of great interest to lawyers and judges who have to consider similar cases in the future, but it's important to remember that they're not law (lawyers collectively refer to them as dicta, meaning 'speeches' or 'sayings'.). Only the holding is law. I have seen decisions where the holding set precedent and the opinion is so logically or factually flawed as not to make sense, but bear in mind that you can't overturn a court's decision solely by pointing out flaws in the opinion, because the opinion itself is not law. You have to either point a contradiction or falsity within the holding itself (rare) or start over with reference to external sources (Constitution, legislation, prior precedent) to show why the holding is wrong.

It's very important, and often difficult, to distinguish between the holding and the dicta. I mention this because many people, and especially hackers, are liable to get caught caught in some ambiguity or linguistic argument about the contents of an opinion and mistakenly think that they've thereby invalidated the holding. Lawyers and even courts are not immune to this kind of mistake, and cases sometimes come apart because one side has relied too heavily on a particular sentence in an opinion.
It takes a lot of data to get good A/B test results and you can't run all these tests at the same time and in parallel. A lot of newer startups simply don't have the traffic or data available to optimize like crazy. I think the key is just to focus on your core metrics, like engagement for a consumer product or whatever your metric is for a B2B company (contracts, revenue, etc.).
Well no, the demo is removing the green screen but only in the shaders. As I said, this really isn't a big deal, but it does add complexity.
No. Don't downplay people concerned with privacy who noticed a series of obvious, blatant actions over a period of literally decades as cynics or conspiracy nuts.

You are picking on people; we really did know, not "know." It was obvious, it remains obvious, and the fact is that its going to continue and get worse despite the revelations of this week, unless we do something.

Painting rational people who notice and complain about government overreach as paranoid is precisely what enables the expansion of these policies. You should be asking what you can do now to help rather than setting us up to be further discredited or ignored by implying our years of complaining weren't substantiated until just now.
It's technically very amusing but I have really mixed feelings about running code on others' gear even for good.
The 'Fair Use' case for this is pretty easy and strong:

Transformative use... a form of comment on the original... negligible impact on market for the original... no attempt to profit from the republishing.
So? The seemingly random enforcement of laws is a hallmark of dictatorships.
Another very interesting part of the article is the call for the decryption of the SMP source code:

http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2013/06/there-was-a-time-befo...
Technically they didn't, but interpreting how Jones will be used going forward is like reading tea leaves. Technically the Supreme Court, in Jones, ruled that altering a car in order to track its location constitutes a search. On this matter, five justices (Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, and Sotomayor) agreed to rule narrowly and put off any decisions on wider surveillance for another day. Scalia's opinion of the court makes it clear that it is not deciding any issues beyond that. Sotomayor's concurrence agrees.

Beyond that point, things become a bit tricky. Alito filed a concurrence in judgement (meaning he reached the same decision on different grounds) arguing the GPS tracking was a search because it was too intrusive in terms of the information collected and therefore violated a reasonable expectation to privacy. Kagan, Breyer, and Ginsberg joined him.

If that were the end of the matter, that would not make things hard at all, but then we have to come back to Sotomayor's concurrence. In her concurrence she expressly agreed that although the case was disposed of narrowly with her support, she also agreed with the concurrence in judgement that it violated reasonable expectation of privacy, so in this she endorsed the minority opinion after joining the majority which is why this is tricky to make sense of.

At very least, the fact that 5 justices appear to agree that this is a problem gives circuit courts permission to experiment with rationales as to why this is the case. It is however premature to say that the Supreme Court has so ruled.

To recap, you have three opinions in Jones:

Opinion of the court (Scalia, joined by Roberts, Thomas, Kennedy, and Sotomayor): Reasonable expectation to privacy is not the only test of the 4th Amendment. When there is a common law trespass there is always a search. We need not decide whether this violates reasonable expectation to privacy because we can rule this was a search due to the trespass.

Concurring in judgement (Alito, joined by Breyer, Ginsberg, and Kagan): This surveillance violates the 4th Amendment due to its intrusiveness and the level of information obtained. People have a reasonable expectation to privacy that is violated by massive surveillance of this sort.

Sotomayor, concurring with Scalia: I join Scalia in ruling on narrow grounds, but I also think that Alito is right....
I know that even people who lie a LOT (compulsory style) can sometimes be trusted to give truthful answers on things they feel confident (if not proud) about and are knowledgeable in and have a healthy attidude towards. I don't trust Obama on things like police states or killing people with robots, but I have zero idea what he knows about gardening. I personally know nothing, and if he gave me advice on it I would initially trust him.

If this is a stupid thought process I apologize, I am slightly sleep deprived.
Rather, I'm trying to hold onto the idea that my mail is not directly piped, entirely, into a government tracking and storage system. No questions asked, no filters: just everything.

Which is what is probably happening right now.
There's a famous quote somewhere about where political power really comes from… I look to history (and present day actions) and it seems like a fitting solution to meaningful representation. Then again, years later we could be right back where we started…

Hint: The last bit I left out rhymes with "carol of the sun" ;)
I respect Warren Buffet, but since when is he an expert on predicting nuclear attacks in America?
Additionally, the licenses are a pain in the ass. Not having them encourages more collaboration.

Yes!

While Mathematica is a great product (or ecosystem), the license overhead is extremely irritating, and a bit scary if you're running business-critical apps on it. (Lost touch with the license server? Oops, your applications won't run.)
Ah this old chestnut... Clearly the author believes in fighting flames with a flamethrower. Anyone could write the exact same arguments against this piece, just as he does against Linus. His arguments aren't well backed, and his tone is even more inflammatory than Linus...

Sad to say that a lot of people's bias against c++ is rooted in their experience with it 10-20 years ago. Poor compilers, poor stdlibs, poor portability, etc. If that is you, I would encourage you to check out what modern c++ is like. C++11 fixes a bunch of things, c++14 will fix some things that the committee missed. Yeah, c++ is big and complicated, but so is every language, even C. Yeah the C core language is small, but any large project starts either rolling their own library for data structures, algorithms, string processing, etc, or linking in behemoths like glib. C++ just comes with a lot of the basics included, and learning the best practices and modern idioms of using the language isn't that bad. Consider:

unique_ptr<foo> bar(); // c++
foo* bar(); // c.

The C++ version conveys way more information (and is almost impossible to screw up its use accidentally), without the need for comments, and compiles to the same code. This is just one example, but they abound.
I'm just happy someone found a productive use for Facebook.

But right, it can't be kept in check because it will bleed out into other areas of law enforcement. Then we hit back. But I do think people's thermometers are good enough to know when something like this is warranted and when it's not. When you remember that we are at war, on our own soil, this is a very minor thing. But if one major attack happens though it will create a panic and then we'll see major changes to our way of life. And a lot of the same tough guys here from New York and San Francisco will be the ones demanding it.
That could certainly be the case. The only two plausible reasons for leaking classified information are moral convictions or personal gain (selling it to the news or a foreign country). Edit: Maybe three reasons. Blackmail/extortion is a possibility that doesn't quite fall into the personal gain category.

However noble the intention, it doesn't change the fact that everyone who has access to that information has signed an NDA and been through a security indoctrination (indoc used without the negative connotation in this case). They knew exactly what the punishment is for what they did. The jury that would nullify that would be a rare find in the US. It's basically zero probability if it was a military member subject to the UCMJ.
...that is still outside the scope of the program that revealed the information.
Google ordered by US judge to turn over data to FBI
Here's hoping! https://spideroak.com/faq/questions/35/why_isnt_spideroak_op...
Absolutely. I'm completely on board with the concept of an organization acting as an information clearing house for leakers; I just feel that Wikileaks is the wrong organization to be doing the job.

Whether it's intentionally making releases dripping with spin or the inability to function internally (e.g., resulting in the destruction of the Citibank documents), it's clear to me that Wikileaks just isn't up to the job of serving as that sort of clearing house in a credible manner.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be anyone else stepping up to the plate to take up that challenge at the moment.
I don't know if Hayek would be on board with it. The main problem is that it introduces a new criterion for arranging production which doesn't emerge from the existing order.

Hayek isn't trying to build the Ideal World. He's taking the world he saw and said "here's how it works", and then, "here's why it wouldn't work if we decided to design a system instead of having it emerge".

So for example, if subsidiarity is imposed, how does that play out? You already create a requirement to deduce what the smallest group capable of producing a thing is. But we already have something like that in the market. It's lumpy and fuzzy, but it does eventually kill off the too large and the too small (modulo endless tinkering by legislators).

Coase explained that firms emerge because of transaction costs. Sometimes it's easier and cheaper to do a thing in existing groups. Sometimes it's not. The tension between these allows firms to emerge from the social order. I'd add that the rise of IT has enabled coordination on a vastly greater scale, which has helped to create the modern corporation.
Nice find, great article on Newsdiffs, In the Times.
Why do you need CS fundamentals if you are applying for a role which suits your background?
I'd like the raw/unredacted slides, please (or at least images of them, to protect the source).