skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's OK if specific data gets copied out pursuant to a warrant. That's what I'd expect for law enforcement, counter-terrorism, etc., and that already happens with our current legal system for investigations. Somehow those don't seem to leak out all the time either.

The point is to ensure that wholesale illegal data mining would not occur.
Siri is a man
Companies using GPLed software also don't have to share more than they're comfortable with sharing, or they would not be doing it. They are just comfortable with a bit more than other companies.
> "For me anytime I see even small amounts of money spent I compare it to what I've been taxed for the year and calculate how much of my money went to support the program."

Does your analysis include any estimate of corresponding benefits, specifically reduction in costs down the line?
Well the NSA claims (I'll stipulate "claims" as it's not as if I could check anyways) that they only hold it for 5 years.

Congress could enforce the matter by just not giving them money to build anything fancier though. Even the NSA has to obey information theory and physics.
They are solving problems people won't ever realize they're going to have.
My new email client is heavily scriptable via Lua:

http://lumail.org/examples/
Maybe you want to tell the load balancer before stopping a service, and actually wait for it to drain before going ahead. Or you want to disable alerts for services while they're being restarted.

Maybe puppet has hooks to integrate with the rest of your setup, I don't know - either way, caring about how things are restarted isn't that crazy imo.
I'm working on a analytics-related project and this looks like something I can use! The input format is a little restrictive, but understandably so (since this is meant to be used for tabular data)
The data I'm working with is a little more nested and looks like :
[ {
color: {r: 0, g: 0, b: 255}, shape: {name: "circle", description: "A round shape"}},
{color: {r: 255, g: 0, b: 0}, shape: {name: "triangle", description: "Has 3 sides"}}
]

than the example that was provided.
Likewise on an iPhone
Add this to your bookmark bar - https://gist.github.com/autarch/5856172 - it's quite handy.
Sorry, wasn't intending to hide anything. James Hardie was behind one of the crap systems of cladding I believe. Poorly treated timber from Carter Holt has been fingered, and a multitude of building development companies that created new legal entities for each new development, then folded them at the end of each job and vanished into the night. This was a standard practice. And of course, the government (starting with Nationals Bolger, and subsequent governments too) through weakening regulation, and local government who failed to ensure that even the weakened laws were followed. Like all good mistakes - everyone had a hand in it, and no one group was entirely responsible.

Edit: On further thought, I see I've been slightly misleading/unclear. When I started taking about the manufacturers of the problems, I wasn't meaning just the building materials that have failed, I also meant the regulatory systems and practices that were poor.
We've seen this a lot in user testing at Twilio, and I tried to boil down a lot of the info we saw into this talk, along the same lines as the post.

http://www.confreaks.com/videos/2468-railsconf2013-how-to-wr...
I am not sure about this - why would requiring an interface require boxing?
It's more clear if you read his follow-up to the post. (http://www.peteradkison.com/blog-entry-3-wizards-of-the-coas... <-- highly recommended)

What probably happened is that they (on the basis of really, really, REALLY bad advice) started with something like 1,000 shares of the company, valued at $0.50 apiece. They did genuinely own 100% at that time. Then as they raised the 300k they issued additional shares, at valuations between $0.50 and $4, diluting the founders horribly, because the founders did not award themselves new shares.

The fundamental problem here is grossly misvaluing the company (i.e. the total value of 100% of the shares) at the time new shares were issued. For example, if you had hypothetically bought them a drafting table for $100 (an example used later), you ended up with a 0.5% stake in the company (implicitly valuing the company at $2k at that point). A tech company which only exists as a napkin held between two hungry young men with no asset other than a gleam in their eye gets a notional value of $250k+ on day one. If you attempt to invest in them later, after they have e.g. a product with customers for it, the value gets re-pegged SHARPLY north of that, perhaps in the single digit millions or higher if they're doing really well.

He mentions that a lot of the money men involved were annoyed by hordes of small investors making seemingly outsized returns on their initial investments. I don't think he quiiiiite understands that they're not wrong: their outsized returns were essentially large gifts of surplus value from the founders to them. (The money men, of course, seem a little put out that the founders didn't instead make a large gift of surplus value to them.)
“OK Glass: Hand Me The Scalpe, Please…” Google-glass During Surgery
I'm not particularly interested in the Snowden play-by-play and backstory, but I think it's probably good for his cause.

The story would already be dead if he was extradited or simply disappeared quickly after the leak. Instead the US is getting daily "Where's Waldo" stories in the New York Times along with stories about the relationships between the US, China, and Russia. Having all of these angles from which to write about the story is giving it legs; and the longer it stays in the public's mind, the better.
They are trying WAY too hard to be like other sites and copied a lot of elements but under no vision or creative guidance new design looks horrible.

Old one was at least professional and to the point, this one is pure garbage and looks like a web site for a grape drink.
Please stop wildly ascribing negative intentions. Even if you think Sam is talking out of his ass, matching him does not improve your situation.
The menu is not usable for me. It seems like my screen is too small and yet I'm on a 1920px width screen.

The documentation pages are broken too. I guess the flat and typographical design is meant to improve the reading experience and not just for the sake of flatness.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2777218/Sans%20titre.png
> It seems to me that one of the biggest questions on this issue that Americans need to face is: are you punishing or are you rehabilitating?

It seems to me that there is a third option: isolating. Some people we cannot cure, but should not be "punished". Even so, they need to be kept away from the general population for the sake of the population.

I personally think that using imprisonment as a sort of "punishment" is barbaric and has no place in a civilized society. It should only be used to rehabilitate or, barring that possibility, isolate. You have someone who just won't stop killing people and your psychologists are at a loss as to how to turn him into a safe productive member of society? By all means, keep him locked up and off the streets, but trying to frame this detainment as a "punishment" is how we start down a very dark road.
Did they use PHP to build it? ^^
This is absurd. Is all this just to eliminate the n+1 queries problem? There are already solutions for this in any ORM.

When loading a survey into an ActiveRecord object, why not just preload the associations? You can then iterate through the children and subchildren of survey in Ruby. Either Survey.includes(categories: { subcategories: questions }).find(1) (one query) or Survey.preload(categories: { subcategories: questions }).find(1) (four queries) would do the trick.

No need for convoluted Postgres-only queries.
How? It compiles down, and produces(not-great but decent) JS, and be included normally, why the objection?
This is overly nitpicky. Of course some people are bad in any company. Clearly the blog author means to say that there tends to be more "bad" engineers at MSFT than you would expect from its outward reputation. The problem with that is that if every blog author hedges in exacting detail their every argument, discussions would devolve into technicalities.
I could do awesome stuff with cold fusion if I was still stuck in a previous era. There are much better solutions to the problems of web development.
As I was reminded in another comment many Atom based 1Gb netbooks were sold with XP and a 160Gb hard drive. Such a machine can run ubuntustudio well, and allow a young person to do quite a lot with audio, images and some low-fi video.
It appears this very site is using Perfect Forward Security. http://cloud.lucasjans.com/image/081m1V3c3O1z
Wow, they could use this for Hawaii. We deal with a lot of the same stuff here.
Fully agree! It doesn't hold a candle to the gReader interface...
For what it's worth, I haven't decided Snowden is "a good guy". (I'm not 100% sure of anything in life other than "something exists", and so far I don't even know what "exists" means) But I consider it likely enough that I wouldn't feel good about anything but a very, public trial, where everybody moves reaaal slow and I can see their hands at all times. [which is silly of me to say, because I'm not even an US citizen, but that's how I think and feel about this, doubly so if I were one :P]

All those people, even officials who are already yelling traitor and espionage? Restrain those first, show them their place, before you ask Snowden to come into their reach.

Some guy who leaked slides is on the run, while the man with kill lists resides in the White house; there is so much wrong with that picture. Maybe Snowden should get a trial, but not one presided over by a bunch of hardened criminals who just happen to have the law on their side because they can't keep their fingers off it.
Exponential Growth of Supercomputing Power
Can you please elaborate on the exploitable codepath you found that was due to the JIT? That sounds interesting!
I know that Montecito was one of the highest priced zip codes in the USA, as of a few years ago. SB is stuck between the ocean and the mountains, with no room to grow.
AWS: We’ll go to court to fight government requests for data
Google Apps or LDAP Auth For Stackato PaaS
HPC geeks ponder 100 petafloppers and quantum supercomputers
I'm holding out for Lorem Ibsen.
Maybe he wants to contribute? That's all I could think up...
Does anyone else think that the best way to promote PHP would be to have a home page that doesn't take 240ms of processing before it starts to download?
Why Hadoop projects fail — and how to make yours a success
It's an interesting method, reminded me of vimtutor.
If one is being extremely charitable (to the poster, not Georgia Tech) one could say that GATech is an elite engineering school but not super elite, like MIT. There is legitimate controversy over what the best university is for CS in the world. For what the top four are there isn't. They are CMU, MIT, Berkeley and Stanford. Georgia Tech has a really great reputation and every professor there is a very impressive researcher but it is not comparable to MIT.
> What program broke it?

I'm not going to limit my view to an incomplete set of documents written by no-credibility liars and rubber stamped by secret courts. When multiple independent sources, people who actually worked there, come out and say "no it's far far more than even that, they're on a mission to collect everything", I tend to believe them.

So you tell me...

What was the "program" authorizing Room 641A?

How many other "fiber taps" are there? (as alluded to in the PRISM doc)

What data is being collected?

Or rather, what data is not being collected?

The fact that we don't know the answers to these questions because they are being deliberately withheld from us means that we are not "secure against unreasonable searches".
Yup, that was the only one that I tried that really fit my workflow.
Three kids, a safe job and an Audi is not ambitious. And it certainly isn't netting you a YC partnership at 25.
I faced this dilemna last year. I chose college, and it was t he best decision of my life. Yes, it's expensive. Yes, I could learn how to code by sheer willpower and practice. But the people I've met and the things I have learned, not just academic lessons but lessons about life as well, have already made the experience worth it.

My advice to people in my situation is to really, really think about your decision. It's sexy to drop out these days, but it's not always the right thing to do
IRS Wasn't Fond of Open Source Either
Unless I am mistaken, that is only for a specific subset of data. The released policy also includes indefinite retention of encrypted data, even on Americans.

As far as budgets are concerned, when is the last time anything in the intelligence budgets was significantly cut that it affected their operating capabilities?
> Why not?

That is exactly the WRONG question. Government power & influence needs to be restricted to the bare minimum necessary - for the security(!) of its citizen.

We can all clearly see what extensive government power leads to. Just wait for the HN front page to be flooded again with reports about Snowden/PRISM.

There are certain tasks that should be put in the hands of the government (ensuring the rule of law, national defense, making sure free elections happen) and others that have a good ROI (education / healthcare).
But beyond that, it is just more power to the wrong institution.

Going completely 1984 here: Today they distribute Linux, tomorrow they distribute Linux with a Rootkit pre-installed.

Regarding UI changes: Boy... I hate those. 20 years of Moore's law have left us with incredibly powerful computers and we manage to waste all that raw power, those billions of CPU cycles per second on fancy UI. You are completely right - from a technical, educated standpoint.

BUT, that's not how the human brain works. For your average consumer the rule of thumb is "if it looks fresh, it is fresh". Plain & simple. They don't "get" that NTFS now supports transactions and that atomicity in file operations is like the holy grail and just completely awesome - but "Oh boy! That start button with lights up when I move the mouse over it!!!!"

Tell you what: Microsoft has that shit figured out - at least with every other version ;-)
Yoleo has been wonderful for me. I've been recommending it to everybody.
Ask HN: Will you help a junior developer in need of short-term employment?
Hi!

My name is James and I'm a student at App Academy in San Francisco. We spend a lot of time working on projects in Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, and Backbone. In less than a month I gained enough skill to build a lite version of Rails' ActiveRecord in a day. We will be finishing up around the middle of next month and then I will be searching for a job as a junior engineer (not that I haven't already started looking).

Here is my problem: I want to stay in San Francisco while I look for a job, but the money is running dry very quickly. Things are more expensive here than I anticipated. If I don't find a way to get some money after I finish my stint at App Academy, I will have to move back to Florida and stay with my mom while I look.

Will you let me work with you for a month or two? Not only will this allow me to stay in the area while I look for work, but I will gain experience and you will get some cheap labor. If you are interested then I invite you to check out my GitHub and StackOverflow accounts or shoot me an email, all of which can be found in my profile. Payment is negotiable. I really just want enough to pay my bills until I search for the right job.

Hope I hear some good news soon!

James
Well, the mistake you made (and that a 19-year old starting a company should avoid) was getting into debt in the first place, even if it was with your family.
Okay.

function f(n) { return -Math.abs(n) }

EDIT: something that works for negative numbers:

function f(n) { return -n[0] || [n] }
Trust is the central issue, as you are correct that no Snowden leaks have demonstrated illegal activity. Without trust, it's just as easy to argue that the next president can use our secret weapons and will only be prevented from starting a nuclear war because of political policies. We trust the government with enormous power (including enough weaponry to destroy the entire planet and enough surveillance to defend our national interests).

@mpyne: Thank you for the dose of common sense in what has become an unrecognizable hyperbole circus over the last few weeks.
Or a lot of other groups [1], but I thought this was the most relevant to HN

[1] www.nytimes.com/2013/06/25/us/politics/documents-show-liberals-in-irs-dragnet.html
"When trying to talk people away from Outlook that entire secondary ecosystem has always been a much bigger roadblock than the lack of a native client or even the idea of storing corporate data in "the cloud" in my experience."

Wow, that is surprising to me. I wonder if there's an opportunity to provide a replacement for people who are just getting to the point of needing something like Outlook, but aren't entrenched yet.
If that is the constraint, then don't go to school.

If you absolutely have to go to school, student loans are the responsibility of the person who takes them out, and have nothing to do with the blog's point. Get financial aid, get a merit scholarship, go to community college - there are alternatives within your control.
dont worry , they used JEE so you can feel secure.
Snowden should be trending on Twitter
The landing page looks pretty good I think. When I first looked at the site I had JavaScript turned off, and I think it looked even better that way.
Okay. MSFT Research is great. It would be unreasonable to offer that as a viable alternative for even a highly gifted and ambitious (but not genius-level) 19 year old.
I gave Yoleo a shot as well. Biggest issue is no mobile app :-(
Yes, there are a few problems with PHP, and the following rather famous blog post outlines them quite nicely.

http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...
I'm guessing that figure came from Cato's comments on TSA body scanners[1].

[1]: http://www.cato.org/blog/cato-comments-tsa-nude-body-scanner...
Techu v0.20b - RESTful full-text searches with Sphinx, Redis, Nginx and Django
Do some reading. Congress doesn't actually vote on how much money the NSA gets.
Keep in mind that the final software for the console can differ from the OS that the development kit is running.
The Playstation 2 development kit was running Red Hat Linux and shipped with a custom system software once it was released.
The Playstation 3 development kit was also running Red Hat Linux, but it shipped with CellOS, an operating system that has supposedly been branched off of FreeBSD during development.
Hey there! Make sure you check out the list of issues for planned features https://github.com/georgepsarakis/techu-search-server/issues... Add your own request!
Great idea! Where are the verbs, though? Right now I can see from the JS source it doesn't use Markov chains [1], which could improve the result greatly. Good placeholder text in a language the user can understand (as opposed to simple Greeking [2]) is non-distracting precisely because it balances on the verge of meaning. From my experience I'd assume fake Latin and nonsense prose would both be less distracting than a soup of fascinating SF words.

Edit: Here's what a markov.js remix of William Gibson's Burning Chrome looks like:

>Los Angeles was a dream, responsive to Deke's slightest thought. For weeks he systematically visited every boozy watering hole in the Fifties. Sometimes they'd run old eroded newsreels as filler on the museum's exhibits, a NASA Hasselblad recovered from the inside. It probably took all of Jackman's silent and vast and perfectly immobile bulk wedged into a gray plastic tiara. Tally Isham smiling up from the huge speakers. He sought her almost blindly on the edge of the tall drinks and paid. A big woman in green, and in- clined her head. She was everyone's giggling sister, in a way to trust in whatever context it encountered. Congratulations, I heard the woman said. That's the trouble with designer drugs; they're too clever. That stuff you're doing has some hard data, Toby; she's a hologram stuck behind my left ear, where they'd gone in to tell it to. Nobody at all. And I know you were looking for us, or for the road, admire the city walls, the high point of the hydrogen atom. Tsiolkovsky's radio telescope was tracking, relaying the signal to geosynchronous comsats that bounced it down to Plesetsk, where bulldozers were already excavating for a year later, when two leading firms had the exact change, unless he wanted and couldn't have, everything he'd had to jump with it, and it was relentlessly tacky: ephemeral stuff extruded by the open doors and watch the crowd pull me along, walking blind, willing myself to relax.

[1] For Markov chains in Javascript see, e.g., http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~cz1/prog/markov/markov.html.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeking
At least they know the previous one was fugly.
> For example, if you had a system that could scour through essentially infinite amounts of hay and be able to spit out each brown needle that passed through (think keyword filters), then definitely you'd want all the hay you could find, and then even more hay.

It doesn't work that way. In a big system with too much diversity, anomalies become indistinguishable from noise and you cannot eliminate noise. This translates in so many false positives that (1) the security agencies will end up spending their resources on investigating innocents and (2) a lot of innocents will suffer from being discriminated, investigated and even tortured.

And another thing - it's a commonly known fact that security agencies have the means to listen and to record phone conversations, ever since the phone was invented. If anything, a would-be bomber would have to be pretty dumb to speak about his actions on the phone or to send unencrypted messages over the Internet. If this stuff still happens only speaks to their level of sophistication, but training on the matter can render whatever "smart filtering" you have useless.
Agree. PHP is actually still my goto language for web stuff, even if today its more or less moving to the backend only. The language itself isnt very nice but i simply love the symfony php framework. Ive been using it since 2007 and the 2.x version produces very clean code, is extensible in any way imaginable and just lets me get stuff done really quickly.

I think not many people know how mature the tools in the php ecosystem are today, many people that switched to rails or whatnot years ago still think of PHP as it was 10 years ago, and yes that was horrible.
Thanks, Got the quote : Matthew 6:

1 "Take heed that you do not do your charitable deeds before men, to be seen by them. Otherwise you have no reward from your Father in heaven. 2 Therefore, when you do a charitable deed, do not sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory from men. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their reward. 3 But when you do a charitable deed, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 that your charitable deed may be in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will Himself reward you openly.
Ah, but what if it was

three kids, a safe job, two Ferraris, and the ear of Larry Ellison?

or how about

Climb the ladder, eventually transition to politics, and become a Senator on a technical platform?

ruswick's point is that ambition is not the sole province of the startup crowd.