skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The thing is, do you actually take anything away? If you don't talk about caching in the CPU, scheduling in the OS, or propagation delay in the gates, how does that help your understanding of how to write software?

What materials and courses structured like this excel at doing is very rapid demystification. They quickly allow the student to remove the "and this layer is black magic" notion of things and give them structure on which they can realize the limits of their own knowledge, or learn to know what they don't know. With this sort of foundation they are better equipped to teach themselves.

Materials and courses like this are not vocational, and don't pretend to be. They are very much the opposite.
FWell, there was Total Information Awareness, which was "shut down" after public objection, where "shut down" meant moving the functions to various other places.
Yeah, everything I've been seeing seems to be that they seriously threw out everything about being competent in the 1990s, and then blew up into something huge (and incompetent) in the post-9/11. Hayden does not seem to have been a good director at all, at either NSA or CIA, and was responsible for the big push toward contractors as well.
I read it similarly, but not everyone may recall the ins and outs of the Patriot Act's passage—it was nearly a dozen years ago now. Many of the folks on HN were in grade school.

I was trying to draw attention to the line that government keeps giving us about how "they are trying to prevent another 9/11" with the secret laws and secrets courts that enable warrantless wiretaps and constant surveillance.
There is definitely a voting ring for NYT. They are pushing hard to vote up their articles here. I usually just tune them out as low quality materials.
Sorry about that, you can see I'm kind of getting clobbered below.

I don't think the problem is that the end result isn't a computer (it certainly sounds like it is), but that the computer only runs in the provided simulator, and is written in a custom HDL designed to make this project relatively simple. The simulator itself ignores a bunch of complexities around timing that a commercial one (like ModelSim) would consider.

Personally I haven't done this class, but I'd be curious to know whether the students design the control unit and data path themselves. I know that was a giant pain in the ass when I did it for a gimped RISC processor (as you described).
Why SmartOS in my lab? - SmartOS
Exactly. A lot of leakers in the scene actually go to quite some lengths (financially and otherwise) to be the first one to release something. It's a whole another world of its own where cred matters a lot, and people will really do go through a lot to make their name known.
From the article: "One response, endorsed by the State Council, is to urge more graduates to take jobs at small, private companies. But a generation of people who grew up under the government’s 'one child' policy has proved risk-averse and slow to join or set up new companies.

"'I would not work for private companies, that is not secure — only state-owned ones,' Ms. Yan said."

That search for what was called during the 1970s "the iron rice bowl"--a secure job in a state-controlled organization--makes me wonder how much more innovation can be promoted in China's economy. Desiring that kind of security in employment would never make a Silicon Valley happen.
Product Priorities for 'Preneurs
Intelligence and counterintelligence are two different things.
Yup, they look like chainrings and that implies a bicycle app.
Candidates for an automatic downvote:

* Downvote preemption
* "This."
* Article font/background griping
* ...
Hey rayiner, if it helps at all, I frequently follow your comments on Hacker News, and I've been able to grasp all your (very cogent) examples of how the government was worse in the 20th century. So it's not falling on deaf ears.

Just wanted to give some encouragement since you seem really discouraged by HN this week. It's been straining on the whole community, I think.
I've always had difficulty interviewing because I'm a #2 on this guys list--the "long distance runner" of thinking. My talent has always been slow, methodical crunching of massive amounts of data-- analysis. There's no way to demonstrate this talent during an interviews. I've gotten feedback from interviews and heard, "It's not that you didn't answer every question correctly, it's that you weren't fast enough." So I essentially can't show my most valuable skill to a potential employer.
Given the poor education that most Chinese graduate school provided, it is really a big waste-of-life for many young guys pursuing it.

The good thing is that it only cost two years to get a master degree now. 10 years ago, I spent 3 years for it. I wish I had the courage to quit it that time.
My IQ is 136. I can attest that it is not an indicator of anything. I am a lazy, average programmer. Whatever benefit I gain from having a higher IQ is offset by my inability to focus for more than a minute. I don't understand how people can study and lack many basic skills because I aways seemed to sneak by without them. I am a chronic procrastinator, only the fear of having to write a final in 24 hours made me study/cram by pulling all nighters. I have a CS degree and rarely went to class, having collected every letter grade A+ through F, and survived being on academic probation (my semester with four D's and an A+). Just one data-point and a counter-example as to why IQ is not a good measure of anything.

According to Gwern[1]: It is worth noting that studies of human genius frequently say that raw IQ and talent are not helpful past unexceptional levels like 130 IQ; what makes the difference is motivation and the "drive to mastery"

1: http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20Effective
This is documented in several books including "The shadow factory", it's been going on for decades. The Telco's basically get absolved of any legal responsibility directly from the oval office. How exactly that works in terms of law, I have no idea, but I would assume it's locked inside a safe.

ps. Do not use satellite phones unless you want everything listened too:)
Teen forced sex - XNXX.COM
I speak German and had a look at the example document [1], and it's hard to tell how big the changes are - this document shows the original and the changed version and asks how annoying the changes are, from a scale of 1 to 6, presumably to know how much their algorithm can change before the rights-holders complain.

Often, the words are replaced by synonyms ("nicht denkbar", not thinkable gets replaced by "undenkbar", unthinkable) or switches the ordering of words ("zwischen Blei Gold und Silber", between lead, gold an silver becomes "zwischen Gold, Silber und Blei", between gold, silver and lead), just the connection of words is changed ("Schmiergeldübergabe", transfer of bribes, becomes "Schmiergeld-übergabe") or the linebreaks are slightly changed, for example one word is moved to the next line.

At this stage, it's very hard to tell how much the final mechanism is going to change the original text, but I can't see much changing of very minor elements like punctuation.

It's still a stupid idea since many of these above elements are important to the "vibe" and meaning of a text - the way an author orders elements, or the specific words used by authors can be interpreted differently.

[1] http://www.scribd.com/doc/148113352/Sidim-Changes
If developed countries can't trust each other not to spy on their diplomats where does that leave us?

It leaves us precisely where we are - developed countries have been spying on each others' diplomats and using their diplomats for spying for, well, just about ever.

US Secretary of State Henry Simpson famously said "Gentlemen don't read each other's mail" some 80 odd years ago. A quaint attitude, even back then.
Sorry, but even the most agressive prosecutor is highly unlikely to bring a charge that is so easily and cleanly dismissed. It's like trying to charge someone with the murder of a person who clearly isn't dead. Our justice system has gotten hyper-agressive, but it's not that bad. At least not yet.

A far more likely tack would be trying him under the Espionage Act, which is vague enough to make prosecution easy and defense hard. Relatively speaking, at least.
Why don't libertarian views have much influence in either party?
Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5884362
Someone has to pay for the first copy to get it, of course.
So it's okay to invade the privacy of your guests?

How many countries will attend the next G20 in London?

How many countries will attend any G20 summit in any country??

If spying on them is fair game...
It seems that folks get upset at these types of narratives about SV because they're convinced that it's an attack on tech entrepreneurship. It's not: it's an assault on the Series A -> writing checks to Lamborghini lifestyle, and the poor allocation of resources that world rewards.

Real businesses that use tech as a lever are steps of progress that moves the world forward. You don't have to cure HIV, but you shouldn't receive a seven-figure check to pursue your dream of predictive music based on the color of cats you upvote on Reddit either. Anything that destroys the fallacy that working in this industry requires you to live in a tiny region in a certain state in a certain nation is good, and in a very small way, pushes humanity closer to the egalitarian ideal of the Internet.

Build a SaaS app that improves a dentists relationships with their patients from the middle of Minot, ND. Hell, take some kids in a village in the middle of Africa, teach them to code. Let them launch something using little more than a circa 2000 class laptop with a 3G connection, in a hut with a generator. $300,000 a year in revenue. Total. That totally changes the game for things like world hunger. That kind of business will revolutionize the world far more than 10-figure exits for photo-sharing apps ever will.
Snowden docs show U.K. spies hacked foreign diplomats
This is hilarious:

>What do ordinary Americans think?

>But, more importantly, what does Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak think?
Why does your login page suck?
It was a helpful answer and answered the question. More helpful a contribution than yours.
Of course not. But it's the only America on offer.
HN loves wikipedia pages lately. If anyone is interested in a fascinating example of this blurry line between spying and transparency that rdl brings up check out:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_Open_Skies
True, but it's a bit misleading. Although the developed areas of Hong Kong are quite literally wall-to-wall skyscrapers, the majority of Hong Kong's land is undeveloped country parks and village areas.

Less than 25% of total land area of ~400 sq. mi. is actually developed.[0] The average density of those developed areas is thus incredibly high. Mong Kok for example, has a density of 340,000 / sq. mi., which is described as the highest population density of any district in the world.[1]

[0] http://www.gov.hk/en/about/abouthk/facts.htm

[1] http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/11/world_population_wh...
This has long been recognised, and sometimes even codified. For example there is the Treaty on Open Skies, under which member states allow each other unarmed surveillance flights over their territories.
They spend 30 seconds per person at the HK airport on average (was late for a flight and was timing it to see if I needed to start doing something). However, I'm sure they swipe your passport and the computer system immediately displays something if there is a problem.

However, he's in Hong Kong. I expect that a "real forged passport" or a high quality fake passport or an actual passport stolen from someone is... procurable. Maybe a nice Australian passport, for example.
I have to comment on this--my advisor told me very early on not to become a technician--to understand what I was doing and why. At least in physics, the usual pattern is to give a student a project to work on--as they advance, they gain more independence. Sadly, some people never reach this stage...
I think the situation is basically that it’s allowed, but employers have to jump through probably more hoops than they should be required to to prove it’s fair. The Supreme Court ruled in 1971 in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. that Duke Power Co. had high school graduation and IQ test requirements for all but the lowest-level positions, the IQ requirement having been added after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed and they were made to stop directly discriminating against black applicants. The court looked at promotion records and decided that the requirements weren’t really predictive of anything and served mainly to allow them to continue discriminating against black applicants, and decided that the Civil Rights Act prohibited general intelligence tests, so employers either have to prove that such tests are predictive of job success, or only use tests that are written to test job-specific abilities.

I don’t know where to find the data used in that case, but my understanding is that intelligence tests have been shown to be broadly predictive of job performance, more so than any tests written to test only “job-related” skills; intuitively, it’s often better to hire someone who can more easily learn new things than to hire someone who already has some amount of experience but has difficulty learning new skills, drawing inferences, and dealing with unexpected situations. So if you’re hiring someone, and you have two otherwise equal applicants, and one scores better on an intelligence test, it makes sense that you’d be better off hiring the one who scored higher, but this is prohibited by the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Equal Rights Act.

Banning employers from using an effective method to choose who to hire necessarily causes economic efficiency. It’s fascinating to think about how much; a large part of why companies like to hire from top universities is that that’s where the smart students are. A large part of why so many companies are requiring college degrees for jobs that didn‘t previously require them is that it’s an effective form of cognitive selection; as more and more students go to college, fewer high-IQ students don’t go to college, and the IQ gap between those who do and those who don’t grows. I think eventually someone’s going to realize it’s possible to hire students straight out of high school on the basis of test scores and provide them with all the necessary training, skipping the whole process of making them spend $250,000 and four years of their lives experimenting with drugs and getting shwasted.
pg, I humbly submit that it's time to make a "subreddit" of sorts for politico-technical discussions, and moderate what is submitted to it. I know this might sound distasteful, and I'm not suggesting we go down the slippery slope of becoming like reddit, but I think the events of the past week have shown that it's necessary for change.

I'm not a particularly old member here by any means, but it's become very obvious that this community is too large for the current constraints on it. Minor changes, like implementing a separate area for political discussions would act as a sort of "release valve" without sucking up precious real estate on the front page.

My reasoning is as follows: there's no stopping wave stories like the NSA scandal from being submitted to Hacker News, people are too invested in hearing about it. Besides, there's some justification for it, being that it has a technical basis despite being political.

Moreover, it would lessen the impact to the front page for polito-technical debate to have its own "arena" of sorts. I would also motion for these to have separate karma/upvote/"staying power" treatment, similar to Ask HN: threads.
Okay, time for a serious question.

IBM has money, and SCO's lawyers gave them a fee cap. So this endless litigation is not wrecking anyone's life. Mostly it's just an annoyance to IBM and to SCO's lawyers.

But suppose it weren't IBM. Suppose SCO were suing me. Or you. Being hounded for over a decade by the ghost of a company, which remains in existence solely for the purpose of suing you sounds horrible. And since I/you may very well have done nothing wrong, this is an unacceptable situation.

Now, I would hope that a good judge would realize this. Just about all the articles I've read concerning this case are about the court asking SCO to clarify something. And, indeed, here we read:

> So it's going to go like this:

> 1. SCO must file a brief statement identifying the claims ....

So I would imagine that our hypothetical good judge would stick up for me/you by simply saying to SCO, "You need to make a clear statement about what you are claiming, and we're not going to waste any more time with you until you do."

But then I wonder why the judge couldn't simply have done that in this case, too -- a decade ago.
It's probably relevant to note that both Android and iOS ship with SQLite as the de-facto database storage engine, so there's very much a use case for having reliable in-place migrations in SQLite on modern software.

I could certainly see the value of having more robust ALTER TABLE support in SQLite itself, and I don't find the argument that such functionality will go unused very convincing. In real world scenarios almost everyone is going to have to migrate at some point, and the easier this is to accomplish, the better.
Because libertarian views are typically some flavor of anti-authoritarian, and — although for at least cosmetically different reasons — both mainstream US political parties are very much authoritarian.
> It's getting to the point where I'm reading papers on the subject in my spare time.

Sorry to rain on your parade, but you've still got a way to go. You're an occasional jogger. A PhD is a marathon.

Which isn't to say that you shouldn't go for it, but its a hard road.

An academic paper needs:

- solid background research (think "literature review")

- a bright idea

- implementation

Guess which are the hard parts. If you can do those then go ahead, write some papers, and publish your work. Given your outsider status, people will forgive you for not publishing in a peer-reviewed journal, but you need to publish equivalent material on a website.

But would it be so much harder to just do a PhD?
Exactly the same way you'd get a job that requires a B.S. when you don't have one: prove that you're already working at that level without the credential. A Ph.D. purports to demonstrate that you can do original research and effectively communicate that research. So, successfully publish papers in the peer-reviewed conferences of your target field.
Right? What happened to "No read up and no write down" and all the other gnarly things from the orange book and its colorful friends.
There's a difference in knowing how the sausage is made. I'm certainly not naive enough to think that governments aren't always spying on each other's diplomats, however the appearance that the UK and US went to pretty crazy lengths to keylog and tricks G20 diplomats into giving up intel out in the public could have some pretty negative implications for diplomatic discourse down the road.
Scene culture is fascinating.
The 1-bit interface
I've seen cases of people without phDs at national labs who are doing research--but it's rare. I would suggest that you figure out who the actual researchers are who are involved with the project and contact them (personally, I would send and email and then follow it up with a phone call) and see if you could chat with them about the project and where you might fit in. It might be possible that there is a position that you might be able to step in with your current qualifications and see how you like it and if you want to pursue a phD while you work there. Do you live reasonably close to the facility? Would you be able to stop in during your free time?
A lot of people take criticism of their work as personal attacks. They don't have the ability to separate the two. Those kinds of people are not fun to work with, particularly in a peer review situation. You don't want to hire people who will break down during code review because someone else didn't like the way they coded something.
How is it not easy? For every Ai Weiwei whose fame gives him some protection (and who still ends up getting harassed and put under house arrest) there are many Li Wangyangs

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/09/world/asia/chinese-activis...

They don't seem to have had much trouble at all keeping him in jail for 22 years from where he probably didn't get to do a lot of public dissenting.
Politicians believe in government -- generally powerful government. There is no place for a powerful, forceful, government in libertarian philosophy. Why would politicians or those who support their actions have an interest in a philosophy that is at odds with their beliefs?
Somehow this quote from the interview by Thomas Drake, a former senior executive of the NSA and a decorated Air Force and Navy veteran[1], carries a bit more weight for me than the widely trumpeted blatherings of Dick Cheney[2], winner of five draft deferments[3]:

I actually salute him. I will say it right here. I actually salute him, given my experience over many, many years both inside and outside the system. Remember, I saw what he saw. I want to re-emphasize that. What he did was a magnificent act of civil disobedience. He's exposing the inner workings of the surveillance state. And it's in the public interest. It truly is.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Andrews_Drake

[2] http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/2013/0616/Dick-Chene...

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/01/politics/campaign/01CHEN.h...
There used to be a selfmade low budget series called The Scene which showed the internal workings of release groups:

http://www.welcometothescene.com/faq.html

I watched 2 episodes or so before it became too boring watching people chat on AIM, but I learned quite a bit about the internals (in how far these are true, I do not know - the makers say it's fictional but the stories are authentic)
Could I have an example of walk though and describe the memory state? Do you mean just describing what references are in the stack and heap?
I feel bad for Drake, he was facing federal charges and nobody seemed to notice. 89% of federal cases are plead before trial and of those that go to trial 90%+ are found guilty, that is how much the odds were stacked against him. He got nowhere near the attention that he deserves[1[]

William Binney is an absolute hero. I have absorbed everything this guy has ever said or done[2]. He was not only employed at the NSA, but he was a director who designed the software that is being used right now to dragnet all the communications. It is difficult for anybody - congressman, president, republican voter, etc. - to argue that what the NSA is doing is fine when the guy with all the technical details and design of the program says it isn't. That he is against what is happening is a big deal and needs more attention.

This video is on the front page of USA Today, so these guys and the topic is starting to get the recognition they deserve.

[1] The New Yorker did a great feature on him called 'The Secret Sharer' - good for background http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_...

[2] Search YouTube for Binney - he was the keynote speaker at the 2600 HOPE conference last year - a presentation that everybody must watch. Apparently Snowden decided to go the route he did after watching Binney in Laura Poitras' "The Program" for the NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-secur... Potras is the same person who was the first journalist Snowden contacted.