skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed. It's not unique to startups, either; i've seen it in ordinary companies too.

There's something deep and interesting to be unpicked here. On the one hand, the desire to dive into with new technology and make your own things is rather positive and joyful. On the other, doing that rather than pursuing goals with real value is sad.

Many would object that the former enables the latter, but this is nonsense. We're not talking about prudently investigating potentially useful new technologies or inventing transformatively useful new tools. We're talking about using the latest hot NoSQL database without worrying about its appropriateness, or writing your own web framework just because.

Choosing the former over the latter seems, more than anything, childish. It's choosing eternal inconsequential play over taking effective control of the world.

I note that there are other elements of modern programmer culture which can be seen as childlike. The lust for table football tables in the office, the excitement about workplaces that have free food. Garann Means's 'Bacon is bad for you' talk advances a theory that's vaguely related; it really struck a chord with me.

I find this angle of programmer culture to be deeply frustrating, because it means the discourse is dominated by the shiny and superficial, rather than the genuinely difficult and important.

But then, Bucky Fuller wrote that "children are born true scientists", and the dramatist Keith Johnstone said "Most people lose their talent at puberty. I lost mine in my early twenties. I began to think of children not as immature adults, but of adults as atrophied children.". Maybe i'm overlooking the positive aspects of hacker neoteny.
What? There's still going to be memory.dmp somewhere in c:\windows that'll tell you what happened.
I wonder if this will cause countries to abandon OSX & Windows in favor of open source software.

The bigest takeaway from all of this is that you can't trust closed software that was developed by foreign corporations.
I was just messing with OpenCV + Python + PIL today, I wrote a script that finds all the faces of an image on the net and puts a smile-face on top.
Thanks for an insightful reply.

> Frankly I think that level of privacy control has little appeal to the mainstream.

One might argue that the whole idea of privacy is of little appeal to the mainstream.

> The fake-/no-data approach of incognito (also one of the options that OpenPDroid offers) probably won't cause any compat headaches.

The idea of OpenPDroid is to provide fine-grained permissions together with the fake-data/no-data approach to enforcing them, which prevents apps from crashing when access is denied. And that also enables using the apps even when they might have potential violations of your own privacy policy.
What he can't do is confiscate your 500 shares in AT&T or other US property without any legal proceeding.

He just has to sue the shares for having had the bad taste to be owned by a suspected terrorist.

See http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/seizure-fever-the-war-... for a description of prior art on this technique.
Travel between HK and 'mainland' China regulated, as I understand it. It's possible that China is looking more closely to that border as an escape point than people leaving HK.
Linux on the hx4700: Chapter 0 – Introduction
If they did't trust their hosts they wouldn't have used internet cafes. Though they may just be technically inept.
One is 272kb and the other is 78kb. This should be noted at the beginning of any article making such a comparison.
Manning didn't step forward -- he was trapped after confiding in the wrong person. He had no choice whatsoever, he couldn't flee.
Oh and when booting with nvidia disabled, the Intel card in the T420 is not entering power save after standby, this regression is open since kernel 3.6.2 (October 2012).

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=150743&p=16
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/32025
Yes, I do think it's wrong. I disagree with filtering in the first place, but also I'm on a contract which if I were a child I couldn't have legally signed.

It's certainly possible to opt out but only by providing ANOTHER set of personal information (a credit card number) which there's no good reason for them to have. More tracking possibilities, more data...
Sounds like the cobra effect.
I don't know whether to be amused or depressed by the ahistorical ignorance of your comments.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee
He was being sarcastic. CSS (the pathetic 40-bit "encryption" used on DVDs) was cracked in 1999. Blu-ray wasn't commonplace until 8-10 years later.

Blu-ray's AACS actually is much better than CSS ever was, and as far as I know it hasn't been attacked in either a brute-force or break-the-algorithm sense. But like all other DRM, there are inherent flaws it can't work around. You need only extract a player key and you can freely decrypt the data.
Absolutely agreed! Some of the language being thrown around many companies can be nauseating.

I didn't write about this possibility in the article, but there's also a universe of apps/tools/companies which do seemingly trivial things that don't transform anything on the face value and eventually end up being rather impactful. Take Twitter: for the first X years, many people dismissed it as that stupid thing where you write about what you had for breakfast.

Now it's basically a media company. Granted, no lives saved, but a major player in the landscape.

Point being: you can end up doing something truly revolutionary in the end by doing something trivial and useful at first. A better way to order pizza could become a better way to do [something that doesn't sound as banal].

(I would also posit that this kind of serendipity doesn't necessarily make you a visionary.)
King lived in a world where extra-judicial killings were frequent in the South, and the perpetrators (many with connections to local law enforcement) had effective impunity.

As to Federal law enforcement, the FBI tried to blackmail him personally with recordings implicating him in extramarital affairs; see http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/01/king-like-all-frauds-yo...

Also, the 1950s Red Scare was a fairly recent memory; that resulted in ruining the livelihoods of numerous Americans, including at least one prominent and politically active African-American, Paul Robeson.
>how hard do they check for leaving Hong Kong?

Busy border guards are busy. He might slip in unnoticed on some dodgy documents. Also, HK is an island, and China is like, right there. One could get into the country unseen via boat very easily. Boats are coming and going along the coast all the time.
Edward Snowden's not the first to make claims about NSA
There's no such rule.
why not use the best of both worlds, i.e. run both linux and os x at the same time via virtualization. i develop rails on ubuntu in a virtual machine on top of os x, works great, but then again i do have 16G memory, 8G is probably the minimum. and there are great tools to get ruby 1.9+ working on mac, but i prefer to run code on the production os so running virtualbox, vmware fusion, or parallels works wonders, try it out.
You are suggesting that people in China must be afforded a much lower average carbon footprint than somewhere like America or Australia?
You're not even allowed to where the glasses that assist you with marking cards, I think Google Glass is probably out of the picture as well. :)
Seriously? I mean, _really_? 200k? This isn't 1998 any more. If it was 2MB, you might have something resembling a point.
This is actually closer to breadth-first (since the alternative is an 'in-depth' course) in my mind, but I get your meaning. The thing is, do you actually take anything away? If you don't talk about caching in the CPU, scheduling in the OS, or propagation delay in the gates, how does that help your understanding of how to write software?

I'd be curious to know a) how deep your education actually went (since you've implied it was broad, from logic gates up to OSes and high-level programming) b) what you actually do day-to-day that you think this high level overview is indispensible.
Wow. What a non sequitur at the end:

> That is, until the NSA scandal broke. Nothing made the purported libertarianism of Silicon Valley more laughable and aggregious than the fact that many of these companies are tools of secret government surveillance. This is why I had to include Paul Carr’s article about Silicon Valley’s participation in our security state infrastructure.

This is not even a complete thought, never mind a pretty blithe treatment of the actual issues involved. And also, the companies most under fire, particularly Google and Microsoft, are not "startups"
Hop in a car or on BART on the weekend, go 15-20min east and you can hike in the sun or wander around Berkeley/Oakland in warm weather. That said, March to April/early May and Sept-Nov are generally quite glorious.

Fog is a nice to have, you can always travel a short bit to avoid it.
Here's 58 solutions in 58 languages, for the algorithmically curious: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/24_game
Ask HN: How do you get a “PhD required” job without a PhD?
Computers. It used to be a strong academically controlled field. It was an area where you needed needed a PhD in Math to even touch the machines. That was then.

I want to get deeply involved in a field that was started by academics. It is dominated by academics. Guess what their minimum requirement is for a job?

I don't have a PhD. My academic credentials suck. However, the field fascinates me. It's getting to the point where I'm reading papers on the subject in my spare time. What realistic options do I have?

I want to build something that goes beyond NASA's Curiosity.
It's not technically illegal, just legally perilous. Some companies do it, but they're companies that require a whole lot of other qualifications - "we only hire from Harvard and Yale" or "applicants must have ten years managing at least 150 employees".
The parent said "unconstitutional", not "illegal"
It did. It wasn't without it's hiccups. But, there he is in NZ still doing two things that he apparently loves to do, trolling and making money.
The Minimalism Of Not Knowing
By which time he can probably get a Visa somewhere else and rinse and repeat, shuffling between two secure locations and flight paths. Once extradition proceedings have begun, he can no longer be deported.

Deportation and removal orders still have to go through the court system though: http://www.hkhrm.org.hk/english/reports/eimrev96.html#Deport...
Can you list your "known working" platform (Macbook model, Linux distro and version, etc?) or a good place to find those, if you know one? I'm going to replace my laptop soon, and am considering a Mac, but I've been running only Linux since 2005, and would love to know how to pick a Mac that would allow me to continue doing that.
The cause for whistle blowing is totally independent of respect or disrespect of a state's corrupt or otherwise judicial system. If you're an international game changer, what we're talking about here, ES initiated a cause far transcending something as trivial as what the political poseurs back home think of him.
This is a common attack on activists: "if you're really interested in your fellow man, you must act like a saint hermit. Anything less than that is unacceptable and means you're wrong on <position you support>"

How is the problem (that the NSA can record everything we do online) related to a young man's attempts to save his skin?

Would the NSA stop spying on us if it turned out that Snowden was a buddhist monk? Would the NSA stop spying on us if he'd let himself be crucified on a hill near Washington, dying for our sins?

Turning the attention on his means is another way to deflect it from the main problem: that NSA and friends run wild on all the routers in the world with no respect for anyone's privacy or human rights. This is the real issue, regardless of whether Snowden is a saint, a prostitute, a Dutch double-agent or an alien with a penchant for bicycles.
None of the bruises? You're arguing that he hasn't paid a substantial personal cost already?
The Ember generators for yeoman are a bit out of whack. For now, I'd suggest you try out Ryan Florence's ember-tools (https://github.com/rpflorence/ember-tools), which can do many of the same code generation type things yeoman can do (we don't handle SASS/etc yet though; there is talk of generating ember-tools in with yeoman some day soon).
"It's striking how one obscure blog post can be more valuable than all the media speculation on this question (that I've seen) put together."

Perhaps this still qualifies as striking, but it's becoming rapidly more common, as mainstream journalism becomes ever more predictable and imitative, and individuals with expertise and actual insight, not working for news organizations, stand out as the only voices worth paying attention to.
You seem to be contradicting yourself, earlier, you said "And yet, Linux doesn't have all that great driver support ..."
It's pretty much the same as this:

(loop [n 0]
(if (= n 10)
n ; true case: return n
(recur (inc n)))) ; false case: loop with n++

;=> 10
Google is working on new tech to eliminate all child porn on the web
You mean like how the KKK and WBC were brutally subjugated by the U.S. government for their hateful speech? That kind of thing?
If you pick and choose industries, of course you can shape arguments to suit your favourite OS. How does OSX deal with managing SCADA systems?

Or back when I was in neurology, there was EEG hardware for Win and Lin, but no mac.

I mean, you're responding to "Use lenovo as a reference model" with "looking at a bunch of other suppliers from a niche industry, it doesn't match up". It's not just apples and oranges, it's not even the same ballpark.
> New Zealand is the land of night-raids on Kim
> Dotcom's home to please American corporations
> -- not exactly a prime candidate.

That has caused a bunch of blow-back in NZ though. I'd say it's up in the air as to whether or not another such incident will occur.
Yep. This wasn't exactly an essay, just some thoughts around a "trend" I picked up on (ie the backlash). I could write a whole separate article about the NSA but I let Carr's article speak for itself. The reason for including it was that the NSA disclosures put a different light on the tech vs society question. But yea, it could have been more developed.
AFAIK the IMEI and IMSI (IMEI for subscribers) are nothing more than client side variables. The telcos have their own internal designations that relate to billing and active connections.
I'd have to read it closer than I have to figure out what it means, but section 2.4 seems relevant:

Agencies within the Intelligence Community shall use the least
intrusive collection techniques feasible within the United States
or directed against United States persons abroad. Agencies are
not authorized to use such techniques as electronic surveillance,
unconsented physical search, mail surveillance, physical surveillance,
or monitoring devices unless they are in accordance with procedures
established by the head of the agency concerned and approved by
the Attorney General. Such procedures shall protect constitutional
and other legal rights and limit use of such information to lawful
governmental purposes. These procedures shall not authorize:
(a) The CIA to engage in electronic surveillance within the
United States except for the purpose of training, testing,
or conducting countermeasures to hostile electronic surveillance;
(b) Unconsented physical searches in the United States by agencies
other than the FBI, except for:
(1) Searches by counterintelligence elements of
the military services directed against military
personnel within the United States or abroad for
intelligence purposes, when authorized by a military
commander empowered to approve physical searches for law
enforcement purposes, based upon a finding of probable
cause to believe that such persons are acting as agents
of foreign powers; and
(2) Searches by CIA of personal property of non-United
States persons lawfully in its possession.
(c) Physical surveillance of a United States person in the United
States by agencies other than the FBI, except for:
(1) Physical surveillance of present or former employees,
present or former intelligence agency contractors or
their present of former employees, or applicants for
any such employment or contracting; and
(2) Physical surveillance of a military person employed
by a nonintelligence element of a military service.
(d) Physical surveillance of a United States person abroad
to collect foreign intelligence, except to obtain significant
information that cannot reasonably be acquired by other means
Note to Bob Schieffer: The US' pathetic record on protecting important gov't whistleblowers is responsible for Snowden's flight.
I've recently benchmarked RAM bandwidth and latency on computers based on i.MX53 (Cortex-A8), Exynos4 (Cortex-A9) and Exynos5 (Cortex-A15). RAM throughput increases by something like 20 times between the A8 and the A15 platforms. So while it's true that ARM systems used to suffer from low throughput, this is something they've been working on for some time, and the results look quite good from where I'm staying. I found this microbenchmark[0] and (looking at memcpy) the results for new ARM systems look alright to me.

Of course, this is an oversimplification, but I'm happy to go into more details if there's interest.

Since the first ARMv8 cores are built for server workloads, I expect they're brining significant improvements compared to A15.

Disclaimer: Not associated with ARM, but I have an interest in ARM being used more for things other than mobile devices.

[0] https://github.com/c2h2/arm_c_benchmark
Can Tech directly solve it though ? My instinct tell me that perhaps there are some server hosting companies that tolerate such materials who need to be blocked.

You will need to somehow flag users and kick sites out of the index. What will happen as well I assume is that there will be niche forums and as they are tricky it will go on deep.

Any ideas what can be done ?

I m not an expert on fighting crime online. cheers
I suggest they might want to filter based on IQ but the math doesn't support them. Pick a cut-off point, below which you will not hire a person. Assume perfect filtering and no mistakes. How big can your company get?

Start with 7 billion humans, then reduce to the set of those with at least the target IQ. Are there enough people in the world to make this work? How about after subtracting people who don't do that kind of work or don't speak the right languages? Or they're in the wrong country and won't move. Or they're at some other employer. Keep subtracting from the pool and see who's left.

If your company is bigger than the number you get after this filtering, then you aren't really filtering that way. You just think you are.
No, they're solving the exact same problem: to provide a good computing experience.

Now, how they go about solving that same problem is radically different. Windows and Linux tries to support as much hardware as possible and be general. OS X tries to limit scope to own MacBook hardware only, and benefit from the advantages of that approach as much as it can (clearly, it has some disadvantages it suffers from too).

I'm not sure it's easy to say which approach is more difficult overall. Linux and Windows approach is clearly much more difficult on the software side. However, OS X has to have is own hardware made by the same company. If Apple falls behind in hardware, OS X is screwed. So there's a lot more importance and difficulty in making sure the hardware is great (if a Dell makes bad hardware, Linux and Windows can be okay as long as any other hardware company makes something good).
The Constitution established the Congress and its legal precedent, including the superiority clause restricting International matters to Federal law. If you obey a law under U.S. Code or the Statutes-at-Large, it's because of the power granted to Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court by the Constitution.

Or in other words, things that are illegal are illegal because they're also unconstitutional (assuming it's withstood the scrutiny of the Supreme Court, if it makes it to that level).
Probably never. A lot of us "apologists" think that this is actually a good thing, but many are unwilling to admit it, even to themselves.

For me, it's simply a matter of valuing truth over privacy.
A friend of mine got tired of never having network drivers out-of-the-box in XP, so he made a slipstream install image that was vanilla XP SP2... plus 676 network card drivers.
> An awesome free-software webmail client is something that is sorely missing.

Roundcube[0] has a nice list of features and a decent UI. As we (an ISP) move our mail infrastructure from Windows to Linux, we intend to replace our current (proprietary) webmail client with Roundcube.

I haven't tried it but, in theory, you should even be able to use Roundcube as a front-end for Gmail. You'd have to host it yourself (unless you find a misconfigured installation somewhere that you can "hijack") and point it at Google's IMAP servers but it should work (although I'm not sure how well).
He might face extradition at the border, depending on how Macau-China-US relations work.
Actually, it doesn't "force" you to use get/set. You can just POJOs just fine w/ Ember, but you won't get property observation or unknownProperty support.

I also question your assumption that Object.observe will be as fast as Ember's observation system. I wouldn't be surprised if it was several times slower.

Object.observe also doesn't support array observation, which is something we support in Ember.
Given all the misleading statements so far when you hear a statement like this:

"the statement that a single analyst can eavesdrop on domestic communications without proper legal authorization is incorrect"

They are basically meaningless unless you can ask a few follow up questions:

- What exactly is incorrect in that statement?
- Specifically which entities does this denial cover?
- Can more than one analyst listen?
- How about anyone else (i.e. a non-analyst)?
- What exactly does "eavesdrop" include?
- How is "domestic" defined?
- What are "communications"?
- What do you consider "proper legal authorization"?
- Are you using any non-standard definitions for the words in your statement?

I don't think you can give these guys any benefit of a doubt.
Tips For College Students Entering The Tech Job Market
> Switzerland, as I said elsewhere, is now an EU state in all but name, and their security services are laughable anyway.

Agreed. The changes they made to their banking after 911 are a clear indication of how much reach the US has within Swiss borders.
If you can have all the effect, getting the message out, without getting bruises, that is strictly better than getting bruises. The only thing standing in the way of that is people like you who think you have to sacrifice yourself for your message to count. Who would Snowden be selflessly helping by turning himself in?
Online laundry delivery service with funding from Andreessen Horowitz
That's an unusually broad and not terribly useful definition of "unconstitutional".
I appreciate the editor trying to make it sound sinister by implying that it is a government cover-up, but the very person behind the story to begin with, Rep Jerrold Nadler, claims his words were misconstrued by CNet. In a statement today: "I am pleased that the administration has reiterated that, as I have always believed, the NSA cannot listen to the content of Americans’ phone calls without a specific warrant."

Read more at http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/06/jerrold-nadl...