skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was an unmotivated math learner, who did not want to admit it. I essentially stopped at integral calculus(failed three times), although I did try a linear algebra course at the same time and had to drop it because the effort needed to complete the proofs was beyond me.

On the other hand, I took well to immediate, CS-y applications. I liked graph theory, since I could write pathfinding algorithms with it. And I learned to like parts of Fourier analysis, since I could understand DSP with it. So I know I can enjoy the study, given the right context.

However, I think it speaks to the difficulty of math education that nobody discovers exactly the same approach to its study. But perhaps this is the wrong way to frame it. Perhaps, to put it another way, other subjects allow students to cheat themselves more easily into getting answers without understanding.

I think, with respect to current curricula, we focus far too much on computation, and on proof. Both are answer-oriented by nature, whereas in my self-study I was motivated by developing a process, and in understanding the process I was considering things with language and hasty spatializations of ideas, long before I was ready for the formal applications. And we give almost no credence to process development as part of mathematics education. A typical lecture begins:

"Assume the following. We define..."

And this is perfectly reasonable if you've already immersed yourself in the jargon and want to get to the point as quickly as possible. But if you aren't ready for it, it's intimidating. A tiny definition, a sentence or two long, can become something you struggle over for a week, which only compounds the intimidation factor. In theory the problem sets should help you explore further. But if they're unmotivated, the students can barely try at the problem sets.
Wait, you're trying to beat NSA by writing your own crypto? This is worse than useless :), all you'll do is flag that communication for further research (which the NSA will then break within a couple of hours if need be), at least with plain text you'll stay in the noise of the masses.
Java runs the world and runs on several devices from Raspberry Pi, embedded robots (java me) to Mobile Devices (Android) to Enterprise Software (Java EE) to Data Servers crunching Big Data (Hadoop).
Forget about DuckDuckGo, it's based in the US. Better use Startpage.com, which is based in the Netherlands.
Blazr, find your buds
are non us people going to stop using microsoft windows, intel cpus, vmware... ? Wouldn't it make more sense for the nsa to bug these things ?
Java is still relevant because of how much code is written in Java.
iAds is already a significant ad platform, it's not clear to me that this one will definitely eclipse it.
What are you talking about? The labels are white, not black!
So you mean the quality of results is poor (compared to just Googling, for example)?
Similar to mine. I'm working on an online ant colony sandbox where people can write AIs to compete for resources, etc.
I think it was just down while the NSA were installing their beam splitters and PRISM Panel.
I... I like it. I did breifly try to use Android last year (very expensive mistake) and they've nicked the two or three good things from the nexus / flat blue 'droid theme, plus FINALLY a fast way to turn wifi and bluetooth on and off, like on the droids.

I'm interested to see how long it takes the old UI to look antiquated to me. Isn't human reaction to fashion interesting? :)
How many different refutations of "I have nothing to hide" have to be posted before it sinks in what a terrible stance that is? Or are you simply explaining the average person's inner response?
"It's not just that most Americans don't believe they have anything to hide from NSA. It's that they don't have anything to hide from NSA."

I'm not so sure about that. Roughly 90% of Americans use illegal drugs at some point in their lives[1], and supposedly the average American commits 3 felonies per day.[2]

[1] http://www.monitoringthefuture.org/pubs/monographs/vol2_2009...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/...
> I think I would vote for allowing call logs to be trackable by the NSA

Why? Someone looking to do harm doesn't use phones (maybe Burners) or other communication methods where they know they'd be easily tracked.
The beta is only for the iPhone/iPod Touch.
> Yea, that's one thing which Skeuomorphism does well is I know instantly what I can interact with and what I can't.

It does it well when it is done well.

Then there are elements like the red book mark in Contacts. where you think - what the hell is that meant to do?
If you're really interested in civil liberties, the battle ground is the drug war. Everything becomes less scary once sending people to prison for drug use and possession is taken off the table.
Well, stick me at the place on the Venn diagram of Americans who:

* Have a problem with the NSA getting wholesale access to telephonic metadata for all domestic phone calls.

* Generally do not believe NSA is using that metadata for purposes other than nonproliferation and counterterrorism, where "counterterrorism" means "pursuit of groups with active plans to kill American citizens".

* Agree that the shortcut NSA appears to be taking around existing due process is going to be a problem in the future if it isn't addressed and restricted.

Also, I find the number of acronyms we're tossing around --- NSA, FISA, FAA, &c --- comforting, not alarming. There's a lot of process here. Some of it is really bad and needs to be fixed. But in the 1950s, we had no process; the USG just listened to everything.
The Central Limit Theorem and the Law of Large Numbers are wonderful things.
The issue is with BAD government, not all government. America has a bad government because the government has been co-opted by a corporate elite.

Government should be a meritocracy where the smartest minds in the country elect representatives from their field of expertise. So instead of having the dumb public elect one or two figurehead politicians, you have well-educated people electing top minds in their own field, who represent the scientifically and intellectually validated viewpoint of those well-educated people.

Cronyism, nepotism and super-rich corporate privilege are what has destroyed the American government.

Libertarianism would also seek to destroy the American government, reverting to a state of anarchy where the super-rich corporatists simply rule everyone by virtue of their superior wealth, manpower, and organization.
Those are screenshots of a beta! How categorically can you judge something until you have the final release in front of you?
Detecting Ghostery
Pretty sure you are using Radio Stations, not iTunes Radio. That feature has been around for a very long time.
Edward Snowden's Motivation: Internet Freedom
These are completely valid use cases. I think the problem with Siri is that it was billed as some insanely useful tool that would radically change how you use your phone. Obviously it's limitations outweigh it's strengths.
> Given the guy is a former DOJ prosecutor, I think he's probably done his homework.

Given his history since leaving DOJ, and particularly since being dumped from (and then suing) Judicial Watch, I'd be less than confident of that.

> I mean looking cursorily at the filing, a Bivens action is the right vehicle for this. Anybody with some more insight want to tell me why it won't work?

It is a class action which doesn't appear to identify a class with a viable test to determine whether someone is or is not part of the class. Leaving aside whether or not it states viable causes of action, it seems quite likely to fail as a class action, and not at all unlikely to fail entirely on standing grounds for failure to state a particularized harm.
At least post the original and not some paranoid screed.
This appears to be a lot like the Cube. Some thought it was ahead of its time then. Looks to me like Apple is giving it another try.
Oops..guess I found something old that I thought was new..sorry HN folks, my bad :(
This is form over function.

Exactly why I'm not taking it seriously. What does form do for a power desktop? Nothing. I put my desktop under my desk. I can't see it. I have to stoop to reach the power button.

I'm not going to say there's absolutely no use for form in any desktop, but IMO it's practically the number one least important feature of a power desktop/workhorse.
Tech commentary used to be more more than baseless hipster-y. Oh the good ol' days.
Cult of personalities, I think. Fascinating, if not terrifying, human trait. People root for their political party like they root for their home team; issues be damned.
Yeap. these are the ONLY 2 reasons I use siri
I am one of those further burdened taxpayers who is concerned and uncomfortable with NSA snooping. I have friends who were burdened taxpayers as a result of the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District multi-million dollar settlement; they sure were not all lunatic bible thumpers.

It is important that individuals are able to sue their governments for painfully large sums of money, even if that money is ultimately paid with increased taxes. The corrective force lawsuits can apply is more important than a percentage blip on the taxes of voting citizens of a broken government.
BBC did a good documentary on this very subject:

"The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0430484/

Seems fear, ignorance and apathy is still working out just fine unfortunately.
FISA judges are US District Court judges. We don't know exactly which ones they are (for no good reason, I agree) but they aren't, as I understand it, random party functionaries.

(Crazy that anyone would have modded you down; did my part to try to fix).
Neither of course. "All major parties supported this bullshit" is no reason to drop a lawsuit.
When I read that I see Sam Harris attributing things like "honor killings" to the doctrine of Islam as if Islam is a monolithic entity. He's equating the extremists with the mainstream and that is exactly what the islamaphobes do - insist that the crazies are the ones who have the true interpretation of islam and that the vast majority of regular muslims don't count because they aren't crazy. It is kind of like saying that all christians should be judged by the actions of the Westboro Baptists. The crazies get the headlines but they only define the fringe, not the mainstream.

FWIW, the one thing I can agree with Sam Harris on is that European integration of muslims (and other minorities) is slow compared to the US because they have less of a commitment to freedom of speech. For all of our racial problems, the US does a better job of integrating immigrant communities because we have a culture of airing our dirty laundry, of hashing out our feelings - bigotry and all - and thus working through the differences rather than sheltering people from possibly being offended. Its ugly and frequently unpleasant but in the long run I think we reach a level of accommodation a lot sooner.

FWIW, I'm an atheist who married a woman from an immigrant muslim family although I've probably been in more mosques than she has.
There are fanless workstations.

I have two large silent fans: one in the power supply and one over the cpu in my monolithic 2007 PC.

How about a load of mini-itx boards suspended in cooking fat?

I agree in that most workstation units have are visually lack lustre. I was asking someone the other day why they don't wrap X model of iPhone in alumunium or titananium, and he said that it costs too much. But surely they are so small that it wouldn't hurt to add some luxury materials - a can of pop comes with a free alu can.

The design actually reminds me perhaps of a precursor to the R1 astromech droids (on the inside.)
They're going with external expansion options. There are enclosures you can buy for PCIe cards to plug them in to the Thunderbolt ports if you need to.
Just out of curiosity, what is it about your relative's blood test that you don't want the NSA to know about? Especially since the results are already on a network at the hospital (or testing lab), and the NSA can get it directly from there anyway via an NSL.

I've often wondered about why medical records are such a sensitive topic to most people. The only things I can think of is either the insurance company will find out and raise your rates (they find out anyway, as they pay your bills), or the condition one suffers is due to something they did that was embarrassing (or similar).
Most Americans do not believe NSA gives a shit whether they've smoked up before. I don't believe that either.
Not available on iPad yet.
Java will wane in relevance as Oracle turns it into a way to squeeze support contracts out of users (see the recent timezone-update kerfuffle).
We use UFS snapshots for that. No service interruption required ;)
Perhaps that's because the parents find that their kids can't compute anything?

With the students that I've seen in college physics/math courses, ability to solve real-world arithmetic/word problems quickly is limited at best.
the labels are white, check your facts before you start ranting.
I won't point out just how much is wrong with the excerpt that OP has quoted (because HN is a gender-troll breeding ground unworthy of my time), but you should definitely research gender-based descrimination. It will make you a better person and a more successful leader!
128GB with 32GB DIMMS. Also, it's possible there is some amount soldered on the board.
I love the government's response here. "Sure, we can have a debate about state surveillance, but the guy that forced this debate IS A NO GOOD DIRTY TRAITOR!"
People have a low expectation of the term "workstation" these days.

The whole "prosumer" thing has been blurring the lines, typically to the detriment of the "pro" market, except for those "pro" markets that do not overlap with the consumer space whatsoever, e.g. heavy construction equipment.
We do know who appointed them. They are 11 federal judges who are appointed to 7 year terms by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. At least 3 must live within 20 miles of Washington, DC, they can only serve one term, and none can be sitting on the Court of Review.
Fair enough. I also doubt that the NSA - as an agency in general - are using their snoop data for "purposes other than nonproliferation and counterterrorism"... yet. And while it's admittedly hypothetical, it's that "yet" that concerns me. But fear of how government collection of personal data can be misused is not without valid precedent: see the reign of J. Edgar Hoover, for example.

Who knows, maybe the political winds shift in, say, 5 years, and it becomes very dangerous to have certain ideological beliefs, or to have said certain things. I'm not crazy about making it easy for these guys (doing the whole "we were just following orders" thing, possibly) to go on a wholesale fishing expedition to find people to start giving the "yellow star" treatment.

I know, I know... way hypothetical, and you could argue "paranoid". Unlikely, even. But just because something seems incredible or unlikely doesn't seem, to me, to be a good argument for making it any easier for that scenario to come to pass. :-)
> Why is Bush missing from this?

Because its not a real lawsuit that is intended to win, its a propaganda piece designed to get attention for the theory that the Verizon metadata capture is an act targetted against Obama's domestic political opponents, which is why the suit highlights the named defendants (including the one who is also the attorney filing the case) strident criticisms of the President as the basis for the conclusion that they were surveilled (not just their metadata, but their actual conversations) by the NSA as part of the program.
None of those fancy things seems to work if you have just a hint of an accent.
Yes my accent is fairly noticeable, but that doesn't seem to bother humans ..
But I feel less bad knowing Siri doesn't work if you happen to be Scottish.

ps: I also hate phone menus that can only be accessed via voice recognition.
If you haven't told her "what to call you" you need to do so now.
Why do you think people looking to do harm don't use phones? Why do you assume the use of burners makes telephonic surveillance pointless? Are you attributing to adversaries the best possible set of circumstances and smallest possible set of constraints?
That's how it started for me. Now it just seems so much faster to dictate a text/email if I'm not near other people that I have found myself using it more and more. It beats typing on the small touchscreen keyboard.
What do you mean? Android has a perfectly servicable multitasking UI already.

https://developer.android.com/design/media/ui_overview_recen...
That's true, it is somewhat similar with the XCode interface. I'd rather they switch the XCode interface to be more like Safari 5 had.

The interface in XCode isn't bad. My big problem is that you can't view source any more, it's crammed in that panel. The list of requests? Crammed in that panel. JS console? Inspecting elements? All crammed in there.

I always feel light I'm fighting to find what I want instead of switching between things I might need.
I would be disappointed if you could not lock this new Mac Pro and bolt it to your desk.

I also bet someone already is drawing a cylindrical case that holds a few 3GB drives and connects to that Mac using Thunderbolt. Make the cable short and rigid and you get something inspired by the Petronas towers.

And if I had or planned to buy those 20 Thunderbolt devices, I think I would drill a hole in a desk, pull a Thunderbolt cable through, and hang the devices and the cabling under the desk surface

Alternatively, one could build a Cray-1 inspired enclosure by adding a small pedestal with 10 Thunderbolt devices in a circle around it; unfortunately, this machine does not have a thunderbolt connector at the bottom.

And now that I am throwing analogies around: this thing needs a handle on top: http://curta.org.

That 'no connector at the bottom' is a bad thing, by the way. I can't find any picture on apple.com showing this thing with power and display cables plugged in.

Finally, I hope they have tested this thing well for dust intake and overheating in the case people place objects close to it on their desk.
I use Siri and voice dictation every day for:

"text my wife I'm on my way home"
"set timer for 10 minutes" (cooking)
"Directions to 101 spear st, san francisco"
"Remind me to ______ at 5pm today"

... and writing meeting summaries in the car. (always needs some fixing afterwards from my mac)

It sucks for lots of other stuff, but I've found these pretty useful.
My son (5yo) laughs at me arguing with Siri when trying to send an SMS to my wife through my car's Bluetooth/hands-free setup.

He thinks my phone is an idiot that can't understand me.

So, I'm not sure how successfully I use Siri, but I do use it a lot for hands-free messaging.
Use apt pinning
I'm an Indian and Siri has no notion of any accents or usages other than some variations of American English. Android speech recognition though works incredibly well for me.

I live in a mixed iPhone/Android household. The iPhone users have completely given up on Siri understanding almost anything in their accent. My Nexus4 understands me almost flawlessly. I use it all the time for the usual "remind me to mail the check at 2 pm", "Call <person-name> mobile" type things to relatively complex search queries "what was that movie with Hugh Jackman about magic" etc. It typically does and searches what I want within the first try... more complex things could take two or three tries. But the hit-rate is good enough to encourage me to keep using it on a regular basis
"Poor people are stupid" isn't an experience, it's a prejudice.
Speaking for myself in the U.S., the need to learn a new language other than English has become such an edge case that I always marvel when non-native English speakers put their work out for us to judge. Your writing is clear...more importantly, you have a great grasp of how to visually partition your essay, a skill that many writers, native English or not, could improve on. Great submission, even if I'd like Java to be less prominent :)
Good point, cleanly described!
I stand corrected. But the more important point is that the decisions and discussion are private and without oversight, and the presumption that they basically "rubber stamp" all these surveillance requests. Now, maybe they don't just "rubber stamp" everything. But without more info, who's to say?

Edit: Also, for anyone more interested in details of the FISC (some of which I obviously misremembered), here's a good resource:

http://epic.org/privacy/terrorism/fisa/fisc.html
Thanks! We apparently all failed at Google at the time. We were using Java but it seems there are wrappers.
In 1981 I built an all in one with my Dad:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zx81

(Or rather he built it and I played the games.)
Depends what exactly you mean by "virtually unlimited". A direct attack on the crypto in Tarsnap is ~ 2^128 operations, which is beyond even the wildest guesses of NSA's computing capacity. In practice, they would attack in another direction -- e.g., exploit a vulnerability in your web browser to take over your computer and steal your keys.
Show HN: Get a Server Instantly
Real elitists consider the term elitist to be a compliment. So just use that.
Snowden goes missing in Hong Kong
Why learn Java? Sure, there's lots of jobs out there for it, but there's also lots of Rails jobs too. Rails is more fun than Java, so if you're looking to expand your career opportunities, you're probably better off learning a tech stack that won't bore you to death.
IANAL but aren't warrants designed to override privacy when there is existing probable cause? IMO one problem is sweeping collection and indefinite storage for the purposes of trawling for crimes. The other is that the FISA court could be a token "APPROVED" rubber stamp for all we know, taking a "guilty until proven innocent" stance on anyone outside the US.

The bit that really bothers me is the total lack of transparency and accountability.
Benchmarks taken with different software on different hardware isn't very useful.
A few big advantages over the iMac

The features you list are hardly innovation, just market segmentation.
It sure doesnt help if the government constantly exagerates the severity of the issue. This naturally leads to disinformed consent. Not lying so much and not keeping so many secrets would go a long way.
Just a decade ago Clinton faced impeachement for trying to keep an affair secret and then lying about it. Nowadays Obama can just do a "no comment" about how many vitizens he is secretly asassinating.
Sizing up Xbox One's $499 price tag against console history
That's irrelevant. Given the scale of the issue, there is almost no way we could confidently come to any conclusion about him in such a short amount of time. You're free to ignore input from the MSM, but you still need to allow time for more facts to surface.
The Guardian has the the distinct edge of having exclusive access to the few actual facts in this case. That is a clear advantage, no doubt about that. But make no mistake, the Guardian has a substantial arsenal of axes to grind.
Also a lot of the de-facto Big Data/NoSQL/Distributed Computing stack is Java(/Scala). Hadoop, HBase, Cassandra, Neo4j, Storm, its actually pretty interesting to note that most of the popular nosql solutions are in Java. On top of that its the number 3 language on Github.

I'm not a huge fan of Java but I'd be pretty surprised if someone was saying Java wasn't relevant. Don't quote me on this, but its also the fastest language you are going to get without pulling out C/C++. When the author made the claim that Java was as fast as Go, I was a bit surprised. I wasn't aware Go had caught up to Java.
Mark Blyth: Austerity - The History of a Dangerous Idea