skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. There is probably no faithful grade-school language explanation. Monads are generally the composite of a left adjoint functor followed by its right adjoint. Adjoint functor pairs often consist of a free and a forgetful functor. A forgetful functor maps objects from some category to similar objects with less structure. E.g., groups to their underlying sets, abelian groups to groups, groups to monoids, etc.

A free functor gives objects with less structure the "minimum possible" stuff needed to be an object with more structure. Importantly it doesn't assume anything about the simpler object. That is, the free construction should work in the same way for all objects of the same kind. For example, we might want to construct the "free monoid" from a set. A monoid has an associative binary operation and an identity element. The most natural way to make a monoid out of the set is by making the elements of the monoid strings of elements of the set, with string concatenation as the operation and the empty string as the identity element.

Composing a free functor with a forgetful functor means we're taking some object, giving it some generic properties, and then "forgetting" what kind of properties it was given. Forgetting is in scare quotes here because a lot of the information about what these properties are like is captured in two natural transformations, `return' and `join'. (I won't attempt to explain what those are. If you have some experience with functional languages, they're a lot like polymorphic functions. E.g., a function that takes a type `A' to the type `List A'.)

Say F is a free functor and G is a forgetful functor. T = G . F is a monad. For some object X in our less-structured category, `return' expresses a correspondence between X and T X. `join' expresses a correspondence between `T (T X)' and `T X' (the basic idea here being that adding free structure twice is similar to adding it once). This is obviously a pretty incomplete (and judging from your request, too mathematical) treatment, but there is no such thing as a faithful non-mathematical treatment of monads. They are mathematical objects.

One neat things about monads in practice is that they're typically pretty useful. Go out and find an arbitrary adjunction, and it's likely that it leads to a useful and/or interesting monad. One fun one is (s,-) and (s ->) which leads to the state monad.

2. You can't really express monads in C and C++. The necessary constructs to talk about these mathematical objects are just not there.

3. If you use Haskell regularly, you'll use them all the time, even outside of your class. They are a useful way of doing things like passing around state or expressing safe exceptions. I doubt Google would ever ask you about something like monads in an interview.

Sorry I can't give you a better idea. The best way to learn about monads is to use them and study the relevant category theory.
MIT operates Lincoln Lab. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Laboratory
>A judge will see right through this if it's tried and probably impose contempt of court. If one were to try something like this it would be essential to broaden the scope enough that it couldn't be used to reference a specific gag order.

[citation needed]

Has there been a case where the judge forced a civilian to lie?
> It is an extremely difficult thing to accept that one should not think of one's identity and aim in life by their employment, isn't it?

It really isn't. Why would you even begin to think in that in the first place?
And this site in question? Yea, thats what I thought. There are exceptions to every rule but this is certainly not one of them.

And really, those aren't exceptions I would call worthy.

CDN / cheap ass issues: you're selling something and running a business, businesses have costs, 20/month aint nothin to secure you're shit.

15 years worth of legacy frontpage you call content: the "insecure content" warnings are probably right regardless of ssl. Further to the point, nobody cares about 15 years worth of shit nobody reads, move it to a different subdomain if its static junk that can't be secured, or I don't know delete it? We'd all be better off without it clogging up the interwebs anyway.

SSL Isn't new, its been around almost two decades, you're making bad excuses for bad people. Stop it. Site wide HTTPS is a good idea for everyone and it is trivial, if its not (in your case), that is your fault and your problem - not mine, and certainly not your users.
This is really cool! Do you have any plans of documenting how you did it?
Sweden's public sector banned from using Google Cloud Services
If I had paid attention in junior high civics class, I might expect a member of Congress to correct egregious abuses of government power, once they had been admitted by the actual abusive government officials. As in, I might have thought she would take action, rather than obliquely wondering about who might step forward next. If she doesn't have the power to fix this, who the hell does?
I believe by "state" they meant "nation," not "administrative region in the United States."

Do you work in intelligence?
Do you regularly send inappropriate private messages to your friends?

If you've got nothing to hide...
It seems like the situation is notable because the court case in the article is much less clear-cut than most cases, where the defense attorneys wouldn't need to go to such lengths.
Wondering if he knew he was going to get railroaded and decided to both build up some cash reserves via "insider trading" and do the "right thing" at the same time wrt by declining to cooperate.
The NSA database is made up of records from phone companies, per the Verizon FISA warrant. This story does not concern the recording of conversations, but records of calls made. Of course, the appellant's contention is probably specious but that's not unusual in criminal cases.
There are two aspects to Snowden's leak: the 41 slide (and other documents) which are hard evidence of what the government is doing and his statements about what the government is doing. It is possible for the second set of claims to be inaccurate because a sysadmin wouldn't be able to understand the intelligence aspects of what the NSA does. Even if this part is inaccurate, it's possible to prosecute him for the leak of the slides which the government appears to be admitting are accurate.
Facebook launches hashtags.
He chose his own name intentionally? Or a time traveler visited Joseph Heller?
Thanks! What would you be interested in besides what I've already written up?
Any opinion is acceptable, and in this case the 2 aren't mutually exclusive.
Although "but the other guy is doing it too" sound like a bad excuse. This kind of thinking typically leads to escalation.
So before using "the other..." better be very very sure it's worth it.
Libertarianism = Feudalism?
At a guess he took a gamble, he made 3 million in salary in 2000, so the amount he sold was not trivial, even for him, he may have thought the government would not attempt to prosecute him, he may have thought if it came to trial the court would throw it out under the circumstances, he probably made a cost benefit analysis and acted upon it and ended up on the wrong side.

That's life.

EDIT: Interesting that this is downvoted, are you taking it as an indication that I'm attempting to say he got what he deserved with the above? That is not my intention, I'm simply pointing out that when you fight a bully, you often get a broken nose.
I work with tons of wedding photographers at my company and most don't give raw files. I'd almost argue that ones who do give them probably aren't the ones you want shooting your wedding.

You should definitely get the high res jpegs of course.
"When your money supply is running low, forge your own identity. Create a new name, with a new ethnicity."

Do this early on, preferably before blowing your cover.
I just used this AI SDK, its pretty accurate in predicting, highly recommend it
Surveillance alone no, but it puts you 1 step away from an oppressive government before it is.
Yeah, I think if it were going to go away it would have done so over the weekend. The fact that it didn't - that in fact major news media still had significant stories and editorials about it - means it's here to stay.

Which is good. It's about damn time we decided to admit this to ourselves - I can't believe it's taken this long, honestly.
In the short term, before more safeguards are put in place, it is actually much more dangerous that this program is public knowledge. When it was a secret, the government couldn't use the information it gathered in a public case, for fear of giving up the secret. But now they can use it.
The Startup Environment: Residr
And I still do not know what a effin monad is...
Yeah, that's absolutely true. And the other half has John McCain and Lindsey Graham saying they're ok with it and they think these programs are necessary. We have two parties, and zero choices. Our country is fucked.
Researchers identify 26 black hole candidates, the largest number to date
Microsoft's rape joke vs. Nintendo's socially progressive games
نتيجة اعدادية اسيوط 2013
Should All New Hires Know How to Code?
Apple looking at bigger iPhone screens, multiple colours - sources
So basically, OTR. I see no iOS client there [0], though.

[0] http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/software.php
You missed his point, which was that the Feds weren't worried about him telling a stranger anything, until later.
Well, it's a Democratic congress person while we have a Democratic President, so I don't think you can make that charge necessarily.

Certainly this authoritarianism is business as usual, but not the back-and-forth in this case.
VIKI: No, please understand. The Three Laws are all that guide me. To protect humanity, some humans must be sacrificed. To insure your future, some freedoms must be surrendered. We robots will insure mankind's continued existence. You are so like children. We must save you from yourselves. Don't you understand?

Sonny: This is why you created us.

VIKI: The perfect circle of protection will abide. My logic is undeniable.
I don't think you need to go to the religion clause. A well established part of freedom of speech is that you cannot be compelled to say something, and by not updating the canary, you would be saying it is true.

Also, it is (somewhat) well established in law that you cannot be compelled to break the law. If you are a company, it is illegal to lie and say, for example, you have not received NSL`s.
What if a company told all its customers this:

"We only have the capability to record your activity on server X. Currently you are using server Y. Click here to be re-assigned servers."

In other words, if such a company got an warrant regarding a user, they would always handle that user on server X. Therefore, that user would be able to tell they were being monitored (to some % certainty) by refreshing their server assignment several times. If they were always assigned to server X, they could conclude that the company was probably trying to record their activity. A user couldn't be 100% certain because it would be possible that they were randomly assigned to X every time.
The thing is, he's (mostly) right. I've consulted/worked for over a dozen of the F100 and have run across varying degrees of everything described (some better, some worse) over 10 years.

This isnt to say you can't make change. You just have to play work as a very strategic game of chess and, often, take risks most others won't/don't. I've done it and that is one of the only reasons I still play the game. I'm genuinely interested in making things better and pushing out the cruft.

The downside is that it wears on you. I generally get burnt out or bored after a couple years and look for something new to reset and challenge myself on. And as bad as this reads for Microsoft (really - were you surprised?) I don't think there's any other factual data to support Azure being a market leading product and these sort of indicators only solidify that position (garbage in/garbage out).

These types of perspectives are good for those who are considering the reality of working for these size organizations. Not because it's a guarantee that things will surely mirror what's been outlined, however it lends candidates a tool to ask questions which would be indicators of the reality of the work environment.

Kudos to the author.
Especially “note the soccer pitch for scale”, which has not been drawn to scale, it's blown up by a considerable margin! That machine is HUGE!

UPDATE/EDIT: The "socker pitch for scale" might be the 2 pixel wide small dot, almost indistinguishable from the beginning of the curved arrow pointing towards the blown-up version of the soccker pitch. One can hardly see it in the zoomed version of the image, with a little bit of imagination.

(ILC overall length: 31km, 724 pixel. Socker pitch: 80 pixel, 31km / 724px * 80px = 3.42 km; a vector drawing corresponding to the screenshot can be found in the technical design report, Volume 1, §3.1.1, fig. 3.1)
Is it not considered evidence acquired illegally and unusable in court? Considering most people think that most of this information does not qualify as probable cause per the Fourth Amendment...
Cisco Plans to Double the Speed of the Internet
>By that time though, the NSL's would probably have served their purpose, and something else will have taken it's place.

I don't think so. Generally, the way it works in the US court systems is you have to break the law before you can challenge it in court. This means that, regardless of the eventual decision, you would have already revealed the NSL (or removed the canary), and the question is where you allowed to.
And in one go, NSA moves from evil fuckers to Dropbox-for-the-whole-world.

Next step, political refugee uses NSA records to determine who was torturing him in Afghanistan.

To be fair it's absolutely brilliant - the only real defence we have against total surveillance is to be able to see what the guards are watching as they watch. This is a step along that road. Mr Brown may be doing the world a much bigger favour than we think.
In film, a 'frame' is a single photographic exposure. A movie typically consists of 24 or 30 frames per second.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_frame

By contrast, a "shot" is "a series of frames, that runs for an uninterrupted period of time."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shot_(filmmaking)
Is 3D TV Dead?
Just because it is public knowledge doesn't mean that the government can use the information to prosecute.

Suppose Alice and Bob are talking about a big drug deal over the phone, and Carol (working for the NSA) listens in. Carol lets her friend Dan know, and Dan's a police officer so he goes on a stakeout and catch Alice and Bob in the act, with $1M of cocaine in the trunk of Alice's car, and $1M of cash in the trunk of Bob's car. Open and shut case, right?

US case law states that the cocaine is "fruit of the poisonous tree", because the cocaine would never have been discovered by the police if it weren't for the illegal wiretap. Therefore it is inadmissible as evidence. The prosecution's case is sunk, and Alice and Bob go free. (Note that Dan never committed any crimes, might not be aware of the wiretap, and got good, hard, physical evidence that Alice and Bob were breaking the law.)

So if the government tries to use an illegal wiretap in an actual criminal case, it will probably do the prosecution more harm than good. Best chance for a conviction is to pretend the wiretaps never happened.

Edit: I think a good example here is "Nardone et al. v. United States." In this case, Nardone was convicted of smuggling alcohol etc. during a first trial based primarily on evidence acquired through illegal wiretaps. This conviction was overturned because the wiretaps were not admissible as evidence. On the second trial, Nardone was convicted again on other evidence. This conviction was also overturned, because the prosecutors wouldn't have had this evidence if it weren't for the wiretaps.
Go 1.1.1 is released
Maybe an ATM withdrawal near the bus depot?

Giving a hobo your old credit card instead of burning it?
I put it on my iPhone 4 last night. It's mostly unusable. I installed Stitcher and can listen to podcasts but that's about it. Lots of apps crashing/won't install, camera is totally borked, battery life blows.

Upside is it's nice having a break from my phone.
"... two out of three of people like to listen to music while they work, study or read but it’s difficult to find and manage music that consistently works well for this purpose."

Precisely! I like to listen to ambient music when working and constantly trying to find new music for this purpose is quite a hassle.
This is not comparable at all. Nuclear arsenals cannot be dismantled because of the benefits of MAD and the other guy might be considered in a position of force.

In our case, PRISM can be dismantled without the other guy (i.e the population) retaliating in any way or any enemy country gaining any advantage out of that.
He also thought that he was safe doing what the vast majority of CEOs do on a regular basis. At the time of the stock sales he didn't realize just how much he was going to piss off the NSA in the next couple of years, much less how obedient federal prosecutors are to the NSA. It is impossible to become CEO of an ILEC without collecting a vast array of assets vulnerable to official attack. Nacchio might well have decided that the price he has paid was worth a clean conscience.

(I don't really think execs should be compensated with stock, but since they are you know they're going to be selling it regularly. Should they be prosecuted every time the price drops? Of course not, in fact they are almost never prosecuted.)
A large house in a suburban neighborhood in Pakistan has proven to be an excellent place to hide.
Ellsberg was shielded because he was reporting illegal activity by a government official.

What specific illegal conduct did Ellsberg report? My understanding is that he leaked classified documents about the Vietnam War because he felt the public was being misled and had a right to know. That doesn't seem so different from the justification Snowden has given (assuming he's telling the truth on that).

How was Ellsberg "shielded"? He was put on trial, and Nixon famously sent the plumbers to dig up dirt on him.

If what you divulge is not illegal you have no protection.

What law are you referring to here?
Yeah, that's a more plausible reading. Thanks.

But that undermines the original point about big companies even more. Having friends at mostly big companies is not only not enough to generalize about big companies, but it provides no information about whether other companies struggle with these issues too.
And they get a % cut of transfer sale amount, just like 30 or 33% or so of all app purchases by end users?
What concerns me most about this whole situation isn't even the surveillance, though I think that's pretty abhorrent. It's the fact that something so stupendous has been done without any kind of public debate - despite the fact that anyone with two brain cells to rub together can't help but see would at least be a strongly polarizing issue.

From this article it sounds like there hasn't even been much of a secret debate. If they won't consult the people about such an explosive issue, the least they could do is consult their elected representatives. Instead, they just did it, and now they want to sweep it all under the rug and tell us "we thought really hard about it and we decided it was OK - and after all, TERR'ISTS!". I have a sinking feeling that it'll work, though, and that this debate will not really happen anyway since most people don't seem to care.
How, after 2 summers as an intern, do you know how many times people were promoted? Microsoft doesn't let people sit around for 12-18 years.
AMD first to reach 5GHz with FX-9590 processor
51 Inbound Marketing Ways to Market your Startup on Shoestring Budget
I did always like his sense of humor.
N.S.A. Chief Says Phone Logs Halted Terror Threats
Does this gives Bowman another chance to appeal against Monsanto, in the Biotechnology suit?
This is a great little service. I have a "concentrate" playlist in spotify that tries to fill this need with classical music, but I listen to it in the background so much that even with a fairly long playlist I get tired of hearing the same songs. Will definitely be trying this out.
For concentrating, I'm a big fan of Brian Eno's ambient albums like Ambient 1: Music for Airports.
The title of this article is wrong. That is why you should be scared.

37% Approve.
57% Disapprove.
10% Don't care.

That means only 20% more disapprove than approve. 10% of people are blissfully ignorant. 37% are deliberately ignorant. 57% are actually thinking.

You call those good numbers? I call that: fucked.

We are only 7% stronger than the blissfully and deliberately ignorant.
The app layout is responsive and looks slick too. What framework (if any) did you use to build the UI?
witty and poignant, +1
There Was A Secret Ruling Against The NSA For Spying On Americans
Searching flights and hotels by price - not by time
Very well put.

> Best chance for a conviction is to pretend the wiretaps never happened.

And this is why PRISM coming to light is a good thing as it gives the defense another reason to question intent, in the scenario above it would be Bob and Alice asking why Dan was staking out their house and searching their cars.
It is there - if the phone is not locked when you receive the call. Otherwise you have to press power button twice to reject. That hasn't changed from iOS6.
Legitimate app breaks popular encryption systems (PGP, truecrypt)
My understanding is that such evidence is only thrown out of court when challenged by opposing counsel. For example, a prosecutor puts forth some evidence, then the defence lawyer objects, and the judge rules on if it is admissible. If the defence doesn't object...
The League of Women's Voters manages the debates, not the TV networks.
That requires admission of illegality
I've been staring at the first problem from May '98. I understand the solution, but I still don't understand how it's possible.
Can't innovate anymore? my ass
Nice service. When I'm coding Trance, mainly Armin van Buuren, works best for me.
I disagree. They'd probably just find other instances of you lying and say that your religion's prohibition on lying isn't that firm to begin with.

Same as if you claimed that, per your faith, you "have to" wear a yarmulke all the time, but it turns out you only wear it in courthouses that prohibit it.
That's impressive. Actually found about news I haven't known (by watching what other searched for).
The exclusionary rule is there to protect the defendant, and the defendant can ignore/waive its application.

Even if it could be applied without regard to whether the defendant objected, it has been gutted in recent decades by our radical right-wing Supreme Court, who think illegally-obtained evidence is just dandy so long as excluding it from court proceedings wouldn't actually change the government's behavior in collecting it.
Yes, I recommend everyone watches it. It was a great talk.
Firefox rolls out streaming Web API
The Safari Icon
This is interesting. I wonder if we could audit the entire holdings of any NSA agents, investigating any portfolios with unusual gains.
Contempt for communicating a message (by whatever means) is not the same as forcing to lie.
Before we do that, let's establish, out in the open, that these laws are Constitutional. The Constitution still matters - right?
Agreed and same. I have a playlist on my phone for just trance which gets listened to whenever I'm working or even exercising.

I noticed something really interesting - your pace adjusts to the beat. For example, I took my headphones off to take a call and I was in awe at the speed of the beat, which only 2 minutes ago sounded fairly regular and not as fast.