skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's exactly what I feel like, but I've been feeling like that for a long time. I used to go out of my way to tell people about these things, but after a while, I figured out that most people just don't care enough to really do anything about it. Sure, they'll pay lip service to the notion that the NSA shouldn't be doing things like this, but there seems to be some sort of implicit trust factor within people that compels them to just shut up and accept that what their leaders are doing is for their own good, which puts a damper on any action they might think about taking. I do think that if the media really got on board with lambasting the government and pointing out the obvious reasons that things like this shouldn't happen, the public at large would eventually start caring, and our society would be better for it - but I don't expect that to happen any time soon, if ever. So instead of hoping that people will eventually catch on to what's going on, I've simply started making plans to get myself out of the pot before the water gets too hot and I'm too cooked to leave.
Technically the are JS falsey, but I choose not to treat them that way. I rarely want to treat the result of a calculation as a boolean condition. However, I often want to know if a calculation isNaN or isEmpty. Just because something is falsey doesn't mean it should be treated that way universally.
Vesper isn't either, just below this post are 3 vesper related links.
"Any senator who’s expressing shock about the program is a liar or a fool. "

Or a good politician. A Senator's purpose many times is just to play to the masses and appear to be outraged at what happens regardless of what the truth is. That's the way they operate so it can appear that they are concerned and getting to the bottom of protecting honest hard working Americans.

They do come off as jackasses frequently. But not everyone that votes for them sees it that way.
Sounds like some one (or many) are blowing whistles. A lot of documents leaking.
The World's Knowledge is Free
How, pray tell, do HFTs make Social Security poorer?
What is truly a scary thought is if the vast, mindless mass of people easily swayed by consumerism, advertisement and buzz, talk about this for about two weeks and then forget the whole thing, screaming "We have NOTHING to hide!" as a logically flawed and incredibly poor excuse.

It won't stay at the top of the news for even two weeks. Most people don't care because a) it doesn't actually affect their lives and b) they actually want government to monitor traffic patterns for potentially suspicious activity. As a society, some 25% of our labor force is engaged in some sort of security activity, not counting police and military. This is arguably a consequence of the fetishization of private property in the US compared to other countries: http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~bowles/GarrisonAmerica2007.pdf

a good, conservatively Green or Green Libertarian government is the only path to resolution

Er...I think you're going to run into some consistency problems there.

United States mass public is uneducated and apathetic (unlike how it used to be 300 years ago

Highly questionable. Most people in 1713 were not educated at all and even if we look at the revolutionary period we should remember that wealthy landowners whose writings have come down to use were economically exceptional (eg John dickinson, the 'Penmnsylvanian farmer' who was chided by Alexander Hamilton for implicitly arguing for 'free as in beer - http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfi... and http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfi... ...please excuse my gross oversimplification, but it's a fact that many colonists saw revolution as a means to get out from under state and private debts owed in England).
Edit: Just saw the portion markings (the stuff on the slides that says their classification level), and I'm going to change my judgement to "this was pretty classified." And whoever released these slides to the public is going to jail for violating the NDA they signed. Jail for quite a few years for knowingly revealing TS information. I'll leave my previous comment below so you won't think I erased anything.

My problem is how they portray this. Direct from the article:

"The highly classified program, code-named PRISM, "

and also:

"The technology companies, which participate knowingly in PRISM operations, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley."

If you have numerous (non-government contractor type) companies knowingly participating in the program, then it isn't "highly classified." And if you thought that your communications were private then you were fooling yourself. Even Tor, the darling of the EFF, was initially developed by the Navy. It's very tough for people to communicate electronically these days without the government being able to listen in.
I bet it is very useful. If you have one or two suspicious persons who happen to be a member of a particular lodge, church, mosque, etc. you can probably usefully winnow down the list of associates to further investigate without a large and intrusive effort investigating the entire group.

People easily imagine the worst case scenarios, but the okay case scenario is surely more typical, e.g. when a man travels to eastern Pakistan to allegedly visit relatives for several months, the FBI can look at the 9 people he spends time with rather than creating dossiers on the 112 people who so happen to attend the same mosque.

(Whether and how the Constitution cares about the "good case", "okay case", "worst case" is a different question.)
There is nothing particularly beautiful in this, it's just a trivially obvious identity (once you know the relevant theory, of course).
Prior discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5835310

TLDR: "Women and minorities just don't want to be successful like us, nothing to criticize here."
I don't think collapsing comments is the perfect solution, but is better than nothing. I don't have an answer, I don't believe anyone has it ready. If anyone knew how to fix the way we talk to people over the internet, that person would be rich by now.
I believe it is required for some sections to be in all-caps in regards to EULAs to make it more obvious it is there. Specifically, disclaimers, waivers of liability and warranties are almost always in capitol letters.
London Map of 2nd Languages
> What's the significance of this?

I cannot remember (I'm 49yo) the NYT ever going from endorsing a candidate [1] to "The administration has now lost all credibility." That's quite a fall politically.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/opinion/sunday/barack-obam...

Edit: I have to agree with them, but I hold out hope that this will cause several high-profile firings in the administration.
Ask HN: What are the most important OSS projects of all time?
Hi HN,

I was talking with some of my co-workers about how important OSS has been in advancing technology. I argued that without OSS, technology wouldnt be close to where it is today. Some of the projects I listed as being the most important were the following:

* Programming Languages - Php, Python, Ruby, etc.
* Linux - the OS basis for nearly everything
* Android - powers a large percentage of the worlds smart phones
* Wordpress, Drupal, blogging platforms - Empowering peoples voice

What else am I missing? Any other threads I can read about this?
The switch to https = no referrer in whatever analytics he uses.
Am I immune to any challenge by saying my slander is an expression of emotion?

She didn't say something of the sort of "I was treated in a sexist way". She said something more like "The skeptics movement is fundamentally sceptic". That is not an expression of emotion, but slander. And even if it were, it shouldn't be allowed.
US or else, I wouldn't trust other governments either, even if you trust governments, your cloud provider could still get hacked and even if it doesn't get hacked you still have to trust a third party: your cloud provider. If you're storing stuff on the cloud, encrypting it on the client first is probably the only way to get (pretty good) privacy.
This allegation has been debunked. Apple device are not being throttled. In fact, the original author has deleted his article.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7037/apple-not-throttling-ipho...
Just a note - forEach doesn't work in IE8. I wonder at what point can we stop caring about that?
>> maybe I'm naieve but you should do something about your confidence, aren't you raising a child?
> I don't really know what to make of this - I do, but it's not like I can just pull myself together to raise my self-confidence. I have been making gradual improvements, but I just can't flick a switch.

I'm sorry I am not trying to say that it's something you can just do, but you were sounding a bit defeatist. If you say you're making gradual improvements I respect that.

The attention-based economy is simpler than you make it sound. The idea is just to build something you like, NSFW or not, and put it on github. Use some hip technologies to show you have the ability to learn new technology.

For fun, here's a small recipe:

Pick a combination of 3 technologies that have been up on HackerNews lately, say AngularJS with MongoDB and Node.js, do 2 small projects with them, and maybe an Android app in Java (or whatever your enterprisey language of choice is) that does something silly like open your garage door or plays words your child said.

Now you have 3 original projects on github that show aptitude in frontend dev, backend dev and app dev, fill out your github resume with at least 3 forked open source projects you find interesting, and another 2 you submitted a patch to (just fix a spelling mistake in their docs or a trivial bug in their tracker).

I bet you could build this github resume in 2 months of free moments in evenings/weekends. Accomplishing this will give you a confidence boost ('hey I can do hip stuff') and I bet it'll do your resume a lot of good :)
Agreed - but they are doing a full scan when doing searches so I don't see the benefit.
Where to ?
You've never heard of RIAA, MPAA, et al?

What happens when marketing departments realize they can use the data freely given to them to target people to blackmail and extort, rather than just flash ads at and try to sell to?

"For a monthly recurring fee of just $XX, conveniently and discreetly billed to your credit card, you can prevent this information from being sent to [spouse||significant other||law enforcement||employer]."

Or company will be founded--if not already--to buy bulk data and develop reports and profiles on individuals and groups, with law enforcement and the intelligence community as the primary customers? Sign up and buy a report/profile for $25-50.
I feel like saying this:
Ideas are a dime a dozen. It's execution that matters.

But, I feel this would be harsh, even though it's true. So, instead, I'll ask you this:
Who is going to pay for the product or service your idea will lead to?
I just emailed Tim Cook that imho iCloud is dead.

He is welcome to add options to use my own cloud storage while using clientside encryption, and I might reconsider.

You're welcome to send him your opinion as well. It's tcook@youknowntherest.
Love this. Thanks.

I can see a bunch of ways I'll make use of this. The first one I attempted to work on involved trying to color scale the use% in the output of a "df -h".

Alas it didn't work as I expected it:

$ df -h | colout --scale 0,100 "([0-9]*)%" scale
ValueError: could not convert string to float:

However if I grep out just the /dev/sda line it does what I expected:

$ df -h | grep /dev/sda | colout --scale 0,100 "([0-9]*)%" scale
/dev/sda 20G 3.2G 16G 17% /

The 17% is a pretty blue.

Tips?
How does this stuff work? Would someone at the NSA contact dropbox and ask them to build in a backdoor or are they just able to access whatever the fuck they want and simply do?
If the NYT publicly states that his administration "has now lost all credibility" it should be significant. They are the flagship liberal / progressive newspaper in the country. Their blunt outrage signifies an important element of his party's support is rebelling against the President's actions.

However he will probably be able to just shrug it off. US citizens have become too fat and lazy to give a damn about anything but tax cuts and their entitlement. They've forgotten that this is still a world where you have to fight for what is important.
> If your "opinion" is stated in the form "x is y," then maybe you are the one who should be more conscious of the way people communicate.

I don't think that's true. Some examples:

"That place smells bad."

"Red is too bright a color for a car."

"Lost is a terrible TV show."

Those are all opinions and it's obvious that they're opinions. You could prepend "In my opinion" to each one and no one would complain, but it's unnecessary, and people say stuff like this all the time with full knowledge that they're opinions. Their status as opinions isn't contingent on anyone stating that they are; they're just opinions because they're value judgements or statements of preference.

I've found that it's generally easy to separate opinions from statements of fact, and so it's not required that anyone be the "that's just your opinion!" police. Of course it's their opinion; that's why they said it. The weird thing about complaining that opinions should be explicitly demarcated is that is suggests that either a) you have trouble telling the difference between fact and opinion or b) you assume the person saying them doesn't know the difference. Both of those are bad.
Probably slightly safer using a US hosting company. At least some civil rights apply but I don't think there are any rules against the NSA spying on people outside the US.
My point was that if you are developing a program to do electronic market making (adding liquidity), then the program you write to test that program must by definition be taking liquidity (it shoots test orders at the quotes provided by your market making algo).
The only way to ensure your data will not be (easily) extracted is to encrypt it.
Isn't charging 5 cents a shipment very low?
Criticizing a president for wire-tapping puts the NYT in an incredibly awkward spot, as they forced their reporter to shelve the Bush wire-tapping scoop until after the 2004 election, back when privacy violations were still something people could get up in arms about.
I totally agree on the attitude on the blog, the author is clearly working through non-mathematical issues on their own (if you read some of the other entries you can see how those challenges affect their writing). That said, I tend to see it as a counterpoint to mathematics blogs that are bit too gushing the other way. And its amusing the path that is taken as well.
oh, and here's to the button monkeys:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/opinion/president-obamas-d...

"The administration has now lost all credibility. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it."

So it's okay to submit as an article, just not for a mere mortal commenter to basically say the same fucking thing. Which reminds me, I use phrases like "'n shit" to distance myself from you lot. I could "polite talk" like the best of them, I just don't trust people who can't say "fuck", so I don't see a reason to. Think of it as garlic to vampires.
I'm probably missing something, but that is the Taylor series at 0.
This is a super west coast view. MIT/Virginia Tech/and many other east coast technical schools send people to the DoD in droves.
This creates lock-in with whatever company is storing the cards. Let's say you let PayPal store all your cards and you only had tokens. Now, you want to switch to Stripe, but you'd have to re-acquire the cards from all your customers to do so. If you're doing recurring billing, you're going to lose a significant percentage of your revenue doing this, perhaps so much that it's not feasible to switch even though you're unhappy with your current processor.
Have the voters wise up and then what ? Vote for either Romney or Obama ?
Unpaid internships are a gross circumvention of minimum wage laws.

Either the interns are there to learn (In which case, they should not be working on anything that provides the employer with value) - or they are employees. If your business can't afford to pay its employees, you should probably not be in business.
NSA extract email, photos, audio, video, docs from MSFT, GOOG, FB, AAPL, others
I've been on the receiving end and posted a couple times trying to explain how it happens. In short, the NSA doesn't typically appear directly. Instead they use the courts and subpoenas to induce compliance for what seem like mundane court cases.

See a previous post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5754641
I suspect just getting a request from a three letter agency is enough to make most CTOs and CEOs wet themselves and roll over. (Standing up against the government is not usually part of the business plan.)
i had been a C++ hater for a long time, partly because of the environment i was in (strongly C, anti-C++) and partly because most of the C++ hackers i knew enjoyed abusing language features.

i'm reading a bunch of C++ lately and i have to say i like it, i like it a lot. it's something i may have to dive into and actually learn.

some of this is due, i think, to solid standards coming in, but also a lot of growth on my part as a coder.

plenty of things are done better in OOP than not, where re-use through inheritance, design by composition, and modularity are needed and well executed.

my bigotry against C++ has ended.
Author here, "core" is a fuzzy term I suppose, but it's often the most disclosed by services to the outside world. I agree it would be interesting to compare these metrics to some baremetal numbers. It would then be relatively easy to determine if they are dedicated cores of the type advertised.
At least we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Skype has a backdoor now. Not really surprising although they did have some security people analyze the protocol and state that it was e2e secure.

FTA: "According to a separate “User’s Guide for PRISM Skype Collection,” that service can be monitored for audio when one end of the call is a conventional telephone and for any combination of “audio, video, chat, and file transfers” when Skype users connect by computer alone. Google’s offerings include Gmail, voice and video chat, Google Drive files, photo libraries, and live surveillance of search terms."
Good tip, you never know when it's time for SF.
You are conflating market making and latency arb, which are not the same thing. All of your points apply to latency arbitrage and you haven't said anything about market making.

As long as there are profitable arbitrage opportunities, people are going to go after them. The profits from latency arb aren't infinite and things will hit an equilibrium when the profits line up with the costs. Incidentally, I don't think latency arb is a bad thing. The arbitrageurs keep prices in line between exchanges, so you don't have to worry as much about getting a crappy price at one exchange when a better price was available at another exchange.
> Yet, none of them care about your pet issue.

Actual former East Germans still remember the Stasi and Germany itself has fought for privacy (see Germany v. Facebook).
Looks good, thanks for the tip
The only thing I don't understand is, why should I be worried if I'm not doing anything wrong?
XBox One needs to connect to the web every 24 hours, disables gaming after that
Right on, I get that, but truthy(NaN) and truthy(5) both return true, so you still don't know if the calculation isNaN.

Btw, I should have said first: I love the article in general and it's great to see these techniques becoming more mainstream in javascript. Thank you!
will be exciting to see how soon these servers become compromised and massive amounts of private information leaked. I would give it a year tops!
They hand out these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter

You're not even supposed to reveal that you are complying (gag order). Google has been in the news recently about fighting one in court.
I'm just going to leave these here:

https://www.cdt.org/content/donate

https://supporters.eff.org/donate
I don't believe they need backdoors, they probably just ask for the data and it's provided to them by those companies to comply with the current laws (or at least their interpretation of it.)

I'm pretty sure dropbox can reverse any encryption they use for the files they store. Or do they even encrypt the data?
It's probably as common to have them falsy as truthy; notably, they're truthy in Ruby.
> whether this is due to a difference in policy or random occurrences is not clear to me

Also, 6 is a numerator. The denominator is unknown. Are there more leaks under the Obama administration, period? Are people more willing to leak? I don't feel like there's enough information available to make a judgement call.
It's described for a couple of the cooperating corporations in the article.

For example, for Facebook, the analyst goes to a special webpage/site at Facebook, then they simply clicks through a "Yep, this person is a terrorist" EULA and they have full access to Facebook's database (eg. full access to user content). I bet they rejoiced when Facebook Graph opened shop.
>Where does this money come from?

In theory those posting liquidity will reduce the bid/ask spread, those that are taking liquidity will see a reduction in frictional costs of buying and selling costs. It is the reduction in frictional costs that generates $$$. That and being able to have an edge in whatever orderbook/microstructure you are playing on.
I wonder whether he has ever written a blogpost that doesn't mention receiving his PhD at 20. I find his self-aggrandizing intolerable.
Is anyone else really impressed with his personal archive of documents or scannings of them?

I've gotta get rid of my drobo FS and upgrade to a serious colo or something.
How does any government action work? It may start clever and/or subtle, but the fundamental threat is that of violence. You will either be compelled to pay fines, have your equipment confiscated, be thrown in jail, or some combination of the three.
The spineless, reprehensible CEOs are doing it willingly.
Also, the install docs mention python2.7 but after a bit of head to brickwall I realised that this is trying to use python3.

To get it working I needed to do:

sudo python3 setup.py install

And /usr/local/bin/colout was created for me (unlike what it mentions in the readme atm).
Paper: Memory Barriers: a Hardware View for Software Hackers
I think you mean k-means is "the first port of call when clustering." K-nearest neighbors is a supervised learning algorithm (for regression or classification), not a clustering algorithm.
I find the article a little superficial, but there is an underlying truth that can be valuable: sometimes the best way to be great at something is simply to become better and better at that thing, rather than hoping one or three bold and brilliant choices will reap a windfall.

I would cite the Wright brothers as an excellent real life example. They were very far from the brightest, best educated, hardest working, or best-financed. But they did do a lot of careful, incremental improvements. And most importantly, they chose to improve themselves: they decided that learning to become skilled at both flying and building gliders would be an important step, before daring to strap on a powerful engine to see what happens.
> I hold out hope that this will cause several high-profile firings in the administration.

Why would it? It's pretty obvious Obama's complicit in this - why would he fire those who are implementing policies that he's supporting?
I had 5 minutes of downtime, but everything seems to be back in working order.
Not to mention that they select in favour of those who can afford to live in a high cost of living area without an income.
Any data shared with hosted services really needs to be seen as postcards ie open for any agency to read.