skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was using Xilinx FPGAs in 1998 and they were saying next year then for such a thing.

It's 15 years later and it's still the same with shitty overpriced tools, per-vendor ghettos and crazy per-unit prices. Granted we've got a couple of ARM cores instead of a single PPC 603 and a clock speed ramp but that's it.

If they snap out of that crap, perhaps, one day we'll reach utopia.

Then again, fucking rich engineering companies over for wads of cash is better for business.
When you start to hear those kind of things, you know it's all BS, and they just go ahead and do what they like.

It's not like anyone is gonna find out or held them accountable at the listening level.
There's a lot of good information in the article for software people for whom hardware design is strange but I think the author makes some strange points. For starters, its strange to have him refer to Verilog as a programming language multiple times all over the article. Anyone that has ever tried to do even minimal stuff on hardware will know this the wrong way to think about things.

Verilog, VHDL and whatever other hardware description languages should not be approached as programming languages, or you'll have a bad time. You need to think about what you are generating. By using HDL's we have the ability to avoid messing with crappy interfaces where you drag chips and connect wires by hand, but ultimately you really need to know what's being generated. If you write a couple of lines and have no idea of the hardware behind it, you'll likely be making a lot of mistakes. Everyone that has tried messing with FPGA's without thinking about this has ended up with hundreds of generated latches among other niceties... There's already some degree of syntactic sugar on VHDL processes (or verilog @ blocks) which make it really easy to shoot yourself in the foot by abstracting stuff.

Ultimately you'll want to know what's going on rather than not. Hardware is hard, but when you need the performance you'll do it the right way, or you might as well save yourself a lot of trouble and just go with a beefier machine and some optimized C code.
Interesting, though I don't think the optimization of friction in payment flows is the issue -- it's more that people in general don't want to pay for access to the internet just to have to pay for specific sites/apps. It would be like paying for cable connection AND paying for individual channels -- it's stupid and a generally despised practice (and they STILL show you commercials!)

Further it's regressive, as it impacts lower income and developing countries hardest.
We offer it to a few customers who use it. Still trying to figure out the best way to offer it publicly. Happy to work with you if this is something you are looking to do. We definitely need more feedback on this one.
How Do You Make a Building Disappear?
Virtual gaming headset Oculus Rift raises $16 million from Spark Capital
True! You could do that too. Sending the codebook is a cromulent strategy. It'd be lossless too. That's (to a first order) how LZ works.

I was arguing you can use a standard codebook (some agreed-upon top-N list) instead. I imagine if you did you'd lose a couple words ("wherefore" springs to mind, as it's not in common English usage) but by and large you'd have just about everything.

Technically, you can also have a lossless JPEG (or at least, within epsilon), but that's not why it's done.

More importantly, the entropy of English text isn't really that high -- ~ 1 bit per letter -- which means lossless compression works pretty well on it. Images less so.

The lesson here being that compressing English text as suggested in the article is rather meaningless, and can be done much, much better. When the article asks at the end:

> We're sensitive to data loss in text form: we can only consume a few dozens of bytes per second, and so any error is obvious.

> Conversely, we're almost blind to it in pictures and images: and so losing quality doesn't bother us all that much.

> Should it?

My answer is "mu". I wanted to answer "no", but that would mean I even accept the question as valid.

EDIT: s/in this way/as suggested in the article/ for clarity.
William Binney, Thomas Drake and Kirk Wiebe, who have over 100 years of combined NSA experience between them all seem to be supporting the bulk, if not all of Snowden's claims.
-http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/06/16/snowd...

Why do you claim that the evidence is all provided by "ONE person"?
I'm a programmer, and I care about delivering great performance at reasonable price to my clients. If I had a set of problem in an application where an FPGA would benefit the customer, I'd seriously consider targeting one.
Agreed. I've often presumed that stats (esp. language and commit counts, etc.) were part of the "social" aspect of GitHub, but not otherwise useful to me in any meaningful way most of the time.

I think the sidebars are a step back for me. I preferred some useful content at the top, now having it on a sidebar just moves that content to the right side, away from my focus.

One positive thing about the change is that "network" and "graphs" are now not co-mingled with main workflow items like Issues and Pull Requests.
First ever web security add-on for Heroku
The problem I have with his example is that I would probably want to do this:

Person person = dataSource.getPersonById(personId);
if (person != null) {
person.setPhoneNumber(phoneNumber);
dataSource.updatePerson(person);
} else {
user.notify("That's an invalid ID.");
}

So I need an "else", in effect, regardless of whether it's implemented as a conditional, block, lambda, exception, or whatever.
That article states it's a logical fallacy, even though it's clearly not. When did this trend of labelling any argument you disagree with a logical fallacy begin anyway?
I just checked, they actually do it very early, similar to what I suggested, but instead of ignoring and producing warning they simply throw yyerror and they do that without even walking a tree, but during parsing. So I'm still correct. You can verify it by executing "go run .." multiple times with and without import error, you'll notice how fast it generates "imported but not used" error, compared to actual compilation.

And the whole point of their solution has absolutely nothing to do with unused imports and variables. They are just reusing object files without recompiling and they can't have circular dependencies to do that. There is nothing more to it.
I'm no Chinese spy, Snowden says in webchat
Cartero: An asset manager for modern web apps.
The sad thing about this intense focus on the NSA story by HN in the past 2 weeks is that the sensational headlines stay on the top of HN for days, but when those headlines are later refuted it is not as widely seen.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/305855-hous...
Tixef.com extends the line to fill the full length of the browser window. If the line is still does not fit, then it is wrapped and icon is inserted to indicate the fact. If you have an office then you probably also own a large monitor if not several of. There is really no sense of keeping fixed layouts nowadays in a product targeted towards professionals.

[disclaimer: Tixef is my project so I may be a bit over the top about it]
Hour is a long time when you can use libraries to do stuff like this in a manner of minutes.
I don't remember exactly, it was a while ago. I was looking at this SO thread: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4445244/attachment-fu-or-....
And, relatedly.... if I offer to perform allegedly-medically-beneficial surgery for free, am I exempt from all the laws about regulation of medical practice?

And relatedly, if I give away viruses for free, am I good to go?

Not that I'm particularly sanguine about the odds of legislators getting it right, but I agree with rayiner that "open-source" isn't a GOOJF card.

On the other hand, it seems clear that code I write only for my own use has different regulatory requirements. In general, laws often let people do riskier things for themselves, relative to risks they let people take on behalf of others. But in this case, if you write code for yourself, it's obvious that you opted in to its features.
Beijing rejects claim of Snowden being Chinese spy
Why the West Loves Sci-Fi and Fantasy
I guess I'm used to a more technical definition of "can't" than politicians nowadays.

Apart from that, I'm German, and every time I read this "not to US citizens" excuse, all I understand is that they'll happily rape all my data without any questions asked.
Snowden: hope of a fair trial 'destroyed'
Ecuador would examine Snowden asylum claim
It'd help if someone defined FPGA before the 12th paragraph... I like to learn things, but when you start out assuming I know what the acronym means, then you lose me before I get to the good stuff. :(
Fine, call it a haphazardly improvised propaganda machine if you prefer.
"Anytime someone gives you a simple answer to a complex problem, you're being mainpulated." - Michael Nygard

Discovering "A players" in the interview process is actually a pretty complex problem. How anyone thinks a single, notoriously unreliable, self-report measure is the answer is beyond me. Link bait?
Soon. We can work with you to get this started!
that has got nothing to do with blocks.

you could have pretty much the same code in any language by doing something like:

List personList=database.personListForID(id)
for(person in personList)
{
person.setPhoneNumber(phoneNumber)
}

Personally I prefer that idiom over null checks, it is a lot easier to read.
I do like the OP names for 'Finder' vs 'Teller' though, that is a good way to describe the difference, that I haven't heard before.
"AT&T Hacker" weev is flashpoint for website crime law
Drop boxes attack corporate networks from within
Building Offline Applications With AngularJS and PouchDB
So NSA hired a Chinese spy and didn't know it?
Job, Ideally
I seem to be posting this link about once a month on HN, but here goes.

http://vimeo.com/22053820 - Mike Monteiro - F*ck You, Pay Me

It's truly worth the listen. But, since there is already spilt milk, I'd advise your letter to include notification of the date by which you will be reporting them to Compunet, dunn and bradstreet, the BBB and whatever trade organizations that they belong to, including their bonding agency (which they might have).
I hear you, but I disagree that "the alternative is actually much worse". I live in NL, which has a pretty fragmented political landscape.

And yes this means that we get idiots like Wilders (and similarly idiotic parties before him, though not as popular). But on the other hand, we have a Pirate Party, an Animal Party (that I'd be more supportive of if they knew to choose their battles better, IMHO), Green Party, Socialist Party, Party for the Elderly, a couple of Christian Parties (different ones, from very strict, to relatively sane but right wing mainstream, and even a leftist one), Labour Party, Liberal (right wing conservative) Party, and many more.

It works, also because if a smaller party gets a seat, what that means is they can voice their standing points, but only really have a good chance of changing something if a larger party also picks it up. However, they are more likely to do that with a smaller party advocating it, because it's a clear signal of popular support for such a point, and it steers the discourse in a particular way.

Another plus is that the extreme crazy (often bigoted) ones, tend to blow up on themselves, because of the evaporation effect (I forget the exact term, it means that moderate people leave, and it becomes an in-fighting echo chamber), because there's always feasible alternatives to vote for, so you don't end up with two parties that are really not representative of whoever would vote for them because it's the "lesser of two evils" (or worse, I've heard some people word it recently as "the equivalent of two evils").
Funny to unexpectedly see my front room on Hacker News
Since there are many different things that are referred to as "windev", you might want to be more specific. Put a little thought into your submissions before submitting them.
Apparently Oakland is running a handful of police academy's this year in an effort to increase the size of the force. Salary's start in the $80's I think before overtime. Might be a pretty lucrative position.

And you get to shoot people at will! (ok, not really, but my cop friend says a lot of their "what not to do" case studies come out of oakland.)

Hopefully more officers on the street will help the incidence of crime, but I'm not convinced. Time will tell.
I had a talk with a friend recently who is newly single, and it was clear to me that Facebook was making her crazy. She kept asking me questions about what people that were friends with her and her ex thought of her, or were saying behind her back, or were posting about her in a way that she couldn't see.

It was an uphill battle, but I finally convinced her of the truth: nobody really talked about her or her ex that much at all. And what was said was trite and banal, "Oh, I'm sad they broke up..."

This was a bit of revelation for her.

I think people that obsess over what is said about them behind their backs should take that to heart. The truth is you probably spend a lot less time in people's thoughts than you think you do.
Here's the FPGA from Adafruit: http://www.adafruit.com/products/451

At the time they wrote "we searched around for a fpga board we really liked, here's the one we picked" (https://plus.google.com/+ladyada/posts/VZ1zyTF73oM)

Here's an example demo using that hardware: http://learn.adafruit.com/fpga-rgb-matrix/overview
If even max quality has that many single character shifts I'm worried that this is barely demonstrating compression at all, and is instead mostly demonstrating color space conversion.
>You are of course entitled to your own personal philosophy, as am I. That doesn't mean I have to silence my disagreement.

I don't think you are being asked to be silent, I think this is a question of attachment to life yielding suffering through anger.

What cannot be changed must be accepted, and to you calm acceptance looks like complacency--to the extent that you insist that _no_ one could be free from your horror at death, and anyone who claims otherwise is subject to 'Stockholm Syndrome.'

I seem to hear you saying "Well excuse _me_ for being attached to life." I am of the opinion that attachment to life is readily apparent; of course we are attached to life, that is was it _means_ to live.

It's just... death is just a thing. It is. And it is an experience like any other. To appreciate its unique aspects is part of life. Even should we conquer death, we cannot change the fact that death has happened.

...Now, is it insensitive to be talking about death like this in a topic about someone's death? Maybe. But I am confused, somehow, at a violent reaction to a very contemplative perspective on death.
Every story on this subject from the government uses very specific technical qualifiers. "Listen" in this case. Likely there is some kind of natural language processing done to each call - either to give a complete (written) transcript or a categorical summary. In both cases the verb is not 'listen' - but in both cases the action is similarly egregious.
True, but it does essentially mean that what the public considers to be "strong" crypto is not secretly broken by the NSA in such a way that they can decrypt communications in realtime or en masse.
I think the author makes a number of good points. I think in the future, it may be possible for machine code to be converted directly to RTL (the equivalent of machine code for FPGA's) without going through the intermediate steps of converting C code to a multi-state machine in Verilog or similar types of coding. If this happens then a CPU or OS, could use an FPGA as a Co-processing Cache of sorts, in the same way that often accessed data in placed in higher speed cache RAM; often executed pieces of code could be placed in the FPGA co-processor. If that happens, I believe we could see the same kind of order of magnitude jump in performance we see due to memory cache happen in processing speeds.
Mr. Snowden didn't have to spend the majority of his time being a professional fundraiser.
This would be against github ToS
Scientist out to break Amdahl's law
Obama is still treating this problem as though it's a case of privacy vs security. The real issue is trust. U.S. citizens can't trust what private U.S. corporations tell them if the government has the power to coerce and then muzzle them. This is a poisonous environment to do business in. International business is going to go elsewhere, and domestic business will also choose to outsource to more transparent countries.
Making sense of the confusing Supreme Court DNA patent ruling
Great exposé, I think the author uses "Phineus Upham" and nickname so prominently in the hopes of using the article to hit back in poor Phin's reputation management. Given enough buzz, soon the article will come up for "Phineus Upham" too.

The online "arms race" between Google and those trying to game Google seems to me to be speeding up. Google is making a lot of reactionary moves like the "Panda"[1] updates and its "Disavow Links Tool"[2] after articles like this one expose tactics or businesses successfully gaming the results.

[1] http://articles.latimes.com/2011/feb/26/business/la-fi-googl...
[2]http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/10/a-new-too...
Never store != never see
Physics is magic, just measured, tested, and quantified.

No need to go as far as the quantum to see it. Play with two bar magnets for twenty minutes on a quiet day [1], try to twist a spinning bicycle wheel [2], or, if you're pressed for time, just hold a thing at least six inches away from everything else and let go [3].

No strings, no wires, no-one behind a curtain nor sleight of hand, but it's still magic, and it happens [4].

[1] Relativistic consequences of quantum-mechanical charge carriers screaming around nuclei generates a field that virtually interacts with other fast moving charge carriers to generate a dipolar force? Occam's razor might land on the side of magic.

[2] The first time I did this, with a lead-lined wheel, it threw me across the room, as I was sure everyone else in the class had been faking.

[3] We have no idea how it is that things fall. We have a really good theory for it, that agrees with every experimental test ever done, but it gives little insight into the way in which momentum is exchanged between massive bodies.

[4] Campy, yes, but when you're studying Physics, you're studying the Force(s).
Chile is eager to imprison a particular Nobel Peace Prize winner... and frankly, I more or less support them.
Transparency: a secret court with secretly appointed judges who make secret rulings on requests whose details are kept secret from the judges.*

* I've seen allegations of this last bit, but not evidence. The claim was that it mostly goes on the word of the requesting agency/analyst and the judge has no real way of knowing whether it's a legitimate request or not.
In the UK, there is an old Roman Bathhouse available as a tourist attraction. Along with your ticket, you get a chance to taste the water that comes from the same hot springs that powered the baths.

It is unbelievably disgusting. But watching the reactions of the people trying it is a source of endless fun.
I often struggle with the most basic question of them all: Who am I?

To me, how I live my life is the only way to answer that attempt at self-reflection. Yet, we are not what we do. That's the dodge that plagues me.
How To Write Amazon Product Reviews For Affiliate Websites
> True, but it does essentially mean that what the public considers to be "strong" crypto is not secretly broken by the NSA in such a way that they can decrypt communications in realtime or en masse.

Or, at least, that they are monitoring enough data that if they had to decrypt all of it in realtime, it would overtax their computing resources, so that they minimize the burden by going after the cleartext at the source when they have the capacity to get at it that way.
... well, yeah? How can one know not to get burned without getting burned?

I mean, I don't disagree (though I think you're mischaracterizing his post--he didn't say it was a problem in need of a solution, he was merely saying that death has that effect), but it seems like your example is counter to your point.
Also I can't read anything that slides, and I'm a fast reader.
No, I'm saying if avoiding a DRY violation creates more methods/classes it's worth doing.
I suppose my confusion arises from the fact that pretty much any practical compression scheme is essentially 'content adaptive' rather than 'standard codebooky'. In the lossy cases, add whatever magical filtering to toss out the perceptually irrelevant frequencies.

I agree with you that the article misunderstands compression and coding in general I just couldn't quite figure out what one of your counter-examples was about.
As a land use issue, the police don't get involved. By local ordinance police power resides in the zoning department not our police department. However, because zoning violations are punishable by jail time under our ordinance they are criminal offenses.
To schools, not students. You have to be the purchasing agent for a school board to make this purchase.
Clapper: "the NSA does not voyeuristically pore through U.S. citizens’ e-mails"

Obama: "the NSA can't listen to your calls"

The denial I would like to hear: the NSA does not collect your e-mails, phone calls or internet traffic. The lack of a denial is looking very suspicious, and a careful reader is forced to act as if it's all being vacuumed up.

Their promises only relate to when that data may be used.
In Obama-speak, "can't" means "we have a law that says they cannot, so they certainly must not be doing it."

In human-speak, "can't" means, "do they have a system capable of letting your average NSA analyst do this easily without oversight?" I suspect we'll never get the answer to this question unless it is leaked.
Cool. I, for one, will also be keeping an eye out for more real-time garbage collection articles. I'm specifically interested in real-world implementations that have actually been helpful. I'm sold on the value but I don't think that most languages provide the kind of guarantees that you need for RTGC. Again, its the problem with proving temporal properties, which is hard in functional programming. But I don't know any real languages for which RTGC should be easily integrated... maybe Mercury? TLA+/PlusCal feels closer to the right direction but is focused on specification instead of compilation (a distinction that we have turned into a difference). But I don't see how a traditional imperative language could handle RTGC without time-consuming and error-prone manual instrumentation. (I'm hoping I'm wrong about that.)
Unfortunately the truth appears to be somewhat different. See: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589672-38/snowden-nsa-sn...

EFF's position (from the CNET article): "The evidence shows that the NSA seeks a warrant only after the communication is initially acquired and analyzed by computers according to algorithms designed by humans, placed in a government database, and reviewed by an analyst."
"It depends on what the definition of "can't" is"
The most important question: Can you buy it without windows?
Apartable pulls back curtain on landlords' management histories
Here's EFF and EPIC's parsing of the technical qualifiers (they found a lot of weasel words): http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589672-38/snowden-nsa-sn...
I heard a good joke about this: when you're 20, you're obsessed with what others think about you. When you're 40, you don't give a damn what others think about you. When you're 60, you realize others were never thinking about you at all.
Did you not know that white people are the cause of every problem ?