skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Slightly offtopic: The abacus is a fascinating tool; often considered an early prototype for tangible interfaces.

"Among other historical inspirations, we suggested the abacus as a compelling prototypical
example. In particular, it is key to note that when viewed from the perspective of human-
computer interaction (HCI), the abacus is not an “input device.” The abacus makes no
distinction between “input” and “output.” Instead, the abacus beads, rods, and frame serve
as manipulable physical representations of numerical values and operations. Simultaneously,
these component artifacts also serve as physical controls for directly manipulating their
underlying associations."

(Brygg Ullmer, PhD thesis, MIT media lab)
The price of freedom? About $3400 from Hong Kong, Hong Kong (HKG) to Reykjavik, Iceland (KEF) via Air China. If you work for the gov then the revolving door opens to corporate, where on earth is there a untouched welcoming place?
Having taught logic programming a few times, I have come to the conclusion that it is a worthwhile thing, but it should not be thought of primarily as a programming paradigm. Rather, it is a technique that a programmer should be able to make use of within the framework of a larger program.

An analogy: a good programmer should be able to write a state machine. And these are occasionally useful. However, just because a state machine plus a large bidirectional sequential-access data store can do any computation whatsoever[1], does not mean that it is a good idea to write all our programs this way.

Similarly, logic programming and the associated unification operation make up a Turing-complete system, but ... so what? I think that logic programming ought to be available as a library in every programming language. But I don't see the point in making it the only functionality there is.

And, of course, core.logic is an attempt at doing just this for Clojure. (And then there is Pyke ....) However, as this article -- along with the article it references -- notes, we have not really figured out how to integrate logic programming with more mainstream programming methods. This, I think, is a problem well worth solving.

[1] Think "Turing Machine".
"I don't know about anybody else, but for the first time I can think of, I'm seriously concerned about the consequences of posting support for somebody like this online. I don't know how things will play out years down the road and who will do what with this information."

I've thought the same thing many times. I think there is really no choice since I don't want to live under a dictatorship, and if I don't voice my opinion I keep thinking about it. So it's better to voice what you think, then go back to work. I feel like at least I'm doing my part.
>"I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions," but "I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant."

Exemplary. I am glad that men like he exist, bur I am genuinely fearful for his safety. Look what happened to Bradley Manning.

I think it was a good thing that he revealed his identity so as to speak with authority and be representative of the current events.

But I also believe it was done too early and too carelessly - the government now knows exactly where to look for the leak and prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law.
My fundamental question here comes back to this:
If the number of reported crimes in the country doubled, what would you expect to happen to the prison population?

In the time period that the incarceration rate in the USA grew 4x, the number of violent crimes in the US grew nearly 7x [1]. This was a much more dangerous country then. The incarceration _per crime_ rate is only about 25% higher than it was in 1960 [2].

None of which to say there is not something deeply, deeply flawed in our country today and in the way we deal with imprisonment. Similarly there are real fundamental issues of race and class that make crime and enforcement problematic.

That said, we seem to look at institutions more than society when we look at social ills. But just like with healthcare and education, the two are inseparable -- we must consider the priors.

[1]: Data sourced from two sources, focusing on 1960-1994: http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat...

[2] http://www.crimeandconsequences.com/crimblog/documents/pictu...
Yeah this should happen, but no Rand Paul shouldn't be in front of it.
Who Made That?
Indeed. Snowden's decision, assuming we're getting the whole story, is what I call a true "Patriot Act."
I was really looking forward for Waze's Windows Phone app[1] to come out of beta, but now, given Google's stance on Windows Phone, the app will most likely be killed :/ Atleast with an FB acquisition, it wouldn't have happened. These platform wars getting tiring.

[1] http://betanews.com/2013/04/30/waze-seeks-beta-testers-for-w...
By the way, I don't know about anybody else, but for the first time I can think of, I'm seriously concerned about the consequences of posting support for somebody like this online. I don't know how things will play out years down the road and who will do what with this information.

I don't know about you, but that's a chance I'm willing to take. As far as I'm concerned, Edward Snowden is an American hero and deserves a medal and a ticker-tape parade before he deserves to spend the rest of his life on the run, and possibly ultimately in a jail cell, or having his life taken prematurely by US operatives.

I think he did the right thing though, by going public. Presumably he knew the odds that "they" would track him down anyway, and by going public he has a chance to leverage popular public sentiment as a shield of sorts. As he says, it's a tactic to keep them from "going dirty". He might still wind up in jail, but there's a better chance now that they'll have to deal with him through ordinary judicial means, and (hopefully) no torture, or secret imprisonment at Guantanamo or whatever.

Hopefully Iceland (or maybe Ecuador!) will grant him political asylum and give him a shot at a semi-normal life, albeit far from his original home.

Postscript: To any NSA / CIA / FBI / etc. spooks who are reading this - blow me.
What are some APIs that you would like CLI clients for?
Inspired by this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5849359
In the States, the Supreme Court hasn't opposed recording of police officers (so far):

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-suprem...

Video is becoming mightier than violence.
How likely is it he really is in HK, and not in some remote village in Thailand? I'd prefer the latter, but tell the former. If he actually is in HK, China might even offer him asylum and twist this in a huge propaganda victory.
Wheezy was released May 4. Given the cycle with which many major corporations upgrade their computers (e.g., Win XP -> Win 7), I would have been surprised if NASA had chosen Wheezy. I'm sure they have their own software to test, and they can always upgrade to Wheezy at their leisure and upgrade some time between now and May 2014 (when Squeeze support ends).
We use Vagrant at Virgin Media in London. Great tool.

Ps. please fix the issue where on disconnect, you can't vagrant ssh back, the only fix I've found is to restart the vm using virtualbox.
This was the one scene from the movie Infinity [1] that I really didn't like. Instead of a restaurant in Brazil, the script had Feynman challenging a shopkeeper. Unfortunately, the way is was done made him come off as arrogant and obnoxious in that scene. Other than that, though, it was a decent flick.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116635/
I imagine they either represented themselves or had a lawyer who acted in accordance with their wishes.
Bravo Edward, and yet very little is said about PRISM at all. When will we finally get to the bottom of what PRISM actually is? When will the public get access to the entire set of slides? How much exactly did Edward know about PRISM, or did he just stumble onto these slides and assume the worst?

So many questions, so few answers. Hopefully the coming weeks sheds more light onto this.
It's a hyperbole to demonstrate that hiding certain things isn't an illegal or a even bad thing. In fact I'd say its overall better for all involved.

And for the record there is always a way to do all the listed things while being completely more or less naked (transparent clothing, frequent showerings, small discreet tatto, etc).
Yes and the raid of his company illustrates the high level of cooperation between HK and U.S. law enforcement, and that was only over movie downloads.
True, but the risk of dying at the hands of these people is extremely slim. According to tabular data found here[1], which chronicles US terrorist incidents and assassinations dating back to 1865, only 5031 people have been killed by terrorists in the last 148 years. That comes out to approximately 34 deaths per year!

That number is trivial compared to other causes of death. Here's a sampling of some death statistics from the year 2006 [2]:

Fireworks discharge: 8
Fall on and from stairs and steps: 1,818
Bitten or struck by dog: 32
Contact with venomous snakes and lizards: 8
Accidental drowning and submersion: 3,579
Exposure to electric transmission lines: 93
Transport accidents: 48,412
Contact with hot tap-water: 32
Terrorism: 0

You're more likely to be killed by hot tap-water than you are by a terrorist.

[1](http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/terrorism/wrjp255a.html)

[2](http://www.nsc.org/news_resources/injury_and_death_statistic...)
It's more a question of "when", not "if".
As a whole I think graduate school is a good thing, but moment to moment it's pretty negative, by my experience and the experience of all of my classmates. I just ended my first year of masters study, and I couldn't name one person I know within the program who didn't seriously debate dropping out numerous times over the first year. On the other hand, most of us have overall gained good experiences and knowledge, and I do not regret staying.
Not just lobsters, oysters happened the same
"I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest," he said. "There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn't turn over, because harming people isn't my goal. Transparency is."

This seems commendable.
29 yr-old CIA, NSA contractor admits to leaking secret programs
Is anyone else stuck on advertisement? :S
Support is not a one way street. There were a lot of Americans who thought Martin Luther King Jr posed a serious threat to the US. In that case, the status quo today can be a bigger problem for you tomorrow.
Its easier if you've a) gone to school there and b) have family/significant others that are Canadian. I'm on my second immigration attempt (the first one was nullified because I moved out of Canada and its a different process depending on whether you live in or out of the country).
for starters, Rand is proposing some legislation. A supreme court case is always non-binding to congress. They can just re-propose the law, and wait for someone to sue again (e.g. child labor laws in the 20s). Or the executive can just say, damn you supreme court we're gonna anyways (Jackson, early 19th century). And while a constitutional amendment would be nice, the only part of the constitution that the US follows anymore is 'election protocol' and details that create the pomp and circumstance around inauguration.
This could be drastically reduced if the USA would implement proper social security. I hardly think that is is coincidental that the Scandinavian countries are generally at the bottom of the list - or e.g. Germany. It is not really high level science, that if a person does not have income he still needs food. If he can't buy it, the government doesn't give it - he has to steal it.
NSA whistleblower Steps Forward
"Their playmates were so selectively chosen that they were rarely allowed to interact with other kids at all. It showed. They were socially underdeveloped to a degree that, in retrospect, is legitimately sort of troubling."

"His skin was paper white, in Georgia, in August. He hadn’t been out in the sun in months. Not only did he not understand the rules of baseball, he was, at the age of about 12, physically unable to throw an object."

"Steve, in effect, was completely socially isolated."

The culture of acceptance of this kind of abuse in the US needs to change.
Exactly what I thought. They may say that they only target foreigners, but nobody is actually checking that once the "general warrant" is signed by the rubber stamp FISA Court. And pretty much any analyst should have the ability to check any info on anyone, since they have all the data on everyone.

If that doesn't scare you and you still think "I have nothing to hide, nor will I have anything to hide in the next 2 decades or more", then maybe Americans will deserve whatever is coming their way.

Just know that the worse this gets, the harder it will be to get on the right path again, because it's very hard to change an oppressive government and an oppressive culture, once you get to that point. And the worse the "solution" will have to be to fix things.
The "law" is standing on very weak foundation right now. It is those that enforce these laws who should be tried, not Edward Snowden.
> It's best to assume all nutritional claims are bogus, because the vast majority of them probably are, and there is no way for us to tell which at this point.

"I don't know anything about ____. Therefore all these claims the so-called experts are making about ____ are clearly bogus!" This kind of dismissive line of thought (there are some variations on the theme - many people don't like to admit that they don't know something) pops up in a lot of areas and it is pretty embarrassing.

In the real world when I meet people with attitudes like this, it invariably says a lot more about the person than the supposed inscrutability of the topic under discussion. The narcissism to dismiss entire lines of study and the lack of curiousness of someone who hasn't bothered to form an opinion on which ideas are better than the others... even when you hang out with a community of avowed skeptics, these attitudes really help separate the wheat from the chaff.
Good comment. I think you could go a step further and say one side is never all bad. I'm sure there is an exception out there, but I don't know it.
About a year ago I used Google Android navigation to get to a Walmart. Unlike other GPS which just take you to a street address, the Google system knew the Walmart was in a large lot and navigated me to the store within the lot.
It seems the future for this kind of projects is very bright. When I have time I'll look into vagrant and docker. I also need to learn either puppet or chef... I've got a busy summer schedule!

(Any other related, interesting technologies I should add to that list?)
Have you been to the hood lately?

Just got back from a bicycle trip through "the hood." I didn't experience any hostility or criminality so I'm not sure what you're referring to.
Neither tentd nor buddycloud seem to be attracting many users. Another contender, pumpio, may have better results as the protocol developer has chosen to replace the ostatus protocol running identi.ca with the pumpio protocol. Sometime later today identi.ca is expected to complete this transition to pumpio. This will jump start pumpio with about 25k active users.
If you just want a shortcut to invoke find in this common way, put this in your shell's profile:

function ffind {
if [ $# -eq 1 ]; then
search_path='.'
expression=$1
elif [ $# -eq 2 ]; then
search_path=$1
expression=$2
else
echo "ffind [path] expression"
return 1
fi
find $search_path -name $expression
}
After watching the video, I am reminded of this quote from Gandhi:

Men of stainless character will easily inspire confidence and automatically purify the atmosphere around them.
I want them defended too, which is why everyone in charge of security should be punished to the fullest extent of the law for their incompetency, as well as everyone up the food chain reprimanded for their poor oversight.

I expect that fence to be at least somewhat resistant to a group of pacifists cutting a whole in it. I expect it to be electrically charged.

I expect that EVERY camera is ALWAYS working and when ONE goes down that at least 20 people are notified "Fix this or you are fired". EVERY instance of failure should be notified.

The fact that cameras weren't working at a "secure nuclear facility" for 6 months is what should scare you.
Top Secret America: 9/11 to the Boston Bombings
My first reaction at how public he is making his identity and why he disclosed those documents was that he is seeking fame and flattery. But it's actually the best thing to do.

By making sure the public knows who he is, where he is, and what he stands for Edward Snowden has (hopefully) protected himself from the more nefarious things American intelligence services may do to capture him by making them impractical for the sake of public relations. China would no doubt be upset if CIA agents nabbed him from a Hong Kong hotel. Plus, his fame gives an incentive to nations to give him political asylum if they want to make a political statement against the U.S.
I noticed that in your post as well just now,

"What you can see here is the result of many hours of work from Pete and I, ranging from programming time, to nearly giving up trying to understand the algorithms involved, to hours spent manually wrestling with Excel spreadsheets containing the data we needed. Let's just say that the world would be a better place if data was offered in a variety of similar, usable formats."

I'm leading the project on exactly that, our new Beta site is built upon the new API my team have been building (common data model, RESTful, lower latency etc). Ping me over a mail and we can get you involved in the beta API.
I'm not sure Chine can use it for propaganda, I think there's no question if Chinese government records everyone's phone conversations.
colors in blog are terrible too.
make it work first.
A SCOTUS decision IS binding to Congress. They can't pass a law doing something that has been deemed unconstitutional unless they first amend the Constitution to explicitly allow them to do that same thing, which is obviously not going to happen.
If the US govt decides to prosecute Edward Snowden, doesn't that basically confirm every single accusation is true? So far there's been a lot of denials from all parties involved. The govt is in a tough position.
SCOTUS can have "original jurisdiction"[1] over some cases depending on the matter under review. In this case, because the State (read: USG) is a party in the case, SCOTUS can be the court in which a case is first argued.

_____

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedures_of_the_Supreme_Court...
for the vast majority of people, private corporations have a larger impact on their life than the NSA.

the NSA will not touch your life. your bank, your mobile operator, your credit card company - immediate impact. if the latter want to fuck you up, you're toast as well. see all the foreclosures, etc.

this focus on government is truly strange. just one of the players, but somehow special.

the NSA has accomplished, what a lot of fucking startups are attempting - your unified social media profile. linkedin is green with jealousy.
I95 is 3000 miles from LA.
https://github.com/bup/bup

bup is the awesome.

It's quick, and does space efficient snapshots. Supports remote operation through ssh (backup remote server locally, or local server remotely). Uses git as backend. Has FUSE, Web and ftp backends.
My one desire for Bootstrap is to have more than 12 columns. That's too coarse-grained IMHO. Why not 24? I know you can do this yourself but in my experience it results in weird bugs.

I also agree that span3 and offset2 are/were better names.

Still, Bootstrap is awesome, even in spite of the ASI BS it's authors maintain.
The problem with this sort of analysis is that there are EXTENSIVE efforts to reduce the amount of terrorism.

You might not like it, but the efforts are not trivial.

You're looking at the number of terrorism incidents AFTER efforts to mitigate them, and then concluding it's not a real issue. That's like saying that vaccinations aren't important because we haven't had a large number of Measles incidents lately.

We absolutely need better information, as citizens, to help weigh the relative success of these programs, but pretending to be sure that they aren't affecting the numbers is silly.
I would have thought the prize for intimidating ship names goes to HMS Vengeance, one of the UK's Trident missile subs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Vengeance_%28S31%29

NB I've always assumed Iain's fascination with ship names was related to his father being in the Navy - like his fascination with Really Big Things was influenced by living in North Queensferry as a kid.
I expect he mostly goes to places where 99% of the people in the room don't think that.
They SUCCESSFULLY broke into a nuclear weapons facility without any opposition. The nuclear facility security staff and management should be getting the horns.
Love the evil faces in the infographic with the twisted eyes. Notice how the sysadmin is not evil.
but I don't think that America really subverts them for the purpose of oppression. The US is perfectly capable of oppressing without appealing to those ideas (indian wars; japanese internment). I actually think the US means it (and thinks that it can) deliver democracy without being oppressive.

Hanlon's razor. But the difference here is, in this case it is impossible to not be incompetent. Just as it is impossible to deliver what you intend for the world without being incompetent in the sense of being 'non-oppressive'.
I think Tim Cook answered on his D11 interview that they did not make an offer for Waze.
What amazes me is the hypocrisy in all this. The American people have basically known about this since about 2006. It's just that there wasn't as much proof or specifics but the media covered this and it was pretty much common knowledge that all phone calls and Internet activity were being watched. Of course that's not okay and I still get the current outrage. Totally understandable.

But then there are the senators... These guys approved this activity long ago and while not all of them knew the specifics the Intelligence Committe did. They were taken into meetings where no note taking tools or anything with a battery was allowed and briefed about this.

Now that this story breaks the senate gets their panties in a twist like this is news to them. They simultaneously defend it and condemn it.

It isn't fair to make such a blanket statement about the entire Senate, I know but what I'm really getting at here is that what Rand Paul is doing doesn't strike me as sincere at all. It looks like a dog and pony show set up to make it look like someone gives a shit while they all keep getting briefed and voting for this stuff behind closed doors.

It's like set up a bunch of PR stunts to make us feel warm and funny then do the opposite while no one is paying attention. On this issue I feel like its the guys trying to get attention the most who can be trusted the least.
I moved to Sweden from the U.S. about 3 months ago, and it was a very easy process (I already had a job lined up here).

The hardest part is international interviews: they really want you to interview in person, and they really don't want to pay for international airfare to do it. The best way, if you can make it work financially, is to plan a 2-month "interview vacation" here.
I spent six weeks in London for a college exchange class the summer of 1990 and discovered Banks and the Culture; I believe it was Consider Phlebas. One of the best parts of that summer. I remember the delays in releases of books once back in the US was agonizing.

Fuck cancer.
About CPU Backdoors