skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can take a stab at this, but someone else might be more comprehensive.

1) Grade-school language is too hard. I am not a mathematician, though, nor a hardcore Haskeller. But maybe that's good enough. Let's see.

A Monad is typically a parametric datatype which stores a value with some context. (A "parametric datatype" is just a concise way of describing something like scoped_ptr<Foo>.)

An example would be Maybe. A Maybe is a parametric type, much like your scoped_ptr<>. An example would be Maybe Int.

A Maybe Int can be one of two things: Nothing, or Just x, where x is any Integer. Examples: Just 2, Just -8, Just 0.

Monads support two functions: bind and return. Maybe is no exception to this.

Return (unfortunate name) puts a value inside a monad, in a minimal context. So if you apply "return" to the number 6, you get Just 6.

Notice that unless you implement your own arithmetic routines, you can't (hand-wave) use operations like + or - on a Maybe Int. This is what the second operation, bind, is for.

Bind applies a function to the value inside the monad, with the stipulation that the function in question itself results in a monad. (Hold on to that thought.)

Bind is what you'd use to add (e.g.) 3 to Just 6, or how we'd divide Just 9 by 3.

Why would Nothing be useful? Well, in this dumb example, you might want to implement a division operator. So what if you have Just 0 and attempts to divide it by 3? Well, since Nothing is a valid value for Maybe Int, you could just return that instead of throwing an exception.

By convention many functions which can result in a failed computation return nothing. So a key lookup in a map, for instance, will return Maybe MyVal. It's incumbent on the caller to check for whether it's an instance of Nothing or Just MyVal; there's no "null" in the picture. (I'm hand-waving here; there's a ton of syntactic stuff in Haskell to make this very simple.)

I'm not going to talk about function composition, except to say that Bind lends itself well to that; you can bind multiple items expecting such as a Maybe Int in a row, since a stipulation of bind is the result has to be a monad.

2) They're probably doable in C++ with template magic, but I would never ask someone to subject themselves to that.

3) You won't necessarily use them but they are a useful concept to have in mind. Maybe itself crops up in such as Scala or other places, as an Option type.

It's conceivable that instead of returning null/None or the moral equivalent you design your classes such that nobody returns null. Instead you might return an empty Person class. Calls on it which do nothing could be a no-op instead of crashing the program, or what have you; you can define what behavior you want to occur rather than a crash/stack trace.

I probably didn't do a good job explaining this but I hope it helps. I tried to define monads in a more operational way rather than explaining the theory, which I myself can't explain in a systematic or comprehensive way.
Or we can use the same logic that the Clapper and Alexander use. Instead of the canary, just publish a database containing a list of the NSLs. Distribute a client that syncs the database, and disallows logins if your user is affected. Politely ask that your users not attempt to view the information in the database that has been sent to them periodically.

Since no human actually read the contents, they didn't "collect" your communication, so you haven't broken the law.

Remember, they themselves set the legal standard so that you can have all of the data you want, but it doesn't count as you officially having it until you actually look at it!
The relevant quote from the book written by Joseph Heller:

"The girls were crying.
'Did we do anything wrong?' they said. The men said no and pushed
them away out the door with the ends of their clubs. 'Then why are you
chasing us out?' the girls said. 'Catch-22,' the men said. 'What right do
you have?' the girls said. 'Catch-22,' the men said. All they kept saying
was 'Catch-22, Catch-22.' What does it mean, Catch-22? What is Catch-22?"

"Didn't they show it to you?" Yossarian demanded, stamping about
in anger and distress. "Didn't you even make them read it?"

"They don't have to show us Catch-22," the old woman answered.
"The law says they don't have to."

"What law says they don't have to?"

"Catch-22."
Same here. This needs to be the issue of the next elections. Just like they discussed the economy/jobs 50% of the time in debates, I want this to replace that in the next elections.

Now, good luck with the TV networks actually pushing for that. Knowing them, they'd rather discuss irrelevant things that that.
My hyperthreaded [1] Core i7 makes kernel compile jobs fly.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthreading
In a couple points. Much of the advice may be more valid for overt CIA operations than in Snowden's case. Snowden is writing his own rulebook and it is based on a fairly narrow array of relatively novel tactics plus more standard tools I suspect he picked up in his special forces training (remember he has at least some special forces training).

A careful look at Snowden's tactics is that he is working off an understanding at how to play various groups and people off eachother. He has a keen sense of what everyone's interests are. His goal is not to be invisible but rather to be too hot to handle for anyone.
More like, withholding evidence! Think about it. That metadata could very plausibly confirm or deny alibis (or at least help confirm/deny maybe).
There are plenty of military assigned to NSA, to do things like operate SIGINT aircraft, or handle key distribution to the military on the COMSEC side.

NSA doesn't do much field intelligence stuff; it's mainly radio/etc. intercepts on military bases, aircraft, ships, etc. Their regular site security is either military or contracted out to Wackenhut or other private security companies, after all (which is apparently what one of Snowden's early jobs was).

The real tough guys of the signals world are the Army's ISA, who do tactical sigint and killing, all in one. I'm sure ISA and NSA cooperate a lot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_Support_Activity

They're the guys who caught Pablo Escobar. Essentially the most secretive of the tier-1 JSOC units. IMO, the world's most awesome job for a bofh sysadmin -- you get to listen in to enemy communications, and use their improper security procedures to find them, and then punish them (by killing them).
Thomas Drake, William Binney and Jesselyn Radack gave a talk about "Enemies of the State: What Happens When Telling the Truth about Secret US Government Power Becomes a Crime" at the 29c3 last year:

http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2012/29c3-5338-en-enemie...
As far as I can tell, the only thing the users will notice is a change in name of the Seller in the app store listing if they care to notice; there is no active notification to users. The copyright info and date last updated remain the same.
I don't feel like adding to the "what is a monad" literature. However, there was a lively discussion on LtU recently regarding this after a posting about Joe Armstrong's Three Laws of Programming Language Design [1]. They were brought up because one of the rules was

What is difficult to understand you have to explain to people over and over again.
The difficult to understand stuff is a real bummer. You have to explain it over and over again until you’re sick, and some people never get it, you have to write hundred of mails and thousands of words explaining over and over again why this stuff means and why it so. For a language designer, or author, this is a pain in the bottom.

More than one person brought up monads in relation to the above quotation. The comments there are fairly short and make an attempt to be both precise and motivated. This comment [2], along with its first reply is closest to addressing all three of your questions.

The longer approach, which I personally found descriptive, is chapters 11-13 of Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! [3]. This is by no means the succinct description that you are looking for, but it does a good job at motivating monads by bringing about functors and applicative functors as solutions to a certain problem, and then showing how "moands...are just beefed up applicative functors, much like applicative functors are only beefed up functors."

[1] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4754

[2] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4754#comment-75528

[3] http://learnyouahaskell.com/chapters
Google's photo search break through, Linkin's MonitorRank and on-demand touring
It took me a while to understand your point, I think because I assumed you were challenging my comments. Once I understood, though, I found this to be a very well-positioned anecdote. And having belonged to a Mormon Boy Scout troop, I don't doubt the truth of it for a second. Identity is a powerful construct. Plus, the bigger your 10%, the better, right? Call it reclamation.
It's a fine line, trading freedom for security. Two hypotheticals:

1) NSA monitoring known Al Qaeda operatives while being required to publish public reports detailing the scope of the surveillance (after a predetermined period of secrecy to protect the investigations): unequivocally good.

2) NSA installing video cameras and microphones in every house in America, constantly monitoring streams for suspected terrorist activity: unequivocally bad.

Where is the line? Which side does PRISM fall on? It would be an easier question to answer if the whole program wasn't so carefully kept out of the public eye.
I'm going to remember this episode the next time the GAO is described as some great oracle of wisdom and impartiality. I guess the IBM lobbyists don't have to worry about this particular act of bribery being investigated too closely.
Wow, incredibly profound. THANK YOU. Upvoted.

It is an extremely difficult thing to accept that one should not think of one's identity and aim in life by their employment, isn't it?
The article contains this graph
http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/MK-CD938_IBMCIA_G_...
where MIT is listed as a DoD (originally I thought it was only CIA) technology provider with a contract of $270 million a year.
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin
I agree--most Americans have probably been going about their lives and not paying too much attention to this so far.

But I think this issue is going to be in news cycles for quite a while. The more news cycles, the more likely people will start to think about it, the more likely they will run into the friend who feels passionately about it, and the more likely they are to decide it doesn't belong in their America. (Or that if it does belong in their America, that it shouldn't be kept a secret.) It's important for those who feel strongly about this to speak up now.
Part of the risk that "document retention" policies mitigate is the risk of a staggeringly expensive legal discovery phase--not just the removal of potentially damaging correspondence per se. Imagine that your company kept 100,000 volumes of dense text on file, and frequently had to pay a legal team to pore over those volumes and think about which parts might be germane to routine legal disputes. Good for the lawyers' billing, but ruinous for the business.
That's like saying two wrongs make a right.
Yes! That's it. At first I wasn't sure—I must have heard a shorter excerpt or something before—but then I recognized it. The whole thing is exquisite. He is so lovely.
It's great that Snowden is a pivotal character in that story too!
> Joseph Nacchio sold millions of dollars of Qwest stock after gaining access to information about weak future sales

"Gaining access to information about weak future sales" = He was threatened directly by the NSA that they would cut existing and not provide future contracts to the tune of approximately 3bn worth of revenue if he didn't play ball.

How is he supposed to notify the public of this fact when there's an implicit gag order in the requesting? So he has two options, take the financial hit for doing the right thing and telling them to go fuck themselves, or selling the stock and taking the legal hit for breaking insider trading laws.
Here's a standard for you: Complete honesty. No secrets, period. No classifications. All activities and policies related to national security are a matter of public record by law.

What? The intelligence agencies can't operate with full disclosure? Okay, I'm not a radical. They can keep some secrets from me if the actions are morally permissible and for the greater good, and the secrecy is plausibly necessary. I would even accept "trust us" at some point-- but only if they had earned my trust. They haven't. Not with decades of documentation citing immoral secrets kept for personal and political gain. The trust was gone from this relationship before I was even born.

And when you violate my trust, none of it is on me. You're the one who fucked it up. You figure out how to make it right.
Actually, they love to pay overtime and the government doesn't care as long as they have money to spend. Their budgets are mandated by law. A government contractor can cost upwards of $200 an hour for a senior level engineer. Typically $140 an hour for level 2 and 3 engineers. Anyway, the company takes a huge cut off the top and leaves $50 to $70 an hour for the employee, their benefits, and payroll taxes. So, the more overtime they work, the more money the company gets to pocket.
Take everything negative that you have ever heard about the CIA. Now consider that the victors write the history books and the CIA records have not yet been seized and poured over. Both those things considered together should paint a rather chilling picture.

Never underestimate the crimes of the CIA. We will likely never live to see the full extent of their atrocities.
According to the Guardian article that broke the news, "[a] 2005 court ruling judged that cell site location data – the nearest cell tower a phone was connected to – was also transactional data, and so could potentially fall under the scope of the order."[1]

IANAL but it seems clear that cell site data could be included (since it's held to be transactional data), but it would be limited to the towers connected to when making and ending calls, not a complete timeline. [2]

1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-record...

2. http://www.steptoe.com/assets/attachments/1948.pdf
That's true--the Prism program really could have the positive effect of making recruiting harder. That's definitely the most sensible argument I've heard for it.

It's interesting that the program being useful in that way doesn't require the program to be secret...
Ubisoft dropped Michael Ironside from the Splinter Cell franchise, so I'm pretty sure NSA has no tough guys left now.
Also Jefferson: "A strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means"
Google tax whistleblower says he was motivated by Christian beliefs
The Top Countries Who Request Data from Tech Companies
WSJ writes:

"A survey ... found that 56% believe that broad-based government tracking of telephone records is acceptable ... More Democrats than Republicans found it acceptable, a reversal of findings in a similar poll taken when George W. Bush was president ..."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732490400457853...
Actually he has been hiding in plain sight. His goal is not to be found. He has told everyone where he is. He is writing his own rulebook and playbook. He will be remarkably hard to touch.

He realizes he can't hide. He's taking quite a gambit with Hong Kong but the calculations to do it have been extraordinarily well thought out.
There is, however, a secret interpretation of the law, which the executive branch uses to apply the public law and which they refuse to reveal to the public.
I found this bit from the article interesting:

In July the FISA court ruled that the NSA violated the Fourth Amendment's restriction against unreasonable searches and seizures "on at least one occasion."

And yet I've read so many assurances from the legal eagles here on HN that since the relevant service providers already had these records, there was no way the Fourth Amendment applied. After all, it's just about your papers in your house! Because 18th Century!

Yeah, I knew that was bullshit, but it's nice to learn that even the craven, supine FISA court agrees. Try again guys!
If the defendant is the one who wants the phone records, can't his laywer call the phone company on his behalf and obtain them?
Oh I'm aware you're not the same guy.

While the religious might consider it self evident, the non religious don't so your choice of wording has the opposite affect that you intend on those of us who consider it nonsense. You've taken something simple like the phrase self evident and replaced it with something provocative and not immediately apparent in meaning to the non religious.

Some people consider faith a virtue, others consider it idiotic, so it seems a poor thing to introduce when you can simply and unambiguously say self evident. I am not unique in this, and it's got nothing to do with being correct or not, rather its about a poor choice in communication by choosing language that means different things to different people. To consider god a synonym for self evident is simply an absurd notion to me and I'm sure to most atheists.
I don't believe in moral imperatives. I simply try to teach people things I understand when they are willing to listen. I'm not obliged to do that. They are not obliged to listen. But if it happens that I tell you arguments why government is evil, I will hold you responsible if you simply disagree without a convincing counter-argument. So we could have been friends before, but after could be not anymore.
Another hatchet job against Snowden, being done by Joe Mullin
So, politics as usual, then?
The NSA has the database. The phone companies do not. It would be very impractical and a huge invasion of privacy to record conversations like this.
OTOH, the CIA has some incentive to being known as ineffectual. If enemies underestimate them, the mission of the CIA will be easier.

OTOH, as far as I can tell, to call them ineffectual from ~1989 until ~2000s sometime would be excessively kind. So maybe they did also suck before that as well, but I think the end of the Cold War and political turnover after GHWB really gutted them, and it wasn't until they remade themselves as a black site operating, drone killing paramilitary group that they came back.
The phone company does not have the records anymore, according to the article. So they want to get the records from the NSA because they probably have not deleted them.
India's 10,000 Startups programme by Nasscom
In this case they're hoping the NSA kept better records than the phone provider:

"The prosecution had told defense attorneys that they were unable to obtain Brown's cellphone records from the period before September 2010 because his carrier, MetroPCS, had not held on to them."
I wouldn't necessarily classify what he's doing now as hiding, although he does seem to have lowered his profile considerably the last couple of days. But publicly he's said he doesn't really intend to hide, so I was speaking more to the hypothetical case where he does decide to just flat out "go to ground" and try to evade being found at all. As opposed to hoping the Hong Kong government or some other political process will shield him.
I assume he's actually in a journalist's apartment, not going out. Intelligence agencies may know where he is, but no one is going to go after him.
Agreed, but I find mozilla's guides less spammy and more specific https://developer.mozilla.org/
When you're done convincing them, can you convince the GPU makers as well? It's crazytown over there.

At least the network switch makers have a sort of internal consistency, though you still have to learn individual vendors' styles.
I'm surprised they'd even consider the cloud, knowing what they must know about the NSA, and its abilities to snoop public infrastructure and cross agency boundaries
However Snowden of the book unfortunatelly for him contributes the content of his dismembered guts:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yossarian#Snowden

Captain Korn gives to General Dreedle is that Snowden died in one uniform, and his remains were soaked into Yossarian's, and all of Yossarian's other articles of clothing were in the laundry. General Dreedle says "That sounds like a lot of crap to me." Yossarian replies, "It is a lot of crap, sir."
I just did some searching to try to find what percentage of the Republican Party identifies as libertarian as opposed to conservative, and I didn't have much luck. But, considering the party's platforms on gay marriage and immigration, I think the percentage of libertarians is small.
I've read ars on and off for 15 years, but no more. I thought I was done when the founders left and the content started sucking. Now the content has become offensive.
Lawyers have this habit that they share with coders, when they are consulted as to why the system is behaving in a certain way, they treat it in an exercise in debugging legislature, and tracing the path of execution of case through the legal system, much like a coder will debug a program, and trace the path of execution through the computer, and the various methods and decision trees in the source.

The difference is though, when a coder finds out why the program is doing what the user doesn't want it to do, he will say "See, there you go, we can fix it now" where the lawyer will say "See, there you go, it turns out you're in the wrong because the law says so", the deeper embedded in the fabric of the legal profession they are the harder it seems to be for them to consider the possibility that although it's the law, it can still be utterly and completely wrong.
If he's smart, he's not even in Hong Kong anymore, nor has he been for some time.

Prerecorded video explicitly stating where he's located? Seems like a ruse.
iOS 7's auto-updates and app transfers will be the next major customer source
Why I’m Terrible at Finishing
The reading is hard. A careful reading could go either way. The fact is historical cell site location data could arguably fall under the order but does not necessarily.

The question in my mind is what is the purpose for the order. If it is to compel Verizon to do something they don't want to do, then maybe it wouldn't, but if it is to give Verizon cover for what they want to do anyway, then it very well might.
Kim Dotcom to release new CCTV footage of Megaupload NZ raid