skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Everything the guy did just screams amateur. The first issue is posting information about a deal before a contract has been signed. "

Agree. Default state in business normally "not ok to talk about this" unless specifically mentioned or there is some reason to believe that it is ok by other factors. Sometimes of course it's explicitly pointed out. Maybe someone simply forgot in the chain of command. Doesn't a meeting with Steve scream "better not talk about this"?

In the end it doesn't matter whether Apple is right or wrong anyway. It's the golden rule. He who has the gold rules. In this case assuming you want to be in business with Apple you need to go to extreme lengths to play the game the way they want it played.
joey@gnu:~>gpg --recv-keys 2512E3C7
gpg: requesting key 2512E3C7 from hkp server pool.sks- keyservers.net
gpg: key 2512E3C7: "Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>" 24 new signatures
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg: new signatures: 24

KSP's still seem to be alive and well. I'm sure the NSA has long since pulled in this info about the people I met and signed keys with at Linux Conf Australia this winter. (Of course I Have Nothing To Hide.)

If you're using any Linux distribution, there is certainly use of the web of trust at many points in the development, build, and delivery chain of its software.
You bring up a good point. It's common knowledge that most countries have laws about spying on their own citizens, but not citizens of other nations. Furthermore, global intelligence organizations freely share intelligence. They have been using this "loophole" to effectively spy on their own citizens by proxy. It seems that it's in the best interest of all citizens of the world to form some sort of treaty that says they want spy on each other without due process. It's seems pretty counter intuitive that my own government would encourage, and even assist another government to spy on me. Isn't the main purpose of the government, the reason that I let the government exist in the first place, to protect me from foreign threats. Certainly another country spying on me is a threat worth protecting from.
You did good boy, keep it up.

Sincerely yours,
Satan
The CIA World Factbook[1] calls it a "constitution-based federal republic" but also adds that it has "strong democratic tradition".

[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
Correct. The AES family of algorithms are public knowledge, not proprietary. They are open for scrutiny by mathematicians and crypto experts across the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard
Reading your statement makes me want to call you a fucking idiot. Cheers bitch!
Show HN: Github for Contracts
They explain the math pretty clearly under the heading "How Widespread is This?"
What exactly does a partnering company get if the escrow is triggered? They obviously get your source code, but the question is what are they allowed to do with it...
What kind of design service do you need? I can provide help.
It's also surprising that they claim to need all these powers without a warrant if they're only going to be used after an event to try and figure out what happened.

I do think it's important not to over-react to things like this and neuter the security services when they really do have legitimate grounds to investigate someone and they really are doing their jobs under a reasonable level of scrutiny and oversight.

However, how often would security services really need to act so fast that they had to circumvent getting a named minister to personally sign off on their actions (and accept responsibility for them, presumably) or getting a court order for surveillance based on making a case that it was a reasonable to invade someone's privacy under the circumstances?

William Hague keeps talking about how all of this spying is done under a legal framework, but I think he loses a lot of credibility making that argument as part of an administration that argues for secret courts and the like, standing next to the senior foreign representative of a nation that uses blatant legal trickery so it can detain people indefinitely without trial contrary to even its own normal legal rules. What's the point of having a legal framework if most people can't see that law in action or if you can just circumvent the framework when it's inconvenient?
I think Andressen is a bit off the mark here. OK, yes, maybe some of the initial reporting was "sloppy" in a sense... but given the very nature of the subject under discussion what else do you expect!?? We're talking about exposing secret government programs, which the Director of National Intelligence has demonstrably lied to Congress about, and which are still mostly concealed and hidden in the shadows.

The "direct access" thing is, IMO, a red herring. Who cares if the NSA access is "direct access" or not? There's a larger point about all this, regarding NSA data collection via all of the various means they employ.

And regarding the denials by Google, Facebook, etc... I still don't take them at face value. I'm not saying anybody is lying, but I will freely admit to being skeptical. I certainly would not say it's been demonstrated that Google, Apple, Yahoo, etc. aren't giving the NSA a lot more than they are letting on.

This past weekend, National Intelligence Director James Clapper confirmed the U.S. does use a program called PRISM and released a fact sheet on it.

Why even mention this guy, he's a confirmed liar. Clapper has zero credibility in regards to any of this, as far as I'm concerned.
No, I didn't. I'm happily wrong though. :)

I thought it was a bit of schadenfreude or just happiness that developers weren't being singled out.

Poe's law is alive and well on HN, so I find it hard to spot sarcasm here unless it's fairly overt.
As far as neuroscience goes, we need the following:

- An open source GUI for sorting spikes. When you put an electrode into the brain, you often end up recording the "sounds" of multiple neurons firing. To make sense of what's going on, you have to identify which spikes came from which neurons. While there are fully automated algorithms for spike sorting, they aren't widely used because people don't trust them to work on real recorded data. Even if you use them, you probably want to check their results later, and you need a good GUI to do so. Right now, the "state of the art" is Plexon's Offline Sorter (http://www.plexon.com/products/offline-sorter%E2%84%A2), which is slow, occasionally crashes, and costs thousands of dollars per license. It's mostly a GUI, and replicating it would probably not require much domain-specific expertise. The fact that it's closed source actively prevents the development of better partially supervised spike sorting algorithms.

- Better fMRI data analysis tools. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5239530 for some previous discussion.

- An open source replacement for MATLAB that is familiar to users of that language and encourages modular design and has a JIT that can achieve C-level performance. I am betting that this is going to be Julia (http://julialang.org/), but there's still plenty of work to be done before Julia is ready for people without substantial programming experience.

- Better tools for visualizing high-dimensional data sets. I'm not actually very familiar with what's been done in this domain, but I feel it's something that isn't often attempted because there's little overlap between experienced graphics programmers and scientists. A good way to visualize your data can save you days spent performing statistics.
"I have come to the conclusion that politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians."

- Charles de Gaulle
It is theoretically possible to do that. Blood is wonderfully conductive with all the electrolytes.
Congressman: <hard question>

NSA rep: "That's a matter of national security, I can't answer you."
Given that the NSA is not a troop of Boy Scouts telling scary stories around a camp fire, I'd be somewhat surprised if they're monitoring the White House's communications in an attempt to be able to say "the terrorist's call is coming from inside the White House".
its important to note, the government of china has a controlling stake in a large number of those companies.
These weren't fp intensive workloads at all - mostly your typical IT IO workloads. I don't know the internals to say exactly what or why, but something seems to go really wrong on bulldozer when you try to schedule two different vms on the same coupled pair of cores.
In all seriousness -- don't. At least, not unless you have a major website to design. There are just too many excellent ready-made options these days. Instead, hire a usability expert. Usability is what actually gets you returning business. (Disclosure: I work in UX.)

No one uses a website because it's pretty. Everyone uses a website because it's useful. It's a testament to human superficiality that in 2013, there is still such a thing as a 'web designer' for sites smaller than 20,000 uniques a month, while many of these same sites (and many much larger sites!) are usability nightmares.

Hiring a designer when you don't have a UX consultant is like sending interior designers to Louisiana after Katrina: nice, but it would be even nicer to get the levees rebuilt, hmm?

(Sorry, I'm on a bit of a rant; I hope it is informative enough to justify its irate voice. Allow me to continue just a bit longer.)

Do you have a tailor make your jeans? No. Do you have a haberdasher dash your hats? No. Do you have a cobbler hand-cobble your shoes? .... So why are you paying someone to put e-lipstick on what might very well be a www-pig?

So, go to useit.com and read up about usability, and then hire a UX (user experience, or usability) expert. Go get yourself a website that works as good as it looks. Because you deserve it --- and so do your visitors.
AFAIK a strong key passphrase would be effective at protecting the private key while it's at rest (stolen laptop / hard drive). However as soon as the private key is pulled into memory for a signing or encryption operation the passphrase doesn't matter as the raw key is needed at that point.

As for your second question, there are techniques that perform static and dynamic analysis on javascript to try and detect illegal flows or taint propagation (without having to resort to monitoring the outbound network traffic). See [1] and [2] if you're interested in that topic.

[1] http://static.usenix.org/event/sec10/tech/full_papers/Bandha...
[2] http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/pub-inf_5310.pdf
Burger King Banned From Opening Within 20 Miles Of Mom-And-Pop Burger King Sign
Men are 50% more likely than women to support whistleblower Edward Snowden
Not just anonymous users. Even as a logged-in user with set preferences Google constantly knows better than you which language you want.

"Oh, so you did a local search for hardware stores in insert-country-here? Well, than let's change your default settings to insert-language-here, regardless of what you told us you wanted."

This nightmare grows exponentially if you're in a multilingual country.
I'm really, really sorry that most of today's developers (it seems) consider checked exceptions to be a bad practice. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person in the world still advocating their usage. I'm currently working on an application that uses libraries developed by people who had the same opinion about checked exceptions as you. Of course, their code still throws exceptions. Except now, I don't know whether a method I call can throw an exception and whether I should write code to handle it until it all blows up at runtime (more often than not - in production). So what do I do then? I write a try-catch to handle their exception. The exact same thing I would have done had they decided to throw a checked exception. Only now, I don't get any warning that I should handle possible exceptional behavior at compile time, I get it at some point during runtime.
Filmmaker picks a copyright fight with “Happy Birthday”
Way Too Many Criminal Laws, Lawyers Tell Congress
You're probably thinking about the child pornography case that's going on right now where the accused was ordered by the courts to provide his passphrase. Higher level courts say you cannot compel that sort of evidence.
Is this legit? It kind of feels like those old scam ads that would say, "Has your credit card number been stolen? Enter here to find out!".

Why, especially in the light of recent privacy concerns, would I just hand over my full name, address and phone number and allow someone I have no relationship with mail a legal document on my behalf?
"Am I angry? Nope."

Usually when people do get angry about these things
it's because they don't have what you say next, in other words they haven't been around the block:

"I have enough experience"

More directly people get mad when you feel naive that you expected something and were fooled. In other words "I'm loyal to that girl and now she cheated on me". So you are mad at yourself for trusting and feeling fooled.

Sivers of course will most likely never make that type of mistake again. He has learned from the situation. If he does do the same thing though it will be with full knowledge of the possible outcome.
It seems like the distinction that the NSA is trying to make is that, it's not illegal to possess the data, only to look at it. That argument may even extend to automatic processes that aren't seen by human eyes, who knows. If you happen to get a warrant in the future, you'll be able to "travel back in time" to see all communications of the person in question. The most maddening part of all this is that no one outside the government is even allowed to know the rules.
I think the point is that the character encoding scheme can't use "." or ".." for its own purposes because they already have meaning due to filesystem conventions.
Why Ember.js, and what other frameworks did you guys evaluate?
It can be deemed as a "massive positive" for RoR only when "slow dynamic bytecode-interpreted globally VM-locked language running a massive completely-overkill framework" is a good thing.
I wonder if the DB request he was (apparently) doing ended up being the gating factor.
The really important saving between the two will probably be memory usage for most uses - 10x less memory is far more important as memory is a limit far more frequently hit than processing speed. This does depend on the application of course, but for the vast majority of web applications speed is not really an issue, even when they have a lot of users, so then it comes down to tooling and libraries, where Go is a little lacking at the moment (though I'm sure it'll catch up).

It's a great language to work with though and I can see it easily overtaking Ruby in this space given a few more years, partly because it's so easy to pick up when coming from languages like Ruby and Python.
Thanks, very important to know!
Interestin blog post. thanks kevin.
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It will be nothing but good for Nick Clegg if they do. He could threaten to break the coalition over it on a point of principle, and in doing so make amends for the tuition fees betrayal. He could put the Lib Dems back on the political map and reassert their authority for the next two years in government in a single sound-bite.
boom. assuming legal documents is primary use case v1?
Although it's apparent that the US military and police are prepped for widespread civil unrest.
Just what this debate needs, useless grandstanding.
> get the US populous to accept this whole surveillance state, and to get congress to fully legitimize these surveillance operations...

that does, frankly, seem the most likely outcome of all this, specific orchestrations aside.

no one really has the stomach to roll back the security state, so after a good catharsis, these programs will get legitimized, we'll accept pervasive surveillance as the new normal, and adjust our lives accordingly.
Bigtincan, Improving Content Management Globally
This is the real reason why cryptography hasn't caught on. It's opt-in by nature - No matter how hard you try, you can't send someone an encrypted message if they don't have a public key for you to use.
Fine, then, a DNA-RNA base pair mismatch incurs approximately 1.5 kcal/mol penalty, which is a 1:10 less likelihood of matching. 3' UTRs of genes are what you need to reverse transcribe (by accident) the mRNA of interest to generate the cDNA you describe. On average they are around 700 bp, the odds of finding an exact match are about 700/4^18 - then a one bp mismatch is 700/4^17 times a 1:10 hit in terms of competitive binding. Two bp mismatch is 700/4^16 times 1:100. Then you have to consider that it's evolutionarily unlikely to have segments that exactly or inexactly match tRNAs because the resulting dsRNA is likely to engage in silencing via the DROSHA mechanism - probably because our bodies like to guess what - get rid of ssRNA viruses. So these numbers are probably at least on the order of 1:10 or even 1:100 or more in the wrong direction.
In the UK Oliver Drage (alleged child pornographer) was convicted and jailed for 16 weeks under RIPA for not disclosing his password. http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2010/10/polic...
That's for distant stars though, isn't it? I mean, just with Google Maps you can see the mirrors on a car. Newsprint isn't that much of a step up.
Also, just to clarify: good user interfaces are tested. Their creators collect empirical data. This is what separates visual design from UX. UX (user experience) is testable, and you can get hard data, distribution curves, and confidence intervals. Anything less should make you feel.... unconfident. At least, for an interval. ;)
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Crisis Of Confidence Could Spur Flight From US Tech
Making your app modular: Yapsy (Python)
Watergate was unambiguously targeting rival political parties. That's why it was such a big deal.

Nothing that's come to light so far is on that type of level. No matter how strongly you think the government is overstepping its bounds, it's at least possible for reasonable people to think they were justified.
What is Happening in Brazil
It's a Catch-22.

If he gets the data, he will use the long and numerous phone conversations between the IRS and the White House to infer the administration is guilty. However, it proves nothing.

If he doesn't get the data, he will argue it is because the President personally ordered the crimes and is hiding it.

He won't get the data. The NSA won't want their databases and valuable time used to perform discovery in every lawsuit from now until eternity. He will exploit the NSA's "Need to Know" policy simply to make Obama look nefarious.
Or, the catch could be such that, with such enhancements, everyone realizes the meaninglessness of existence and kills themselves in a fit of existential rage.
A recent poll found 20% of Republicans think Obama's the antichrist...
Most people do get their meat from supermarkets in Norway, but a lot of butchers have cleverly turned their stores into high-end gourmet delis. Gourmet sausages, cured/smoked meats, marinades, pre-marinated meat etc. are all in vogue. I guess people got tired of obsessing about coffee and making beer. You still have quite a lot of old-style, no-frills butchers, but they are almost invariably halal butchers that serve the relevant part of the immigration population.
More info here: http://whatsinbrazil.tumblr.com/post/52916097951/its-not-abo...
RESTful Paradigm In Internal Architecture
Thanks for sharing your experience! I'm wondering how does the editorial process work with this approach? How does the publisher ensure quality?
Haha, yes it would. But likely my ability would at least enable me to convince others of this discovery!
Most people are completely unaware of what CS researchers are doing in France because they don't work on things which the public finds ultra-sexy. Most of what they do and are good at has direct industrial application.

They made some pretty interesting things in type theory, language design (OCaml), proof (Coq), static analysis and certification (B-method, Frama-C, CompCert).

All of these is useful if you want to do safe embedded softwares for your planes, flight control softwares, automatic metros or nuclear reactor monitoring systems (which they do) but it isn't really easy to explain to the general public.

There is also a supposedly quite strong numerical modelling group working on nuclear deterrence but most of this stuff is classified. Let's also not forget that France still is a major arm dealer so you have some R&D done by private defence companies. Nothing comparable to the USA but you still apparently have some development in targeting, surveillance and interception (well, France has a world covering array network, I hope they at least try to use it).

Now, there is nothing particularly exceptional here. The situation is mostly the same in all publicly founded laboratories around the world. What France doesn't have very much is people doing frivolous stuff like email sorting or social network aka start-ups but that's another problem.
You're speaking from an Objectivist position, aren't you?
This subpoena has nothing to do with PRISM; it's really more of an effort to link the White House to the IRS targetting of conservative groups (which was apparently just an agent running amok).

Ultimately, though, there's the classic adage about the president: "The buck stops here." If Obama was aware of PRISM (which I have to believe he did), then he also had the choice of stopping it. The same is true of the IRS scandal. Even if he did not (unlike Nixon) direct the programs, knowing about them and not stopping them (again, if true; I really don't know) is tantamount to running them.
Generally they just get a limited, non-exclusive license to use the code for their own purposes. e.g. they can't resell it so someone else, just use it the way they would have had the escrow not been triggered.
Software Development: Fast and Slow
It's ethically dubious," Snowden said in the interview on Wednesday.

So is the entire concept of espionage!

The entire purpose of espionage is to convince people in other countries to break their oaths and tell you their secrets.

If this guy doesn't like the morally gray or dark areas of intelligence, why did he spend 7 years in the industry?
Thanks! Glad you thought so
Let's hope they don't kill what is an otherwise great product.

I'm hoping they bought AppFog for the right reasons, because they want to add resources to accelerate it's market share (and of course profit). This would be good for us and PAAS in general.

But if they just bought it so they can play around with "cloud" and seem hip and cool to shareholders then let it wither on the vine, we all lose a little.

PAAS is where we're going next, any many already have. AppFog has done a great job of pushing out features and keeping the community competitive.
You vastly underestimate the voting power and wealth of people aged 50+. Try and convince a retirement home that something called the Pirate Party is a good thing. Best of luck to ya!
Look Jobs could be the way he is because he has things that people want (I don't mean Apple products so much as what someone like Jobs is able to do for someone economically).

If he didn't have those things nobody would pay attention to him or care about him other than the base level that anyone cares about anyone day to day. He knows that. Same as some pretty girls know why guys are interested in them. (Or rich guys hopefully know why girls are interested in them). It's a symbiotic relationship.
Certainly voting doesn’t seem to change anything, given the present lot want general surveillance and the last lot wanted ID cards.

I’ve just written to Andy Burnham about it. I can only hope he’s receptive, though from his voting record it doesn’t seem likely.
This is already being spun on some media as if MS intentionally delays fixing bugs to let the government take advantage of exploits.

http://news.yahoo.com/microsoft-waits-fix-software-bugs-nsa-...