skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
PhD's are mostly devoid of value and often harmful to people's judgement in and of themselves. The certification means nothing, implicitly. If someone's PhD work is not contributive to society (I mean, let's look at quality of life in society here rather than number of papers produced) then the PhD is not a virtue of that person. On the contrary, it becomes an object of deception.

Anyone that doesn't realize this fact is cowed by an entity or knowledge-base that you probably don't want to end up slave to. If they are requiring you to have a PhD despite your ability then you may like to look into finding people like yourself and working outside of the existing employment system you reference.
But then also, multiple reports seem to indicate they can start listening to previously-recorded believed US person calls with merely the intent to pursue a FISA warrant within the next 7 days. What if they start that and get more evidence to push the foreignness-confidence over 51%? Perhaps no warrant application is then necessary. What if they use their 6 days and 23 hours of listening and then decide, false lead? Does this "free look at anyone for any reason" have any cost for the analyst? (Was it this sort of temporary-unilateral-overreach that let an analyst access stored intercepts of former President Bill Clinton's email in 2009? [1])

No need to speculate. Do as I did today and read the law at http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1881a.

The 7 day rule is in g.1.B, If the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence make a determination under subsection (c)(2) and time does not permit the submission of a certification under this subsection prior to the implementation of an authorization under subsection (a), the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence shall submit to the Court a certification for such authorization as soon as practicable but in no event later than 7 days after such determination is made.

From this it is clear that, if they are following the law as written, they can start without a warrant, but they need to pursue the warrant. There are no exceptions in the law for "the user was foreign" or "we decided this is not a useful lead".

Whether or not they follow the law I leave to your imagination. I'm inclined to believe that, at present, they do. (Whether they will continue to do so is another story.)
Whenever we see very different behavior in other countries compared to that of our own, we should recognize that those people have most likely made that decision for very rational reasons. The decision may be grounded in reasons ranging from monetary to status-driven reasons, but people perceive their environment accurately and made the best decisions for themselves and their families. People in general are not blindly dumb or obtuse. The vast majority of the time, they are making sound decisions for their current and future prospects.

I used to think that the "US Way" was the best bar none no matter what the local situation or culture. Working in a different country and then observing the social and corporate dynamics from afar has made me realize that I was wrong.

If people in China desire government jobs, it really does mean that that is the best option for them.
Please re-read my comments. It has nothing to do with military service or the number of years served. I'm making a general point about each individual's credibility and motivations for speaking out on PRISM. Drake gains nothing from his outspokenness, Cheney stands to profit quite a bit.
You keep talking about something I am not talking about.

"And this applies whether their reasoning is that nothing authorizes the bill, or that the bill violates a specific protection in the Constitution."

But not that it simply happens to be prohibited by a law, where the constitution authorizes the law but doesn't require it. Not every violation of federal law is "unconstitutional", at least as commonly understood.
Ah yes, don't stereotype teenagers, just the "shallow and passive" ones! You know, the other people. The ones who aren't here. Where we are.
I'm a little skeptical a "revolution" will ever improve things (in the short term). Revolutions are generally costly in almost every way possible. China's growth and prosperity don't seem to justify one (at this point in time).

How do villagers sell their land now? I thought market sales were already being done?

So is this another issue in china that is a result of the "mid-level" corruption?
A loss of investor confidence does not necessarily mean the investment will shift to another tech hub. We saw during the first dot-bomb that loss of confidence simply led to money going into not-tech.

Tech investment is, unfortunately, not a zero-sum game. Every dollar that doesn't go into a Silicon Valley tech company is not guaranteed to go into a tech company elsewhere.

So yeah, the failure of SF/SV will probably mean an increase in tech investment in other cities, but ultimately I don't think there's a chance in hell we'll break even. It will be a huge net loss for the tech industry as a whole.

Not to mention there isn't really a strong SF/Bay Area alternative when it comes to tech. I know Boston/Tel Aviv/Berlin/Toronto (add Montreal, Waterloo, NYC, Austin, and Seattle to the list for more completeness) like to hang up banners proclaiming themselves to be just like Silicon Valley, but let's be honest, the scale difference is enormous. None of the above listed cities are even close to being able to assume Silicon Valley's mantle.

Even as someone who no longer lives in the area, who has no interest in returning to the area, the loss of the SF/Bay Area's status as the de facto tech capital of the world will have enormous negative repercussions.
Hmm, that's not quite what I meant. I know what I care about in a refrigerator and I know I'll be able to buy one with minimal hassle once I decide I want one. I'm free to research online and I'm relatively confident someone at the store will be able to answer my questions when I get there. I also have lots of friends (and family) who have purchased and installed refrigerators, so I can ask them for input if I want.

My dealings with hardware + Linux has not been like that at all. Instead, what works and what doesn't is essentially arbitrary. Some brands are generally more compatible, but there are always some make/model combinations you want to avoid. And even if it "mostly works" there's a good chance some of the less common features will work poorly, at best. When I say "memorize" I mean internalizing this essentially arbitrary list. The HP 450C is ok, but don't get the HP 451C! That sort of thing.

To top it off, if I go to the store and ask questions about Linux compatibility -- perhaps there's some information I couldn't find online, say -- I'm not at all confident I'll be able to find someone to answer my questions. And even if they didn't, I'd wonder if what they knew was up-to-date or not.
I'm way ahead of you there.
See also, mlock(2)
As an event organizer of events at many different levels, I will always make sure to have a vegetarian option, but I usually stop there. It becomes increasing more difficult, expensive, and complex to try to guess how much of and many different diets may be represented.

That being said, I do usually push for healthier-than-average food. I also started a "War on Pizza" in Seattle to get other event organizers to stop serving Pizza at events...
Note that this is exactly how they made the Apollo Guidance Computer, except that it was 2,800 chips, each with two NOR gates. And a giant honking breadboard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer
Sure. I've used Linux on the desktop since then. Even with printers it was still hit or miss. CUPS just acted as a catch-all, lowest-common-denominator of printing.

I'm pretty familiar with CUPS, too. I helped build a school-wide printing system at my university based off CUPS as part of my job at the time. It had to interface with our internal authentication system, debit student printing credits, and interface with dozens of types of printers across campus.
Why could he not veto the patriot act?
There is plenty of evidence regarding the opinions of the people of Cheney's parents' generation (and earlier) about people who avoid mandatory military service, not to mention voluntary.
> then sent people to their deaths

On several occasions. He was the Secretary of Defense for the first Gulf War, and VP when both Afghanistan and the second Gulf War started up.
Joeffice, an open source office suite one developer built in 30 days
he was saying it about Los Angeles, when making fun of LA types. He was performing (as he did nearly half his career) for a British audience.
What do you replace pizza with, and how does it compare cost-wise?
For kite aerial photography, I've used a really tiny altimeter that only has one LED: http://wingedshadow.com/howhigh.html
Fly Or Die: Divvy
Probably you're getting clobbered because you made lots of negative comments about something that's really cool, and because your criticism (that it falls short of a complete degree program in computer engineering) misses the point of the thing.
Oddly, the Reuters article and headline changed (and then the moderators appropriately changed the HN headline). That's also why so many of the comments below, particularly those referencing the 300 number, don't make much sense.

Here is the lede of the originally linked article:

U.S. spy agency paper says fewer than 300 phone numbers closely scrutinized

WASHINGTON, June 15 (Reuters) - The U.S. government only searched for detailed information on calls involving fewer than 300 specific phone numbers among the millions of raw phone records collected by the National Security Agency in 2012, according to a government paper obtained by Reuters on Saturday.

The unclassified paper was circulated Saturday within the government by U.S. intelligence agencies and apparently is an attempt by spy agencies and the Obama administration to rebut accusations that it overreached in investigating potential militant plots.

The administration has said that even though the NSA, according to top-secret documents made public by former agency contractor Edward Snowden, collects massive amounts of data on message traffic from both U.S. based telephone and internet companies, such data collection is legal, subject to tight controls and does not intrude on the privacy of ordinary Americans.
They will teach you how to make many amazing startups such as Foursquare for dogs!
Yes. Hiking is really popular from what I understand. http://www.discoverhongkong.com/eng/see-do/great-outdoors/hi...
NSA Agents Are the Best Friends You Never Knew You Had
PRISM "provides the government with names, addresses, conversation histories and entire archives of email inboxes."
Uhhh, that post looks more like rampant speculation than an update on where things stand. Here are a bunch of primary sources of info that came out over the weekend instead:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/federal_government/of...

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2013306160046

https://twitter.com/markknoller/status/346414410945941505
SELinux is no match for a poorly set-up database.
I think the most salient point is that he needed to go to a country where

- the US did not have significant influence

- could not be strong-armed into giving him up

- would cause significant problems if he were taken without consent (or killed outright - not implausible, given the things we've seen in Pakistan)

China is a fairly logical choice - it's as far as you can run from the US in geopolitical terms. Hong Kong is just being in China without "being in China".
Securing data against a systems administrator however is difficult on the best of days. I have done some of this for Efficito (http://www.efficito.com). Even with the best of care there are ways an administrator can get the info no matter what you do. All you really can do is restrict it to ensure that casual access is not an issue.

For example, we store virtual machine root passwords in an encrypted database for last resort purposes (so that someone can log in using virsh console as root when nothing else is working). There are three layers of encryption and as far as casual access goes (assuming nothing is reconfigured), mere root access to the box is not enough to reveal the information. However if you can change what is logged by PostgreSQL and reconfigure PostgreSQL's authentication options you could grab enough information to effectively read this data.

People with the sort of access required to make sure things are secure can effectively get the data off the system that they want, and the alternative in designing a system is to have one with no superusers and the possibility that information is irrevokably lost when someone forgets a password. The most secure systems end up somewhere between them.
Not sure what domain you're in, but here's the view from mine...

SAS is extremely common in pharma companies. Basically, any company that has anything to do with a clinical drug trial will be using SAS.

In the basic research / tool development parts of the biotech industry, R is common as well. Today, basically every biotech company has some kind of "data science" component (though they won't necessarily have adopted that buzzword).

Either way, in my view this is a far more specific and valuable skill than "HTML programmer".
And whats exactly the reason for the side blow against the EU? Oo
And if it was Bob Kerrey, a Navy SEAL, vietnam veteran, MoH recipient, Republican from nebraska?

Why did you assume I used a Democrat as an example?
Take a look at the credits for Diablo 3 or Starcraft 2. Blizzard is a big fan of protobufs.

It's also interesting to look at the mailing list for Cap'n Proto - there are a bunch of folks from FourSquare, Twitter, etc. helping out. Many of them are ex-Googlers, and many cited being big fans of proto2 as their reason for helping out with Cap'n Proto.
No one (at least not in this particular thread) is calling them stupid. The statement was made that when people are risk averse (even if such behaviour is rational), not much innovation (or even a Chinese Silicon Valley) can happen.
Thank you for the thoughtful response. I have committed to teaching one more year, but I will be in a much better position to switch this spring if I decide that's what I'd like to do. Your words are very encouraging.
There's a website that will help with that: http://itsthisforthat.com
People are more than bodies - they all have minds, too.

While the need for physical labor will continue to decrease, many things that require a human mind to do will still be in demand. The real question is, will we vote to allow those that choose to apply their minds the chance to actually try their ideas in reality?

Look at what's happening to Airbnb. What kind of message does that send - "come up with a great new idea, one that provides value to hundreds of thousands, work as hard as you can for years, and watch it get crushed by regulations?" That is the biggest threat to everyone that wants to earn a better life for themselves in the future, not the "rise of the machines," which has only made us more productive, richer.

Regulations are a major reason why everyone seems to focus on doing tech startups that don't get too far outside of computing. It's not just a random trend. When we let the best and brightest do their best, a lot more wealth will be created, and you'll see the standard of living start to increase again.
Canaan Partners’ Maha Ibrahim On Why There Aren’t More Women VCs
Old discussion (4 months ago):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5089487
"PS. Not to mention that Macs ship with broadcom wireless cards these days, which don't have very good linux support."

You're saying that OS X has better hardware support than Linux? :-)
New Parents, Bookmark This Website
Yeah, I'm going to go with "You can't" for this one - "Postdoc" is inherently post-PhD, and the expectations of the position will pretty much require one. For example, many require establishing yourself as an independent researcher - which means grant writing, which is next to impossible without a PhD.
Make Things Do Stuff
Only at the time it is passed, not later; and a law passed with a 2/3 majority (such as the Patriot act) is veto-proof.
No such rule, but you are generally judged on impact and not effort at Google. If your efforts don't make an impact, then they aren't going to be counted in your favor.
Brazilian protests explained — it’s not the economy, stupid
Previous discussion, from earlier this evening:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5891181

EDIT: And another article about the same thing, yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5884362
For a more robust image registration, SIFT [1] could have been used too. SIFT is nothing short of amazing, capable of matching images under different rotations and scales. I'm pretty sure OpenCV has good support for it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transfo...
The "it is complicated" is a very specific situation.

My brother joined the Marines 3 days before his 18th birthday because at the time if you did that you only served 3 years and couldn't go to Vietnam. 2.5 years later he was in a horrible accident. The recruiting officer got him to re-enlist because that was the only way to pay the medical bills. The reup also would put him through college, and he couldn't go to Vietnam for 5 years - no chance it would still be going on!

The recruiting officer word was carried out perfectly. But the war was still going on and my brother earned a purple heart there.
India to send last telegram
As someone who has started looking for jobs recently, that sounds like a great way to hire people. It gives you a chance to interact with the candidate and see how they work.

As a shameless plug, I also wrote a Chrome extension for GitHub. It lets you commit changes from Chrome Dev Tools to GitHub. It unfortunately took me a lot longer than half a day.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hotfix/bfmckmhcljh...

On GitHub

https://github.com/FajitaNachos/hotfix
Why Even Messy Numbers Of Government Data Demands Are Valuable
Linux-based surveillance cameras start at $70
how come it's faster than just having github bookmarked?
First, I suspect that Snowden revealing these details is not that harmful. The fact is, I think everyone would expect that everyone keeps track of everyone's diplomats. That's just the way the world works. Additionally, hacking into network backbones in China? Is there anybody out there that was aware of the NSA's activities over the last few decades that doesn't immediately assume that they do? Or is this news to those who didn't read about the NSA tapping into undersea cables back in the 1990's?

In other words, the details Snowden has given are largely harmless affirmations of what everyone probably knows already. They don't cause significant harm to our diplomatic relations. They don't cause significant harm to our intelligence.

I suspect given his moves so far, he agrees with my assessment above, so the question is, what is he doing with them? I don't think that is a hard question to answer. He's making public what those in power have assumed is the case for a long time in order to send signals to all sides that he knows a lot more than he is saying. In essence he's upping the ante regarding any indictment and extradition request.

He's sending a threat to the US: Try to extradite me and maybe I will spill your secrets, real ones, not the ones hidden in plain view I have been talking about so far.

He's also sending a message to China: I know enough to be valuable.

Time will tell what happens. However this follows on "I chose Hong Kong because of their tradition of free speech and rule of law."

This totally follows his strategy of pitting the US against China, and Hong Kong against both.
System76 just announced a MBA/Ultrabook competitor.

Matte 1080 screen, quad core processor (8 hyperthreads), Intel 5200 gfx, two hard drives, upto 16GB ram... all in a 14 inch laptop not much bigger than the MBA 13, and of course it runs Linux perfectly.

Cost? Starts from just $995.

https://www.system76.com/laptops/model/galu1
I'm in no way going to defend the Great Leap Forward, but governments can have policies that are better or worse irrelevant of ideology, and such policies can be developed and improved. In hindisight, despite the huge amounts of problems the Chinese society has (some of which are truly scary and may become emblems of future times), it cannot be denied that it is a country that has had a streak of massive, incredible growth and has hoisted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. This does not contradict the fact that the same government had such massive failures in the past.

I abhor the current Chinese state, but I really, really doubt that Western Capitalism would have been half as effective, at the very least not without costing the Chinese a huge relinquishment of capital and corporations in the hands of foreign interests, not a favorable position to be in. You can't implement certain policies without having absolute control of some parameters.
How to move a 15-ton magnet from NY to Chicago
Ron Paul has specifically mentioned two places as having more liberty (in certain ways) than the US: Switzerland and Hong Kong.
True, but only if you remember that some 50,000 or so people have "dated" the party being complained about and you're reading the complaints of 2 of them, who also tend to complain about most of the other parties they've "dated".
See How PRISM May Work — in This Infographic
I'm a fan of Fortune's Algorithm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune%27s_algorithm Voronoi diagrams in general have lots of nifty applications... e.g. game worlds http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/...
D'oh, I scrolled back and you're right that I misread what mpayne had said.

Indeed, something that is against a law that is constitutional is illegal, but not unconstitutional. It is only unconstitutional if you'd have to change the Constitution or (more often) the interpretation of the Constitution in order to make it be permitted.
نتيجة الاعدادية الازهرية 2013
لمعرفة نتيجة اعدادية الازهر لعام 2013 التيرم الثانى نهاية العام برقم الجلوس ويقدم موقع مشيخة الازهر نتيجة الاعدادية الازهرية 2013 بدلا عن موقع الازهر
The YouTube Paradox And The Off-YouTube Solution
It was on life support for a long time before that, though, and plenty of stuff was done outside the law from 2001+ which became legalized under FAA/etc.; if it died with the Patriot Act, I guess those count as raping the corpse.
I'm digging it, thanks for the tip.
How Yahoo Fought Against PRISM in Secret and Lost
New Zealand had a libertarian revolution in the 1990s, although it's walked back a lot on that recently. One of the few cases of non-violent positive change like that.
I was thinking it was magnetic while moving. In this way, It is just moving an expensive and fragile component.
Some of these observations and learnings are indeed timeless, and not dependent on the current fashions and trends...
Most of the EU countries are in cahoots with the NSA (reportedly to get around pesky legal restrictions on domestic spying; don't remember if this was media speculation or shown to be true). Wouldn't be surprised if Switzerland is too.
Thank you for the background explanation and the optimistic view of China's future.

I must admit that I am a little bit exaggerated in my original reply.
Agent Smartwatch Banks On Design, Developers, Distribution To Survive Battle
You wish. For years, I have been trying to run Linux on my dual GPU Macbook Pros. This generally works, but Linux always uses the "big" GPU, thus battery life is abysmal.
Can you expand this critique? I'm a recent grad with the prerequisite knowledge they ask for (barely) and aspirations to build cool stuff. Is my time better spent elsewhere? If so, where?
Just enrolled. It looks like this is the second time the class has been offered. Has anyone on HN already taken the course? What did you think?
Iphone compitetior called xiaomi now lunching smart TV