skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But but but we'll pay you! We'll pay you approximately half the market rate for your services in a consulting setting! How could you turn that down?
> Achieving simplicity in code is an art.

By that do you mean that it's difficult to do and you need to practise it? That sounds like a craft. I find it impossible to imagine the Mozart's Requiem or Sistine Chapel of software, much less of programming.
That's one reason I feel Snowden has hurt his cause by digging in for so much.

Another leak or two (especially about China, who most Americans feel are one step away from being the next U.S.S.R. anyways) and Obama, DNI, Congress, and basically everyone will be able to smooth the whole thing over by painting it with the traitor brush.

I really think Snowden has tried to bite off more than he can chew. At first I believed him that he wanted a debate about how the NSA was being used and how dangerous it could be in the wrong hands. Now I think he really wants to gut the whole thing entirely.

But Americans don't want that, they want an agency whose job it is to protect COMSEC, break others' COMSEC and especially to detect and root out terror cells and other anti-U.S. crime before it reaches our shores. The more Snowden aligns his goals with the destruction of the NSA and CIA the more I think he will get people to turn on him completely.

Don't get me wrong; I want that utopia where no one commits crime, we don't need money, everyone's interested are 100% aligned and we just explore the galaxy as peaceful peoples. But if we ever achieve that it would be 1000 times more remarkable than the Sistine Chapel. And you can bet your ass they wouldn't have completed the Sistine Chapel had they torn down all that ugly scaffolding ⅓rd of the way through.
PNG vs SVG for sprites
How is it possible for that to be taken as a humorous remark?
"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court."

Not that the US follows the constitution, but you know, in theory nothing he's done is remotely close to treason, and even if what he did qualifies, it might be difficult to get two Witnesses.
First steps with Hy, the Pythonic Lisp
I'm always curious of why people feel the need to defend various people who are obviously breaking rules, laws and other moral codes.

The government works for the people - not the other way around. We should be at least as suspicious of them as they are of us.
There is absolutely nothing naive about questioning whether intelligence agencies ought to exist.
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Thanks ! :) Yes, of course, but ads are displayed by YouTube and iTunes links aren't affiliated.
It sounds more like you're saying that software is an art, rather than programming. The details of how the program was created have a similar status to incidental stuff about tools and how Michelangelo used them.
It's morally wrong, but that's the way our gov't plays it.
You make an interesting macro point. But there's a world of difference between an entry level full-time job and a 1-2 week "audition project".

The phenomenon you're describing is what makes recruiting such an interesting problem. The largest or wealthiest employers can often afford to constrain their candidates to people who have proven themselves in other settings. Which of course leaves a "Moneyball"-type opening to the employers who can figure out how to hire for aptitude instead of experience. Which makes hiring at those savvier employees a high-stakes, high-value process, instead of a tedious formality inflicted across the whole team.
Why is this US only?
Your dinging of Bush on his post-election shift to a foreign policy president fails hard due to it being after 9/11. And it's not like he didn't continue his promised domestic policies, remember Medicare Part D, No Child Gets Ahead, the all in effort that ruined the party for a while on immigration, and the attempt to reform Social Security?
That's not practical for landing due to safety concerns. But Airbus has a related proposal for making take offs more efficient with an electric launching sled. http://www.airbus.com/innovation/future-by-airbus/smarter-sk...
> A few weeks ago, Edward Snowden blew the whistle on an ongoing program - involving the Obama administration, the intelligence community and the internet services giants - to spy on everyone in the world.

Er... no.
Very painful to read and I detect signs of growing paranoia in his text. It seems like he no longer has full mental sanity.
I was referring to the fact they can't choose not to have the balloons float above their territories.

I do think the concept of Project Loon is amazing, though.
> How could we stop China from doing so? We can't. So we spy back.

We also spy on the same people & aggregate the data so that instead of doing it themselves, they only have to breach one data trove.
But they didn't know it was, which is why they felt cheated. It's not because of the marginal costs.
I agree with gverri. Sorry, but your comment is very naive, nd not informed. These people with political flags were the people attacked by the police earlier, the people who started everything and now they are being attacked by the new protesters with poor political understanding.

Your notion of "party" is even inaccurate. A party don't need to participate in elections (there are lots of not electoral parties). And between parties who act in elections, there are those who do it not to be elected (in fact, they are almost never elected), but to spread their message in the TV during elections. Just trying to use the system against the system. Even there are parties (PT, PSOL), that are in fact a huge aggregation of different groups (like sub-parties), and those groups can be very diverse, some of them not wishing to concentrate in government, but acting with social movements.

The current acts against political parties in Brazil is a huge ignorance spread by right wing groups. Is indeed a very fascist thing.
since I was the one that called it first, I should be paid.

Instead of paying me, why don't you make a donation to EFF instead: https://www.eff.org/

Any sum is appreciated.
Manning is not dead (hence, not "tortured to death"), and he is also subject to the military justice system, which Snowden is not.
> ... there doesn't seem to be much in the way of limits our ruling class has in what they're willing to do to retain power.

I disagree. There are strong limits on what our courtier class is willing to do. Those limits are not even particularly objectionable. The problem is that the limits are beyond what it takes to provoke a strenuous response from the average person.

Our government is unstable. If it were to move one millimeter beyond public toleration, a vicious cycle of escalation would start. The last straw would be something seemingly trivial, like a flippant speech about how hungry Americans could just eat cake. (A scenario that is actually plausible, given Washington, D.C.'s obsession with paying their cronies to turn corn into transportation fuel.)

The most disturbing thing about the courtiers' obsession with espionage is how careless they are being with operational security. They are using espionage to score PR points but neglecting the basics of opsec: mandatory access controls, cryptography, competent background checks, etc. If some Booz Allen yahoo could rifle through NSA documents, then other countries already had everything.
Note: tptacek said "most evil" not "most dangerous", and I may have to agree with him. Inside North Korea is a hellhole the likes of which we rarely see in the 21st century outside of movies about Nazi atrocities. Most estimates of deaths due to state crackdowns, gulags, and so forth within North Korea put the number right around 10% of the entire population of the country. A catastrophe equivalent to the holocaust has happened in North Korea but few people appreciate that it has because of the extreme secrecy of the regime. On top of that there are the continual threats North Korea makes to the security of the region and the world, their acts of terror (they've downed airplanes, kidnapped civilians, and worse). And, perhaps the worst of all, they've been a major player in the international export of both nuclear and ICBM technology.
It's very hard to keep your 'sanity' when US congressmen call for your assassination and you live in a tiny building which you can never leave.

My personal description of his words wouldn't be inaccuracy, but being hackneyed.
industrial&agricultural machines, cars and handguns has overcome humans limitations in physical space to comparable degree that chip augmentation is supposed to do in virtual/information space, and we're still not transhumans.

Overcoming violence, individual and collective, toward animals, other humans, alien visitors (alternative version of First Contact in StarTrek Enterprise looks more probable considering current mental level of human race), bringing billions of people up to the basic human level of existence - that will at least make us better humans, and continuing on that way we would one day may become transhumans.
Well, Reagan has the honor of being the first president to have convicted a government official for leaking information to the press (the Samuel Loring Morison case). A New York Times editorial about the Morison case basically presented an argument that Reagan's DOJ invented the modern leak prosecution, using a novel interpretation of the Espionage Act to override the will of Congress, which had refused to criminalize leaks in general.

And of course, the information Morison leaked was positively anodyne compared to entire databases full of diplomatic cables, or North Korean proliferation intelligence sources, or the precise details of which Chinese computers the NSA TAO group was hacking. Which is funny, because the NYT editorial called some of that kind of information out as the sort of the Congress did want to outlaw leaks in.

But that aside: I was stepping back from leak prosecution to the broader issue of transparency.

The Reagan administration was less transparent than this one, or even the Bush Administration (which was itself also less transparent than this one). The Reagan administration not only got the US involved in a war based on entirely opaque objectives and analysis, but conducted the whole war without the knowledge of the American people.
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You've got to count the victims in North Korea, and with an official population of 24 million today, we know from the history of other Communist countries who's killing fields have been at least partly revealed that they're going to number in the millions.
> and yet I find myself not blaming Obama much for this.

Might not be his fault for creating it - but he definitely bears responsibility for continuing it.

If we really wanted to - he could call a press conference at any time & blow the lid off the whole thing. But instead, he goes the opposite route & prosecutes anyone who speaks out.
Just for the flipside though, he did this to call attention to unconstitutional programs in his opinion.

There is a reason we don't generally allow individuals to each individually determine what the Constitution does or does not mean.

There is a famous example in the military of an Army major (doctor) who refused to deploy to Afghanistan because he claimed it was unconstitutional.

You might think he was referring to the war, but instead he was referring to his Commander-in-Chief himself (Pres. Obama), who this major personally felt was a Muslim Kenyan who somehow managed to finagle himself into the Presidency.

It's hardly conclusive that what Snowden has revealed so far is even likely unconstitutional. It seems the most you can say is that the NSA is simply not being very nice at all to the rest of the world, but the Supreme Court decisions up to this point (including recent ones relating to Guantanamo's prison) have generally treated the rest of the world as not worthy of any but the most basic Constitutional protections.
There is no reason it has to be.

However, invoking the 4th of July as part of the American public consciousness is not guaranteed to resonate with the wider world population.
>As a matter of fact, I have never seen or heard of instance of any tugging around their powerful station to do any special purpose work

Live events work, video work, anything where you need >2 external display outs and top performance...you're thinking in terms of the single person, where lugging a Mac Pro around is an inconvenience. I'm thinking of the Mac Pro getting thrown on the back of the truck with the rest of the lighting rig and truss, in which case it's one very small component in a larger travelling system.

I used to work in live events, it wasn't unusual to load Mac Pros in with the rig.
> That's a terrible justification for not protesting. Free societies require courage.

+1
Yes, many of the features would be impossible or wouldn't work as well if they actually protected user privacy. But that was still their choice.
A useful term when understanding tail recursion is "trampoline"[1], even though most compilers don't use this, it is a very useful way of visualising tail recursive calls.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail_call#Through_trampolining
The point I was trying to make wasn't about hiring "for experience" but leveraging those who were around them to vouch for their aptitude. This is a distinct difference, and you have to work hard to get people to think in these terms instead of amount of experience. I may be naive in even thinking we're accomplishing this.

Without the public displays of performance that baseball has, there's another level of indirection that you must filter through to try and illustrate a candidates performance.

This makes it something like the "Moneyball of Moneyball of programming".
> Sound like an Obamapology to me

I don't think these stupid partisan catch-phrases have any place on HN whatsoever.
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Sfter some reading on how CIA works and how the information retrieved is used by washington, I guess that Obama is getting highly interpreted and filtered information. More opinions based on the opinions of analist's boses, than really having access to the whole picture.
The second video is definitely cool. At the end I was waiting for a crack in the glass, or the drone tumbling out of control and then the static screen, but was disappointed.

The first video of the "shooting down" looked very simulated and kind of dumb.
Yes. The daily national intelligence briefing content is worlds away from anything that senators get. The only people privy to anything close to the same content would be the members of the intelligence select committee, but they receive periodic reviews not daily decision maker content. And it's worth considering that once you become president, by nature of your status you suddenly become the person everyone is spinning to. Even if you have access to the same thing, only one of you is getting told all the worst case horror stories that will benefit someone's budget if they get protected against.
I'm not pedantic because I think what is technically legal is more important than "what nearly every person in this democratic republic holds" to be true. I'm pedantic precisely because there is no such democratic consensus. The people don't broadly believe what the NSA is doing is wrong. Your friends might think the way you do, but the vast majority of my friends are okay with what the government is doing, my parents are okay with it, my wife is okay with it. They are wary of the information being abused, but they stop short of thinking that the government cannot be trusted to have that information at all in its prosecution of terrorism. I'd have to go out of my way to personally find someone who strenuously objects to the NSA program, as it exists today.

So when you can't resort to an appeal to the democratic consensus, you have to resort to pedantic legal arguments: the fact that the people don't care doesn't change what is and is not unconstitutional. And that brings you to an analysis of: what is the spirit of the 4th amendment, both in light of the text and in light of history? Was it intended to protect your house and home, or was it intended to be a broad protection of the amorphous concept of "privacy"?

The third way is by far the worse, but it's the one you're stuck with if you reject pedantic legalism. If the majority doesn't agree with your viewpoint, and you can't find clear support for your viewpoint in the text or history of the laws, you're stuck arguing that your viewpoint should prevail based on an appeal to transcendent principles. And that puts you in the same boat as people who think the U.S. was founded as a "Christian nation" and that the Bible should inform our laws. That is to say, it doesn't necessarily mean you're wrong, but rather that you're fighting from weak ground. While viewpoints based on an appeal to transcendent principles do sometimes prevail, it's almost always based on a hard-fought campaign to first establish a democratic consensus.
Russell Brand takes over MSNCB
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> It's very hard to keep your 'sanity' when US congressmen call for your assassination and you live in a tiny building which you can never leave.

Especially when your world view is so distorted to begin with.
Just a quick note, remember to turn off your cell phones at these events. Protestors are tracked by their cell phone records by the police and govt.
Yeah? Test drive a lot of houses, do you?

The reason you get to test drive cars is that the people who have cars to sell are desperate to sell them to you.
Sarcasm will get you down voted.
"Secret" has a specific historical implication, which is that in prosecutions based on secret evidence, the accused was not able to evaluate and challenge that evidence. Sealed warrants cannot be used to indefinitely keep targets from confronting the evidence against them.
> (I hate looking stupid, especially in front of strangers, especially in front of male strangers--don't we all though?).

You should get over that. It is probably very important for your career (and life) that you not care about looking stupid in front of other people. It's going to happen (a LOT) in your professional career, dealing with it gracefully is one of the skills to have.
Because of all this bad press, the US will rally around a fake-libertarian or Republican in 2016. Rinse, wash and repeat.
Ask HN: Should I give up my dataplan to save money?
My wife and I both have smart phones. Our monthly bill is 150+. I'm considering giving up the data plan (shudder ... or perhaps even the phones!). This will certainly lower quality of life but 150 a month is a lot of cash. Have other HNers given up/downsized phone plans?
The purpose of an interview is to see if the person is a good fit for the position at hand; looking at the "future". The past experience is a natural measure of future performance, provided the future projects at the new position are similar to the past projects. My experience [1] is that the past projects can often be significantly different from the future projects, and yet the candidate may be a great fit.

What does carry along with the person is still something about the way that person thinks, handles problems, basic aptitude, knowledge and understanding, etc. Fizzbuzz is a good measure of basic programming aptitude [2]. I have constantly used simple equivalents of Fizzbuzz for electrical engineering and have hired some great performers.

[1] I have conducted over 100 interviews.
[2] C++ vs. Perl should not matter much since the question is about the basic algorithm.
I'm not sure if this is surprising. Even the proprietary Macromedia Flash showed us in the late 90s that vector graphics are more computationally expensive than raster equivalents.

SVG is nice because it gives us additional flexibility -- it's resolution independent (so you don't need to redraw your image by hand when higher-DPI displays come out) and allows for animation[0]. But if you don't need those things (and you probably don't for your sprites) then they'll just slow you down.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SVG_animation
That's ok. There's enough value in elevating the awareness that these things change frequently and providing a change record for those interested in a specific article, that providing a neater/cleaner way of conveying the changes is forgiven. Anyone can figure out how to read the diffs once they sit down to do it, and it still requires a human to interpret the value of changes. A single word can simply be a correction or it can be a complete reversal.

If a better UI is developed later on, it can be retrofitted.
This is the big reason we had to write a pixmap caching layer for icons/Plasma themes/etc. in KDE.

GTK+ goes one better, and they compile an entire icon theme into a single mmap-able file with the data in a static GdkPixbuf format. Sadly I'm not sure how to map that to a QImage in general, otherwise I would have adapted that theme cache (where present) into KDE.
SVG is scalable, if you have a vector-graphic that is a clear advantage. For pixel-graphics PNG is better. A downside is, that the Internet Explorer supports SVG only with the coming version 9 (before with plugin). Mobile browsers may also have limited support for SVG.

I would say PNG simply for the fact it seems to be a more accepted format than SVG.
As long as we live in a world where scarcity exists, we will compete for resources, or compete to provide them.

Spying on each other is a natural consequence of needing to have an edge on the competition. Therefore, it's actually harder to justify not doing so if you know that your competition, say China, will do so with little compunction.

Whilst we're waiting for this sunny amazing utopia with no walls, no ownership and no scarcity of commodities to happen, espionage and similar behaviours will continue.