skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Having many laws and inneficient law enforcement is the recipe for disaster. You just get corruption and lack of isonomy (poor people get jail, rich people get a bail for stupid crimes). Come to Brazil and marvel at the result of your theory.

Those are not the results of "my theory". Heck that's not my theory either!

First, who said anything about "many laws"? I'm also against having too many laws.

Second, inefficiency != lack of isonomy. Or rather, it can lead to random lack of isonomy (ie. whether rich or poor, colored or not) -- which is not the same as the situation you describe, which is about inequality of law enforcement between rich and poor.

For example, if the police cannot demand a drug testing, then neither rich nor poor can be found with 100% certainty after having taken some. If the police cannot demand your ISP records, then they have a harder time enforcing 100% crackdown on piracy, whether you are rich or poor etc etc.

I was talking about "less efficiency", in the sense of being against giving those kind of "enablers" (which make 100% enforcement a closer possibility) to the police.

Not in favour of discriminating between rich and poor.

>What you want is less bogus laws around individual liberties rather than less law enforcement.

That's good too, but my point was another. That even for good laws, total enforcement of them would make a nightmarish situation. A couple of examples:

1) I wouldn't want everybody to have free reign to spray paint anything they wish.
But I'd like for people determined and willing to express something to be able to do it, even if it means I also have to stand some people that just spray BS tags.

2) I wouldn't want all people to go 150 miles on the highway whenever they like. But if the road is empty, it's straight for miles, and you have a nice car, I wouldn't like people to not be able to step on it for some innocent fun.

In this case, fines and speed cops are OK. But not devices like "compulsory speed control" on all cars, or "total speed radar tracking" on all roads, which would enable something like 100% enforcement of the speed limit.

So, when I talk about less "efficiency", I mean not enabling the police to the point of it being a total control state for every aspect of people's lives.

A lot of the times, some of the improvements to society, art, morals, etc, come by breaking the law. Rosa Parks, IIRC, broke the law that day, too.
"This guy's really good with his fingers on the keyboard. He's really good."

Not sure about CIA or Booz but at every company I've worked at a good sys admin can get anything.
Sometimes you have to write software to make all the other option much more efficient. Let give an example, we at MobileWorks (https://premier.mobileworks.com) are in business of providing virtual temps to businesses. Since we are built to scale, the entire team has virtually unlimited supply of temporary labor and we use it A LOT.

However, in a lot of cases a little bit of code actually makes the temps much more efficient. That's the real value of code. Making the mundane much more efficient.
When was you friend working for the agancy under good leadership? During the Bay of Pigs? Vietnam War? Afghanistan (the first time)? The South American banana republics? Iran-Contra?

(Perhaps these are more CIA issues, and NSA was rather tame in the past.)
...after "being convicted of insider trading in April 2007 for selling $52 million of stock in the spring of 2001 as the telecommunications carrier appeared to be deteriorating."
So I have this group of bytes that generate a sound when processed by an application.

You can call that group of bytes whatever you like, and maybe you can even come up with a novel abstraction for it, but be you iPad novice or kernel hacker, that group of bytes will always need to be recognized as a discrete unit for it to be useful; that unit is a file.
It's a surprise because it's one of the few times the FISC has said no to the gov't.
It looks like even Reuters engages in link baiting now. This is a non-story. In the original Guardian article, Snowden says that the FBI was at his house asking questions before the release, but only because they were concerned about his disappearance.

> When Booz Allen checked in with him, Snowden said he was suffering from epilepsy and needed more time off. When he failed to return after a longer period, and the company could not find him, it notified intelligence officials because of Snowden's high-level security clearance, one of the sources said...The government did not know Snowden was the source for the stories until he admitted it on Sunday, the sources said.

So the Feds "hunted" for him the same way a parent "hunts" for his child that has wandered off in a store.
No, but it will fit in an oil tanker[1]

[1]: http://what-if.xkcd.com/23/ (second from the last answer)
Slower to roll out, yes, but the change would have happened long ago so we'd be talking about incremental upgrades anyways, not new construction everywhere.

As far as cost, nuclear has the fewest deaths per unit energy generated (yes, even including renewables) and is only more expensive than fossil-fueled solutions which would be disfavored due to carbon emissions concerns. Renewable can be less expensive (which is why I mentioned it).

The current nuclear cost estimates include some rather insane design margins, containments, redundant system after redundant system which could all probably be reduced a bit without appreciably affecting deaths/TW-hr, which would make it cheaper.

Also, a major portion of the expense is from very restrictive contamination handling requirements to keep radiation exposure to the workers themselves at extremely low levels. These levels could probably also be increased without detectable increase in cancer rate (in fact, it may even reduce cancer incidence; see radiation hormesis). Would we really say that nuclear workers absolutely much be safer than coal plant workers, coal miners, etc.? We do now, and this also makes nuclear more expensive.

Besides, if it's true that there is an undeniable nexus between all civilian nuclear power programs and nuclear weapons programs then it is probably imperative to take much stronger action against Iran than we are currently taking, since we can't trust their assurances that their program is strictly for civilian power generation. Unless of course, we're willing to allow them to further destabilize the whole Middle East region.
That's a fruitless way of approaching the problem. It plays into the political divides of "us" vs "them." By trying to establish groups of people as "clueless" about a topic, it just reinforces the feelings of, "they just don't get it" or "they wouldn't think that if they just knew better." All sides of an issue believe exactly that.

This reminds me to read a book that talks about this: "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion," by Jonathan Haidt. Maybe someone else has read it and can comment.

http://www.npr.org/2012/03/01/146474609/why-we-fight-the-psy..., http://www.amazon.com/The-Righteous-Mind-Politics-Religion/d...
Well, except for that one time when the court said a part of the law is unconstitutional and the government refused to mention the specifics of that ruling. ;)
I hate posts like this that lay out some first-order criticism of a design as if the designers did not consider their obvious concerns. It also sounds like you are making judgements based upon screenshots without actually using the software.

As far as messages go, it seems that the contrast is appropriate for the bubble at the bottom of the screen. The presumption, I think, is that users will scroll to read previous messages and the contrast will be fine where they are reading. The contrast for old messages is reduced to reduce the distraction from content the user is not reading, since it has already been read. How often do you read previous messages in a conversation vs. the last message? This difference clearly has dictated Apple's design.

Second, the concern about white text above the photo not being readable is laughable. If you really think Apple hasn't considered the idea that some photos will have lighter colors I don't know what to tell you. If you watch some of the intro WWDC videos it's very clear that Apple has thought through very carefully the various automatic treatments and text rendering they are applying to ensure they are readable by the user. Any places where things are not perfect will be corrected later.

If you want to criticize iOS 7 you can do better than conjuring up things that would only be true if Apple literally had zero design skills.
We're all going to need to be specific with what we're talking about or we really are talking past each other.

I think that right now the vast majority of the outrage here is over PRISM, although, if PRISM turns out to be a non-issue, I'm sure the outrage will simply migrate to the phone records issue.
You're absurd.
Based on the rumors (and partially supported by Firefox with Bing), both Microsoft and Yahoo were actively bidding against Google (for the ad revenue, presumably).

Microsoft also probably has some interest in supporting Firefox for "browser strategic" reasons (pushing back against WebKit/Blink on mobile, a partner other than Google or Apple for work with on new web standards, etc.). I find it harder to imagine Apple being interested, but perhaps that would change if Blink starts eclipsing WebKit or if they want to push iAds more. More generally, though, the point I'm making is that (almost?) all potential alternative sponsors have extensive US ties and/or interests...
I would suggest its a threat to society, even humanity it's self.

Social interaction only works because we have the ability to keep secrets. We hide our true feelings and intents to enable the great machine to work. If those views became known to all, you'd be in trouble. Worse still, what if you really knew every one else's views. Even worse than that, say a few people knew your real views, then used them to manipulate you.

Our ability to keep things private is vital.

I hope that some people think I'm talking about interpersonal relationships, and that other people think I'm talking about international diplomatic relations. If government expects to be able to keep secrets and privacy, it had better understand my need for it too. If it doesn't want its privacy abused, then it had better not abuse mine. We both need and value it.
takes photo

Posts like these are why HN can't have nice things anymore.
A Statement on Rep. Peter King's Call for the Prosecution of Journalists
this story has been floating around for a week or so now.

i remember when the qwest insider trading scandal first broke back in 2001 - it fit with the times - bernie ebbers, worldcom etc - corrupt telecom executives.

it is quite disturbing to think that a CEO might have been targeted in this way for refusal to cooperate with the NSA.

so much so, that i have a hard time believing that this is actually the case. lots of people in jail have elaborate theories for why they are innocent.

the market topped in 2000. spring of 2001 the market was already in serious trouble. nacchio would undoubtedly have known about earnings shortfalls that would occur as part of the implosion of the telecom bubble. the company had a number of accounting irregularities and was engaged in phony broadband deals with enron. qwest would not have escaped the market troubles with an NSA deal.

let's keep some perspective here people.
What was that old saying about rats and ships?
I actually take notice of how many consumer laptops I see in a walmart / target / best buy are actually running AMD APUs. The big brands might not, but they see bigger numbers on the A6 than a Pentium and feel better about the buy even if the Pentium dominates it.
God is not equal to self evident, and I'm not wrong.
1. "Presumably, if someone asks if you've ever been served a NSL, you're supposed to lie and say "no.""

This is an awful large presumption. You could simply say nothing, and not answer.

2. the only courts to ever confront the NSL's compelled silence have ruled it unconstitutional.

There are zero courts that have ever okay'd this.

3. The "not your lawyer" part is now explicitly wrong, as the law now states (and has since 2006), "shall disclose to any person (other than those to whom such disclosure is necessary to comply with the request or an attorney to obtain legal advice or legal assistance with respect to the request)".

4. Judicial review of any NSL may now be had (again, since Mar 9, 2006), in a normal district court. See "18 USC § 3511 - Judicial review of requests for information"

There are plenty of reasons to generate large amounts of righteous indignation about NSL's, but it would be nice if you actually got the law right in the hyperbole.
I was wondering about something similar yesterday; the feasibility of a provider truthfully indicating receipt whilst staying within the confines of the law.

For a 'regular' warrant, a provider can "confirm" or "deny" being served. Presumably they can "deny" being served a secret warrant if one hasn't been served, because the terms of a secret warrant presumably only require them to decline acknowledgement if they've been served, in which case they could "neither confirm nor deny", couldn't they?
Selective enforcement?

There don't seem to be that many cases:
http://www.sec.gov/spotlight/insidertrading/cases.shtml
The big four in Taiwan can compete with Samsung
Public opinion is a double edged sword. Be careful when you grasp onto it. One terrorist attack and it swings back the other way in a hurry. If you truly believe that these programs violate the fourth amendment, then it doesn't matter what the majority thinks, your individual rights are protected from the majority by the constitution.
What we do is to back up the staging DB, overwrite it with the current production DB, then run the necessary migrations on stage to get the schema up-to-date.

This has a couple of side benefits:

- "Dry" run of the migrations you'll eventually need to run in production anyway

- Using real production data in staging/QA (as long as you're allowed to) can uncover some edge cases you wouldn't have accounted for using fixtures or manual prepopulation.
I'm not an American, and my country is, especially now, poorer than the parent's (he said Brasil, IIRC).

Nothing about some "white boy perspective" to what I said.

That's based on a misunderstanding about what I meant by saying the police should not be totally efficient.

Less efficient != discrimination.

Less efficient != corruption.

It's not a two way association. One could say that a "corrupt police" is "less efficient" but the inverse is not true.

If anything, with it being less efficient, in the way I describe, FEWER poor, black, "wrong kind of white" etc people will actually get caught.
The EFF has been carrying an immense amount of weight throughout all of this. I'm not sure I can name another organization that has done so much. Their budget desperately needs to be expanded dramatically.
ChicagoQuest: Teaching with Games
A: start with a large fortune, and buy an airline.
I completely agree. However, how can a group that owns coercion set the rules for their own agencies?
Man on the run: Former CIA spies on what they'd do if they were Snowden
(Counter)productive Dystopia
We can help them do exactly that:

https://supporters.eff.org/donate
Not really, because the AMD 8 physical core layout is still 4 packages of 2 register sets sharing ALU and FPU. It is exactly like a hyperthreaded Intel part, but Intel has much better per clock performance.

That, and I see next gen games more favoring openCL / GL 4.3 compute shaders to offload all their parallel workloads than to aggressively optimize for greater than 4 core processors. Your returns on moving traditionally CPU bound workloads (per agent logic, path finding, collision detection) to compute class GPUs (when available, with the cpu fallback for now) gives you significantly more returns than optimizing for the CPU.

Also, you can take a 4770k to near 5ghz on air. This part is already pushing the thermal limits of the Bulldozer architecture, AMD is just fabbing them out this high speed because they are floundering in this low-per clock performance rut the entire architecture put them in.

Now, I would point any budget oriented gamer to the 4 or 6 core AMD models around $120 - 130, because since they are all unlocked, you can get real performance gains (but terrible power efficiency) over Intel parts below the 4 core unlocked part they put out each generation. Since they are effectively 2 / 3 module parts, they are well suited for the next gen of GPGPU everything in the engine and let the CPU do control flow.

If you even approach $200, the performance gains from jumping from any non-K part to a 4.8ghz 4570k are huge, and that alone outclasses every AMD cpu for gaming, but does trade blows on some titles with the 8 core parts.
The chart of page 15 of the document you linked says a 50 USC 436 covers "all financial information relating to consenting, identified employee" but wasn't it used to obtain customer information from Verizon?
What am I missing here? Is what the document is describing just one possible use case?

Edit: typo
I wouldn't be surprised if some youngsters these days weren't aware that there'd been a Windows 3, while still being technologically savvy generally. Possibly 95 as well, although they could probably still get the order right just based on the pattern at that point.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail_deadly

Fail deadly mechanisms go off unless they are explicitly told not to. During the cold war, Russia implemented fail deadly policies in an attempt to assure a retaliatory nuclear strike would go off even if most in power were taken out by a first strike.
>if we DID live in a dystopia where nobody could get away with anything, would this perhaps lead to more civic engagement in protesting unjust laws?

Perhaps. But it could also be the other way: that in such a dystopia, protesting and civic engagement would also be more difficult if not impossible.

E.g anything beyond voting between a couple of candidates you are given. A dystopia that would enable the police like that, will in all probability also have laws prohibiting public assembly, rallying, etc.

And on top of that, they could also enforce any BS laws to dissidents -- since, with 100% efficiency, they could always find something to pin on them.
The problem is that digital file systems are digital versions of the physical file systems that we are all familiar with. Most notably these don't let one file be in two folders at the same time. But our mental file system does work like this. By this I mean that the same memory can be reached by multiple routes. Couldn't you design a filesystem that was a flat database with file metadata being used to both browse and search for files, thus avoiding the need for tree hierarchies in current systems? Wouldn't this be closer to our mental model? Crucially, could you develop software like this?
OK, this earned a chuckle out of me. When I was in college I had a professor who used to be in the Navy who would also send ALL-CAPS emails to us.
http://injury.findlaw.com/torts-and-personal-injuries/defens...

"truth serves as an affirmative defense to an action for libel or slander"
> The only solution to a private internet is to fully embrace cryptography for all our communications.

Mozilla (or at least the Mozilla employee that wrote the OP) does not believe that: http://benlog.com/articles/2012/04/30/encryption-is-not-grav...

Personally, I think that argument is right. "Complete" encryption has usability tradeoffs many people will refuse to make. And I get that. Emotionally, it frustrates me that I can't store my Google Authenticator key in Google Drive even though I understand exactly why that would break two-factor authentication.
If the product you're working on is a long term project of the company, it's likely you'll leave before it's over in which case there will be a future person who'll have to figure out your code.
In such a case, documentation is essential as otherwise this person would have to contact you after you've moved onto other projects and may have forgotten the intimate details of the code making things tricky.
As I see it: Compelled to be silent is one thing. Compelled to lie is another.

To me, the notion that the second shouldn't be possible is common sense. I find it hard to express how little it surprises me that you do not share this perspective.
If you have the keys to the house you might as well look around...
"In fact, it took EFF longer to figure out how to physically file a motion with the FISC than it did for the FISC to dispatch with the DOJ's arguments."
The whole 4'33" thing kind of broke down for me; I thought the point for Cage was to capture the ambient sound of the area where the performance was taking place? He wasn't making a statement about different types of absolute silence, he was commenting on the different types of imperfect silence in an analog environment.
Instead of a news headline, they could use an entry in the Bitcoin ledger to prove that the canary is current (http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2013/05/bitcoin-is-public-ledg...)

EDIT: Actually, they could simply include the hash of a recent block in the blockchain.
Of note, even if you store your information remotely, it still makes more sense to organize it in a file system. That photo app is best done with folders and hierarchies, you organize your email in the same way, discrete information is best organized in groups, and that is all a filesystem is.
You're right; I misread it. It's 50 U.S.C. 1861. Sorry, I'm out of my depth.
Well there is money to be made on either side. You, could as a dev get good at at building apps quick and turning around and selling them at some potential revenue multiple. As a buyer, you might be able to buy something cheap that pays for itself over some short period of time if maybe you are decent at marketing or something.

I think it exists in both iOS and Android. I haven't looked into it enough to see which is more valuable, but the possibilities are there.
I think only direct democracy is a real democracy. No need for "direct", just "democracy" will do. The fact that so call democratic countries need a modifier before the word "democracy" tells you that it is not real, as such.

A representative democracy is really a practical alternative to a real democracy which would have been hard to implement. That doesn't make it real though. Its just the practical best one can do, probably. That abstraction layer of representatives, who get a free reign, gets in the way, rendering it no longer a real democracy.
Lol so am I that's why I wanted to clarify. Thanks for clearing that up
Too bad the law is interpreted by people and not computers. These kinds of hijinks are frowned upon in courts. "Here look, I'll illuminate the pixels that aren't part of the message and leave the other pixels dark!"
Opera Tantalizes With Its Next Browser
The Opera browser can't compete in terms of market share, but performance is another story.
Differentiate Encryption From Compression Using Math
>When a disaster occurs in engineering, the lessons learned are applied to the next design.

And how does that work for software engineering thus far?

What we know of it, is that errors tend to repeat themselves, and little is learned from design to design, especially across projects and teams.

Software engineering is much more like law than civic engineering.

So, it's quite invalid to compare law (which deals with people, perceptions, norms, ever shifting societies and situations, intentions and other delicate situations) with some well known ways to build things with very tangible, hard physical constrains and behavior.
I think the ACLU is also an important organization in the fight to rein in NSA overreach. http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security-technology-and-li...
Rally in Hong Kong to Support Edward Snowden
Now I know why techcrunch doesn't allow comments on their articles. People would rip them to shreds.