skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder what current (or perhaps past?) president of the MLA, Michael Bérubé, has to say about this.

Or rather, I wonder if you wonder. I know. It's this:

"""
You know, I've been trying for many years now to get people to understand that the decline in humanities enrollments in the US happened almost entirely between 1970 and 1980. I usually work from this table from the NCES Digest of Education Statistics -- http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_286.asp -- where you can see that English plummeted from an anomalous 7.6 percent of all bachelor's degrees in 1970-71 to 3.4 percent in 1980-81. (It was 4 percent in 1950; it rebounded to about 4.5 percent in the mid-90s and is back down to 3.2 percent today.)

But today I came across this other table -- http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_289.asp -- and lo! In 1970-71, 17.1 percent of all bachelor's degrees were awarded in the humanities, and in 2009-10 the figure was .... 17.0 percent. For the purposes of the NCES, "humanities" includes "degrees in Area, ethnic, cultural, and gender studies; English language and literature/letters; Foreign languages, literatures, and linguistics; Liberal arts and sciences, general studies, and humanities; Multi/interdisciplinary studies; Philosophy and religious studies; Theology and religious vocations; and Visual and performing arts." That last group, btw, has more than tripled in majors since 1970, while the total number of degrees has merely doubled. And "liberal arts and sciences, general studies, and humanities" has increased sixfold. This makes up a lot of ground from the relative dropoff in English and foreign languages.
"""
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” John Steinbeck
At least the USSR would notify you before listening in, I guess.
Inefficiency is the most important protection we have against tyranny. The entire design of our government reflects this: three branches, two houses of congress, checks and balances, limits on how laws can be enforced, etc. Inefficiency is the only thing that ever stood between the USA and tyranny.

The real problem is that we have allowed the government to become far too efficient over the past few decades.
Survey of instruction selection (in compilers)
Security Without Identification
I'm guessing that people who only accept encrypted mail are such a small minority, you're probably safe from most spammers if you do this.

People who target your company and employees specifically, maybe not. But even this could be made more difficult for spammers by only allowing access to your public key directory from trusted IP ranges.

It's also a great idea from the standpoint of giving an encryption policy teeth. I'm thinking of a company where the official line is "We encrypt all our email," but then some IT screwup results in having half the company sending each other cleartext email for several quarters before anybody notices.

If your mailservers reject unencrypted mail, the above scenario can't happen, because presumably people will notice when everyone's mail starts getting discarded, and it'll be fixed very quickly.
this link has been down for me for a few hours
Or /r/all without the NSFW subreddits, which ends up being indistinguishable from the default.
That's just it though, we've heard of stuff like ECHELON (which involved no warrants whatsoever) since years before this discussion would have taken place. ECPA dates to 1986! FISA dates to 1978! The insidiously loose interpretation on 4th Amendment controls for third-party communications dates back for centuries.

A lot of this was just a quick Google search away, and would have been just as relevant the very year GMail was introduced.

Likewise there's no theoretical reason to trust internal Google policy controls over U.S. government legal and policy controls. Even if what the author thought had been true about U.S. law actually was true, he'd still have been setting his customer up for the possibility of having their confidential data leaked (maliciously or not) or hacked into (e.g. by the always-vulnerable password reset function).

That's not just a nitpick either. There have been a couple of services at work I would have liked to setup on something like Digital Ocean, Basecamp Breeze, etc. that I can't because of PII concerns.

So while I'm sorry that the author made wrong assumptions I don't know what to tell him other than IANAL isn't just a five-letter acronym, and "due diligence" doesn't simply mean "hire a contractor to think about this for me".
Monetize your content. Help the world.
The author brings up a great point in that C++ really does have a massive lack of modern development tools. I can envision a lot of the language being fixed up from the tooling angle, eliminating a large part of the repetitive and boilerplate work that bogs the language down the most.

Could anyone point me in the direction of modern C++ development tools or would be interested in beginning a project to create them, possibly through Sublime plugins and a preprocessor? (email in profile) I'm familiar with CDT & Visual Studio, both of which are hardly satisfactory (not to say they don't do some things well.) I've also written some tools to close some gaps that I see in C++, but nothing too intrusive or ambitious yet. These are here: https://github.com/personalcomputer/supermake & https://github.com/personalcomputer/cppinterp
NSA.gov is down
If a major is a program of study, then to study a major is to study a program of study. It's possible, of course, but I don't think that's what most majors do. And English ones especially would see the subtle language implications here. (As you can see we're both already abusing the term: majors are also those that enroll in a particular program of study, but I'm quite sure he didn't mean to study them.)

It just seemed ironic that a question about the validity of an English major was perhaps incorrect in its use of English, that's all. Not a big deal. Not even sure if I'm right, I've just never heard "to study a major" before.
> No one has found a way to put a dollar sign on this kind of literacy, and I doubt anyone ever will. But everyone who possesses it — no matter how or when it was acquired — knows that it is a rare and precious inheritance.

This is a widespread sentiment. This is even a chic sentiment. This is maybe even a sentiment I once sympathized with. It is also the kind of romantic bullshit that hurts people.

It doesn't really matter if Johnny Middle Class believes it, his parents can probably help him muddle along somehow. Jorge, though, first in his family to get to college, might just take it seriously, and wind up somewhere ugly with too much debt, four years gone, and a piece of paper that nobody wants.

I personally know at least a dozen people like that. I didn't make that mistake- but it was more by whim than anything else.

The worst, saddest part of all of this, is how trope heavy and unoriginal it is. This is the world's second oldest complaint, right after "the youth are lazy and disrespectful."
> Bitcoin is, by design, deflationary.

No, they have a very carefully controlled (and diminishing) inflation of the money supply.
That was my thought too, but to be fair:

" 'Thankfully, neither of us use our Google accounts for anything remotely sensitive,' McCarthy wrote on his blog on Friday."
when it says that the half-life of the rhodopsin molecule is about 420 years, does that mean that if we would live that long, half of our rhodopsin will be gone? how would that affect our eyesight?
Automagical: Objective-C to C# source code translation
Peer-to-peer technologies not only make Skype obsolete, but also make it much harder to spy on people.

By the way, use WebRTC or some completely peer-based video conferencing (WebRTC still uses central servers to establish connections). Don't use Skype. Doesn't make any sense from a technology standpoint or from a privacy standpoint or anything.

I am actually amazed by how little discussion there is on Hacker News and reddit about peer-to-peer technologies for things like video conferencing, publishing and realtime data collaboration.

This whole NSA thing should be enough to push things like named data networking/content centric networking, WebRTC and meshnets (http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan) into the mainstream.

I believe that we are going to move away from a lot of traditional ways of doing things pretty soon. For one, obviously centralized servers have to go. Replace that with encrypted, privacy-focused data oriented networking.

Replace centralized internet backbones with wifi meshnets, private laser systems, even private fiber networks, etc.

Its very nice to have a simple programming language and API available with things like Webkit and Mozilla browsers, but that still puts too much power in the hands of a few companies, and locks us into particular implementations, and also traps us within the browser.

Programmers and businesses do need easy-to-use, cross-platform and cross-device APIs and programming languages. I think we can port a lot of the Web APIs to a language-neutral, binary-neutral, implementation-neutral semantic representation. Dump as much of the unnecessary complexity from Web APIs as possible.

Take a look at what HTML/SVG etc. provide and re-engineer a more general purpose solution for representing all kinds of things _including_ software source code that is based on truly semantic representation inspired by description logics which separates presentation from display/editing.
If I were really brave, like Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg was after the 2011 massacre there, then I would stick by the ideals my country was founded upon and wouldn't particularly care about the public's reaction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Norway_attacks#Domestic

"At a press conference the morning after the attacks, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and Justice Minister Knut Storberget addressed the country. Stoltenberg called the attack a "national tragedy" and the worst atrocity in Norway since World War II. Stoltenberg further vowed that the attack would not hurt Norwegian democracy, and said the proper answer to the violence was "more democracy, more openness, but not naivety".
You are trying to take Obamacare seriously. Sure,
it's a serious issue, and no doubt in the
2000 pages of the bill and the 10s of thousands
of pages of 'regulations' there is some good
thinking.

But my overwhelming impression is that Obamacare
was, in the end, poorly designed. Maybe enough
writers of 'regulations' can make it helpful,
but I doubt it. I just believe that the whole
thing was politics, not healthcare. Or, I
can't trust in the seriousness of something that
made Nancy smile like a Homecoming Queen.
And I can't trust the academic
'health care system economic
planning' community. That's
Karen Davis, right? I've been
too close to such academics,
and I wouldn't trust it to hand
me a band aid.

The exceptions have already started.
Supposedly Congress doesn't want
it for themselves (does this mean
they actually read some of it
or understood it was junk
just on general principles?).
Some states are fighting it.

My guess is that after Obama leaves
office there will be no one
strongly supporting it. Then
the IRS will torque off one too
many people, and Congress will
just repeal it. I'm just guessing
of course.
Archive that displays more than a paltry 15 lines at once:

https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/2013/06/sort/time...
> it would still not be as big a problem as automobile accidents

In terms of deaths? No, it wouldn't.

But what about the property damage and economic disruption that came from attacking an important financial center?
The English major has been declining for at least a decade, due to the offshoring of coveted jobs for English majors such as writing poetry. [1]

[1] http://watleyreview.com/2003/111103-2.html
Well, I think there's a weaker, but still alarming claim to be defended here: that one reason is the ease of circumventing seizure; that that reason props up the value of BTC somewhat; and that that reason has become weaker, hurting its value, and possibly the network effects it needs to take off.
I coded the page for my girlfriend
> bizarro literature based Hacker News where a person is saying "Do you really need a full Comp Sci major to write code? Seems like one or two classes would do."

I didn't know this Hacker News was literature based. Interesting. Where is the non-bizarro one?
It actually depends on the merchant category code (MCC) of your merchant account when it is setup. Only certain category codes, such as hotels and gas stations, are allowed to capture for more than they authorize.
Meanwhile there is a smugness that goes along with purely technical training, a certainty that its way is the only valuable way, that calls itself education but whose true name is Philistinism

It's funny that you use the term 'smugness', as that's exactly the feeling I got while reading your post. There's just something telling about a person who calls others Philistines.
"All she had to do was move to a state with 'community rating'", is that it?
That's how current spam filters work, every mail server reports back to some central directories which keep tab on IPs, common subjects, keywords and other characteristics used to calculate spam scores. The trick is doing that without giving out access to message content to third-parties.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spamhaus_Project
I agree. But it's ironic that the author never argues her case with clear writing.

She asserts that "clear thinking, clear writing and a lifelong engagement with literature" is extremely extremely valuable. She asserts this as a fundamental "truth."

She probably doesn't even realize she needs to explain why because it actually is considered a "truth" among English majors.

That's too bad. Obviously it's not considered a "truth" by the people she wants to convince. And they'll think it's just some stereotypical English major bullshit.
I don't think so. You seem to be entirely overestimating the effectiveness of your proposal.
Surely the oldest complaint is that life's too brutal for romance. But why bother living, without meaning, without romance?
That's very cool. I really dig the minimalism of it. I'm currently using a system that involves about the same amount of config and leans on Capistrano for the heavy lifting, but I think I might investigate using deliver for my next project.
From Europe to Silicon Valley - things I do/don't like about USA
As long as the people making the case for studying the humanities make it as unconvincing as the author, there will continue to be pressure towards STEM education. "I can't explain it or give a quantifiable reason, but I know that it is important" is simply unacceptable as a defense of the humanities (I majored in Political Science, and all of the standard critiques of humanities education were true of my experience).
Beijing Said to Have Made Call to Let Snowden Depart
http://www.cato.org/blog/untappable-apple-or-dea-disinformat...

http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2012/08/dear-apple-p...
Sen Schumer Goes On Furious Tirade At Putin For Allowing Snowden In Russia
Reasonable doubt means there is reasonable doubt. Or if you prefer metaphors, the term is naked. Doubt, that the progenitor of the pass phrase was likely the one who transferred the coins to another address(s) is sufficient to preclude it as a determining factor. That is, of course, if your lawyer is good enough to be persuasive.

Meanwhile, people have been convicted with far more implausible evidence (eyewitness testimony comes to mind) so this will be the least of your worries.
The reasons given lined up with my own thoughts. It's very hard to build a stable, reliable and self repairing distributed network. Communicating status and presence info is the largest challenge that distributed networks is the hardest and most difficult challenge you have, whereas with a centralized server, and 'register' its fairly easy to push updates out for all of this. Also, the server can be set to maintain status for the subscriber, even if they are not really connected.
Right. The determinant as to whether information is classified is its effect on national security if widely known.

You don't classify innocuous material just because it might be embarrassing.

But on the other hand you can classify material that risks national security even if it also happens to be embarrassing.

In any event PRISM itself is 0.01% or so in actuality as it was claimed to be, I'm not even sure I'd call PRISM itself embarrassing (it's just a damn web service). The laws under which PRISM operate might be different, but that's not something we can pin on NSA, and it's not something that was secret anyways.
Facebook Accidentally Revealed Their Long-Term Strategy With Instagram Video
To anyone using Skype for actual work, the problems with peer-to-peer messaging become rather obvious, as messages from one device appear only when both that device and the receiver are online, which gets really chaotic when communicating with more people at the same time.

Basically, the perception is "if you don't send the message when all of you are online, really weird things happen".
I've been saying this for, probably close to a year now. Moving supernodes from being personal consumers to running in a cloud is a good thing and has minimal impact on privacy.

Even comments here indicate people clearly didn't read this email or fail to understand it at all.
Bitstamp is pretty good. The only problem is that the cost of an international wire is a significant part of the purchase price unless you are converting at least 1000 USD.
I'd be quite keen to hear how they determined that #16161D is the color of Eigengrau. Stick somebody in a pitch black room, show him various shades of grey on an illuminated display, stop when indistinguishable? But alas, the [citation needed] suggests it was simply pulled out of someone's Eigengrau-colored orifice...
I'll say this: more so than any other department or discipline (yes, including computer science), I think a person would benefit most from a few properly taught college English classes.

Well-taught classes (and I took enough good and bad English classes to recognize the distinction) are completely irreplaceable by Google or MOOCs. They focus overwhelmingly on the art of discourse: sure, there are papers and exams but the soul of the class is in the daily lecture; everyone comes in with X, Y, and Z read and you discuss it, growing and pruning theories and interpretations of literature as one would an oddly looking tree. A good professor wants to teach you that Frankenstein is an allegory for the Industrial Revolution, or the creation of Man; a great professor knows the conversation that Shelley had with Chaucer and Milton and everyone in between -- and knows how to help their students figure out everything themselves, with just enough help along the way.

A good English course only needs a semester to teach you how to make a point, argue it, research it, defend it against a multitude of competing and contradicting points, and ultimately handle the reality that the point has been made many times before by people much smarter than you.

(This experience is magical, and something that really can't happen in a room with more than forty people, let alone a web app with hundreds.)

You develop along the way a finely honed level of communication (I had a fellow CS grad once suggest to me that 100-level English classes were about punctuation and grammar, and it made me inappropriately angry); you learn how to approach questions with no answer and conversations with no real goal, how to talk with peers, mentors, and people who died hundreds of years ago. You learn a tremendous amount about yourself and others through the lens of literature, honed tightly by a great professor and a greater book, because the way you approach any experience is of course colored by everything about you.

I switched out of the English department my sophomore year to pursue Computer Science, but British Literature II was the most valuable class I've ever taken.
List of hidden OS X features, tips and tricks
Cody Wilson on 3D Printable Guns and in Praise of Edward Snowden (Video)
My understanding of arsenic poisoning is that it binds to some proteins that inhibit some processes in cells. This means it eventually gets cleared from the system. So as long as you don't get a lethal dose it shouldn't cause long term damage. There is arsenic in apples seeds and I've never heard of long term issues from eating a few of those.

Lead on the other hand builds up in your system and causes permanent damage.
I'm picking up mixed messages from this article. On the one hand, the author describes the (theoretical) value of an excellent humanities education, and regrets the decline in the number of English majors. So far so okay. But on the other hand, she says that today's English majors are confused thinkers and pompous writers, and are being poorly taught. Well, in that case, what's the big loss? Let them major in a STEM field, so they might learn to think, and might also one day repay their loans.

Solzhenitsyn was a mathematician.
Yeah, because there haven't been any despotic regimes in the US lately.
Congress already has healthcare (tremendously good healthcare), so obviously they wouldn't want to replace it with Obamacare, as that is only what is good enough for everyone. Instead they will simply say the existing Congressional pension/healthcare system meets PPACA requirements and call it a day.

That's the same thing they did for military Tricare health care (which is as socialist as they come, by the way :P). Instead of replacing Tricare with the national plan they simply declare that Tricare is a national plan that complies with the requirements for PPACA.

I wouldn't be surprised if Obamacare is altered in the future but I would be surprised if it's repealed entirely, especially once people start to realize how many people have nothing else to rely on.

And then in about 10-20 years or so we'll have people like today, screaming and protesting "KEEP GOVERNMENT OUT OF MY OBAMACARE" in completely unironic fashion, just as they do with Medicare today.
From Wikipedia: "philistinism describes the social attitude of anti-intellectualism that undervalues and despises art, beauty, spirituality, and intellect; ‘the manners, habits, and character, or mode of thinking of a philistine’.[1] A philistine person is the man or woman who is smugly narrow of mind and of conventional morality whose materialistic views and tastes indicate a lack of and indifference to cultural and æsthetic values.[2]"
The Germans, going into WWII, did not. The term was coined later, and the devices it's meant nowadays to imply were developed later. This is, of course, an accident of history and I wasn't making a deep point, just having some fun, but I do think you missed my point which was that threats of a mushroom cloud in particular would be a difference not a similarity between the two situations.
> There is arsenic in apples seeds and I've never heard of long term issues from eating a few of those.

That's for two reasons:

1: Because almost no one eats apple seeds - even if you swallow them, they probably pass through unchanged.

And, 2: There is no arsenic in apple seeds! It has cyanide - which is a totally different thing.
Php.net get's a new design
Kelo vs. New London.

The job of lawyers is to find loopholes. Since the entire scotus is composed of lawyers we more strongly risk having a court that chooses to sympathize and reward cleverness in finding loopholes that are technically correct according to the letter of the law. For example, myriad genetics.
Yes, someone will have to find a way
to get standing.
If you had video confirmation that it was the police who tripped your alarm before firing a degausser, that would be pretty cut and dried. If it were automatic, maybe not.