skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's just focus on today and Cringley's articles. If you can find something wrong with his articles, where something isn't factual, please let me know. But what IBM has been doing: cutting R&D for short term gains rather than long term ones is going to have to consequences later down the line. Also, they are betting big on India at the expense of tech talent in the states...I'm not sure if this will pan out.

IBM has a hyper focus in optimizing their share price due to the talent they acquired from PwC; I would say, its more like PwC acquired IBM due to the cultural changes that followed (not that IBM was already dysfunctional, they were all too easy to convince of this). But really, how long can this last? Eventually they are expected to do great things to justify their valuation, and all the news suggests that they have no capabilities at all to do such; they just cut and cut!
I thought of a simpler, or at least more relatable, analogy:

Most people have been around a cell phone which was near an audio speaker and heard it make those awful snap and pop sounds.

It doesn't make sense initially that you would hear anything like that from a phone, after all they operate at very high frequency, 900 - 2400 Mhz, definitely not audible frequencies. But, the system works by breaking up radio time into chunks, several hundred chunks a second. The relative spacing of the chunks, a few hundred a second, creates noise that is easily picked up by the speaker and turned into audible sound.

In the same way with the laptop you've got this high frequency signal: HDMI / DVI but when there are particular patterns of bits being carried you can get lower frequency content, similar to the chunks being used by the cell phone. Just like the coil in the speaker gets excited by the radio chunks, you could have a problem where the output circuitry of the RMBp gets excited by these rare low frequency patterns leading to problems with the display.
"I will say that NSA spying isn't necessarily incompatible with a libertarian government."

I would believe it is against the very definition of libertarianism as a belief and not any political party with libertarian in its name. Taken from Wikipedia:

"Libertarianism (Latin: liber, "free")[1] is a set of related political philosophies that uphold liberty as the highest political end.[2][3] This includes emphasis on the primacy of individual liberty,[4][5] political freedom, and voluntary association. It is the antonym to authoritarianism.[6] Libertarians advocate a society with a greatly reduced state or no state at all.[7]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism
No, but judges often take a dim view of legal "hacks"
Weren't they ruled unconstitutional?
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/fbis-national-sec...
>> those actually following the details of the story have no belief that there is anything illegal going on

Just want to point out that this kind of thing being technically legal might be the scariest fact of all.
Hong Kong, a Strange Place to Seek Freedom
I don't know whether I'll agree to any of it. I'm not that wise.

Humans are able to raise kids, leave knowledge to them, and as long as they don't believe so hard in rebirth, treat history with importance. As such many different laws were left - it's for us to decide which make sense.

If we are left to nature, then we are left with whatever the animals have. It won't be anymore our human "nature".

We were not born to speak, record, etc. - over the long period of evolution it developed around us - along with raising kids. This is where we recognize the nature as important force, but not really for guiding us what to do - it's our environment, and we should care about it, but there is hardly any guidance what to do.
Maybe they don't want weirdos who claim to be something other than Male or Female using the service.

Also, note I'm using a throwaway account to say this. If I dare to offend the gay lobby by suggesting that homosexuality is a choice [1], or that companies should be able to refuse to do business with queers, for example, even a normally respectful community like HN is going to react as if I said we need someone like Hitler to run this country.

I'm even fearful that I might be refused employment [2] or otherwise discriminated against for my beliefs, if this comment is linked to my real-life identity.

If someone's best response to an intelligent person who disagrees with their position is calling them names like "bigot" or "hatemonger," and applying sanctions to them, it suggests, to me at least, that the actual argument is weak, and those who adopt these tactics do so because they know their position can't win a debate on its merits.

[1] If who you have sex with is not a choice under your deliberate, conscious control, why is rape a crime?

[2] Even in jobs where my beliefs have no effect on my ability to perform the work. What I think about gay marriage should have nothing to do with my ability to write effective unit tests, but I doubt a Bay-area employer would hire me if they knew I made this comment -- and even if they did, they would receive pressure to fire me from customers, investors, or other organizations they work with.
Some gag orders have been. Other types have not.
When the matter is considered a good punchline on late night chat shows, I think there's some evidence for my view of what people in general think. I spent over a decade working in customer-facing IT so I'm summarizing my experience of the attitudes I encountered. I'm not sure what axe you're trying to grind here.
White on blue is contrast enough, surely? You could also invert for black on orange, get your HN on.
I think the iOS 6 screenshots are just quickly taken from the author's real phone, while the iOS 7 shots are from Apple's iOS 7 marketing. So it's unsurprising, but not intentional, that the iOS 7 screenshots look more carefully designed to please than the iOS 6 ones.
Fortunately, NSL gag orders themselves have not held up in a court of law either.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/03/nsl-found-unconstit...
Actually, that AEA911Truth video is very good with some very high calibre scientists and engineers discussing the event. I especially liked Lynn Margulis's description of what science actually is and how the follow up "investigation" cannot be called scientific by any stretch of the immagination. You should watch it before you just dismiss it.
Show HN: Cubehero adds cover photos and basic stats
I wouldn't say nobody, I am from Texas. We threaten to secede over just about everything lately, it seems.
Curious ... why would you write Free Software, then release it to a walled-garden app store? If you're going to all that effort, why not support a truly open platform?
The need for a filesystem is proportional to the owner's expectation of control.

Filesystems are part of the general purpose computing toolkit. Assuming we don't all turn in our computers for appliances in a forced buyback to get hacking tools off our streets, filesystems are here to stay, if only to allow the Morlocks to create new jellybean interfaces for the Eloi.
Skype no longer accepting calls from bogus caller ID
I contract with a small company that produces a contact management system and predictive dialer for contact centers. In testing for a regression, I found that my test dialer campaign could not reach my Skype number with a bogus caller ID.

I tried calling a land line and a mobile with the bogus caller ID successfully and was baffled why my Skype number wasn't receiving the call. My colleague noticed the bogus caller ID compelling me to determine an appropriate number to use instead which proved to work. I've been using the bogus caller IDs (1999 in this case) for years because laziness. So sometime between the last time I used the test system to call my Skype number and today, calls originated to my Skype number from the bogus caller ID no longer work. Logs of the backend PBX software looked good for all calls so the service provider isn't at issue here, it's Skype.

I'm sure it's nothing but it all seems too coincidental. If you're a governmental organization collecting "metadata" through an important provider, you're going to want to keep out the crap. Much ado?

Can anyone else corroborate this?
Sure, not all.

That goes without saying as the intended meaning for every* use of "everybody", "nobody", "every", "all" etc in normal conversation. Those are statistical qualifiers, not absolutes.

(*well, almost every -- which reinforces my point).
Google's Best Perk: The Library in Building 42
Really? I'd like to learn more about this, do you have a source?

(aside: Sorry for the downvote, my finger slipped up :/)
Maybe he is sick? Maybe his marriage was at risk from the hours he puts in?

People have real life issues, too. CIA or not. I've met Morell and he is a company man to the core, a real solid good guy. Not one to be tied up in or concern himself with scandal.
That's irrelevant. (And I disagree.)
As somebody who makes a living writing code that integrates with an IBM product in the BI space, I absolutely love IBM. They gobble up companies to increase their portfolio and do little to improve them but end up crapping it up. It leaves a lot of market space for a company to come in and write software that will make working with their product(s) easy and intuitive.
This was posted yesterday. https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=Douchebag+Part...
but its a deniable form of disclosure - you could argue that the ISP is trying to adhere to the gag order by lying to the customer that there hasn't been any subpoenas.

What the customer gets out of that lie is none of the concern of the ISP.
Formally verifying software takes much more time than just writing it, perhaps a factor of 10. For instance, the seL4 project[1] states that they used 2.2 person-years to write the kernel itself, and 20 person-years on the proof.

Apparently the version of CompCert from 2007 (before any optimizations) took 2 person-years to write[2]. But some of those persons were pretty impressive.

[1] http://www.sigops.org/sosp/sosp09/papers/klein-sosp09.pdf

[2] http://memocode.irisa.fr/2007/leroy-compcert-memocode07.pdf
It is logically possible that they have been tested, and struck down, in a secret court.
Meet the Spy Chief Leading Us Into Cyberwar
IOS 7 style parallax background in the browser
> I'd be more interested in a study that asked people if they knew what they were actually outraged about.

To list a few reasons people are outraged:
-Surveillance has been revealed that seems to far exceed what is authorized by the Patriot Act
-The executive branch refuses to release the legal rationale on which it justifies the surveillance
-Senior officials have lied to Congress about the scope of surveillance
-Congress has not properly been briefed on these programs
-There programs were kept secret unnecessarily
-These programs are extremely dangerous to a free society
-It appears this is a serious overreach in executive power, indicating a breakdown in the checks and balances of a functioning representative government

> A majority of the insinuations of the original "leak" have since been retracted

I don't know of any insinuations that have been retracted. The NSA slides say one thing, and the companies say another. There is still much to resolve.

> and those actually following the details of the story have no belief that there is anything illegal going on.

This is completely false. There seems to be a claimed legal basis for what's going on (which happens to be an extreme interpretation of the Patriot Act that even its author states goes beyond what it was written to authorize). But it hasn't been ruled on by a court because the executive branch claims it is too secret for judicial review. When that obstruction is removed, it's likely to be found unconstitutional.

Sure, people you interview might not be able to clearly express the reasons they're outraged. But there are at least three tiers of reasons to be concerned. Please consider reflecting on the fact that a claim of legality is not a claim that something is not terribly wrong and dangerous for society.
Things that are "disaster[s] of epic proportions": floods, genocide, NSA spying

Things that are not: fucking betas of mobile telephone software
It's been true of their second-Jobs-era mobile gadgets though. The first iPod and iPhone both delivered a polished experience from day 1, and their successors did too. The same was true of most Apple products since Jobs' return, including the Mac hardware. OS X was the big exception, but that was partly because Apple didn't have the luxury of time: it had to get out OS X as quickly as possible, while also continuing to patch up MacOS, in order to save the company.
Sure, but when did that change? The NSA, even post-Verizon and post-PRISM still can't even get a warrant to get what I said.

The FBI could get a warrant, or local law enforcement, but that was true in 2012, and 2001, and 1999, and 1983 and 1961 and earlier. And while I understand "Law & Order" is just TV, it's pretty amazing what law enforcement can convince third parties to voluntarily let them see, and has been for decades as well.

Ever since I figured out crypto was a thing I knew to use PGP/GPG for things that had to be secret and to not trust the rest to remain secret forever. Certainly I wouldn't trust Twitter or Facebook, have you ever seen /r/cringepics??

Of course back then I wasn't worried about the government, I was worried about Mallory, but I'm still just as worried about Mallory as I was before.
How to Increase Your Blogging Productivity by 500%
How long before it takes effect? I don't see anything on my Retina MacBook Pro with Thunderbolt Display.

Model Name:	MacBook Pro
Model Identifier:	MacBookPro10,1
Processor Name:	Intel Core i7
Processor Speed:	2.6 GHz
Number of Processors:	1
Total Number of Cores:	4
L2 Cache (per Core):	256 KB
L3 Cache:	6 MB
Memory:	16 GB
Boot ROM Version:	MBP101.00EE.B02
SMC Version (system):	2.3f35

Thunderbolt Display:

Vendor Name:	Apple Inc.
Device Name:	Thunderbolt Display
Vendor ID:	0x1
Device ID:	0x8002
Device Revision:	0x1
UID:	0x0001000100508120
Route String:	3
Firmware Version:	22.2
Port:
Status:	Device connected
Link Status:	0x2
Port Micro Firmware Version:	0.0.21
Cable Firmware Version:	0.1.18
Cable Serial Number:	C4M2263005QDNWFAX
Port:
Status:	No device connected
Link Status:	0x7
Port Micro Firmware Version:	0.0.21
As well the FISA court should reject that argument.
> Real opinion pieces that actually ask the hard questions like "should the government know less than Google" are all but ignored

Maybe most people on HN don't consider that a hard question? At the very least, I consider it an ill-stated question. I think something a little more transparent would be better: at what point must a company forfeit all knowledge to the government?

And when you put it that way, it really doesn't seem like a hard question to answer. At least, not for me.
Feds Hunted for Snowden in Days Before NSA Programs Went Public
Having the old farts make all the decisions about technology is what got us into this situation in the first place.
Very interesting -- thanks for posting! Pretty cool podcast too.
Say I'm a hosting company. I doubt that the authorities can compel me to lie to my customers in the form of not terminating the canary. Moreover, I think I have every right to choose to terminate any running process on my machine. The implications of the "canary understanding" between me and my customer should have no bearing on those fundamental facts.
This is the common sense position, but nothing about it being common sense prevents them from telling you to do otherwise. These are people that justify their system with the system that remains otherwise unjustified.
nonsense.
even ignoring the undeniable nexus between weapons and civilian power programs,
where I live, nuclear power would be more expensive and much slower to roll out.
Just turned off the python servers, Unscatter is now powered by Go.
Character questioning is valid; however, although all parties here (Snowden, NSA, Booze-Allen, Internet cos.) could be dishonest, compared with the others, Snowden's motivation to lie is smaller, his risks for doing so are higher, and his ability to broadcast his message is weaker.

A fair assessment of character is almost impossible to make in such a circumstance, as anything Snowden has said or done will be cast in the harshest light. He is not the authority, the authorities are, and they'll always say he's wrong. Because of that, the only valid resolution is to demand more answers from the government and force an incontrovertible picture to emerge of what activities were and were not done.
Guess how they got out of trouble in the early 90s:

January 17, 1993
The announcement by International Business Machines, whose corporate world headquarters are in Armonk, that this year it was cutting 25,000 more jobs worldwide and reducing its budget for research, development and engineering by $1 billion may signify that the company will have to initiate the first layoffs in its history. Up to now the company has used voluntary means like job buyouts and early retirement to eliminate jobs.

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/17/nyregion/ibm-weighs-possib...

Seem familiar?
The government is a privileged actor that can do many harmful things to a person that a company cannot. The government has a monopoly on coercion, and it claims the sole right to deprive you of life, liberty, and property. For these powers not be abused, there must be real and serious limits on government power. Of course people and companies you enter into private agreements with should know more about what you share with them than the government should.
IANAL, but it appears to depend under which legal authority the letter is issued (Verizon's was 50 U.S.C. 436). See the chart on page 15: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/intel/RL33320.pdf
Python Map-Reduce targeting Elasticsearch Indices
For Iraq as far as I remember the UN was opposed to any intervention. They went on their own.
Envy and Giftedness: Are We Underestimating the Effects of Envy?
This is already a great list, and it's just a few of the resources available to people hoping to achieve success with self-publishing.
I actually don't have anything to add to your comment, but I just wanted to say I agree 100% with literally everything you wrote here. These are my exact gripes with the new version, expressed better than I think I could have.
> Snowden is also making himself a part of the story

To not be vanished. Come on man.
Apple shifts from AFP to SMB2 in OS X 10.9
Since about 2001 I've considered anyone who used the word "cyber" to either be internet-illiterate or a politician (usually both).
What a difference submission time makes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5419177
NSA will release full number of terror plots foiled by surveillance
There is an aspect of deniability though it's weak, especially with something that is both updated at regular time intervals, and was otherwise reliably updated.

Maybe a better solution would be a system that generated an indicator with only a certain level of assurance that it is accurate, and have it err on the side of NOT giving false positives. This would have a built in level of deniability.
Pro blogging dreams: How to realize them
In your first paragraph, you seem to assert that this program is as The Guardian reported (that is - essentially unfettered access to private data stored with tech companies). In your second paragraph, you seem to admit that we don't really know and there is more to be resolved.

Ultimately, I think you are talking past the person you are replying to. You are arguing that the program as reported by The Guardian (essentially unfettered access to personal data stored with tech companies) is horrible. He is arguing that the program is not what it is being made out to be, and the differences between what it is now popularly believed to be and what it is are tremendous. That is a more fundamental argument that would make the other argument moot if it is true.

See: https://medium.com/prism-truth/82a1791c94d3
New Human Cornea Layer Discovered
I don't see what's common sense about it. You're just trying to do something indirectly that you can't do directly (communicating the existence of the NSL). I bet there is even an information-theoretic way of equating the two courses of action.
> I can't wrap my head around the sort of arrogance and myopia that makes a 21 or 22 yr old think that he can describe an entire world from such limited experience.

I like him already, If were Microsoft I _will_ hire him asap. He's the type of person who wants to make things better.
If you really want to retrogame properly, you need to track down an old-school giant CRT. 32-36" is about right.
A better abstraction will happen. It is inevitable. And my impression of Jan is that he is neither myopic nor naive.

Files are an old, ugly metaphor born of the file cabinet. Remember when you had to label a file and then figure out where to file it: alphabetically, client name, recency, importance, by project, etc. You even used different color labels: green meant go, red meant it's hit the fan, etc.

What seems unlikely is that the following WILL NOT happen in the next 5 years:

A way to effortlessly tag any content, anywhere and on any device in a predictive and n-dimensional way so that content is broken down to its most granular, atomic and consumable unit- a quote of a book, a lyric of a song, a smirk or a smile in a photo, a highlight clip of a video, the exact anniversary gift you intend to buy- each having its own 'GPS coordinate' on the Web, or in some emergent meta-layer fabric that hovers above and interweaves our now-Web

This much-faster way to navigate is a hyper-jump teleport to discrete coordinates, probably crowd-sourced like Waze. With combinations of tags parallax-sextant-triangulating there way more efficiently than today’s ubiquitous search query paradigm, another antiquated metaphor falls. A metaphor, no matter how popular today, I imagine not playing a major role in the future Internet

What is this next new thing? My 10 year old would say he already has it: Minecraft
I like the "citation needed" there. Quite ironic in the context of orwelian policies.
I'll be adding some more sources soon. Streamified needs to be added back. Also considering a few other sources like Hacker News, Youtube and maybe Flickr.

Overall switching from Python (Tornado) to Go was a pretty good experience. Once I got a handle on the template package it was pretty easy sailing. The only non-standard library I used was gorilla/mux for some url routing.

I do think that the end result code is more manageable than what had turned into a pretty monolithic python script before. I also found using goroutines much more enjoyable from a programming perspective than tornado's callbacks and/or tornado.gen.

I did drop the multi-search functionality that unscatter had before. For those who didn't use it, as you performed searches it would queue them up making a big url you could book mark then quickly return to your searches. Right now I'm considering doing some sort of log in process and providing that functionality and maybe some other stuff at a premium. I'll also be experimenting with some forms of advertising. Trying things like infolinks on search results wasn't really working out.
Here is how to create popular and profitable blog business with AdSense
No--my points stand even on the basis of just the phone record collection.

The questions about Prism just add more to potentially be worried about.
I can't reproduce the issue on a first-gen MacBookPro10,1 2.3GHz connected to an Apple Cinema Display 27" (over mini-DP)

Apple recently swapped my LG LCD panel to a new Samsung one for ghosting but I'm in clamshell mode.
IBM's monthly puzzle challenge