skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well put. Trust has become the underlying issue here, everything else is semantics.

At the same time though, I think Obama is looking at a comfortable point where trust is traded off for security. Problem with such points is that they can shift in either direction depending on who is in charge - that's what's scary.
I hesitate to quote Ayn Rand, but it's fitting:

"Mr. Roark, we’re alone here. Why don’t you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us."

"But I don’t think of you."

-Ellsworth Toohey and Howard Roark, The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
The relevant distinction involves defining where the assumption of privacy exists. And I don't claim to know exactly where the line is (or should be) drawn.
You seem to be ruling out the possibility that they are acting as peddlers of propaganda of their own accord.
> The truth is you probably spend a lot less time in people's thoughts than you think you do.

There is a clinical term for this phenomenon.
Maybe there's an interesting discussion to be had about that. But OP asked:

> What are some of your favorite programming/security/sysadmin mailing lists and IRC chaneels?

He is looking for open channels, and you leave a pointless comment about some elite closed channel you're a part of. Then you further crapped up the thread trying to rationalize this with some chin-stroking about the 'tragedy of the commons'. That being the case I think it's totally fair (if not charitable) to characterize your response as arrogant.
Isn't this second-to-last paragraph the nut of the issue though? It describes how things work under the FAA:

Section 702 of the FAA says surveillance may be authorized by the attorney general and director of national intelligence without prior approval by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as long as minimization requirements and general procedures blessed by the court are followed.

If what they are doing is according to Section 702, then isn't the outrage what the law allows rather than what the NSA is doing according to it?
I think whichever way you slice it, program analysis is an essential aspect of true hard RTGC.
I would feel so sorry for the analyst(s) who had to read everything I've written online, even just in public and semi-public forums, over the past...23 years.
Well, if you've held your tongue at least once, then that's what I call progress. Being forgiving of others' mistakes is not something that will ever steer you wrong (except in the case of the NSA surveillance, but I digress), and that extends doubly to excusing your wife for her unforgiveness. And "shh!", don't tell her I said that, and mine neither.
Paperclip has a small migration requirement where they add metadata(file_name, content_type,etc...) about the file to the related table.
"least untruthful" is not how I would describe the 'New American Revised' definition.
Fair enough on start8, but I will note that compatibility mode didn't work - that's the first thing I went for. I've always found compatability mode to be spotty - probably about half/half in terms of success.

As for linux binaries, I have a sysadmin friend that boasts that some stuff he wrote in '95 works without a hitch on modern linux, so it's not a cut-and-dried affair there either.
Amtrak gets federal subsidies too, though I imagine they're far less than 50%. It certainly isn't a profitable enterprise.
Cryptography is a science, not engineering
" Not a lot of people were surprised at the basic fact that U.S. agents were spying on Russia.

That's what countries do.

"

Is that to imply it's OK because other countries are doing it?

That sounds a heck of a lot like Lance Armstrong's defense of "everyone else was doing it..."
Using secret interpretations of laws.
Next they'll use this device to help reduce voter-fraud.
I don't write web software, but I can't imagine that any other framework of any kind that approaches Rails' feature breadth or popularity isn't as ridden with subtle security flaws, to say nothing of terrible, forehead-slapping boners.
CSS Typography cheat sheet
and:

"...remember that just because you are not the target of a surveillance program does not make it okay. The US Person / foreigner distinction is not a reasonable substitute for individualized suspicion, and is only applied to improve support for the program. This is the precise reason that NSA provides Congress with a special immunity to its surveillance."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-n...
Does that empower the "Move fast, break things" mentality since others were never really thinking about you (or other people for that matter) and just mostly themselves?
Hail to the whistleblowers, then?
Czech PM resigns over illegal spying
Do you guys plan to offer greeting-card printing? Realize it may be slightly harder than postcards.
Boston coaching connector announces new website design and logo.
The sensation that the author describes -- that uncomfortable feeling of realizing that you're being viewed as just as another person, not always in a positively light -- is similar to what I feel when I think about unlawful surveillance, including programs like PRISM.
Pretty impressive for a first post with d3. Really nicely done.
I absolutely agree that private communication is a whole different ball game.

That said, intentionally public communications, especially on a forum, are not a clear indication of a person's morality or what have you. The best example I can come up with is drawing parallels to a comedian's stand up routine.
Show HN: SN1P Organizing, sharing & creating your code have never been so easy
So how does this work? If I talk to my wife (she is a US citizen, I am European) on the phone about, say for instance, groceries, are the NSA going to listen to it?
I don't know it... but I know it exists, LOL.
Based on your statements, I am not confident that you understand the compilation process and the terminology we use to describe it. In particular, I don't how you can say they don't "walk a tree," but do it "during parsing." Nor is timing the compiler sufficient to determine this kind of behavior.

In order to establish that a particular package was unused, they must: at least parse the header for that package, and parse the entirety of this package. Parsing the unnecessary package is the problem they want to avoid. Because that package could also have unnecessary packages, in large projects you could end up parsing more unnecessary packages than necessary packages.

This isn't even considering the building process, which is what actually produces the headers that get parsed for packages. So, if you import a package and it has not been built yet, it will build it. If that was an unnecessary package, then there's even more wasted time.
Title says "If you are a US citizen the NSA can’t listen to your calls" when in the text it says that "If you are a US PERSON the NSA can’t listen to your calls". This is misleading as in reality the Fourth Amendment protects not only citizens but a broader group of people named "the people" in the amendment. As per United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez: The Fourth Amendment phrase "the people" seems to be a term of art used in select parts of the Constitution, and contrasts with the words "person" and "accused" used in Articles of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments regulating criminal procedures. This suggests that "the people" refers to a class of persons who are part of a national community or who have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community. Pp. 494 U. S. 264-266.
If you work at a company that enforces 360 peer reviews you'll get to find out what everyone thinks of you whether you want to or not.
Again, It’s Crunch Time for Congress on Student Loan Interest Rates
As in 2007, Congress waits to the last minute to decide on student loan interest rates. But if Congress does not take action, next month about 7 million students will see their interest rates double.
> I'm continually surprised by how few software engineers in industry spend the time to pick up HDL and FPGA programming in general.

unsufficient tooling? I did some programming with FPGAs once and it seemed the best option I had for programming was proprietary software by altera (quartus). I never got debugging to work or perhaps I did and I didnt understand the stuff it was showing me (I am no hardware guy)

My impression was that an eclipse-like ide, perhaps with a built in HW simulator would make things A LOT easier, especially for beginners like me. Of course this could be completely unrealistic and impractical for hardware design in which case I will show myself out.
>But perhaps if you had had a more natural reaction, that the death was a bad, sad, thing.

This is the assumption I'm struggling with reading these reactions to virtualwhys. There is a sentiment that death is an enemy, a veritable monster; but more to the point, there is a sentiment that anyone who does not believe this is deranged and must be attacked.

You _did_ "call to the dirt" virtualwhys coping mechanism, because you explicitly called his reaction unnatural. Can't you see that he is grieving, too? It is a quieter, more subtle thing; neither maudlin nor overwrought, and he has quietly stepped back from the emotionally charged reactions.

But if you look, other people are stepping forward and relating their own experiences of loss in similar terms.

Personally, I find the "death is bad" to be an outgrowth of our attachment to life; an impossible attachment.

At the very least virtualwhys has received double the insensitivity of the perceived insensitivity of his initial post. You're stomping all over his experience with a friend's suicide: you _know_ that, right?

I wouldn't ask you to feel differently, but I would ask you to understand that not everyone views death the same way you do.
This article reminds me how much fun it is to program an FPGA. It's one of those mind-expanding exercises like learning logic programming or writing a purely functional persistent data structure. "Describing hardware" is quite a different way of looking at computation.

In case you want to try, I had good success playing around with the Altera DE2. It's got lots of "goodies" on the dev board and there are lots of existing class projects, class notes, etc. that use it. It's fun to get your own tiny CPU working and have it flash HELLO WORLD on the LCD display. You have to worry about bugs in your CPU as well as bugs in the program running on your CPU.
And my point is that even after solving those problems, China will still have a ways to go before it's even crappy at dealing with minorities like the U.S.
"Mr Necas resigned days after prosecutors charged the head of his office, Jana Nagyova, with bribing members of parliament and ordering intelligence agents to spy on people. The scandal has a personal element for the prime minister: one of the surveillance targets, according to lawyers involved in the case, was his own wife, Radka. The two are filing for divorce."
Field-programmable gate array.
If you live in the US then NSA cannot listen to your calls as you are what Obama administration calls a "US person".
Thanks, Jacob.
Just for fun, I'd like to throw in my opposite experience. A few years ago I was quite active on FB, you know, posting random thoughts and music videos and stuff like that. The stuff I posted was indeed random, just things I liked and wanted to share based on mood and ...well randomness. But unbeknownst to be, an acquaintance of mine, who was at the time engaged in a horribly soapy love triangle, got it into her head that I was speaking in code about her - more specifically that I was totally in love with her and wanted to make her nicely constructed love triangle into a quad-shape.

It didn't help that I really had been unlucky in love for months at that time, and I once confided to said threesome girl my situation over a coffee. I did express to her quite clearly who my "problem" person was, but for some reason (and I learned that only much later from a meetup with her boyfriend) she actually thought I was again speaking about her, in code. I was not. However, she convinced a lot of people.

Only after noticing that quite a few friends and acquaintances were turning their backs on me lately, and a few people coming out and saying strange things like "hey, what's up with you and X, you gotta let her go, man" or even "dude, I heard what you did and it's not seriously not cool" I gradually learned that this person was waging an epic info war around and about me, who supposedly couldn't stop hitting on her. Upon learning this, I broke off contact immediately, but to my amazement the damage was still unfolding.

I simply could not believe the amount of gossip and straight-up fantasy people engaged in with me playing some kind of role in what had become a huge reality soap opera. Honestly, I never thought I was that interesting. But that didn't matter, because the made-up stuff just kept coming. It was as if I had a very active doppelgänger walking and talking around somewhere. It was absolutely stunning, and more than a bit horrifying. There are a lot of things I still can't wrap my head around. What was she getting out of this? And all the time, we had a "hey, let's grab a beer and cheer you up"-kind of relationship that I thought was pretty good. Why would anyone do this? And why was everyone willing to not only listen but also willing to add to this story?

Now, years later, my circle of friends has shrunken immensely. There are a lot of people who won't talk to me anymore, and I never got to find out why exactly. I only know that the moment I start asking questions, the whole affair seems to get reactivated. One friend told me only recently (unprompted) that there are so many conflicting stories about me in circulation, it's hard to keep track of them all. And none of them is good.

Why me? I'm neither rich, nor good-looking, nor in any imaginable way socially interesting. Seriously, it's stunningly stupid, and I can't for the life of me understand what powers this process. But it happened. A home-made conspiracy story. Sometimes, people really do talk behind your back - a lot.
When I worked at a financial firm, we were regularly reminded not to write any emails that we wouldn't mind being printed on the front page of a newspaper. It's a tough habit to keep in mind, especially for non-work emails, but it's a good litmus test and it's helped me edit some emails before pressing 'send'.
I think partial reconfiguration is actually vital - you can't do stuff without it - while C-to-Verilog is not. Though I've seen people loving AutoESL; one claim - always repeated about higher-level languages - is that you can explore more possibilities and thus beat hand-coded Verilog because of the time it takes to hand-code yourself into a local optimum while missing the global optimum. I sort of ignore the language question, because Verilog feels nice enough to me, though perhaps it's important in the sense that most programmers want C.
NSA plant in San Antonio shrouded in secrecy - Houston Chronicle
you win a war by imposing your will onto your foe and make. him give up. needed bodies of peasants before, then you nuked them. turned out to be too much, back to peasants.

or why do you think has the army (as in infantry) lowered their IQ standards (measuring IQ was developed for the prussian army)? why are poor people massively overrepresented in the armed forces? rich people join too, sure, they call it air force and officer corps. peasants for the meat grinder, best keep them far from home lest they turn on their masters.
From Idea to Reality: A One-Year Case Study on Launching a Successful Business
More than 50 IT companies currently operate in Nis (Serbia)
I guess, if you have a _great_ portfolio Google or IBM will contact you. ;)
So, this is a fun bit of tinkering and all, but I'd be more interested to see just how small HN could losslessly compress the Gutenberg plain text UTF8 file of Romeo and Juliet.

(http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1112/pg1112.txt)

Especially if you're using interesting techniques to build the dictionary.

EDIT: I got it down from 178983 to 44830 bytes, which isn't as impressive as I was hoping for.

EDIT2: Currently at 43,666 bytes which is a bit better.

EDIT3: 40,125 bytes.
Wow, speechless, can't wait to see some games built with new 3D web engines.

EDIT

There's some weird bugs in Chrome on Ubuntu, for instance the youtube video on the start page doesn't seem to play properly.
Secret audits of our secret program have determined that everything is hunky-dory here! No worries, go back to your lives.
No, the nut is that Nadler asked Mueller about Patriot Act Sec. 215, but Clapper addressed the issue in terms of FAA 702. Tellingly.

EDIT: clarification, as all should be doing beforehand in light of the amount of misdirection possible on this topic. (I'm generally bouncing off of this, though: http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/06/17/james-clapper-throws-a-...)
Yes, that is a direct lie. You can prove it a few ways. When you add a new device, how is it possible that both devices get the unencrypted message? Secondly, if you didn't hear about the instances of misdirected iMessages, particularly when SIMs were swapped, google turns up several.

Also, see this, which says the same things about the same memo: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130405/01485922590/dea-ac...

Other useful info: http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2012/08/dear-apple-p...

Basically it is not possible for that claim to be true in the technical sense and for iMessage to do the things that it does. Perhaps they mean in a "policy" sense, or some other nonsense spin everybody is engaged in lately.
In related news, policemen also cannot break the laws.

But isn't it a good thing we have the public with their smartphones recording the police as they work? Isn't it great that there are multiple separate, public, open channels to provide feedback when the police go astray?

The use of "cannot" here is very problematic.
Kudos to her. Whatever makes science interesting, go for it. Maybe combine this with a gross-out reality show concept called "Eating the Earth" where competing geologists dare each other to eat that.
When you need an FPGA, you need an FGPA. I don't think anyone would spec out one gate at a time if C and an operating system could cut it.
The best part of learning HDLs and other bare-metal experience, I've found, is it taught me to think in parallel and asynchronous frames.
"You'll worry less about what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do." -David Foster Wallace
Bonus content from the article: "In 2010, residents who lived near the facility complained that their garage doors were randomly opening. The NSA issued a statement acknowledging that an antenna it was using interfered with garage door openers."
A free simulator (like iverilog) plus a free waveform viewer (like gtkwave) is a nice way to start fiddling with these things. Verilog is way - WAY - easier to deal with than say C, actually, because you have much more visibility (waves instead of a variable view) and much better error detection (none of those bloody memory overruns, built-in Valgrind with the "X" values, etc.)

I'm a programmer by training, and I got into hardware architecture in part because of how fun Verilog was, actually - seeing all this stuff.

Compile and run Verilog online (which is how I tested the Verilog code in the article):

http://www.compileonline.com/compile_verilog_online.php

Running on FPGA without testing on a simulator first can indeed be tough for a newcomer, I'd guess.
Here's something interesting I found on wikipedia. According to the "General Data Protection Regulation", which is a data protection law and is supposed to take effect in 2016 in the EU:

the Regulation also applies to organizations based outside the European Union if they process personal data of EU residents.

Further in the section "Discussion and challenges":

The new regulation conflicts with other non-European laws and regulations and practices (e.g. surveillance by governments). Companies in such countries should not be acceptable for processing EU personal data anymore.

What are your thoughts on this?

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...
Video Capability Coming to Instagram This Week?
I've heard that there's been some progress in compiling Haskell to Verilog, but I don't know how far that effort has gone. Certainly more declarative languages seem much more suited to this than imperative ones. I have no idea how practical this is at the moment, though:

http://cufp.org/conference/sessions/2012/peter-braam-paralle...
I know how it works, I just don't think it should work that way. I bet 95%+ searches on Github are Github-wide, not repository specific. Why not make the most common use case the default? Plus, why would a top navigation bar be context sensitive?
One of the few things Rails LTS adds to prior 2.3 branches is a "hardened" set of security settings that turns off rarely-used and potentially vulnerable arg-parsing code.
Exactly: Obama is using "cannot" to mean "aren't supposed to" while making it appear like he's saying "aren't technologically able to".
HDL development is kind of weird in some ways compared to conventional coding though. For example, the most portable way to make use of the SRAM hard macros that all modern FPGAs have is like this: you write HDL that describes how the SRAM behaves, and if you describe it in the right way it's replaced with actual SRAM through some magic of the synthesis tools.
Glad to see GitHub getting into the telemedicine space.
EU and US 'in biggest trade deal'
OpenAirplane: Finally, a Zipcar-Style Service for Airplanes
"If you are a US citizen.."

The constitution of one country is being used to govern an infrastructure that powers many more.
First, where do you get that Snowden is trying to "prevent" anything? Secondly, we aren't law enforcement and can't torture with impunity the people whose posts we find. Thirdly, public internet posts aren't subject to privacy, and to the degree one may think they are of the sort that phone calls and private emails ought to be, what is the standard being described as hypocritical here?

I think you're either confused or trying to muddy the waters.
There's no party like a Perl party
I don't know that it's by choice. The market is small, and the problems are not easy. Software compilers have had tons of effort, money, and mathematical knowledge thrown at them for the past several decades. HDL-to-FPGA synthesis and place/route on the other hand has been driven by only a few companies, and hasn't been around nearly as long.
You make a good point. There are a few different aspects worth separating here:

- First, oddly, we don't know what the law allows. The Obama administration's secret interpretation of FAA 702 and secret rulings they obtained from the FISC have not been made public. This is a continuation of the Bush-era penchant for secrecy that included a secret interpretation of the law to allow warrantless eavesdropping and torture. See the last page of: http://epic.org/FISC-NSA-domestic-surveillance.pdf/

- Second, Congress would almost certainly not have approved the FAA (2008) if they had known that a single analyst has access to Americans' confidential email, phone records, etc. Same with the Patriot Act (2001) that is used obtain a general warrant to vacuum up Americans' phone records on an ongoing daily basis. And Snowden said today it's not just NSA, but FBI, DNI, CIA, etc. analysts. Read 702 and see if you think you can predict how it would have been secretly interpreted:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:h.r.06304:

- Third, U.S. intelligence officials have argued in the past that the president has the constitutional authority, no matter what the law says, to authorize domestic spying without warrants. So the wording of the law may no longer matter! See:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/washington/02intel.html