skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Iain Banks. With or without the M
NSA whistleblower reveals himself
MIT President Tells Grads To 'Hack the World'
Hong Kong as his safe harbor from the U.S. government. I wonder what Kim Dotcom would say about that.
I've quoted your comment on Reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1fz6ba/creator_of_...

I can remove this if it is a problem.
Great article! We're creating a tool for PhD students: bohr.launchrock.com
WOW. Thank you Edward Snowden. You are a hero, that is to say, a rarely decent human being. Deep respect to you.
This is crazy helpful, thank you! Have you considered doing a similar thing for paid items, maybe with a small commission?
Bootstrap 3: Because deep in your heart of hearts, you still miss using tables for layout.
That might all be true, but that doesn't mean his Department of Justice is faithfully serving justice.

The story is equally chilling regardless of how legitimate the protesters' concerns were.
I remember his first two keynotes, they were at CUSEC in 2006. They were great. Still remember the line about "Yeah, jobs are moving to India, but they are not the jobs you want" line.
At UBS I know they have a small business rules system written in core.logic, in their case I believe being able to run backwards allows them to uncover redundancies - like "which rules match this result".
51 New Excel 2013 Functions
Watches From All Brands & Designs On Sale
> Modern vegetables are, in general, less bitter than in earlier times.

That does not necessarily mean more sugar - it just means less bitter. (These axes are independent).

Selective breeding puts pressure on easy-to-grow-and-sell (shelf life, size, shape, resistance to pests) and only afterwards on flavor.

And another important (and often forgotten) point about modern frutis and vegetables is that they are mostly picked when green (when not all sugar has ripened yet), and then chemically ripened in a process that does not yield as much sugar as natural ripening.

I would like a reference before I believe that today's fruits and vegetable contain more sugar than those of 50 years ago.
Does the mentor get paid?
I've used one VM for deploying my several small projects in the past. I'm definitely curious about separate sandboxes for them when developing locally - one chef-solo and vagrant instance for each - but it seems like it would be a lot more expensive to deploy them to separate boxes afterward. Is there an easy way to "merge" them back into one box when deploying?

... I guess that doesn't make sense. I should have the local vagrant/chef-solo mirror how I have my production server; all projects combined. But at least the chef recipes will make it easier to split things apart once I want to separate projects to different servers for traffic reasons.
Scotland might be a good choice. Everybody seems to think our borders are pretty open.

There's a bit of a revolution starting with lots of startups popping up in all areas from motorsport and travel to energy and biotech.
As I understand it, fructose in fruit tends to be offset by the fact that fruits have fibre. The fibre means the fructose is kept in your gut for longer, and bacteria there break it down before it has a chance to hit your liver. The issue with fructose/sucrose tends to arise when we have it in liquid format (juices, soft drinks etc.), or eat large quantities of foods high in sugar without the accompanying fibre.
My expectation (as a lifelong pacifist) is that, when someone gets arrested as part of a peace protest of this nature, they will try to face maximum charges and then plead guilty to them. That's part of the protest -- taking responsibility for your actions, and using that to highlight the "injustice" of war and the government's actions in relation to war.

Usually the maximum charges are things that match the protesters' perceptions of themselves -- trespassing, vandalism, things like that. "Terrorism" is a completely unexpected form of government retaliation.
find | grep foo
Newspaper identifies source of US surveillance programs
I was just flicking through Excession trying to find some appropriate event, but yes, I think that would do nicely.

As a bonus, it's also a Scottish bank holiday[1]

[1] http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/People/bank-holidays/
The gulag.
Probably worth pointing out that this particular poster has an extremely negative view of many of their life experiences! (e.g., look for their comments about working for Google.)
The thing I hate most about bootstrap 3 is changing the class names of the grid. "span3" and "offset1" were much better than "col-lg-3" and "col-offset-1".

Seriously... there are several places in the docs (and I often do this myself) where a non-grid-related element uses a "span2" or whatever to float itself left and size itself equal to a 2-width column. Example: the input field for a search box. When input-medium/small/mini/large/xlarge doesn't cut it, or just because you want something to fit in a column.

So now we're gonna have "col-lg-2" etc plastered throughout our html? I don't see that as an improvement. The elements that get used the most should have simple names... that's what made bootstrap great as it was a common-sense standard for lots of common html/css techniques. "hide" for display:none, "muted" for color:#999, etc.
> I rather like the idea of a fishery protection vessel called the "Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall".

I'd go with the Me, I'm counting.
I've recently been using DTrace on Ubuntu. I filed two bugs on the project page (https://github.com/dtrace4linux/linux), and Paul Fox fixed them quickly. I have more bugs to file, but I'm doing my part in making DTrace on Linux a reality.

It's very tempting to join these licensing discussions (I was at Sun, too, and many of us DID want to see DTrace on Linux), but I think that's a distraction from what's happening right now.

There are two projects porting DTrace to Linux, which is really exciting. I'm helping out.
From the article:

> The DOE agent admitted the three carried a letter which stated, “We come to the Y-12 facility because our very humanity rejects the designs of nuclearism, empire and war. Our faith in love and nonviolence encourages us to believe that our activity here is necessary; that we come to invite transformation, undo the past and present work of Y-12; disarm and end any further efforts to increase the Y-12 capacity for an economy and social structure based on war-making and empire-building.”

The ultimate reason for carrying such a letter would be to explain their actions in the event they could not explain their actions themselves. For example, had they been shot by guards.

And later they said:

> "For this we give our lives — for the truth about the terrible existence of these weapons."

Sounds like they are very much aware that their actions might have ended in their death, and accepting of it. They are 82, 57, and 63 years old.
You sir, are going to collect a LOT of emails. Good work.
most is correct. That's why sites like PhD comics and http://rezaghadiri.net/ resonate across disciplines.
A fascinating interview with the NSA whistleblower, which ends with a chilling prediction of where the logic of manifest destiny and exceptionalism will lead the United States:

There will be a time where policies will change, because the only thing which restricts the activites of the surveillance state are policy, even our agreements with other sovereign governments; we consider that to be a stipulation of policy, rather than a stipulation of law. And because of that, a new leader will be elected, they'll flip the switch, say that because of the crisis, because of the dangers that we face in the world, some new and unpredicted threat, we need more authority, we need more power, and there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it. It will be turnkey tyranny.

- Edward Snowden

Some strong allegations here - that anyone is fair game for surveillance by the NSA, and that there is indiscriminate tapping of communications. Also some strong justifications for blowing the whistle on these activities.

A hero for our times.
It's all about consistency
Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations
if you're IN a PhD program, you definitely shouldn't be doing a PhD.
While I see your point, generally speaking law enforcement is not going to spend a proportional amount of money with respect to protecting citizens. Hundreds of thousands of dollars may be spent on a single investigation into a murderer that may only prevent the deaths of 1 or 2 people. You can't assign a monetary value to it. Protecting people from dying is a necessary service in any society.

If the NSA had a hypothetical program that didn't infringe on anyone's rights (likely impossible, but bear with me), but did consistently stop terrorist plots when they arose, even if all of the successful plots may kill a few dozen or a hundred people in total, most people would agree that spending $80 billion on that program is worth it due to the lives saved.

I don't personally think that $80 billion being spent to protect lives is wasteful, generally speaking. I do see how it is wasteful in this situation, because it has very questionable results, and when the collateral damage of the plan is so incredibly great.
The Reason Why Nobody Likes Your Content
"Once he reached the conclusion that the NSA's surveillance net would soon be irrevocable, he said it was just a matter of time before he chose to act. "What they're doing" poses "an existential threat to democracy", he said."

Thoughtful people brave enough to blow whistles seem to be the greatest check on what looks like a secret, unaccountable, illegal centralization of power based on lies from the top of the government on down.

Many powerful people will see him otherwise. I shudder to think of what will become of him, though I'm sure we'll see it played out in headlines.

Whistle-blowers are not our only defense, however, as we all have power too, for example contributing to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF):

"His allegiance to internet freedom is reflected in the stickers on his laptop: "I support Online Rights: Electronic Frontier Foundation," reads one. Another hails the online organisation offering anonymity, the Tor Project."

My personal favorite is the Freedombox project: https://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/learn

EFF: https://www.eff.org

(By the way, I don't know about anybody else, but for the first time I can think of, I'm seriously concerned about the consequences of posting support for somebody like this online. I don't know how things will play out years down the road and who will do what with this information.)

EDIT: Followed up by posting the above on my blog -- http://joshuaspodek.com -- based on comments below.
5 Maps That Show How Divided America Really Is
It's not an article, but Matt Might writes a lot about graduate school on his blog: http://matt.might.net/articles/
Very brave kid. I hope he will not be tortured and imprisoned.
This quote alone shows why the author has zero credibility:

"[...] environmental toxicity and genetic proclivities would have contributed as well. Certainly, Jobs was exposed over the years to massive bombardment from WiFi and other electromagnetic fields (EMFs)."

Digging deeper, it appears her career as an author and nutritionist is based on the idea that eating soy and vegetarianism is bad for you. Correlation is not causation, but it has long been known that vegetarians live longer.

I'll put more faith in peer-reviewed scientific journals than an author who writes in a magazine called "Psychology Today."
Ktap was recently announced also https://github.com/ktap/ktap
Tent - The Protocol for a Decentralized Web
Your profile says you have been working at a company for a year and a half, and you list no projects. Your github link contains a tic tac toe solver. You've given us nothing to judge you by.

Everyone has Ruby on Rails, TDD, Agile, and the other buzzwords on their resume. It really doesn't mean much, to be honest. Any intelligent person can pick any of that up if they haven't been exposed to it, and any unintelligent person can list it on their resume and repeat the buzzwords.

A "challenging company" in the bay area is going to throw you head first into a technology that not only you do not know, but nobody knows. You will be expected to create original algorithms and ideas. Your work will be regularly reviewed for patentable ideas. Every day when I walk into the office I walk into the unknown - google and textbooks are no help except to point the way. It someone else had already figured it out they would already have the business. I have no idea if you are capable of that or not, but nothing that you've linked says you are. Change the links, or your plans ;)

It's really expensive to live here, the traffic is horrible, and you may end up living your work. Either the work, or the bay area better be really important to you. If you just want to write some Ruby on Rails, there are much cheaper, better quality of life places to do that. with that said, in some ways my paragraph above is a caricature. There are plenty of jobs here where you are cranking out apps or such, and people with mediocre skills do fine. Silicon valley goes way overboard in talking about how everyone is the best and the brightest in my experience. In that sense any decent programmer is a good fit. There is no particular reason to be intimidated in trying to get a job here if you can program, but is it worth moving across the world just to be average? Maybe, but that doesn't seem to be your question.

I'm not trying to run you down - it's encouraging that you know SICP, for example. But you have a year and a half experience and have only shown us toy projects. As it stands I would have no interest in interviewing you, which could very well be my loss, but who has the time? If you are better than most programmers around you, you will do very well here. Come on over, polish up the resume, and accept that your first job might be a place where you do little but prove that you can produce in a fast environment. As another poster has pointed out, there are a lot of job openings here.
I read an article a while back about the then imminent closing of a prison in New York that was no longer needed due to falling crime rates. There were quotes from workers voicing their displeasure. I'll repeat that. They were upset that crime rates were falling and fewer prisons were needed. As always, incentives matter.
I came on HN just now to ask the same thing. I am going to retire my Google account. What do people use other than Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo?
terrorism is the new communism
Not in my experience. Python gives you complete control over object's internals with no real protection mechansim and this is very often abused. Duck typing is abused. Compilers give you some compile time guarantees that you don't get in Python. Not to mention eval(). Monkey patching. You can only pass by reference, not by value, again a big problem. Side effects galore.

I enjoy coding in Python and I've used it on and off for small things over many years but since getting involved in a project which has 100klocs of Python I've become pretty convinced it's a poor choice for this sort of scale.

Reading statically typed code you know what types the different objects are. In Python, no clue. This can be somewhat mitigated through documentation (e.g. see Google's Python style guide).

Want to find all the places a variable, or a class, or a function are used? You're out of luck. Good luck refactoring that bowl of spaghetti.

Yet another factor is that there a lot of people who have built very large systems in other languages (C/C++/Java/C# etc.) so the knowledge of how to manage that is more accessible.
So should I take vitamins or not?
The Asymco chart that the Mary Meeker report uses shows that smart mobile is in fact tearing it up in terms of market share.

It can also be technically correct that the "negative" impact on desktop is "small" if you take "negative" to mean "shrinking revenue" instead of "shrinking market share" and you factor in doubts about Windows 8 to account for some stagnation in desktop/laptop PCs.
Rand Paul would probably do a lot more good by learning how to think rationally.
You can't give a good keynote if you gave only one conference talk before.

I think the article has a list of nice suggestions, but if you're asked to give a keynote and you haven't given more than 100+ talks/lectures/presentations before, you should do one thing only: Stop. Decline the invite.
He did something I'd honestly never have the courage to do if I were in his position. He knows he will certainly pay for his action the rest of his life but despite that he did it.

I'm not easily emotional but reading this article I had some heart bumps and wanted to cry. I'm speechless.

Thank You Edward Snowden for your act of heroism, the present will certainly condemn you but the history will certainly remind with honor people like you who made progress our currently deficient democracies.
I have no idea of what you're trying to say...

... it appears that your only statement is that there are bad people. I would agree; it seems that quite a number of them have found their way into various US government departments.
Nice idea. You should probably make it clear that it uses Google auth, though.
Words escape. The brilliant aspect to this is asymmetrical release of information. Keep this in the top news cycle as long as possible it seems. Think about what is going on at the White House and NSA right now. They've got to be thinking, "Shit, what are they going to release in the next 6 hours || 12 hours || tomorrow?" Everything they say in public will be cast against what is released in the future. F'ing Brilliant.
I didn't write that. I wrote that in my own experience, most of the people who are overweight who try unsuccessfully to lose weight a) don't have as healthy a diet as they'd like to believe and b) don't exercise long enough and intensely enough if they work out at all.

What is a "healthy diet"? I don't believe there's a one-size-fits-all answer, but I mentioned processed foods because at the highest level, there is plenty of evidence that processed foods are problematic when consumed in the quantities they are being consumed in:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2897733/
http://news.yale.edu/2013/03/06/yale-researchers-identify-sa...
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/11/63
http://www.diabetes.org/news-research/research/access-diabet...
http://jn.nutrition.org/content/139/10/1950
http://wholegrainscouncil.org/whole-grains-101/health-studie...
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120210110038.ht...
You have to be very self-critical when proposing thought experiments. Typically, they end up having no connection with reality (attempts to make variables independent which really aren't), I'm not sure it's productive to think like this unless you're really super-guarded about your assumptions.

You're assuming a 1% absolute difference could easily exist given equal laws, enforcement, and penalties. If you say you're just asserting that for purposes of the experiment, you still can't say anything because the assertion may well be nonsense.

You're assuming you can tease it apart (e.g. existing laws and enforcement's influence on criminal culture) such that stats are "missing", it's not clear that you can. In fact, evidence (prohibition) more likely says you can't.
What a wonderful idea - less intimidating than the UK's use of SkyNet for UK satellite systems, but unfortunately far less likely to happen.

In the meantime we can always use ship names for online avatars ;)
It certainly makes it less-relevant to the comment that started this thread.

And, arguably, it is better, because it may mean that we have made some moral progress.
Pseudo-Random vs. True Random
> consumers dont like 'planned obsolescence' and if they catch a whiff of it, your brand loyalty takes a huge hit.

Tell that to Apple.
Gosh! I completely missed it. :(
Truly, he deserves a Balls Of Steel award. I hope that that what is remaining of democracy in the US will be strengthened by his sacrifice.
Kim Dotcom's company was registered in Hong Kong, but Kim and his office were in New Zealand.
I use rsync via ssh for that scenario and I backup the stuff that isn't provided by the VPS, that is usually a list of installed packages, a dump or snapshot of the database and the relevant deployed files.
Totally agreed. Greenwald has done a very good job of keeping this story "top of mind" as best he can. Hopefully there is more to come from his camp.
the present will certainly condamn you

I think that's really down to us, don't you? The US Government will certainly condemn his actions, but I doubt many of the public will.
Don't Freak Out About the New Gmail 4.5 Update for Android OS
نتيجة إعدادية بنى سويف
P.S. 49% of Asian-Americans 25 and older have at least a bachelor's degree, compared to 28% of the general population, and the median household income for Asian-Americans is $66,000, compared to $49,800 for the general population.

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/06/19/the-rise-of-asian-...

Sorry, that not really an "underclass".

Sure, there's still bigotry against Asians. That, in itself, doesn't make them an "underclass". Words have meanings.
Kids cost a lot of money, the government can give a lot without them being a profitable proposition for the parents. Aid to families would only be a help to those who want kids but can't take the economic risk.
Celebrities' Product Plugs on Social Media Draw Scrutiny
This guy did a very brave thing for us. Hopefully, nothing bad happens to him and his decision to not be anonymous is fucking insane...
I wonder how much of the expansion of the charges against them was due to embarrassing the government, and how much was due to them not pleading guilty and forcing the prosecutor to take the case to trial.
Well, that first paragraph disqualifies the article almost immediately. Considering the most important words in that sentence, "vast majority" have no citation, it sets the tone for the rest of the article.

The second paragraph insinuates that monitoring activists is an immoral act on the part of the FBI, which is completely untrue.

The third paragraph calls the leaking of information to the press a constitutional right, which is absolutely not true. Is it immoral of the government to keep any secrets at all? If it's not, then is it immoral of the government to take steps to prevent their secrets from being released? If that's not, then isn't "monitoring" for potential leaks at their source just another example of the government attempting to prevent leaks?

Paragraphs 4 and 5 are spot on. So is paragraph 6, except for the last sentence. "Protecting innocents from harm", and the link is to a generic body scanner article? If the argument is that the government has at one point in recent history caused emotional or physical harm to someone who didn't "deserve it", then I guess it's right, but it's both as right and as useful to say the government didn't cure my kid of cancer or fix my broken bicycle. It's completely irrelevant to the argument the paragraph is trying to make, specifically that even if the government did collect data about a potential attack, they're incapable of saving those people.

Paragraph 7 is also correct.

Paragraph 8 is downright offensive, but that's probably the point. There is absolutely zero evidence to suggest that the FBI had credible and actionable information about the Tsarnaev brother's intent, and to attempt to try to talk about pre-9/11 government agency behavior with regard to today's situation is about as useful as talking about how Roosevelt may have known about Pearl Harbor. Historically interesting, absolutely irrelevant to now.

You had an agenda, clearly, before you wrote this. You shoehorned in irrelevant facts and articles to attempt to make a point that doesn't need to be made. Now you're calling people idiots because you think this is a black and white issue.

Frankly, I think it's you who's the idiot.
How Much Copy Should You Use On Your Landing Page?