skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I always thought that the doomsday machine in "Dr. Strangelove" was an invention of Kubrick's. I had no idea that this was a real thing.
Torvalds furious at latest Linux kernel
He might be sure that his HR/PR will never look into his blog or read HN or Reddit.
Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia on how brands can bring people together
I salute this man. And I still don't know wtf Monads are.
I think it's every bit as likely that the NSA will be responsible for instigating and elevating (arms race) the very cyber war they claim the private sector won't be able to defend itself against (eg Stuxnet, and I'd hate to know what they've been up to since). Self-fulfilling prophecy.
I can think of a word that rhymes with patriot for this guy.

That said it was great to hear the congress and the heads of the departments agreeing that the entire process deserves review. There was zero animosity, etc at the finance committee meeting today. Very cool to see when the government is working, a dialog is happening, etc.

But this guy is the ultimate sophomore, and if you ask me he was turned by China or just by some dreams of entering into some 31337 hax0r club illuminati.

All for leaking a powerpoint detailing what was codified in law over the past decade.
It was a clever move by Wyden to try to catch him in a perjury trap.
But you can (on Unix) put the same file in two places using ln[1].

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ln_(Unix)
What sort of technology does the CIA get from MIT that's worth almost $300 million a year and is comparable with the Boeing contract?
I thought this post was mildly interesting until I hit this statement :

"I am surprised that no one I met in Windows Azure team heard about Heroku or Rackspace"

Aside from the obvious ambiguities, this simply cannot be true.
Linux Mint does it for the diehard geek
Maddox sums up the PS4 - Xbox One situation
There is a certain beauty to the PRISM idea though. You're right that a capable adversary will already have been avoiding U.S. nets for obvious reasons.

But if you're going to recruit new soldiers, bomb-makers, suicide bombers, etc., you eventually have to go to where the people themselves are. So someone in the terrorist group will have to dip their toes into those dangerous waters.

If a cell is smart that one person will be the only one who does so, but that is still one link into the overall terrorist network, if the NSA can find it, and that can help lead to IP tracking, which can lead to drone surveillance, which can lead to a boots-on-ground raid to grab the computer (and maybe even the recruiter), and go from there.

Obviously the hypothetical "capable adversary" can be resistant to a lot of tracking techniques, but that doesn't mean you give up. They may very well make a mistake eventually and then you've got them.

The NSA's precursor once even cracked part of a one-time pad because the Soviets reused individual pages from their one-time pad codebooks. Breaking the parts of the code they did took lots of time but by 1946 revealed the existence of Soviet spies in many high-level organizations, including the Manhattan Project, which was a pretty significant coup of its own for U.S. counter-intel.

And all that by pursuing an enemy using theoretically unbreakable crypto...
Personal APIs
Aside from running drones everywhere except Afghanistan itself (and even there I assume they run some). All those Pakistan, Yemen, etc. civilian casualties due to drones = CIA. And secret prisons, both gitmo and worse ("black sites", many of which are still unknown to the public.) Ongoing.
> Senator Mary Landrieu (D-Lousiana), for example, had pretty much no idea what was going on ".gov is a coke bottle" ".com is the room surrounding the coke bottle." (paraphrasing).

I saw that too. She was completely dumbfounded, and apparently just defaulted to the attitude, "well, I don't understand what the hell is going on, and I trust you guys are doing a good job, so... good job!"

It's terrifying. We need more computer-literate people in Congress, because the current crop are dinosaurs.
Ask HN: any iOS developer looking for small 2 week project?
I am working on an app that is 30% completed. I have all the design work done, all the web API is complete and I just want someone with iOS experience to finish the project for me.

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There is a lot of confusion around this topic so let's get something out of the way: none of the companies mentioned in the leak were served ANY search warrants.

The participating companies were active participants in the spying scheme using the Patriot Act and FISA requests, not search warrants.
Entropic, Opera Develop HTML5-Compliant Browser
This argument sort of has water because of the improvements in search. Look to email as an example -- you have filers (ie people who maintain filing systems) and pilers (people who use search for everything). Big inboxes and GMail made piling popular.

Piling is the easiest way to operate, because many workers don't have a natural filing methodology to use. Search fills the gap and lets you organize on the fly based on standard metadata and content.

But depending in what you do, it breaks down quickly. If you are an attorney, or a procurement agent or a project manager, you have a natural organizational unit for content: the case, purchase opportunity, project. It's easy and natural to break down information within the structure that you work with. It's also hard to search for... How do you search for a NDA regarding case A signed by party B?

Typically people predicting the death of folders are selling a solution that doesn't lend itself to using folders. The author in this case is the founder of a photo organization startup. This is a use case where folders aren't cutting it, digital photography created this situation wherr we're all drowning in photos that are impossible to organize manually.
It's not a few billion dollars.

The best speculation I've seen on the matter is that the NSA's budget is between $12 and $15 billion, but that was several years ago, it might be much higher now with the emphasis being placed on all of these programs (with the NSA effectively being turned into a military asset).

We can extrapolate a floor on their budget by looking at the FBI and CIA, with it being publicly known that the NSA is far larger than both.

The FBI's 2014 budget request is for $8.4 billion, with 37,000 permanent employees. The NSA is thought to be at least two to three times larger than the FBI.
An alternative explanation is that what he says is not true.
New TestComplete Extends SmartBear’s Leadership Position in Web Application
His point exactly
Seems like there's a monad tutorial posted here every week. This is by far the best one.

Honestly, they mostly come across as condescending. At least this one's honest about it.
Your speeding example is a great example on why being able to get away from infraction isn't the holy grail.

Automatic fines reinforces isonomy (everybody is fined equally), and that's a good thing. If some people can game the system, regulation is useless (traffic turns into survival of the fittest, it's game theory).

If someone feels like speeding for civil disobedience, they still can, the state is not making it impossible to (it would if cars couldn't go over limit, for technical reasons). So one can break the law, but face the consequence as everybody else, and argue on the legal system wether this is fair or not. That's what judges and public opinion are for.

When enough people break the law, either the legislation changes or the people change the legislators. But you need penalties being applied to cause pressure for change, otherwise you only get inertia in the legislative.
You almost wonder if he'd be better off "hiding in plain site" if he does intend to hide, by staying in the (continental) US. I mean, the USA is a BIG place, and outside the major cities, there are some damn remote areas in the US, where the population density is pretty low, and you could probably hole up out of site for quite some time and rarely even be seen. Look at how long Eric Rudolph stayed hidden in the Appalachians, for example. Although, to be fair, while he may not have been a "trained operative" he was apparently a survivalist type, and had quite a bit of skill at living in the woods and living off the land. I have no idea where Snowden falls on that.

But still, it's not that hard to find a job in the US doing some kind of manual labor, where they don't ask for any ID, pay cash, don't pay any taxes, and where the crew usually all go back to the bosses house and burn a few joints after work. If you're willing to swing a hammer and can run a mitre-saw and/or rip a piece of plywood on a table-saw, without cutting your hand off, you can probably find a construction job working "under the table". Finding a place to say would be tougher, since most (all?) US states require hotels / motels / etc. to collect ID information. But if you can find somebody friendly to let you crash on their couch, or find a low-paid motel clerk in some hick town, who'll take a small "donation" in order to rent you a room without ID...

Bus around the country, move periodically, and dye your hair a different color, grow a beard, let your hair grow out, and you could probably stay hidden in the US for quite some time.
Looks like he's not the only one with an adjective that rhymes with patriot.
Really? I thought that we had reached the point where the number of monad tutorials exceeded all other computer science literature put together.
API on the Fly
You may as well link to the actual Ars article: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/06/nsa-leaker-ed-sno...
Did Path cheat its way to the top?
Silicon Valley’s Long History of Government Codependence
+1 for title. Don't understand monads still, so didn't read.
I think this is happening in US as well. Amazon is picking up expensive contracts that Netflix drops or passes on. It seems perfectly reasonable to pay for both services if you aren't paying for overlapping content rights. Since Netflix doesn't appear to have plans to go to higher price points themselves, the opportunity is there for Amazon to fill in.
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Interned there a long time ago and built software for an application they bought. From the internal perspective there was a lot of big company politics and mail it in behavior. From an external perspective they buy companies in growing markets and milk them but don't really improve them. The complaint is that they are not pushing the boundaries not that they don't make money. The way I am evaluating them is whether I think that are bringing something new and valuable to the world. Celebrating them is like celebrating record profits from Exxon. Its kind of sad.
Spy kings at the point of large inflections in power and technology always do. See: J Edgar Hoover.
OP means they aren't in and of themselves a problem if the citizens do their job and hold their democratic government accountable and force it to abide by their collective decisions.

I don't agree, though; I think secret surveillance is in and of itself anti-democratic. However, OP is correct too, in the sense that once it is revealed that secret, illegal surveillance is going on, if the subjects of a functioning democracy don't care or take any action, that is probably even more corrosive to a democratic state (since presumably there will eventually always be people like Norden^W Snowden, and nothing stays secret forever).
Things to Consider when Purchasing Ubuntu Laptops
Distributed Flight Array: Modular robots that self-assemble, coordinate and fly
Definitely agree. We tested our app and it has some minor issues on the beta but I would hate for users to leave bad reviews due to this.
JavaScript Utopia For Mobile App Developers
You are probably the only one that believes his statement.
It doesn't matter what you think, words aren't defined by personal opinion but by common usage. They are used to communicate, and what you want to call a real democracy everyone else calls a direct democracy. So if your intention is to communicate effectively, don't use your own definitions for words because you like it better because it'll just continually ensure you're misunderstood.

Direct democracies are not the only real democracies and it makes you look foolish and uneducated to insist it so.
no the nsa is still cuter, cuddlier, and less deadly than the cia.
Openwar (Samurai Wars) available on GitHub
I wasn't really trying. I mostly write JavaScript or try to bite through the arteries in my wrists while suffering through other people's Java and C#.
The NSA are the nerds, the CIA are the jocks.
I don't think this is necessarily true. I'm fairly strong in math, and definitively enjoy approaching problems in the abstract. However, even in math, it is often the case that by using something you gain an intuition about how that thing behaves.
Monads defiantly worked that way for me. I am good enough at math that I could look at their definition and 'understand' what they are doing (it really isn't complicated, its just difficult to explain). However, when it came time to use them in code I had almost no intuition about how they should behave. Now, my understanding of them is (in my opinion) not at all the natural understanding that would arrive from their definition, but an understanding that is accurate, and far more useful in code.
Waze sold for 1.1 billion and you think the NSA operates on a few billion? Not even close. In 2010 intelligence gathering cost $80.1 billion.

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/oct/28/nation/la-na-intel-b...
Facebook?

Hah, NSA— you almost tricked me into clicking on that.
Glass Explorers receiving un-announced packages from Google X today.
Linus wants credit for distributing info?

They are very hostile to helping new OSes start.

Grub looks like an evil plot.

I don't go out of my way to help new OSes, either, but I don't care. Tee he! -- my assembler only supports a little 16-bit. It's hilarious.
Sure, it's "move slow and break things". As judged by my experiences with most Microsoft products over the last twenty years, and reinforced by my current experience with Windows Azure's bizarre engineering choices and instability issues (the team to which the OP was assigned).
Misleading title and article. Linus is pissed that the latest release candidate is "noticeably bigger than [the previous one]". He's right to be pissed. That's not how a good release process should work. Each release candidate should have a less stuff in it than the previous one. The more stuff you add, the more bugs you introduce. Hence his plea "So don't [send me non-critical stuff]. Send me just fixes to serious problems. Ok?"

Here's a link to the actual mailing list post (not "Linus' blog" as the blogspam article claims, and incorrectly links): http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1306.1/00108....
JavaScript claws back into top 10 programming languages
You're right, and good point, I didn't think about hardlinks or symlinks. I guess you could do what I was suggesting by having one directory that contains every file and then creating links to them in different folders.
That kind of thinking adds very few to the discussion. I respect Apple and I know they are a reference in terms of UI/UX. This does not mean however that they are immune to making mistakes. Your argument is, from what I understood, that as they are very good they must have thought of it and if they choose to do it anyway then it must be the best way. I do not agree.

Even for the message at the bottom of the screen there was more contrast before when the text was black. In a room it does not matter much but out, in the sun, you can tell the difference. Anyway, even if you read the most recent message most often than others (which is probably true) you often need to read the previous ones for context if the reply arrives some minutes or hours later. If you are out, previously you could read the last two or three messages without problems. No you have to scroll so that the previous message is under focus to be able to read. And what is there to be gained? Isn't the fact that older messages appear before the new ones not enough to hint about their order?

Again you raise the argument that Apple always knows best and therefore it's laughable that I point out such a thing. Of course Apple would never make such a mistake. Just look at both photos and ask yourself which one can you read best. Also look at screen of the (beautiful) weather app and see if you can check your signal or even the time[1].

Also do you think that yellow text on a light background is a good idea in terms of readability? Because that's the color of the "actionable" elements in the Notes app.

[1] http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/ios7-app...
Agree with the second half of this statement - this idea is too cute by half for the courts. Acts and omissions both have significance under the law, as does the context of acts and omissions. If the warrant canary convention was considered by the court as context for a statement, it is very likely the court would rule that a statement had been made. The only way around this would be to have an evidentiary mechanism by which a company can prove that it has no control over the canary. This gives rise to the old conundrum: it's logically impossible to prove a negative (although you might be able to under various burdens of proof like "balance of probabilities" or some such).

Edit: Ultimately, legality turns on the statutory language of the provision in the Patriot Act that obligates businesses not to disclose (anyone know what it is?). The approach as originally proposed by by Steven Schear (http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cypherpunks-lne-archive/m...) was for the ISP to simply not answer a direct inquiry by a customer about whether or not a warrant has been served. The advantage of this approach is that it is far harder to provide evidence to the effect that not responding to the question in that context is a statement. The disadvantage is that a non-response might not provide certainty to the person who asked the question. Effectively, the more that a clear convention is formed around the "canary mechanism", the higher the risk that a court would hold conduct in association with the convention in breach of the statutory obligation not to disclose.
I joined MS straight out of college as a SDET too and I agree with most of what this. This is a broad statement, but SDET is generally not the best bet if your goal is to be technical or entrepreneurial. My big regret is that I stuck around for 3 years before deciding to move. My advice - change your role/team/company soon. Realistically, nothing is going to change overnight in your current role or team - the culture has been established over several years. It is important to work on what you are passionate about and in a culture that fits you, especially when you are young and when career is a big part of your life.
The Future of Civic Software Reuse?
The word god is in no way equivalent to self evident and if you use it as such you're simply not communicating well and likely not getting your point across to those listening. Worse, you're using a term that will turn off listeners who tire of religious nonsense being injected in conversations about important issues. There's nothing less self evident than a god, they are certainly not synonyms.
Who is confused? It is the canary operators that deliberately constructs for themselves a situation that offers only the choice between lying and complying with the gag order.
Feature Creep / Productivity Tools / Medium
I would say it should be formulated as such:

The only way to make a secret law is to have everyone agree on the merits for keeping the law secret.
>>So the Feds "hunted" for him the same way a parent "hunts" for his child that has wandered off in a store.

That's a fatuous analogy. Parents aren't primarily concerned with getting to their kid before the kid tells some "stranger" something.
To me it's significant that 37% of Americans support a program that's undoubtedly unconstitutional. I wonder how much the poll participants actually knew about PRISM. Either they support it out of ignorance or for political reasons -- or there's widespread, fundamental misunderstanding of the federal Constitution.
Tim Cook: Android version fragmentation is 'terrible for developers'
US Congressman rises to hail solution to the Boltzmann equation
If Thailand is an option I would go for The Library at Koh Samui. http://www.thelibrary.co.th/

Just out of the way enough to avoid the drunk losers passed out on the beach at patong etc
I joined MS straight out of college as a SDET too and I agree with most of this. This is a broad statement, but SDET is generally not the best bet if your goal is to be technical or entrepreneurial. My big regret is that I stuck around for 3 years before deciding to move. My advice - change your role/team/company soon. Realistically, nothing is going to change overnight in your current role or team - the culture has been established over several years. It is important to work on what you are passionate about and in a culture that fits you, especially when you are young and when career is a big part of your life.
Is Native Better Than HTML5?
While I loved the general feel of iOS 7, there is too much white on the screen - which makes me increase contrast - and few parts feel less thought out and rough at edges - So overall a welcome change, but needs further work.
You are completely right on both. I'm sorry, my mistake. Regarding the Send button, or lack of thereof, it is much better blue than gray but, as you said, it is not as intuitive as a button. There is a lack of perceived affordance. It's one of the top 10 mistakes in application design that Nielsen[1] points. Of course Nielsen can be wrong and Apple can be right.

[1] http://www.nngroup.com/articles/top-10-application-design-mi...
Top 5 reasons to use Twitter Bootstrap
Sorry, I should have been clearer -- I meant to write "high margin" when I wrote "high end". Services are certainly IBM's bread and butter.
Ah! So I am! Re-reading the article in that light makes much more sense.
Pay your taxes. Don't hang out with terrorists.
which is why blogging this is dangerous for him. First off, it his team reads it what will they think? He is inadvertally calling out problems with his management team and got a lot of exposure.
In my opinion, in a real democracy the citizens are not passive voters but a vigilant, armed (at least in the US) populace that holds their representatives accountable and vocally prevents unchecked accumulations of power or other undemocratic tactics (i.e. the electoral college turning into a two-party system). In my utopian view of what a democracy should be, a revelation like this would result in a very significant portion of the people speaking out and actively working to squash the surveillance system, putting the system to work instead of threatening it. Of course, such a society wouldn't let the surveillance situation progress so far and if you view democracy as a voting populace, not an informed one, my argument isn't convincing :)
>You can easily create a paradox by making the canary be a daily notification sent to each customer informing them that they are the target of an NSL, which may be logically problematic but is completely irrelevant in court.*

Now that, that is genius.
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iMarch Can Help Save North Carolina
NSA revelations only 'the tip of the iceberg,' says Dem lawmaker
You know what'd be even better?

A public vault of this articles so we can all learn easily instead of having to go through journal publishers.

EDIT: Why thank you, Lazyweb!
A New Short Story Imagines Google as a Bad Big Brother (2007)
A tag based file systems are equivalent to a hierarchy with symlinks (or directory hard links). If you don't allow tagging of tags, it's equivalent to restricting your hierarchy to one level.

Tags and directory DAGs are the same.
Nokia Puts Four Unofficial Game of Thrones Apps in the Spotlight