skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They also had a functional Dictatorship system. Well, functional for a time... until it went wrong. I think they were actually onto something with that idea though. The flaws likely could have been corrected. A common theme with most dictatorships gone awry is a rogue general, but the real problem is a military comprised of men that are willing to follow a rogue general.
You can probably also implement it in a PLC, which costs more than fifty cents but already includes the relays that you need to drive the solenoids that drop the soda cans and the darlingtons you need to drive the relays. Overall it might be cheaper and easier to program. The US$100 Phoenix 2701043 is the low end here: http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/2701043/277-2648-ND...

You might reasonably ask why there aren't 8-pin fifty-cent FPGAs. I don't really know, but some PLDs (not PLCs) come pretty close; http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/ATF16V8B-15JU/ATF16... was what I came up with on a Digi-Key product index browse: the Atmel ATF16V8B-15JU-ND, 84 cents in volume, a 20-pin Flash PLD with 8 macrocells, each with a flip-flop, 8 I/O pins, 10 input pins, and 10ns pin-to-pin latency. You can probably do a soda machine with 256 states. But an ATTiny has at least 1024 bits of RAM, which is a lot more than 8, and can do much more complex logic; it's just hundreds of times slower than the PLD.

A little higher upmarket, there are CPLDs like the 24-pin ATF750LVC-15SU-ND, which goes for US$3.72 in volume, with 20 flip-flops (bits of memory), 10ns pin-to-pin delay, EEPROM, 171 product terms feeding into 20 sum terms, and 12 input pins and 10 I/O pins.

For a while there was a Spartan FPGA that went for US$5, but perhaps due to a lack of articles like Yossi's here, it didn't do well and seems to be out of production.

Basically I think that when we're talking about state machines that are constrained to operate at mechanical speeds, it makes more sense to use the microcontroller approach — when your response times are measured in microseconds or milliseconds instead of nanoseconds, when you really only need one addition or multiplication per clock cycle instead of 8 or 100, you might as well do them one at a time and spend the extra real estate on more programmability rather than more computational power.

On the other hand, there are lots of computational tasks where it really would be nice to be able to do more ops per cycle.
Linux containers are pretty immature, they only started being implemented recently; mainframes, Solaris, FreeBSD are much older. The Linux implementation is interesting though in terms of granularity.
Since we're talking about Google and the American government here, I thought the context of the conversation was understood.
Coupon Site RetailMeNot Files for $230MM IPO
Indeed. If there were 50 attacks like 9/11 that were only stopped because of this, I would have to sit back and think real hard about my stance about the fight against terrorism. On the other hand, if it was 50 attacks like the idiots who were going to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge by cutting the support cables with a blowtorch, then the program is obviously not even remotely worthwhile.

Of course, the lack of details gives us some details already. If it really was 50 9/11-scale attacks, they would have said so. That they have not said so tells us that these attacks were not important anyway.
Brooklyn's New "Tech Triangle"
Not to attack your larger argument, but the Hungarian Jews were not entirely exterminated, although an attempt was certainly made. My wife's father's family is ethnically Jewish, some of them survived the concentration camps, and they stayed in Budapest after the war. There is a synagogue in Budapest. So tone down your own rhetoric a little, if you would.
I'm surprised they weren't already using a threshold-scheme. (Similar to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_cryptosystem )
Sorry, I was editing and just addressing that :( It's a bad habit of mine. I moved the edit here.

Okay, I know that he specifically refers to the US (he mentioned Gitmo) but remember that even then the state is the one who lets you exercise violence. The monopoly's just lending some of its power to make you shut up and stop whining so he can keep minding his (evil) business.

Also: Windows had a monopoly even when Linux existed. Monopolies don't always have 100% of the market share, but they're still a monopoly de facto and will fight hard to achieve the full monopoly.
I think the parent is slightly "better" in the followings senses. First, I think "surveillance state can be used to oppress citizens" is less novel a thought (though maybe I'm optimistic?). Second, yours presumes a corrupt government eager to secure its power, while parent presumes a corrupt individual eager to make money. While the former is not exactly remote, the latter is (I think) even more common.
STACK4 - A Connect4 game in 3D - goes BETA and needs your feedback
Please enlighten if I'm mistaken but is this not, like, a microcosm for a certain current culture of unproductive client MVC fetishism? What do you think is easier to maintain, the officially supported data-attribute based implementation here:

https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-checkout

or the model/controller code in the article? Maybe I've missed the point.
Helmets have changed substantially since their introduction, starting with the "hairnet" designs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_helmet#History_of_desi... also shown in the classic film Breaking Away), better foam/shell materials, fitting, visors that protect the nose from ground contact, and specialization toward different types of cycling. Full-face helmets are used in mountain biking for frontal impacts.
Well, sure, there's always the armed populace, but that is inherently illegal rebellion against the government, and it would be violently resisted by the government. (And, for the record, almost everyone I know owns guns, and that percentage was even higher before I moved to San Francisco.) But even though founding fathers wrote about the inevitability and even duty to violently resist an oppressive government, that's certainly not built into the government's rules for itself (the Constitution). Nowhere in the law does it say that these laws only need to be followed if you believe them to not be oppressive, or that you are free to overthrow the government if you find it oppressive.
Hehe, same here! So many fantastic courses to choose from, not enough time :)
In theory, the 4th Amendment trumps the Patriot Act. In practice, it doesn't.
Your Software's Walk Score
Some people see the valleys, others the mountains?
Interestingly, the enlargement of state powers over its citizens in the name of fighting (boogeyman of the day) is exactly what gave "the Terror", and its architects the original "Terrorists", their names.

So, "terrorismism" is just classical Terrorism.
Cold War 2.0
The gun boats were firing upon the ship's helicopters because they were in Iranian airspace ...
I can't even figure out what that is supposed to say. I'm guessing, Hiee! ????
The license they moved to is right there in the blog post, with a relevant snippet from the text-

>This software and related documentation are provided under a license agreement containing restrictions on use and disclosure and are protected by intellectual property laws. Except as expressly permitted in your license agreement or allowed by law, you may not use, copy, reproduce, translate, broadcast, modify, license, transmit, distribute, exhibit, perform, publish, or display any part, in any form, or by any means. Reverse engineering, disassembly, or decompilation of this software, unless required by law for interoperability, is prohibited.

I'm not sure how much clearer they could be that it's not a free license.
Alf Watt at WWDC: The Journey from iStumbler to Apple and Beyond
Ask HN: CLI design of import/export commands
I'm developing a distributed project management tool with a command line interface. I have two commands relating to initially copying a project to/from a hub. The export command looks like this:

prog export PROJECT HUB

This reads well when compared with the English "export this PROJECT to the HUB".

The import command could have the same order of arguments if I also want it to match with the English "Import the PROJECT from the HUB":

prog import PROJECT HUB

There is possibly some value in having a consistent order with the two commands. An alternative however is to enable the importation of several projects (or even all) at once, by reversing the order of the arguments:

prog import HUB [PROJECT-1 .. PROJECT-N]

English can also be massaged to work this way "Import from HUB all projects, or the following projects: PROJECT1-N". This also has the advantage that it is a similar order to the "git clone" command which has familiarity for software developers, although git is the last tool I will be modelling my interface on.

Which order would you prefer, and why?
Well, the government did vote for it, we know that much from history. I think the people would vote for it, I am optimistic and think that most people have their hearts in the right places.

Would the government vote for it again, if voting for it was anything other than a meaningless gesture? I suspect not. Not if it actually had teeth.
AppGratis Post-Apple Takedown: Nerfed but Fighting Back
That may or may not be his prerogative, depending on the laws where he bikes.
The NSA's Lockbox Has No Lock
Is there any neighborhood that experiences higher average temperatures in the winter? I've spent most of my time in South Beach, FiDi, and Outer Sunset, and while I never kept records, it always seemed to me like each of those had a higher average temperatures in the (late) summer.
This is complex and inefficient. Using os.read() instead of the fileobject's read() method is better.

It's inefficient to read a single byte at a time. The problem with proc.stdout.read() is that, say, proc.stdout.read(4096) will block until it has all 4096 bytes or the pipe has been closed. "for line in proc.stdout" blocks until a full line has been read. That's the "buffering" this is trying to avoid.

Using os.read() is better. It acts like more like socket.recv(). It will block until data is available, but then return all data in the OS buffer up to a size of 4096 bytes. The key is that, unlike a python fileobject's read() method, os.read() will return less than 4096 bytes if that's all that is available.

For example:

fd = getattr(proc, stream).fileno()
data = os.read(fd, 4096)
while data:
yield data
data = os.read(fd, 4096)

Edit: Now that I look more closely, "unbuffered()" actually buffers until it can produce an entire line. There's no reason to reinvent the wheel:

for line in proc.stdout:
print line
No, we're not. We're just saying that if they get caught driving without a license, they'll likely be prosecuted for that offense. They're perfectly free to try not getting caught. People on the no-fly list will be physically restrained from boarding a plane.
I think they mean that two people must be working together at all times whenever dealing with classified information.

You can't even access your own work computer without another person present.

It works. It's just extremely inefficient.
Well there's a kneejerk reaction if I ever heard one. Is Krugman now a public official?
The runtime is somewhat immature. It locks up oddly sometimes under heavy load. Dealing with latency and queuing issues around gc pauses is much less understood/documented than in the JVM world. The set of best practices in general for doing intense things with the ghc runtime is just still young and sparse.

STM can exhibit something that looks a hell of a lot like livelock.

Error handling is brutal. Catching all classes of exceptions (at the place you want to catch them!) for recovery is surprisingly tricky. This isn't necessary in theory with things like MaybeT, but in practice, lots of odd libraries use things like partial functions and the error function.

Not having tracebacks in production code is painful

The library community is thriving but it has a lot of volatility. Things break each other quite frequently. Semantic versioning either isn't enough to save it or hasn't been adhered to strictly enough.

Thunk leaks and other consequences of unexpected laziness aren't as common as people worry about, but they're kind of a pain to track down when they occur

Strict vs. Lazy bytestrings, String, Text, utf8-string, etc. You may find yourself doing a lot of string/bytestring type conversion

There's still wars raging about the right way to do efficient, safe I/O streams. Conduit vs. Enumerator vs. Pipes etc. They're all turning into pretty compelling projects, but the fact that there are N instead of 1 is sometimes a drag when you're dealing with libraries and dependencies.

There are not a lot of good open source "application server" type frameworks that really handle thread pooling, resource exhaustion, locking, logging, etc, in robust nice ways. We have one internally, and I'm sure a bunch of other haskell-using shops do too, but the ones on hackage are not nearly sophisticated enough (IMO) and I suspect not very battle tested against the kinds of ugly queuing problems you run into in highly loaded environments.

If I think of more, I'll add em... these are off the top of my head.
Poor people are overrepresented because lots of people see joining the army as a last resort. The armed forces also offer things like money towards university (in the US at least).
Is this still available? I don't think that's a valid option in the later versions (at least for the last year). There's been some discussion of this on the Opa forums, and it seems that the OCaml-like syntax is gone now. It's a pity, really.

Edit: ah, you're right. It apparently still exists, but the original ML-like syntax is undocumented now.
Elon Musk announces secret Model S battery swap feature.
When my business partner and I were starting our first business we would unwind at night by watching motivating movies like these. Some of the ones we watched included: Boiler Room, Wallstreet, and Glengarry Glen Ross. Two more recent movies that I would add to the list are Margin Call and the Social Network. My list of motivational books would be much longer.
I've been burned way too many times with Microsoft and there technology. I suggest that no one build any long lasting apps with this. They will dump it when something new and shiny comes along. Unless its based on C# or uses Visual Studio don't use it.
So who holds the copyright on these man pages? Did MySQL get copyright assignments from all contributers before Oracle bought them? If not, how do they have the authority to relicense the content?
Jim Crow, anti-miscegenation laws and hopefully anti-gay marriage laws etc.. could not have been ended without the 14th amendment and the Bill of Rights. 14th amendment is what overrode state-level majoritarianism (in states that had a white majority) and state terrorism/white minority rule (in states like South Carolina which did not).

The constitution and judicial review are not perfect, but they're far better than than naked and unchecked power of government(s).

"Women as property" did not occur in the United States. Denying suffrage rights to women as well as difficult of divorce were unjust, but us wasn't a particularly bad offender in that respect: many civilized countries gave women the vote after US did; many US states gave women the right to vote long before the right was extended nation-wide.

> The USA is no different than Rome, feudal Europe or France under Napoleon, despite the best intentions of its founders.

Well, I'd think there are some subtle differences, don't you think?

If you're going to compare US to any other country, compare it to UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. You'll find 1) the human rights records of all of these countries are on average similar 2) they're still far better than most other places, including other western countries.

I do think that a written constitution is better than de-facto basic law and custom: e.g., freedom of expression has been particularly strong in US due to the first amendment.

Which is why warantless surveillance is such a big deal: even amongst liberal democracies US is probably not the worst offender here, but (to use your parallel to Rome) this may be the proverbial Rubicon -- plain disregard for the text of the US constitution for "reasons of state" or "greatest good for the greatest number."

I will argue this: the "rights revolution" (namely extension of constitution to restrict federal and state governments) happened contrary to the worst _literal_ intention of the founders. The fact that we were able to preserve the "meta" spirit of the founding movement without codifying the repressive prescriptive mores of the 18th century is a huge testament to the constitution.
Stephen Kaplitt: Cease and Desist Response Letter
I think it would be absolutely awesome if the assembly output from my C compiler were syntactically-valid and semantically-equivalent C. Among other things, it would enable me to compile it (with a C compiler rather than an assembler) to run on a different CPU architecture. And then I'd just need a disassembler to generate it in the first place.

Unfortunately this isn't possible because you can do a lot of things in assembly that you can't do in C. RET, say.
I don't know if you ride bikes or not. Regardless of this, you should know that bike helmets are safety rated for low-speed crashes only. An example of this collision is a stationary object - e.g. the ground - impacting a moving object - e.g. your head - at a speed of 11-14 miles per hour.

This is what I term "a small subset of crashes".

Realistically, cyclists ride faster than this. And realistically, the types of collisions you want to protect against are not between you and the ground but rather you and a moving object, such as a car. Bike helmets are not rated for these kinds of crashes.

I would not use the Hovding either. The reason I presented it is because it represents a radically redesigned bike helmet.

Anyhow, as I said before, the only thing you can wear to really prevent bad bike accidents is a motorcycle helmet, which are in fact rated for high speed collisions.
What do you mean by that, exactly? That it looks simple?
VC consolidation
Exactly! If there's a solid argument to be made here, you'd think the silver lining here is that this would provide an opportunity to be forthcoming with evidence of it's value.

To be fair, Alexander seemed to think this way when it came to talking about the policy safeguards in place. At one point he was kind of falling all over himself with joy for how certain he thought it was that the American public would be pretty gosh-darned impressed at what a tight ship they're running over there (once they figure out how to release only information that will steer public opinion in that direction).
PLAN C: what's left--
pastebin, that New Yorker thing(no, gag order), Anonymous posting onto defaced sites, wikileaks, ... more?
At least it isn't called the Department of Peace.
Linux continues to rule supercomputers
Sun glasses? (or polarized glasses)
So we as taxpayers:

1. Did not know about this surveillance

2. Would not have voted for it to be put in place

3. Are (for the most part) angry that it happened

4. Must pay extra taxes so they can be sure to keep it secret next time

I've never been more pissed off about my government.
I know, I'm kind of a party pooper, but My, Maria and Max are the names of Monty's children. Do you see the pattern? MySQL, MariaDB, MaxDB.
For some context of how these commands fit in with everything else, here is the overall command usage summary:

prog help [COMMAND...]
prog init [DIRECTORY]
prog import HUB [PATHS...]
prog new ITEM
prog new project [PATH] [TITLE...]
prog new task [PATH] [TITLE...]
prog new issue [PATH] [TITLE...]
prog list ITEMS
prog list topics
prog list projects
prog list project-states PATH
prog list task-states PATH
prog list issue-states PATH
prog list hubs
prog show ID
prog log [ID]
prog comment ID
prog drop ID
prog push ID PATH [HUB]
prog export PATH HUB
prog sync [ID] [HUB]
prog upgrade [DIRECTORY]
prog sql STATEMENT...
prog ALIAS

At the moment PATH is the way to reference a project.
It's a checks and balances thing. If you're a large ISP and you retain physical control over your servers and network, if you're asked to hand over too much information, it's at least possible to delay and fight it in court. If they have root then you don't even know what they've done.
Every country with some form of election has something analagous to a constitution, because that's what a constitution is: a description of how government is formed, performed, and powers entailed. Many countries without elections also have something similar. This being said, without a document specifically called 'the constitution', the phrase "that's against the constitution" doesn't get a lot of play.

Australia doesn't need it to be in the constitution that slavery is against the law. It's been illegal here since before the civil war (throughout the British Empire in the 1830s). We did have some slavery - 'blackbirding' - and it was illegal without having to be in a constitution.

There is absolutely nothing magical about a constitution, it's just that generally making changes to that particular piece of law is defined as being more difficult than other bits of law, given that it also describes how the whole thing works. In the US, if you can get your law attached to the constitution, it's harder to repeal since you need a greater majority to do so. That's all. There's nothing that makes rights more special because they're 'in the constitution'.
I don't see freedom requiring to embrace such things. Freedom doesn't mean you can do anything you feel like doing, that's anarchy. Freedom means you can do whatever you like that does not infringe upon the rights of the person next to you. You can't make other people slaves to your freedom.

The difference I would say about your examples is that the actions of those people will potentially infringe directly upon the rights of others so there is probable cause for prior restraint. But even in those cases you can point out that the person wishes to perform a singular direct action without adequate training on another person that will most likely result in the harming of that person. You are at least accusing that person of wanting to do something that will likely be bad, with evidence to back it up, since performing surgery without training is a bad idea. I'm sure you can find examples of why it's a bad idea.

I would see that as quite different than preventing a person from boarding an aircraft with absolutely no evidence or, in some cases, even an accusation of any wrongdoing.
The NSA doesn't care at all if you copy the bits from there drives and publish them. What they care about is if you copy the content and publish that. With the right crypto, the bits would be indistinguishable from random data.
There are well established crypto systems that requires any n keys to decrypt. Plug in n=2, and you have a crypto enforced 2 person policy.

If you push decryption to the client (where it should be anyway, don't want plain text over the wires), then even with access to the data center, you cannot get the plaintext.

What I don't think pure crypto can get you is a quota on how much an individual can access.

Also, the fact that a single person can bypass whatever alarm systems they have means that if an external adversary gets root, they are undectable.
Firstly I was responding to the parent who said that Google tells us what they do with our data. Whether you think of it as ours or theirs, they don't tell us what they do with it.

Secondly, if what you say is true, then we should stop complaining about what Google passes it to the government - what business is it of ours what they do with their data?

Thirdly, I doubt that anyone seriously believes that the 'fee' for using GMail is that their messages become Google's property.
Facebook May Have Saved Thousands of Lives by Tweaking One Little Feature