skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's useful when discussing this topic to break the word "spy" down into more discrete terms to understand exactly what we are discussing.

I found this article to be useful in differentiating the various terms:

On its face, the document suggests that the U.S. government regularly collects and stores all domestic telephone records. I use the caveat because there are several ways to interpret it, assuming it is real. (It looks real.)

A few definitions: to "collect" means to gather and store; to "analyze" means that a computer or human actually does something with the records; to "intercept" means that a computer or human actually listens to or records calls.

...
The NSA, under the FISA Amendments Act, is able to analyze metadata, like incoming and outgoing call records, so long as the Attorney General certifies that a particular set of information is useful for reasons of national security. Then, the NSA asks the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to order that a company comply. As that bill was being ironed out, this step was requested by private companies because they wanted protection from lawsuits in case innocents — or millions of innocents — found that the NSA had gathered their call information.

My own understanding is that the NSA routinely collects millions of domestic-to-domestic phone records. It does not do anything with them unless there is a need to search through them for lawful purposes. That is, an analyst at the NSA cannot legally simply perform random searches through the stored data. He or she needs to have a reason, usually some intelligence tip. That would allow him or her to segregate the part of the data that's necessary to analyze, and proceed from there.

In a way, it makes sense for the NSA to collect all telephone records because it can't know in advance what sections or slices it might need in the future. It does not follow that simply because the NSA collects data that it is legal for the NSA to use the data for foreign intelligence or counter-terrorism analysis.

http://theweek.com/article/index/245228/the-fbi-collects-all...

This is written specifically about the telephone call metadata, but being able to differentiate exactly what is collected about Internet traffic would also aid this discussion. Unfortunately this would only be possible if the government was more transparent about what is being collected.
It's understandable that the simple axiom "life isn't fair" is so hard to internalize until you've actually seen it in action. It is nice that this article gives at least a little depth to that, but the title is a bit of a no-brainer.

For people who don't understand it yet, this post is unlikely to help (but then, nothing will, and I won't fault the author for trying). For those of us who do, though, it's almost comically self-evident.
He's said that any loss of power or stability would result in a safe failure mode. I can't see how that fits in with a thousand kilometre long looping supersonic cable in the sky.
Did the hosts of these properties do any vetting of these burglars, meth addicts or prostitutes they allowed into their home?
As a society, are we rallying behind an app that helps people engage in extramarital affairs as this post suggests? Without getting into morality, don't we agree that affairs impact not just the two participants but the families surrounding them?

Say, abused/neglected person looking for a way out, but not feeling safe without some sort of social support outside of marriage. Don't be too quick to judge.
People are willing to pay for Heroin because it scratches a chemical itch in our brains. People don't say they want heroin because they intellectually know it ruins their lives and does nothing positive for them.

Such is the predatory nature of the capitalist.
TermKit[1] was built in this way a few years ago. It was novel at the time and the demo[2] seemed promising, but looks like it hasn't been updated in ~2 years now.

[1] https://github.com/unconed/TermKit

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6Z5dnlfcls
He was certainly an impetus for stronger action from what I can tell, but that's an overstatement. The 2010 bill was originally drafted to target property groups that predate Airbnb or him.
Unsuck your backbone js
At the risk of losing whatever credibility I might have gained by my previous post, an alternative suggestion would be to simply take the power of legislation for non-legislative realms out of the hands of politicians.

Without getting into the merits of how large a government ought to be, it's not really debatable that the government isn't very good at providing services like the ones you described. There are pockets where the government has set up 'businesses' that have done well, the USPS has historically been pretty efficient, the Hoover Dam, Tennessee Valley Authority, etc., but those are the exceptions to the rule, and arguably, the latter two have only worked well because Congress has left them alone, while the former (USPS) has floundered recently because of political decisions with Congress driving.

This isn't necessarily meant to be the stereotypical "Get rid of big government" rallying cry that it might sound like, as I don't generally have a problem with the government setting up businesses that benefit interstate commerce, but the Hoover Dam and TVA have proven that there are ways to do that not involving government's continued interaction. Funds could be set aside for the promotion of general welfare and businesses/policies could be established that would be able to operate as federally owned businesses (in which federally owned is a far more efficient outcome than federally run).

The federal government seems to have forgotten about their past successes, or have forgotten that too often, their over-involvement has led to failures like the USPS, so I'm wary of new government enterprises subject to all the inefficiencies of Congress (Affordable Care Act being a prime example), which doesn't necessarily mean that I'm against the premise of health care for all, but says that letting that be a government-run enterprise is the least efficient way to get there.

Getting to federally owned instead of federally run is another way to get to your stated position, as, so long as we're able to keep political appointees away from the helm of these businesses, they'll be run by competent staff, and be able to fairly compete in the free market as equal competitors to that market, which will help prevent collusive policies, crony capitalism and the like from predatory cost inflation on things like health care.
It's the co-evolution of parasite and host. These firms are like tape worms, siphoning off nutrients in the hopes the host won't notice. But the host is continually evolving new mechanisms that make it difficult for the parasite to survive. The economy is growing, changing and becoming more efficient, thanks to the internet. If history is any indication, easy-money traders are headed for extinction.
do you have the source?
What If There Are No Natural Acquirers (For Your Company)?
New sulfur-based battery is safer, cheaper, more powerful than lithium-ion
Some tweaks to your explanation:

The thinking behind this theory was that a simulator would keep adding liquidity to a fake market for testing a market making algo.

If you're testing a market making algo (i.e. to participate in NYSE's RLP program), you're simulator needs to remove liquidity, not add it. The idea is that the simulator (the tester) accidentally got deployed, and then went around crossing the spread (removing liquidity) and building up large positions in various instruments.

TL/DR Knight crossed themselves many many times in a few minutes.

A self trade doesn't affect your profit. Any self-trades would have been problematic because it's illegal to paint the tape, but that's not what caused the losses.
Yes, you know that the Internet that exists outside the US is connected to the US, right?

Which belies one of the most insidious parts of Stellar Wind... that the NSA could've just tapped the cables which link the US to other countries, but they chose to spy directly on US citizens as well.
"Live every day like it's your last. That's what they tell you, right? Yeah. What they don't tell you is what to do when it gets to tomorrow and you're not dead yet. You got bills to pay...." - Doug Stanhope.
Kind of a link bait title. The real question the author is digging at is value of work, what others are willing to pay, and how it affects your self esteem. But it worked because I read it.
Prices are set by supply and demand. Right now, coders are worth it, if they aren't the price will go down. If you want to take a longer term view and question the impact on the world, well, the galaxy will be gone in a trillion years.
Just because "networks" have value doesn't mean they're in anyway "unfair". It's like saying that having a college degree is "unfair", because it makes you more qualified for a job than someone who doesn't have one.

There are lots of people who make their entire career out of leveraging their personal networks, from salespeople and recruiters to VCs and politicians. It's no coincidence that half that people I work with worked with each other at previous jobs.

Calling it a "network" devalues what it really is: a hard-won portfolio of people who you have relationships with involving trust and credibility. They know who you are and you know who they are, and that gives you both value. In an age of linkedin and networking events part of what's lost is that networking isn't just about knowing someone's email; it's about having a strong enough relationship with them that you can leverage that.
Stuff like this does not surprise me. Well, actually it does. It makes me question my assumption that the U.S. government has been doing stuff like this all along. If this leak is legitimate, then one can reason that the NSA didn't just acquire all of this data by itself in the past, but that they asked permission for it in the present.
> How many people in the US have ever been killed as a result of a terrorist attack? Over all time the number is on the order of a few thousand.

Maybe because they're doing a much more effective job than we realize. Also I don't think you accounted for Pearl Harbor.

> And finally, shouldn't we consider that people like Ron Paul have a point, that a lot of the hatred for the US...

I think this is common misconception. I do not think the vast majority of the world hates the US. I'd be curious to see facts about this.
Improving Backbone App Performance
More navel gazing.
I looked into trying something like this and abandoned the idea after a little research into the power issues and realizing what an ergonomic disaster it would be for me. Props to this guy, though, for following his dream.
Cannot speak for everybody, but I, for one, while not surprised, still need to know the facts -- the difference between what can happen and what has actually happened is important.
>Learn basic graphic design. Not so much how to draw things or create your own artistic images (I'm hopeless in that regard),

This is called illustration, not graphic design. However,

> ..but how to use whitespace, how fonts work together, what a good color scheme looks like. Find web pages and book covers that you like and deconstruct them. Take the scary step of starting with a blank page and arranging colors and fonts and text boxes on it. Hands-on experimentation is the only way to get better at this.

Your description of graphic design is quite spot on. I would also recommend using a pen and paper, and trying to draw an UI with those—the most basic you can get without getting tangled into specialty–tools such as Illustrator and else. If you end up with an UI you are satisfied with, draw the next screen, i.e. what happens when an user clicks a button. Do a few of these and get an user to use it, when he clicks on something, replace the page. It's funny, but it works: it's called paper prototyping, the easiest and cheapest (both time and cost) way to get valid, useful feedback on design of user interfaces.
"Democracy is little more than mob rule." -- Thomas Jefferson

When more than half the country has an IQ of less than 100, democracy is deeply, deeply flawed. The only way to properly reimplement government is to replace corrupt representatives with trustworthy ones, and offer a voice and most importantly, CHOICE.
I'm on the opposite end there. I would never pay money for extra snap options. I'd much rather see ads if choosing between the two.
Top three:
Mockingbird, by Walter Tevis;
Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban;
Glimpses of the Moon, by Edith Wharton

Some other favorites:
The Dog Stars, by Peter Heller;
To Reign In Hell, by Steven Brust;
Machine Man, by Max Barry;
The Dawn Patrol, by Don Winslow;
The Woman, by Hank Ketchum
Nonsense. Just because "is" will never fully attain to "ought" does not make vain the pursuit of a better, more just world.

> Attempts to browbeat the world out of "is" and into "ought" have been universal failures

There are so many examples (a single one of which disproves your "universal" claim) of idealists bring "is" more into alignment with "ought" that it would be almost impertinent to even begin enumerating them. Here's a small handful: Civil Rights movement, Women's Suffrage, and (from an economic perspective, since that what you seem to insist can never be touched by notions of "ought") the rise of Organized Labor, which made it possible for former wage slaves to earn a decent living wage.

If Hayek and Rand make you feel better about the fact that most of us over-earn relative to the "virtue" of our labors, fine. But IMHO it is best to be honest about the inequities and fortuitous circumstances which make our success possible.
I mean this is freaking awesome!!

Just imagine how easily you can turn your car/home/classroom and more into a Smart Environment!

Hope more people get the news, this is worth sharing. Can't wait to find innovative applications of it.
I completely disagree with this sentiment. I say ignore terrorism completely. Don't intercept calls, get rid of all post/911 airport security. We can't stop terrorism and we won't ever stop it.

A better question is: is it worth bothering? The biggest yield terrorism has ever had in the US was 911 where around 3k people died. So if you look at the last 30 years of terror we're talking around 100 people a year. A problem that costs the lives of 100 people a year isn't really worth considering so long as things like cancer and heart disease are out there. Instead of wasting all these billions on war and anti-terrorism, invest it in cancer research. Now that could have some kind of impact.

And, yes, if my loved ones were hurt by terrorists I would be devastated. Just the same as if I lost them to heart disease, cancer, a car accident, etc. But I'm not willing to give up anything (not security, not time at the airport, nothing at all) to stop something that is so statistically minuscule as to not be worth thinking about.
I'm really interested in learning OCaml, but when I tried to view the book it asked for access to read my public information and update my public repositories. Seriously?

Anybody know what that's about?
Sorry – should be more clear: What I mean to say is that there isn't a fixed definition of becoming "an engineer." One's level of expertise and proficiency is defined by the hirer... It's not for me to judge, especially in the abstract, what it takes. If an employer thinks you're qualified, then you're qualified.

What's happening in the market right now is that people who may not have previously been considered qualified are now considered qualified. This is because there's so much demand.
My brother worked for years in the intelligence community. One of the common stereotypes within the IC regards the fact that Mormons are heavily overrepresented, for various reasons that involve foreign language skills from mission trips, a reputation for respecting authority, abstinence from drugs/alcohol, family connections, ease of gaining security clearances, etc. The stereotype in the IC regarding Mormons is they never "question." The dozens of friends I have that work in the IC say that the stereotype is accurate.

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/11-surprising-things-you-didn...

"
The apparent incorruptibility of Mormons' moral righteousness make them ideal candidates for the nation's law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Mormons are disproportionately represented in the CIA. A recruiter told the Salt Lake Tribune that returned Mormon missionaries are valued for their foreign language skills, abstinence from drugs and alcohol, and respect for authority "

I wonder if this has bearings on constructing the new data center in Utah?
We use technology to improve efficiencies in every industry in the world, but when we use technology in the capital markets people freak out. I don't get it.
It's OK Go's "WTF": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12zJw9varYE

It was filmed on a green screen for a different effect: Frame layering.
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, while maybe not the "best" book ever written, is highly entertaining...
resorting to ad hominems rather than reason, pretty typical for the moronic libertarian technophiles that seem to be all over hn.
It's just serve the purpose of trying to keep the audience waken up. Nothing more.
I purposely left it open-ended. I probably haven't read a fiction book in 15 years. I've been so heavy on business/marketing/tech/startup/biography books that I'm not even sure what fiction I would enjoy anymore.

Books I've enjoyed recently are Titan, Outliers, Blue Ocean Strategy. I think a portion of my burnout is losing my sense of fun - hence my general attitude towards fiction over the last decade+ has been it's fake and thus a waste of time. While I know that's not true (the waste of time part), it just hasn't been 'productive' to read a fiction book.

So I was just curious which fiction books everyone else enjoyed, and I was going to pick a couple from the list that was created.
Give it Away for Reglue - Raising Money For a Great Non-Profit
Finally watched that movie on Tuesday night, I loved it, a very interesting story - made we want to get outside more!
Does anyone know how they do this, technically, and to what extent? Does Google just feed them billions of emails, or what? Do they type my name into a form on Amazon.com to get SSH access my EC2 server? And how the hell do they see my finances? Do all of those terms of service agreements say, "By the way, we give your private information to the government without question" ???

At first I thought it didn't matter that they can see what I do, because if I store a movie of my underground lair with nukes and a few F-22s in Google Drive, they can't use the evidence against me in court unless they get a warrant. But let's be real: if you've got a movie of yourself shooting some guy in the face in Google Drive, they're going to find a way to get that warrant before you delete the movie. And they'll have a copy of it to show the judge. You don't even know they've seen your not-so-secret stuff. The fact that they do this in a clandestine manner effectively makes it unconstitutional since the warrant protection is easy for them to circumvent.
https://www.privacyinternational.org/reports/surveillance-mo...
IANAL (I am not a Legislator), but it seems to me that the primary concern from the city/state side of things is that housing is in short supply in NYC for NYC residents.

AirBNB "pros" buy up yearly leases for $x and then sublease them out nightly for a monthly net of a multiple of $x. In other words, it's an arbitrage - they're taking the long-term risk of a yearly lease and gaining the short term reward of nightly rentals by tourists, for which there is strong demand, and which results in fewer hotel bookings and fewer apartments available for local residents.

And, fairly enough, it also puts that arbitrage profit into the hands of the apartment renter, not the landlord, who took the risk of putting the building up (or managing it) in the first place.

So hotels lose, landlords lose, NYC housing consumers lose, and tourists gain and AirBNB hosts gain. Fine.

SO: Rather than making it outright illegal, why not balance out some of the incentives in the name of efficiency? Hosts SHOULD be able to rent out their place when they don't live there (improved efficiency) or rent out a spare room in a multi-room apartment (also improved efficiency), but maybe limit the amount that can be charged to a proportion of rent they themselves pay? If it stops becoming a profit center then you remove the big incentive that "pros" are going for -- sopping up available units and using them solely for tourists. If my lease for an apartment is $3000/month, the max I'd be allowed to charge is $100/night.

It would change the dynamics quite a bit -- now there's zero incentive for a "pro" or landlord to go rent dozens of otherwise available apartmens to use for tourists. In fact, the landlord would go right back to preferring long-term lessors. Rather get an easy, single check per month than dozens of small and unguaranteed checks.

It would remove the profit incentive of regular hosts but still allow the rent-offset incentive.

However, it would make WORSE the imbalance between AirBNB and hotels, and demand for airbnb would increase (and supply would decrease because of fewer hosts). That said, it's not a bad thing. It would be real competition for hotels, and rightfully so -- that's AirBNB's job and the disruption they're causing. And more competition and lower prices for everyone is a Good Thing.

I'm sure I'm missing some untended consequences here, but perhaps it's a start...
How high-tech jobs could solve the autism unemployment crisis
Lessons from Amazon
I'm going to link this once more because I think it's pertinent - http://dennisforbes.ca/index.php/2013/06/02/hacker-news-isnt...

And once again a post that is deeply dismissive of HN (basically "don't listen to anything but hurrah's, and they're all cheap bastards anyways". Well if you're going to butter us up first...), posted to HN.

There are a growing contingent of "positivity-only" champions who seem to misunderstand the point of Show HNs. Is this some sort of generational thing? Some sort of side-effect of the positive-feedback experiment?
Since this is a post about tmux, I feel obligated to tell you about teamocil (http://teamocil.com) a small utility I wrote to automatically create sessions, windows and panes in tmux with YAML files :)
Nuclear physics and nuclear energy as well.

The data center in Utah has more to do with cheap land, low cost, and low likelihood of natural disaster.
What I don't understand is sentiment like yours. We shouldn't bring this up because "everyone knows already"? No, we should be shouting this from the roof tops and do everything we can to make people mad enough about it to act. What is your solution? Sit back and look smug while the world falls apart around us?