skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Certainly a possibility. But the assumption that she was a person of interest to intelligence agencies is much greater than the assumption that the newspaper report is either misleading or being misinterpreted.
Engineers generally already have such things.

I don't think "programmer" is a well-defined enough concept to be associated with an oath. You can't go around calling yourself a Medical Doctor or an Engineer if you aren't, but pretty much anybody who codes at all can reasonably call themselves a programmer.

Even with all that aside, such oaths only really work for things like causing blatant harm. Unqualified "freedom" and "liberty" (especially in the USA) are so nebulous they mean almost nothing at all. The overwhelming majority of programmers work for organisations whose goals (e.g. profit, power) are not - and are often directly opposed to - "freedom" by any reasonable definition.

In short, I don't think the answer to your question is "no, there shouldn't" so much as "no, there couldn't".
I'm not saying that it is an ad hominem, but I've read through the page and I think the connection between grammar and design skills is a red herring. The page considers this an ad hominem too, even though having a grasp of logic is clearly important for making A's statement:

A: "All rodents are mammals, but a weasel isn't a rodent, so it can't be a mammal."
B: "Well, you've never had a good grasp of logic, so this can't be true."

Maybe I'm not seeing the difference though (not a native speaker, just curious).
The only thing in that list that really needs to be done is reporting hazards and traffic and such, and you only need to do that a very small amount of the time. You don't need to give thumbs ups or verify hazards or anything like that, and you only really need to report hazards a small percentage of the time.
Making Excel "smart" is not exactly what he's talking about. He's playing with ideas. It's high level, but you can do high level sometimes. You need to.

Your analysis is too low-level and nitpicky for this high level idea playground.

Excel is still a dumb tool. He's absolutely right.

We have ways of making smart tools. It's called "programming" and "database engineering." That part's a little too hard right now, and part of why it's hard is because if you try to make it easy to mould a flexible program to try to define what your data means and how it should work, it becomes so generic as to be as unusable and amorphic as a cloud of smoke.

I've tried this, moving from a space where Excel was predominantly used, and trying to capture the process into an application. We tried to keep all the customizability and malleability as Excel: but I'm now convinced that was a huge mistake. It led us into genericland.

It is possible to build applications that work for these processes, using the tools of programming and good data design. But that's why we have thousands of different applications all trying to solve these different problems, all of which you could probably represent in Excel in some way. The fact that all those applications exist means that people want something smarter than Excel. It proves the case.

But we haven't yet bridged the gap between Excel's extreme flexibility and an Application's intelligence and process fit. That's because it's really difficult to make that work; to fit all the pieces together into something that makes sense in both realms. It's really hard!

The solution will be a user interface masterpiece. I'm convinced of that. And it will be layered, like an onion, allowing people to build any application they need just by telling the computer about their data and how it fits together and what it should allow them to do. Someday we'll have a system—some sort of super-Rails—that makes this so easy that anyone can do it. Someday Programming will be an ancient art, something that only your Grandfather did, like crafting your own tools or woodworking or making jams and jellies.

Someday that will be true. But the way we get there is by thinking about the difference between Dumb Flexible Excel and Smart Rigid Applications and how we bridge that gap, because it's difficult and it's possible. We have to think at this high level, way up in the clouds—and more people should, and there's no reason to shoot them down.
I have an iPhone 5 with 8GB free space and am experiencing lag and low frame rates quite a bit.
What in my post led you to believe I think there's even a remote chance of that happening?
Fertile Ground
Photos as we know them are retro
Providing descriptions of how they comply with these requests is a good start.

However, they should be even more specific. A skeptical person could say this still leaves the door open to, say, a custom SFTP server that gives the NSA access to any user data. I don't believe that's the case, but I think they should provide more detailed procedures for exactly how they comply with these requests.

e.x.

"The following procedure is the only method by which we provide data to law enforcement:

1. When we receive a request for user data from law enforcement, our legal department thoroughly examines the request to ensure it's legitimate, not overly broad, blah, blah, blah.

2. X person performs Y steps to extract the specifically requested data from our data stores, with Z safeguards to assure no additional data is included.

3. The legal department reviews the extracted data to ensure it matches the requested data, and only the requested data.

4. X person sends data to law enforcement agency using Y methods (i.e. uploading data to a SFTP server account) and notifies the agency that the request has been fulfilled."
Erlang User Conference 2013
Why doesn't the government just profile. We all know who the terrorists are.
Just to be clear, though, we're still doing the 2006 thing, with the only "warrant" being a general FISC ruling on the overall legitimacy of the program. Specifically, that it has acceptable measures in place to reduce and eliminate purely domestic intercepts.
Dice - A Random Algorithm Library for Data Mining (Java implementation)
I think you've actually described David Brooks pretty accurately.
for me, the dropdown has tickets but trying to buy one gives an error message saying the available quantity is 0. This is especially frustrating given that I spent a good amount of time trying to buy a ticket while they were still in stock.

edit: and failing, naturally :(
You are thinking on a whole different level than this article is trying to think about. "Can't see the forest for the trees" if you will.
Modern Concurrency: Erland, Scala, Go, Clojure
Michelle Norris took a leave of absence from All Things Considered during the campaign - I listened to the show in which she announced this and the reason for it. I very rarely watch Morning Joe, but the show doesn't hide the fact that Mika Brzezinski is the daughter of a former NSA.

Not a fan of Mika Brzezinski but you're being unfair in calling these unreported relationships. How would you suggest they go about reporting these relationships?
Ray Kurzweil at Launch: Silicon Valley 2013
Why did the NYT hire him? Is it so that they maintain some "balance" in their opinion pieces?
The incoming phone call and last screenshots are unfair - the iPhone of today would look a lot more similar to Windows Phone and iOS 7 if there was a facial photo of the caller and if the background image was a bunch of dots.
I'd like to raise my rates too. I'm not an expert at security by any stretch but I don't completely fail at it like ~70% of the code I inherit.

But it is difficult to figure out how to sell that. Most clients don't seem give a shit about security until they've actually lost money due to it. It's also hard to prove that my code will be any more secure than the next guy.
Further Towards a Theory of the Emergence of Property [pdf]
I really don't like the fist answer, the second answer is better. In my opinion the main problem with Chernobyl is that the nuclear plant had a lot of radioactive material and the graphite rods burned and spread a lot of the fuel. The nuclear material in the Hiroshima bomb was much smaller. It only considers this in an "edit".

>Edit: As pointed out, one thing I forgot to mention is that the amount of fissionable material in an atomic bomb is usually considerably less than the amount housed in a nuclear reactor. Obviously, having more fissionable material drastically increases the amount of radiation that can be output.

And I'm not sure that the other facts are correct, for example:

> A fission explosion at ground level creates more radioactive isotopes due to neutron activation in soil. Furthermore,

I think that the amount of radioactive isotopes created by the neutrons is very small, and this effect is negligible in the Chernobyl case. Anyone has some data sources about this?
I've lived in Hong Kong for over a decade so know it's culture. It's not that dissimilar from Singapore in its western leanings.

Hong Kong's history is irrelevant as they have an extradition treaty with the USA. Any normal person would not seek asylum in a country where this was the case.
"We(Apple) have always been shameless about stealing great ideas" - Steve Jobs

We progress by improving upon the current best. Clearly Apple felt that Microsoft had taken some steps in the right direction.
Experiment is the arbiter of truth.

I'd guessed it would go up too, but if the reality of monitoring trumps cryptography, perhaps the currency has less value now to enough people to lower the price.

If you think it will go up, you can buy while they're cheap...
HN Poll: Are you `properly embedded in gently `gradated' authoritative structures'?

Who'd be a better friend. Choose one:

Edward Snowdan: unmediated, indeferent, catalyst `Savior of Humanity'?

or

David Brooks: `mediated', `deferent', genuflecting despicable toady?
Rounded corners change in iOS 7
Got to say I'm also somewhat underwhelmed by the EventBee experience. No 'sold out' notice, but the only currently available quantity is consistently zero.
The reason for all that creativity is to try and get around Apple's breathtakingly broad patent for unlocking a phone by moving along a "predefined displayed path".

http://www.google.com/patents/US7657849
As far as I can tell, the problem was with the paypal side. I emailed you (once before posting this original complaint, and once recently); I'd be happy to discuss other possibilities. Eventbee seems to have difficulty deciding whether there are 5 or 0 tickets left, but it's definitely not even letting me attempt to purchase one anymore.
Bizarrely, this whole scenario is very similar to the privacy issues explored in Brunner's 1975 book "The Shockwave Rider"[1].

Perhaps, as in the book, we need to setup an independent encrypted communication service where people can vent their frustrations at pervasive surveillance.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider
The last time Obama held a public speech in Berlin he was cheered like he was Michael Jackson and the Pope in one person. This was before he was elected for his first term.

Back then there was no need to preselect his audience. Tens of thousands just came to celebrate him. It will be interesting to see how he is greeted by the German public this time. In Berlin. At the Branderburger Tor. Will he talk about freedom?
Very well presented and designed too. Thanks for sharing!
Excel is a tool, and it's a really good tool for what it does, which is for applications that require:
- very fast iteration cycles
- a particular data model: grid of numbers which is very common in business world
- support for everything under the sun: persistence (just hit save :), dialog UI, math formula, stats models, string functions, date/time functions (better than even Java's Joda), internationalization, localization, utf 8, and plenty more
This is IMO one of the strong benefits of daeken's course: he's formalized it to the extent that you should be able to turn it into a selling point if you wish to do so.
It's worth looking into FISA (and the DOJ interpretations of it) to see if the court can approve requests for user credentials/tokens. This would give intelligence officers more continuous access to user data, though they would still be legally limited to the time period approved by the court.
They believe that precisely because the media relentlessly worked that image into every story about him.

It's not hard to get a similar impression from his own writing and speaking, or from people that worked with him.
> 1) The US Government wanted to maintain the secrecy of the program.

Well, more precisely it wanted to avoid drawing attention to the program, which wasn't really a secret at this point. But I'll also add a fifth reason: the fewer than 2000 FISA orders a year http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2013/05/fisaca... , combined with the fact that David Drummond appears confident the average number of people covered per order isn't very high. If FISA orders were being used routinely, or even often, to investigate simple immigration cases then there would be a lot more of them; as things are, if you were busted for run-of-the-mill illegal immgration by a FISA order then you'd have to have been very unlucky. It's possible you could be identified by chance as part of a search for terrorists, but again not statistically likely, and as you say the government would want to be very careful about tipping its hand in that situation. There are also NSLs, but Google's NSL tally suggests that there aren't huge numbers of those per month either.
Developers react to iOS 7 and being “Sherlocked” at WWDC 2013
>>Terrorist attempts become more frequent

> Citation needed.

My insinuation that terrorist attempts would become more frequent was IF our intelligence agencies opens up all its data to the public. I was not defending the competence of the US government's intelligence agencies.

Please read the opening post.
An NSA release that is confirmed by another party such as Senator Wyden, Rand Paul, ACLU or EFF.

Realistically I'm not sure what the NSA would share with anyone that could be conclusive. But a logical explanation of how the NSA gets into data without corporate cooperation and that explanation matching up with the timeline presented on the one slide would be a great start.

For instance, you could argue that the PRISM timeline is simply showing once the NSA had filters in place to identify and capture general internet traffic headed to and from those specific companies. But this has a large hole in that why would Google, a company who's search queries would be highly valued, come so far after Microsoft on the timeline. So an explanation that addresses the large questions like that.

As opposed to the current situation which is a credible leak that makes Google look very bad, an executive branch that is defending the information in the leak as being legal and Google flat out denying any involvement.
Only on the surface is it close to Singapore. When you are a part of what political pundits have always hyped up as "the biggest threat to the USA/the next superpower", things change -- attitudes change. "Western leanings" sure, I'll give you that. But that is not equivalent to being pro-American. In fact, if pro-west meant just abiding by the majority of Western countries' attitudes, then on this matter pro-west might as well be equivalent to anti-USA. (I've lived in HK as well).

And the USA has basically an extradition treaty with every country. They are not always followed, either (granted, I am not an expert on this matter). Of course, they might extradite him, but I don't think it's as clear-cut as you make it out.
The Rockwell painting mentioned in the article for anyone who is interested: http://www.kingsacademy.com/mhodges/11_Western-Art/27_Popula...
I am having very hard time seeing the difference between going door to door just to find something, or going from computer to computer / account to account, just in case, to find something. Sure, the meaning of transportation changes, but just because you have a way to do something, it doesnt mean you should do it.

Whether its door to door unreasonable search (hello first amendment), or account to account unreasonable search, its still the same thing! And no court in their sound mind should find it different.
My 2 year old did it on my winphone, which uses a full-screen slide to unlock.
Spearmint - Increase Customer Spending
My beef with Libertarianism
Claim whistleblower could join Dotcom in NZ
gmail is popular but almost no one uses FB.
Great, now put it back together. I am the worst at reassembly of electronics I would have wasted +-$1,500.
Picatic: Crowdfunding for Events
Did you get the job? (for the sake of full disclosure)
Thanks Adam!!!
I have intake filters on my PC, and it's also somewhere around 2 feet off the ground. Still cops a lot of dust.
Steal These Ideas: 5 Tech Companies Who Are Killing It With Content Marketing
Well ... know it, or done it?

I know of most of the items listed in the syllabus. I know the basic mitigation strategies. I know the principles behind most of it.

But I've never done it.

That's what's worth the money, to me: I'll be forced to sit down and dedicate some time to actually doing it, with guidance from a professional. I could easily spend more time figuring it all out on my own -- and even at my meager rates, that would add up quickly cost-wise -- and I still might end up missing something, because it's likely that there are gaps in my knowledge that I'm unaware of.

If you haven't actually practiced any of the stuff in the course, it would still be valuable.
https://bitnodes.io offers small instance for free for 1 hour when you use coupon code "hn" but you win hands down with that built-in terminal!
I put it back together and it works fine! Only, it has suffered some irreversible cosmetic damage..
"If you knew this was happening"...

Define "this".

For the last few days, these huge comment threads have been completely empty of information. People are complaining about "NSA spying" or simply "this" and calling it unconstitutional without defining what these actions were and why they are unconstitutional. In the absence of detail, people are substituting their own worst fears. For the most part, that is also the case in the linked articles.

So far, by my understanding, we have:

1. A court order for Verizon to create a database of phone transaction metadata and make it accessible to the NSA. We don't know what (if any) procedures are in place for controlling access to the data.

2. A non-technical document claiming that the NSA has direct access to "the servers" and is getting information from several companies. News reports imply that this refers to internal company servers. The companies named unanimously deny that this is the case. We don't know the details of what information the NSA is collecting or how they are collecting it; specifically, we do not know and cannot say that they are failing to follow the 4th Amendment and other legal procedures.

3. Something called PRISM exists. People are fearmongering about PRISM being some horrible unconstitutional crime when nobody knows what it is (my guess: it's just a UI for collecting reports from the companies that they send enough information requests to for them to use a standard data format).

None of this justifies the current panic, the uprating of spammy slogans, and the top-rated comment in a 300-point thread saying this is just as bad as Hitler.
And when was the last time Congress actually declared war? Not in my lifetime.
Ok then, then what about his 16 year old son? Another American citizen (born in Denver), killed two weeks later in a drone strike. Does killing teens jive with your idea of due process?
So no Plug&PLay device installed at Google by the NSA?
Even so it would be so easy to install a generic program on Google's servers to make live query on any dataset. Google probably use SQL everywhere right?

Seriously, these conspiracy theories are simply impossible most times.
One would assume that access is given to Customs & Dept of Homeland Security too. Some of the NSA leakers think this is wrong, but I have not heard any elected government official state otherwise.

Someone leaks information about PRISM, and the primary response is TREASON! TREASON! ARREST THE TRAITOR AND DEAL WITH HIM!

Given that, do you really expect that A) random border agents are in on it, and B) feel free to just randomly disclose that sort of surveillance to someone who has no need to know about it?
Counterpoint: completing the course might make you a better candidate for the kind of employer that values their employees enough to pay for training like this. ;-)
> The executive branch has been given no power to indefinitely detain Americans

Wrong.

1) Section 412 of the USA PATRIOT act permits indefinite detention of immigrants; see Jose Padilla, an American citizen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jose_Padilla_(prisoner)#Habeas...

2) Sections 1021 and 1022 of NDAA FY2012 (which Obama is defending right now in Obama v. Hedges): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NDAA_2012#Controversy_over_ind...
The civil police force.
Totally unimpressed with Brooks' character assassination piece.

This college dropout did what those at the NSA with PhDs failed to do in their responsibility to ensure that their organisation stayed within the spirit and laws of their mandate.

He did what Brooks failed to do as a journalist, ie. to draw attention to a worrying centralization of absolute power, and abuse of law.

Lets describe Benjamin Franklin, John Rockefeller, Walt Disney as high school dropouts, rather than look at what they achieved.
use provisioning software like chef or puppet. using knife in chef i can spawn a new rackspace instance, install and configure my entire stack, and deploy my application all in one command. i can launch an exact copy of an application in 5 - 10 minutes - during which i do nothing but sit and watch the entire chef-client run go by. it's about as turn-key as it gets. of course writing out our entire configuration process in ruby is a bit of work - but it's front-loaded work that you never have to repeat and saves you months of tweaking and copying configuration files. you can subsequently modify quite easily to fit new deployments and new applications.

if you need it to be quicker you simply take a snapshot of the resulting instance and clone it to new instances.
I think you're conflating two different issues. The government was defending intercepting emails and getting phone records. The government too never claimed that they can access data from web companies.
DOJ is weighing Google's request to lift NSA gag order
I did not; which I actually think is even more of a testament to how positive the experience (and interviewing with Cody in particular) was.
> The government classification isn't about protecting the secrets of private citizens, only government secrets.

Using that logic, Facebook private messages supplied courtesy of the NSA would be highly classified, considering their collection mechanism would be PRISM or similar closely-held programs.

> I have some experience in this field - handling fingerprints of non-criminals which were classified at the bare minimum for the agency.

Fingerprint data is available to nearly every local law enforcement organization in the country. There's no mystery about the collection method. It's a foregone conclusion that it's aggregated up the chain.

As other comments have said, if immigration officials were using NSA-supplied data, it would likely be in vague, aggregate form that did not hint at the underlying collection mechanism.
Other books that I've found helpful are the many socioeconomics books out there:

Malcolm Gladwell - Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers
Tim Harford - The Undercover Economist
Nassim Taleb - The Black Swan

I enjoyed the Steve Jobs book too, I liked the fact that he believed in what he was working on (no matter how crazy or disruptive) and saw so much beauty in perfection. There's a lot we can learn from his persistence and attitude towards persevering in the face of failure.

And for entertainment, I like profound books: The Alchemist, The Little Prince