skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The premise is completely off. If the author actually compared the totality of the impact of 9/11 on the country, instead of just comparing the number of people who die each year to various diseases, they would surely see the importance of fighting terrorism.

Just some facts:

http://www.iags.org/costof911.html

- The destruction of major buildings in the World Trade Center with a replacement cost of from $3 billion to $4.5 billion.

- Property and infrastructure damage: $10 billion to $13 -billion.

- Federal emergency funds (heightened airport security, sky marshals, government takeover of airport security, retrofitting aircraft with anti-terrorist devices, cost of operations in Afghanistan): $40 billion.

- Direct job losses amounted to 83,000, with $17 billion in lost wages.

- Losses to the city of New York (lost jobs, lost taxes, damage to infrastructure, cleaning): $95 billion.

- Fall of global markets: incalculable.

Keep in mind the reason terror attacks have been successful here is that the terrorists use our own laws against us in order to gain an advantage. The lax immigration laws allowed many of the 9/11 hijackers to set up shop here. Keep in mind a large number of illegal immigrants being stopped at our southern border are middle eastern:

http://www.wnd.com/2010/05/156441/

"A 2006 congressional report on border threats, titled “A Line in the Sand: Confronting the Threat at the Southwest Border” and prepared by the House Committee on Homeland Security Subcommittee on Investigations, indicated that 1.2 million illegal aliens were apprehended in 2005 alone, and 165,000 of those were from countries other than Mexico. Approximately 650 were from “special interest countries,” or nations the Border Patrol defines as “designated by the intelligence community as countries that could export individuals that could bring harm to our country in the way of terrorism.”

It's a tough balancing act. You don't want to give the bad guys an advantage, but when you keep the laws relaxed and reduce the amount of money being spent on this, all you do is play into the hands of the people who want to kill Americans.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

Is a pretty good explanation of why we don't rewrite the whole site. A rewrite would involve every product dev stopping what they are doing and probably spending at least 18 months reimplementing their product in a different language. During that time all forward progress on products would be halted. I am absolutely certain it would be an unmitigated disaster for the company to try to rewrite the site in another language.

Instead we have a small team of people making PHP really nice work work in. HipHop gives us full control over the language and lets us add in any constructs we like. We make sure stock PHP runs, but also the additions we need to the language can be added as well.

I don't really understand devs who think reimplementing in another language is easy or the right thing to do. It's almost always the wrong thing from my experience and always lot harder and takes a lot longer than expected.
I'm sure it has to do with a perception of 'sunk cost.' Everyone there knows PHP. They've developed tons of PHP libraries. They've set up their servers to run PHP. They have probably also ported some of the more complex code to PHP extensions.

They probably should've moved to a different language a while back, but those kinds of changes require a lot of effort that don't seem economically expedient at the time.
Tell HN: Watch Apple's WWDC Keynote stream on linux or windows
Open VLC

Media->Open Network Stream

copy this URL:

http://p.events-delivery.apple.com.edgesuite.net/13oygadvoyibawefpiuawefpiuawdf6/live/8500/8500.m3u8?x-session-format=live
US based technology companies can no longer be trusted.
Cheers, that's the right one. (Though cuts out every minute or so for me, anyone else?)
The risk for foreigners is the same when you consider the US gov sharing intelligence with other governments.
Records are an interesting matter. I think I have read about some documents, however the semi-closed nature of the Soviet government, as well as the current Russian government, leaves large portions of it unavailable to the general public. And what is available is often difficult to place in the context, because the context is insufficient. I will see if I can find anything, it is indeed interesting.
The purpose of terrorism is to cause fear and overreaction. If we overreact, they win.
The live event has begin but this link still streams WWDC 2012.

Has anyone been able to figure out the link for WWDC 2013 for linux & windows users ?
Anki Drive - AI & Robotics Technology Inside Consumer Products
First porn app for Google Glass runs smack into new ban on explicit content
I shall definitively give Inkscape a go, and downloading existing SVGs is a good idea, thanks
He also got the Center of Intelligence named after him:

https://www.cia.gov/about-cia/todays-cia/george-bush-center-...
1985 - Peer-to-Peer Encrypted Phone Calls to Avoid NSA Wiretapping
oh look, governments keep enacting shitty ideas.
I'm also surprised he chose HK - it seems dicey to me. Off the cuff, there are other places that come to mind as being more promising spots. Having followed the Roman Polanski saga a few years back, for instance, I would have thought France would be a proven destination for anyone seeking to avoid US extradition.
It is now easy for any country to ban US based technologies in order to jump start their own tech industry.

This is the beginning of the end of the US tech industry in general.
IMHO backblaze is not a good example, because their design is prone to a few kinds of onerous failures due to the poor hw design of some of their components. Its much smarter to build this sort of thing with an actual JBOD chassis and a SAS controller

> Then you just need smart client that splits data 3-way into 3 different national jurisdictions.

This actually doesn't help much.
From the keynote: "We have paid out $10 billion to developers in the app store, $5b just in the last year"

That would suggest a few billion dollars in app store revenue for Apple. That's nothing to spit at.

Apple doesn't want those billions of dollars to disappear into HTML5 apps where they get not such cut.
Apple’s App Store Hits 50 Billion Downloads, Paid Out $10 Billion To Developers
Rich Hickey would like to disagree.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc
Berezovsky is also dead
I feel exactly this way as I am trying to teach myself some more involved statistics. There are moments of clarity but the broad picture is too fuzzy. And there was a time I could get really excited about math - still love the experience of (re)learning it but it seems like several years of formula grinding with the sole intent of passing entrance exams has taken its toll in the worst possible way by diminishing some of the intuition and feel I seemed to have.
US in Damage Control Mode After Edward Snowden's Explosive NSA leaks.
Is it Google Reader API compatible? I have an iPhone app I want to continue using. It currently syncs with Google Reader via the API.
Tent is a protocol for decentralized event-based communication at scale. File sync is actually a medium-weight application in terms of the load it's designed for.

Of course, just like web servers, the server implementation and hardware it runs on has a lot to do with it. One of our top development priorities is building a very robust, scalable self-hostable server implementation to power apps like file sync and even more demanding applications.
Nsa.py
I agree that technology changes the game because it's a multipler.

There's also an insidious quality to current surveillance in that it is not just pervasive over space, but over time. Once they have a database like that envisioned in PRISM and the Verizon records, it could be used to travel back through any person's intimate life looking for weak points, failures, emotional attachments, and transgressions, very useful in discrediting political opponents or inconvenient journalists, and very useful in quelling any revolts by citizens before they even begin. These are currently the methods that intelligence agencies use to turn assets and use them for their own ends on a small scale, but should we allow them the tools to use these techniques against an entire population simultaneously and retrospectively? What would the long-term outcome of that sort of power be?

I also do wonder why the methods they use should be secret in the first place? I completely understand the need for operational security on specific operations or details of methods, but if a huge broad program like this is done in a nation's name, surely they should know what is being done and approve or disapprove of it? I can't imagine there are any terrorists the professed target of these programs, who are not aware of widespread monitoring, so I find it hard to believe the top secret nature of the programs is about security so much as avoiding oversight. The avoidance of providing specific details to congress from former BAH executive Clapper is a good illustration of this - if congress can't get broad figures out of them, who are they accountable to?

So the combination of power multiplied by technology and the lack of accountability is the difference between this and tapping telephone lines on an individual basis.
I don't understand how setting up a VPN on my local network would secure the information. It seems like you'd need to sign up for one of these vpn services so the exit node was elsewhere. Am I missing something here?
You are right.. #2 (dev and sales) is already very difficult to accomplish and time consuming by only one person.
Well, I'm asking this because I'm starting to feel that I need to take some funding to keep developing the product and the business. It's been becoming very difficult to keep focus on everything at the same time.
Already exists http://briangreen.net/2010/11/diy-ultralight-faraday-cage-po... lol
Where does it say the revelations about the officer ended up jeopardizing the prosecution? And do you know what the final result of the prosecution was?
"The purpose of terrorism is to cause fear and overreaction."

That reminded me of a similar take on that topic from The Economist's latest, which may be worth considering here:

"... conventional terrorism poses no major threat to America or to its citizens. But that's not really what it aims to do. Terrorism is basically a political communications strategy... For the president the war on terror is what the Vietnam War was to Lyndon Johnson: a vast, tragic distraction in which he must be seen to be winning, lest the domestic agenda he really cares about (health-care, financial reform, climate-change mitigation, immigration reform, gun control, inequality) be derailed. It's no surprise that he has given the surveillance state whatever it says it needs to prevent a major terrorist attack."

- http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/06/wh...
New Israeli Device Helps Blind With Daily Tasks
This manages to keep crashing VLC for me. Heh.
Politically motivated criminal charges. Political asylum.
Apple unveils OS X 10.9 Mavericks
- Fall of global markets: incalculable.

Really? If you look at the DJIA over the period from mid-September of 2001 on, you will see that the fall lasted all of about one month. Within weeks it rebounded right back where it had been.
thanks, works perfectly.
I didn't say 9/11 happening every other day wouldn't be an awful thing, just that we should keep it in perspective. Most of the damage from such an event - including in the situations you describe - aside from loss of life is due to people not keeping the event in perspective, which is not less of a reason to keep it in perspective.
> but when you keep the laws relaxed and reduce the amount of money being spent on this, all you do is play into the hands of the people who want to kill Americans.

That is an incredibly unwarranted assumption. Spending less may in fact drastically reduce the threat to Americans.

Food for thought: Why do you think people want to come over here and kill Americans, as opposed to people similar to us in other countries? Might it be correlated to the amount of money we spend doing unfriendly things to non-Americans?
This is working great on an Android FWIW.
> Spending and making laws are all about the consent of the governed.

Laws should be about the informed consent of the governed. Security built on a lie is still a lie even if people feel more safe. During the first days of 9-11, the military sent personal down to the airport to reinforce peoples perception of safe travel. What they did not tell anyone at the time, was that the guns did not have any ammunition in them. Instead, the military were basically posing as an "armed force", because having guns with ammunition at airport would then actually create a security issue at the airports.

The security theater of the US feels somewhat like a doctor who has started to only give out placebos to his patients. If anyone feels better, sing praises, and if anyone get worse, give them more sugar pills. Soon, everyone start to get sick on the sugar alone, while the sugar pill manufacturer crave for more sick people.

The security theater from 9-11 has gone on long enough. People are not going to feel more safe from it, and will just get sicker on the solution.
> (I have heard Chinese graduate students in the United States, students in nonquantitative subjects, deride the mathematics section of the GRE general test used for graduate school admission as a test of "junior high math," and that is literally true in terms of the standard curriculum in China.)

this is true for students educated in the US as well! it's super frustrating, because you're staring at trig identities that you last looked at ten years ago.
Interesting. If anything, I would prefer to do the opposite: work more in fewer days. I like having full days during which I don't even have to think about work.
Two quibbles:
1. We aren't "giving up" liberty, it's being taken.
2. It isn't for the purpose "to fight terror".

Case in point, me.

I have done absolutely nothing wrong, but (symmetrically)
1. I am having my liberties taken.
2. I am not a terrorist in any sense of the word.

I suggest it is the odd framing the story that makes it seem irrational.
No one is ever wanted for "political charges". There are civil charges, and there are criminal charges. When the state is the prosecutor, it is very often (though not always) a criminal charge.

When requesting asylum, the requester makes the claim that the charges (of whatever kind) are politically motivated - which may or may not stick in snowden's case. I have no knowledge of the history of extraditions in such matters.
There was actually an article upvoted on HackerNews a few days ago which supposed, even before Snowden revealed himself, that these leaks were the result of Chinese intelligence activity.
Agreed.

He's also rolling the dice in a major way. Although the asylum laws are sort of up in the air in Hong Kong right now, they could just decide to detain him and put him in jail during the process. Worse still, since China has sovereignty, they could ship him back to China and use him as trade bait with the US.
And it cuts doubly, because a lot of the tactics of the rebels were what we would call terrorism these days - tarring-and-feathering is simple torture and terror tactics.
Seems not for now http://tt-rss.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1338
It starts off on low quality, tries to go to higher quality, then buffers and stops stream. duh.
Hence the protest signage posted in the fences of bridge overpasses of divided carriageways (I don't want to involve myself in an east coast/west coast debate on terms)
There are two parts to the answer:

1. Get a device because you will need one for debugging. Some things can't be debugged in the emulator. The easy thing is to buy a Nexus 4 in the Play store. That's a great price for a really nice device. If you have the money, get a 10" tablet, too. Asus tablets are very nice.

2. Understand that no device is adequately representative of the devices you want to target. So don't assume anything about screen size or density, and don't assume that if it looks good on your device, you are done. Make lots of emulator configurations. Make very large screen configurations. Rotate the screens. Change the font size preference. You would be surprised how easy it is to break apps by changing the font size.

What you will learn form this is that you can't make a separate layout for every device. Don't try. Don't limit the user. Let them change screen orientation. Let them change font size. Let them run your app on a 22" landscape mode display connected to the HDMI port.
Instead of messing around with access and redirect stuff I would suggest, as others have in this thread, that you just put your files in a subdirectory and use this subdirectory as root for lighttpd.

Problem solved with two commands and you can also add additional stuff to your repository like sources before they went through different processors (coffee script, SASS,...) or various drafts. This way you also have a full copy of everything you need for your site in case something happens to your workstation.
POLL: Edward Snowden - Hero or Traitor?
Most oppressive regimes will make sure that dissidents also get criminal charges (fabricated or not), so then you could just as well remove the concept of asylum entirely. Hardly any country has political charges after all.

The concept of murder may not be as obvious as you think. If an American murder fled to Norway, he will likely not get asylum, but Norwegian authorities can't extradict him to the US, because they are not allowed to do that when there is a possibility of capital penalty. The same is the case for many other European nations.
Could you please characterize the difference between "criminal charges" vs "political ones"?
Same here - anybody have a fix?
A Statistical Problem with “Nothing to Hide”
Way too early to say.
You're aware that Shin Bet listens to a very significant % of phone calls originating in the West Bank, right? I've had friends who had access to intel and they described it as quote "just like 1984" (1984 reference unsolicited).

It turns out that you don't need advanced computer systems if you've got a lot of phone taps and an endless source of conscripted, arabic-conversational labor in the form of the IDF draft.

Why should they stop at Palestinian nationals? Meretz and B'Tselem are awfully anti-occupation, what if they're aiding terrorists? There's an easy way to find out..
Who says it is legal? Is it constitutional?
And then they say "it's all legal, and Congress has known about it for years! Why act surprised?!"
> I have just finished high school and I feel like I don't know why 2 + 2 = 4

To be fair, axiomatizing integer arithmetic has been attempted (unsuccessfully) by intellectual titans like Godel, Russel, and Whitehead, and is nowadays considered "too hard" by research mathematicians, so you probably shouldn't be so hard on your schoolteachers ;)
It maybe a bit outdated, but you can check out the net tuts tutorial here:
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/ruby/singing-with-sinatra/

To understand Sinatra, it's best to start with understanding Rack. Railscasts Pro has a good video on it.
http://railscasts.com/episodes/317-rack-app-from-scratch
Orwellian Nightmare.
Though this is true, the point still remains that there is nothing noteworthy in classifying tactical-level detail of military operations, nor in classifying diplomatic cables.

If a government had wanted every other government to know what they were saying they were make a public announcement, not send a diplomatic cable. As far back as 1929 Secretary of State Henry Stimson had said that "gentlemen do not read each other's mail", so there was certainly an expectation of privacy.

As it turns out the world is not full of gentleman; code-breaking became the norm, and was directly responsible for much of the Allied success during World War II, both against Germany and against Japan. This should further reinforce why nations take such care even nowadays to protect their diplomatic communications.

So for Manning the stuff he's getting in trouble for is not new, and it's not ginned up just for him. If he'd done anything approaching what he did in WWII, for instance, he'd have been actually executed. Any later decade he'd have been imprisoned for life, just like the Navy radiomen in the Walker ring who leaked secrets to the U.S.S.R.

We'll see what happens to him in 2013 but the charges are very serious, and it's disappointing to me how much people are treating this as a tribal issue, where they support Manning for no better reason than that he has embarrassed the U.S. government that they hate so much.

This is a tech website after all; if you knew that somewhere in YourEmailSite.com was evidence that "the public deserved to see", would you leak every email that you were hosting to the public? Would you leak just the ones of public interest? Or would you keep your promise to your customers and not leak any at all?
The question that I guess I have is how effective is outing yourself after you have performed the leak?

Leaving aside the fact that this is still evolving, how do you propose to measure that effectiveness?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesnachrichtendienst
"It depends heavily on wiretapping and electronic surveillance of international communications."
If your communications are vulnerable, and your communications are of interest to governments, then there's very little you can do to avoid it being intercepted.

You may, if you trust your hardware, your encryption software, and your key management, be able to keep that intercepted message from being read for some length of time. That is different than actually intercepting the traffic, which is trivial for the organizations we're talking about, and there is very, very little someone can do to avoid the interception.

Believing that being on a different continent makes you safe is deluding yourself.
Here: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/08/18850035-intellig...

The people up in arms aren't thinking logically, they are thinking emotionally. That's a terrible way to make any sort of decision.
Or a British individual who was detained and questioned for tweeting "Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America?"

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2093796/Emily-Buntin...
What No One Tells You About Startup Competitions...
The worst thing about terror is the social and cultural effect it has. America swung hard to the theocratic right after 9/11-- ironically the same ideology as the terrorists more or less (except Dominionist Christian instead of Wahhabist Muslim... basically a branding difference).
There's another plausible explanation for what you have observed re: outrage.

Indifferent isn't the right word, it is outright drooling ignorance. That, and some of them may still not use any electronic means of communication, but those are pretty well dying off. The limit of their outrage would be to Echelon.

Encryption and modems. Oh, and anything to slow down those NLP MR jobs, like screwing with spelling and word boundaries. (Yes, immature and and likely ultimately futile)
Link to version that does not require signing up for and signing into drop box:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=522362

Big brother's little sister is just as bad. Why not give the ssrn link?
Apple unveils OS X 10.9, “Mavericks”
PRISM was born out of the now defunct Information Awareness Office
And intelligence knew about the 9/11 bombers before 9/11, and failed to stop them.

If we already have enough data to predict criminal acts, and we are still failing, how is collecting more data the solution?

[Note, Fiction:] My smoke detector did a create job ringing when my house caught fire, but the fire department trucks didn't get to my house in time to save it. Why should I buy more smoke detectors?
It currently stops for 10 seconds every 30 seconds. Hardly "hold up fine" by me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mavericks_(location)