skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, I was objecting to the general statement that “You can't solve social problems with software.". There are social problems that are solvable with software and social problems that are not. It is an open question which cryptographic problems are of which class.

I would argue that provable-identity is probably solvable in software, but that identity and utility are deeply connected notions. For instance Alice wants to talk to Bob to satisfy some want or need. His identity is only important to the extent that it is a necessary part of the utility of the communication.

Generally two nodes in a network can prove that they have access to a particular set of keys, but the system tends to fall down on proving that they are useful to each other. A MITM attack is merely one party pretending to be as useful to the communicator as the intended recipient. If you disagree consider that your packets don't go directly to your bank, but are "rebroadcast" by routers and switches along the route.
Seem like more like a platform for self aggrandizing quips than anything substantial. I guess it isn't surprising that Snowden and the Guardian are remaining vague, but we are pretty much no closer to the truth than day one.
You've never worked retail?
I think you may have missed my point slightly. Often critique of feminism is held as inherently sexist whether or not that is true. People view the skeptical attack on female privilege and/or rejection of certain aspects of claimed male privilege as sexist. My point being that sometimes people confuse skepticism with sexism. In my mind the unfortunate thing is that some of the big names in the skeptic communities make these criticisms and then later show their misandric or misogynist sides.
Or is trying to suss out what, if anything, related to himself may be leaked in the upcoming days.
That's a predictable smear that's aimed at every whistleblower.
No there is no work around. Only option is to use your own implementation of scrolling or 3rd party library. Looks like demo is using some sort of library that is why scrolling performance is laggy.
A Formula For Innovation
How? By eliminating the people?

I suspect any solution to eliminating sonic booms while travelling at supersonic speed with respect to the nearby environment is immediately publishable.
As someone who probably would identify as a skeptic, I agree with some of the premises here but certainly not his conclusion. He makes some good points about the skeptic community and the serious issues it has, as well as the issues with some of its figureheads. I've never been a big fan of Dawkins but his response to Rebecca Watson over the elevator story was downright hateful. I've always seen Dawkins as part of the militant atheist crowd more than a skeptic but there's a lot more crossover there than perhaps there should be. Phil Plait laid out a lot of this stuff in his "Don't Be A Dick" talk at TAM 8 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrFRbGjUtJk), which I'd highly recommend.

Fair enough, I can see all that as a reason to distance yourself from the skeptical community. There are a lot of communities I should, in theory, have something in common with (gamer culture, for instance, or his own example of /r/atheism) that I reject because I can't stand much of their behaviour.

However, the author goes too far in outright rejecting skepticism and dismissing its value. I think it is important that there's a group of people protesting homeopathy's use in hospitals and disproving the claims of anti-vaccers and blocking creationist teaching laws. You think psychics provide a little bit of entertainment or false hope? Just a few weeks ago, Amanda Berry was found alive, years after Sylvia Browne had bluntly told her mother that she was dead. Berry's mother died in the interim, thinking her daughter had been murdered.

And the rant on Reagan and bankers comes out of nowhere and commits much the same fallacy as Dawkins "Muslima" comment (minus the Islamaphobia). The idea that, just because there are bigger problems out there, no one should deal with the smaller ones. If someone chooses to devote their time to exposing alt. med. con artists, should we really be mad that they're not curing cancer or investigating financial fraud? It's absurd.

There are several factual errors as well. Right after his complaint that skeptics simply take the word of big pharma, he mentions Ben Goldacre but he doesn't mention that Goldacre is a prominent opponent of big pharma research practices, as are many skeptics, and he's the author of an entire book about them, Bad Pharma. He greatly overstates the use of alternative medicine and seems to have the common misunderstanding that the placebo effect is something you only get from treatments that do nothing. A scam artist treating you nicely gives the same benefit as a doctor treating you nicely, but the doctor will also provide some actual working medicine while he's at it.
She starts to lose me when talking about using the MS Windows kernel as a "hypervisor", but she acknowledges it's a poor solution and defends it by supposing it'd be better than nothing. Otherwise, it's a decent discussion of security through virtualization.
Why? What is so bad about having your conditionals be explicit?

What happens when you need an "else" branch?

Is not having a person for the given ID an error, is it a "do nothing", or does it mean to create a new person?

What does the callback version do if you forget to make your index unique, and end up with multiple people with the same ID; does it get run multiple times? The version that returns a Maybe<Person> at least has an obvious proper response (throw an error).
> If redevelopment were generally allowed in cities like Paris and New York some of ugliest, least unique buildings would tend to get replaced with something newer and possibly better. And fifty or a hundred years later some of those new buildings would themselves also be prized by preservationists.

This is completely unfounded. There is no guarantee that new construction would be more aesthetically pleasing and we've seen that new development has not brought down prices in New York City and that gentrification continues to get worse.
Another good option is Body of Secrets by bramford.

Whatever you do make sure to skip <2000 word "history of NSA" posts by Joe Blogger if you want to learn something. If you don't have the extra time or money for a book check out the wikipedia page about NSA.
The difference is that the null check is front and center, instead of hidden.

In C# or Java, the member access expression "a.b" contains a null check. There's no way to do a member access that doesn't do a null check (for reference types)! It's impossible to distinguish member accesses that were expected/assumed by the writer to not fail from member accesses where the check is relied upon.

With an option type / a maybe monad / 'using telling instead of finding', there are no implicit null checks. Only explicit checks, and only when necessary. Either you use Option.map, to do a check and propagate nulls, or you don't, in which case there's no null path. You don't have to worry about null reference exceptions, making a check where you shouldn't, or missing a check where you should have, because the compiler prevents you from making those mistakes.

Applying it to C++: https://github.com/simonask/simonask.github.com/blob/master/...

Applying it to C# (as an augment over null): http://twistedoakstudios.com/blog/Post1130_when-null-is-not-...

Applying it to Java (as an alternative to null): http://java.dzone.com/articles/java-optional-objects
Here is the Fibonacci sequence calculated by a literal series of mechanical steps: http://www.chrisfenton.com/the-turbo-entabulator/
This article was very sad, moving and, in a sense, motivational. Thinking about Aaron's situation makes me put all of my problems in perspective and realize how trivial most of them are.
Flagged for being a witch hunt. I know the rule about flagging club is you don't talk about flagging club, but this is rather egregious.

Even if we decided this was ok, there are two major problems:

First, consider that there are several government projects named PRISM that are not secret and are unrelated to the NSA. Example: http://www.mitre.org/news/digest/advanced_research/03_13/rem... and http://www.dot.gov/individuals/privacy/pia-prism.

Second, the claims about the secret NSA PRISM program that Greenwald initially made have been contradicted by The Washington Post, The New York Times, every tech CEO, and have been walked back by Greenwald himself. I know a lot of people will never believe that and have been conflating PRISM with other issues (such as telephone call logging), but at this point a lot of the initial claims made regarding unfettered access to tech company data are without merit.
enemies of the US also know about this problem and exploit it routinely

How so? I mean, i can imagine a variety of ways, but what have you seen?
Loading CSS via  is 4x faster than via XHR in SPDY-capable browsers
Actually, looks like it was just changed last night - the links before then are fine.
Building Ribbit in Meteor
Capsule.js: Polymorphism and then some
I vaguely remember something about Mountain Lion's TOSes stating that an OS X VM is acceptable on Apple hardware.
The difference seems to be that instead of checking for whether a single object is returned, to actually check for the size of the collection returned, which (depending on your language, of course) the method used to iterate over that collection does automatically.
I struggled for a long time with the suicide of someone close to me.

It dawned on me years later that for all of us affected (ripped apart) by his death (age 24) that we were given a gift: suffering.

Looking back, I left my comfortable box -- dropped out of college, shaved my head and entered a monastery -- trying to make sense of it.

That broke me, several family members, and his closest friends in a way that a so called natural death might not do since it was his choice and our guilt.
Your cousin and her friends aren't parasites for delegating the management of their wealth to professionals. They'd be idiots not to get first-class lawyers, tax advisors, accountants, estate managers, and investment advisors to run their private wealth.

They don't "produce nothing". These professionals are investing their capital and the world is wealthier as a result.
Thank you for replying (and thanks to the others too but this was more helpful). That certainly sounds within my pea-brain's ability to follow directions.
Just saw your very eloquent reply to my comment. Great analogy.
The point is that America's founding ideals are very much worth dying for. "How bad it gets" is totally irrelevant in this context, since the "it" refers to specific conditions, whereas the ideal remains separate, over and above them.

The thing to understand is that "country" in this context, means the embodiment of an ideal, and not just a particular piece of territory, or a group of people inhabiting it.

If you don't feel that there are any ideals worth dying for, then all of this will be much harder to understand.
The low standards to getting a spy job

What would the best qualifications be, I wonder? Being an incredibly good liar and having a great attention to detail aren't available as college courses yet.
It's actually not an uncommon perspective.
That sounds like the UK, where I live.

Unfortunately, because the Conservative party have frozen NHS funding, you'd have trouble getting that doctor's appointment, and the walk-in clinic would potentially bugger up your blood test, forget to put your NHS number on the sample, then call your doctor who would contact you a week later to tell you to go in again and have it re-done.

There's no good reason why we shouldn't be spending more to make sure that the service works properly, just right-wing ideology.
And suddenly I'm very interested again. thanks for nudging me in the right direction.
"What is best" is of course, a matter of opinion.
I'm not sure this is as concrete as you seem to think this is, though i'll admit i'm not familiar with the details of norwegian law, what you say is true of most countries in terms of duties.
Something to consider is that the trend the past year has been to use headless browsers over BeautifulSoup, cURL, etc.. because headless browsers are harder to detect by anti-scraping systems and can interpret JavaScript.
You could probably quite effectively do 'lossy' compression on text given enough knowledge of the language. Compress words with similar meanings into each other, automatically select variants of words based on context (plurality, etc), automatically insert punctuation, and so on.

The result would probably look like it was written by someone with an incomplete knowledge of English (or by a machine) but might end up being quite readable.

Of course, on the other hand, you can just compress the text with LZMA :)
> I'd love to publish my information, but jail or causing grief to these people and their families doesn't sound appealing to me.

Jail for publishing linkedIn data?
Schooling Ourselves in an Unequal America
While some say "government intelligence" is a contradiction in terms, I presume the intelligence agencies we've got are savvy enough to know about the Streisand Effect.
Keep a budget. For 2 or 3 months be fanatical about writing down everything you buy and then analyze it. Ask yourself, 'what could I have saved on?' for example, made lunch more often, buy 1-2 cd not 10, etc. etc. Then set a budget from what you learned and monitor that.

Raise your credit score most effectively by buying something like a car or home and paying it off RELIGOUSLY. Try VERY hard to not be late. Set up direct payments thru your bank, etc.

Get One credit card (not just a debit card for your checking act.) and NEVER be late with that either. By one thing a month to keep it active and pay it off right away.

Shop around for stuff you want. Look all around compare and don't make those impulse buys.

As much as I hate the credit spiral we all are in, you have to game it to your advantage.
Which goes back to the old saying: If you want something done right, do it yourself.
Post the text to Tumblr and JPGs to Flickr and then sit back and reflect on lossy text compression for website titles.
Is this[0] what you're looking for?

szc is saying that carriers should include lost business / damaged reputation, when reporting the costs of complying with the legislation.

Say it costs Verizon $10 million to build the infrastructure to let the government listen in. Verizon could claim that the revelation of this program will cost them $10 billion in future lost business. Since the Attorney General is unlikely to approve such an expense, Verizon would be declared compliant without actually having to turn anything over.

It's an interesting loophole in theory, but probably wouldn't actually work.

[0] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for....

edit: the anchor tag isn't getting parsed correctly: http://bit.ly/14Gbifo
The US is huge! My mother back home in India still has a hard time believing that there are 4 time zones between San Francisco and New York.
I'd say that described Thomas Paine.
Generally speaking, a good means of transportation should not involve killing the travelers with high acceleration.
Show HN: website screenshot for dummies. Shotsrv.com
This is my side project. I recently was in need of a screenshot service and most of them were un reliable. Those that worked were expensive. So I created my own:

Http://shotsrv.com

Your feedback is much appreciated.
More importantly they get more out of publicly screwing you over. You become an example, something that instills fear in the population. The government's treatment of you makes their job easier because people self-censor or adjust their behavior, assuming that they're monitored and would be caught, which means the government needs to tap and monitor less.
What is the point supposed to be?

Defense contractors -- they're just like us!
People ignore warnings. Want proof? Go grab damn near any open source project and compile it. It's almost guaranteed that the default compile options, chosen by the authors, will generate dozens if not hundreds of warnings. Everyone's so very noble at the start of a project, "We shall turn on all warnings, and then fix them!", but really once the program compiles and seems to run properly, all that goes out the window.
It's too bad the full text isn't posted anywhere. I'd love to take a more in-depth look at the results.
They are, but the lines of authority only meet at the very top. The NSA only has influence on the Justice Dept to the extent it can influence the president.
Mint is awesome and I really like my bank Simple (https://Simple.com). It makes it easy to set goals and monitor your money. If anyone wants an invite you can email me I have 9 at the time of writing this.
So... do the counseling! Knowing that the answer is out there for the taking is already changing your life, probably for the worst. "What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse..."
>I don't know what's generating the misogyny or miso-Islamism sentiments from which he's recoiling

That should be 'perceived' misogyny and 'perceived' miso-islamism. The author hasn't presented compelling evidence to suggest either.

And it should be noted in quoting the author here:
>For them, feminism is an unscientific discipline (but how could it be otherwise?), as nonsensical as astrology or Roman Catholicism, and as ripe and essential for debunking. They're okay with women's lib, within reason; but now it's gone too far, and the firm hand of reason must rein it in. Reason, weirdly enough, never seems to disrupt their own grip on power. It's always on the side of the patriarchy.

To the sketpic community, "the patriarchy" needs to be proven. That is the crux of third wave feminism and probably where the the skeptic community and the feminist community butt heads. For instance, one cannot say "it is impossible to be sexists towards men" and use your only point of proof as "the patriarchy" and hope to be taken seriously by the skeptic community. That statement, just as "there is a god", needs proof.

Perhaps the author takes issue with the need for proof? I don't know, just spitballing.
It only really discussed the challenges from the plane's perspective, not the people on the ground when the plane broke the barrier.

The regulations are in place because sonic booms can be not only a nuisance to those on the ground, but destructive.
Bitcoin ≈ MySpace
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is also O(n) in space, right? I think you can get a similar scala version in:

lazy val fib:Stream[BigInt] = 0 #::1 #:: fib.zip(fib.tail).map(x=>x._1+x._2)

This is neat and all, but the imperative version wins by being O(1) in space. Right?
Very neat idea. Would love to have those bound copies....

Reminds me of Nethack, where text in the dirt degrades every time you walk over it.
"Find the nearest intelligent life form" ...that is not carnivorous and is not interested in our resources and is not interested in exterminating us for whatever reason.
BS4, which is still actively developed, got out of the parser game - it can now use lxml (fast) or html5lib (highly tolerant) to parse the HTML. It's kept the convenient interface to dig into the DOM, and it's kept the UnicodeDammit encoding detection system.
Lucky you. Most people -- even defense contractors! -- have probably worked some jobs outside of their field of study at some point.
Hope you're happy, you just ruined Christmas.
> The sad thing is that the probability of this data being misused for political reasons is so much higher in India than in the USA.

I guess this is mostly speculation, while I can understand the sentiment.
In part because America is much larger: NYC to Los Angeles is similar in distance to a trip from London to Baghdad. At that scale, trains are always going to be inconvenient.

Now, that's not to say trains in the US are good, but they are never going to be the best form of transportation for a 3,000 mile trip.
So, for the benefit of everyone reading this: Not urgently needing the money, and not communicating that one urgently needs the money, is one way to avoid having this happen to you.

For your benefit:

a) Asking for partial payment sends a bunch of signals regarding your level of professionalism and need to see this check. Those signals are not helpful in getting you paid in a timely fashion.

b) Two weeks late is practically on time for a lot of clients. Many are just structurally incapable of getting checks cut that fast. Yes, insane, but also true.

c) I'm uncertain of the status of the project and your ongoing relationship with the client. Please note that escalating to lawyers is not in general something which improves client relations, if you wish to get more work from them in the future or if you have an ongoing work relationship for e.g. future milestones.

d) Prior to escalating to a lawyer, write them a short letter yourself and FedEx or courier it to their office. Pay the extra for signature confirmation of receipt. Contents could be similar to:

Dear $DECISIONMAKER:

I invoiced you ($IDENTIFYING_INFORMATION) for $AMOUNT on $PROJECT on $DATE, but to date have not been paid. Last week I spoke to $NAME and $NAME, who promised to handle this issue, but it remains unresolved.

The invoice is due immediately. I would prefer that we resolve this amicably without having to bring lawyers into it. If you have any questions, please call me at $CONTACT_INFO.

Regards,

$YOU
> I was bit by a tick about 2 weeks ago. To get a lyme disease/meningitis test done

Why do they even test for it? Don't they just start antibiotic treatment for it?
Good point. Of course, modern 787s and A380s are also far more fuel efficient then then '60s and 70s era aircraft. According to Wikipedia, the 787 is 20% more efficient then a 767
Apple releases new details on National Security Requests
Google Summer of Code coding starts today
Show HN: World Cup Qualification
ICBW, but Lenovo doesn't tend to sue everyone in sight for using rounded corners...
DevOps & Distributed Teams
We need to fix the root of the problem - evolution-derived protein bodies.
Jaimie Heywood started his own drug research pipeline to try to cure his brother's ALS. That failed, but the effort has inspired a number of other unconventional research efforts.
http://www.ted.com/talks/jamie_heywood_the_big_idea_my_broth...
Explore various World Cup qualification scenarios.

Written in Haxe.
This would all be good once trust is established. FB would basically become a large keyserver that people already use, with an exposed API. That's a good thought.

But I would still need to verify the trust in person. Otherwise, Facebook could be the MITM.

Which is, of course, the problem with the web of trust concept being exposed to the world at large. Too many people would simply establish trust for the expediency. I can see someone in my high school class signing my key and thus expecting me to do the same, without any understanding of the point of the whole business. If Facebook has shown us anything, it's that interpersonal concepts (like "friend") can be easily eroded.
It is perfectly possible to write a fib function that takes O(1) space functionally too, but of course it'd have a worse time complexity due to the lack of memoisation.
I hope we can figure out the mechanics here of ALS and reverse or arrest them. I was reminded of the article below I read in Scientific American where questions are asked about Stephen Hawkings success in staying alive.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=stephen-haw...
Why?

Back when I started programming (1986), Basic, C, Pascal and Forth were seen as prototyping languages, before coding the real applications in Z80, 6502 Assembly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArcGIS
argh, for posterity's sake the last line should read:

"the ipv6 peer entry displayed a lower delay and less jitter while the offsets were reasonably close."
NASA Selects 2013 Astronaut Candidate Class