skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Replace "terrorism" with "killer robots" or "sharks" or "bedbugs". Your statement remains as valid as ever, but somehow the government is only spending billions (or trillions) on one of them. Why?
Writing Open Source Firmware
Some of the more forward thinking folks (Socialcam and HauteLook for example) have rolled in house versions of these, but Apptimize is one of the first end to end solutions I've seen. But A/B testing in mobile is definitely something a lot of folks are thinking about.
Mysql2json - module for converting mysql data to json
Use a mag-sail as a "brake" to slow down at the destination star.
uh, no.

so, what you're telling me is your [i mean the royal 'you', not necessarily you you, anigbrowl] performance isn't as good as cd playback? people would rather listen to your cd than listen to you?

makes me think you should either 1) change careers or 2) get better.

see? the technology gets dumped on as a scapegoat. we all hear this. this case is no different.

the real issue? competition has moved back to the streets instead of in the promoter's office. you're still fighting to get heard. and you still have to be good. and you still have to be lucky. because these days, every tom, dick and harry can become "a musician" by putting out a cd. it's the same fight every creative industry is fighting right now. it's just that professional photographers don't really have a pandora to shake their fist at.

just be glad it's not the 16th century and the only way to earn money as a musician was to get commissions from nobility. the phrase "starving artist" exists for a reason.

m3mnoch.
We build in DB-driven tests into our app so we can make changes at will once we find a winner. Then we just clean up the code to remove the test in the next iteration.
No, he's referring to POODR, which is "new" in the sense that it's been released recently compared to books like The Rails Way and the Ruby on Rails Tutorial.
SmartOS is a distant relative of Solaris. It's an alternative to Linux for the server with all the Solaris bells and whistles (zfs, zones, dtrace) and great tooling for virtualization. Unfortunately it's not very widely adopted and to my knowledge is only supported by one start-up (Joyent) which limits its chances of dislodging Linux. So, a very powerful, highly integrated and ultimately niche stack.

It also inherited a subset of the Solaris community which is jaded by the popularity of Linux and its "primitive" toolset. You can often see them rolling their eyes and making condescending comments as the rest of the open-source world moves on.

The huge potential for all this is to contribute these wonderful tools to Linux, but there seems to be reluctance on that front.
It's especially interesting because a lot of automobile safety revolves around mitigating damage once an incident occurs, and there's a fairly concrete number (IIRC around $3 million) for how much money it's worth spending to save one additional life. Neither one would be considered even remotely acceptable in counterterrorism.
Sure we can't go around trusting trust. OTOH most of the compilers in general use see a number of eyeballs. Ditto for the operating systems. I could even see this becoming the case for hardware eventually. An evil system must model the system that relies on it in order to attack that relying system, while remaining functional in general. The longer you make the chain that inserts your nasty code into higher-layer objects, the more complicated, fragile, and discoverable the attack becomes.
> Lower court precedent has thus far ruled the Glomar response to have potential merit, if the secretive nature of the material truly requires it, and only if the agency provides "as much information as possible" to justify its claim. Otherwise, the principles established in FOIA may trump claims to secrecy.

Is it required if they have no data collected and the subject isn't under investigation?
Most 19th century architecture is completely unfeasible to build today. If only we had more of those non-union wage slaves to build are elaborate monuments like the good old days!

Dubai has that now I guess.
Wow... just jumped into the beta and had a conference call going in a couple of minutes. Not entirely sure how I'd fit in the use of this yet, but it seems pretty cool!
LA sides with taxi companies, sends cease-and-desists to Lyft, Uber, and Sidecar
I think there is a certain level of distrust of the technology on top. I had a discussion about encryption with a group of non-technical peers a while back and every single one of them strongly believed that it could be circumvented with ease. If you come with that attitude, you'll find no reason to use encryption, as it is only as good as plain text at that point anyway.
They want to be able to take large donations from wealthy contributors, without (a) having to pay tax on them as income, or (b) having to follow the normal reporting requirements for political groups.
IRS was targeting open source groups
> ...has been standard advice since decades before Clojure.

Yes, but we're in a thread dedicated to Clojure ;)

> "Macros make things horribly complicated" is nonsense, or no skilled programmer would use them.

Which is what happens, really, and when used it's in a very limited fashion. For example, for quite popular projects inside the Clojure community: Leiningen used one macro[1] and Compojure two[2].

A properly done (and properly used) macro might not make things complicated, but this leads me to the next paragraph.

> ease of debugging is an issue quite apart from anything to do with macros.

It's usually hard, but macros make it HORRIBLE since you can easily lost track of the generated code. Like if translating from Clojure to Java Stack Traces wasn't hard enough...

Whenever you use a macro, the stack traces you receive from the code using it might not like like what you expect at all. Macros are bad because they mutate your code. You usually have to expand the macro and debug there instead of just looking at your damn code.

The big problem is not macros, but code which uses macros.

[1] https://github.com/technomancy/leiningen/search?q=defmacro&r...
[2]https://github.com/weavejester/compojure/search?q=defmacro&r...
This. As cliché as it may sound, John Dalberg-Acton was very very accurate when he said ""Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Right now, the way this agency is being run and the way it is being handed power by the few in Congress that know all the details is as close to absolute informational power as you can have.
Or better yet everyone capable start a p2p service with email as the protocol and millions of random encrypted and nonencrypted junk files to an entire web of ever increasing spam emails.
You should check out the Windows Azure website, .NET is but one column among 5-6 open languages / platforms. Microsoft realizes that it needs to be where the developers are, which is a broader world than .NET.

http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/

I'm using node.js on Azure and it is impressively good product.
Hire a designer - the UI and UX could use some work. Here's some of the design feedback I'd give you:

- You're not utilizing the whole width of the page, and the table looks pretty compressed, making it difficult to read.

- You're also not using the whole height of the page. The pagination would be more useful if there was more content. It's silly to waste that much real estate.

- The icons in the top right are too small and the third (mailing list) carries no meaning.

- Your logo in the navbar is too small, or at least the text. You probably don't need the text in the logo if you've got the heading there.

- Search is in a pretty unintuitive location - try putting it in the top right of the layout.

Edit: From a functional perspective, you've got duplicated stories on the home page currently. Same exact link, two different titles.
I spent a decade in South Africa where the ANC bombed the shit out of it, and there was concern, not terror. No one I encountered was afraid, let alone terrified. Each death was a tragedy, but like the IRA terror bombings in London, people just carry on with their lives.

Are you terrified?
Effective Workflow Advice For The Modern Developer - Tech.Pro
This is why all worthwhile encryption schemes are nondeterministic, incorporating randomness. If you encrypt the same data twice with GPG, the results will not be the same.
Ask HN: What is your startup email solution?
I am curious to know what you guys use for your startup email solution.

I am currently considering moving to AWS, and possibly using their Amazon SES. However I see that there are other alternatives like mailgun.com or sendgrid.com

what would be the advantage of using 3rd party solution vs in house Amazon SES? I see that the pricing is pretty similar and I am leaning towards using SES, but I would like to hear opinions.

Thank you.
Ooh gestapit..
In my experience, whenever a death in the industry makes the frontpage of HN, the black banner has come out. I don't think it's terribly presumptuous to bring it up. I won't hold any ill will toward pg or the rest of the HN mods if they decide he wasn't significant enough or close enough to the HN community or whatever.
Updated Software Performance Benchmark Table
I'd argue that the functional model more accurately represents the real world than mutable objects.

When you use mutable state, you're creating a model that essentially ignores time. Sometimes this is a useful omission when performance is required, but time is so integral to our Universe it's hard to remove it from a model without unforeseen consequences.
Revenge of The Hot Nerds
Show HN: Graphical Data Mapping with Arrays
In other words a system for non-ambitious dinosaurs to get in their cronies and milk the system while almost being assured of a job for the next decade
And Computer Shopper, Micromania, Micro-Hobby, Crash, ....

Oh and books with code listings to type in hexadecimal rows of opcodes. :)
Okay, sure, let's toss out the comparison to smoking. How about deaths in motor vehicles on the US highways? Okay, not that either – there's been (arguably) a lot spent on that in the last 15 years. How about choking to death or babies dying from SIDS? A quick google shows that each claims about 2,500 lives a year in the US. So, over the last 15 years, that's approximately 37,500 lives lost to each, or 75,000 total over the last 15 years... I'll leave the terrorism death count to you. And, I guarantee you, the funding isn't anywhere near the anti-terrorism funding.
Oh great. That would mean this is the lesser evil of the other potential scandals.
Attaching random content to emails reminds me of Emacs's 'M-x spook' command (and I'm not even an Emacs user).

As for distinguishing random data from PGP that is very easy: PGP messages (even binary ones) have some headers that determine who the recipient is, what encryption is used, etc.
See here for the format of PGP messages:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4880

What you could do is to generate a public/private PGP keypair, then destroy the private key, and encrypt your /dev/urandom data using that public key.
On my iPad, IT infini-scrolls and stutters, so not on all devices ;)
I am not a philosopher but I used to spend a lot of time with the philosophy grad department. I am under the impression that "cultural critic" is a dead giveaway for not a "real philosopher."
The US really didn't have much to do on the world stage in its first 100 years. Separated from the rest of the "civilized" world by a few thousand miles of ocean in each direction it was able to be the biggest player in the western hemisphere, but the game was much smaller.
Don't know about the latter two, but they aren't worrying about the former because they own almost all of the killer robots.
OT: Love your style of writing - I am a fan.

Back On Topic:

1. With the examples you gave I can see there are going to be issues, however I have seen many, more focused examples with sometimes a very large number of upvotes, get closed.
Typically a question along these lines will be closed - "What is the best book to learn C++ if I already know Java?" In this case there is no correct answer and the answers will be completely opinion based, but there are still many good answers (and books) that will be relevant.

2. I agree with you that such a broad based question should be closed but even more focused questions are also closed, very similar to the one I used above where there can be quite a few valid - and completely different opinions.

I realise that it is a balancing act and for sure you are moving in the right direction. I am hoping that opinion based questions/answers will be given more leeway going forward.
This is a fantastic headline and a good writeup, but ... why?

Perhaps it's cheaper than a psychologist, but in the process of being "stretched so thin" why are you spending time and effort into something that won't materially help you.

Dude, you have 30 days left. Don't be one of those football teams that gives up with :30 left on the clock. If you're going to lose anyway, throw the ball into the fucking end zone and try your hardest until the game's officially over.

Use your name. Tell us and the world about your company. Ask for ideas and help. Take advantage of this medium to try and turn it around with a Hail Mary pass instead of quitting early. There may be plenty of time for psychoanalysis in August, so what have you got to lose?

There are already 148 people on HN who care enough to comment. And thousands of readers, all of whom are tech savvy and perhaps more. You just never know.

Even if it fails, you'll go down a fighter instead of an anonymous blogger bemoaning his bad fortune. Which would you rather be?

Good luck,

Ken
> There are avenues to report these things, to voice concerns without completely going against your word. Call your government representatives, go up the chain. There are phone numbers to call and people to contact if you're uncomfortable.

Have you seen what happened to every whistleblower who did what you suggest? You'd have to be an idiot to follow them and expect different results.
"didn't see them complaining"? Here in Europe, laws were passed, in most countries, forcing employers to pay for eyeglasses and regular visits, because people were literally going blind.
> When you put something foreign in the brain, astrocytes (brain cells that form the blood brain barrier) will form around the electrode and create a new blood brain barrier around it, causing the electrode that was once inside the brain to be on the outside.

Do the electrodes continue to work through this barrier? If they do, this formation seems like a good thing to me, unless there is something else going on.
2 I think is an agree to disagree moment, I just don't really care for OO.

I agree on three though, and I think the way Clojure handles mutable state is excellent, but it's a good thing that it's not trivial to just say x = 5, x++.
iOS devices getting licensed controllers with iOS 7
Get it up to a couple of hundred and we'll talk. But if you think you can do that simply through process rather than physical design, we won't talk - process can not address the problem of turnkey tyranny.
Hard scify is limited because is based on current knowledge. In 200 years thinks may have evolved quite a bit though. Maybe not to startrek standars, but something completely different that we can not imagine now(or that we can imagine but not give a theorem about).
EC2 or no EC2: The great WordPress server debate
If you want to use something other than "@lavabit.com" for your e-mail address, you can. If you have a domain name, you can point your MX records for your domain at the lavabit servers to have your mail forwarded to your lavabit inbox. For example, you could get "John@Smith.com" and direct it to your lavabit inbox. After setting the MX records, you would just need to send an e-mail to lavabit support to have them set it up on their side.
You haven't answered the question. If a runaway slave showed up at your door, would you ask him to turn himself in? Would you suggest to him that he should go through the justice system, which he has good reason to perceive as being hostile to his cause?

The way you mince words is quite adept, actually. Are you a politician? You mention slavery being "clearly unconstitutional." Then you contrast that with the surveillance programs, saying "there's no indication the programs were illegal." You've set two very different bars. You blatantly omit the following two bits: that there are convincing arguments that the government surveillance programs are unconstitutional, and that 150 years ago there was no indication that slavery was illegal in slave states.
This could spiral out of control in both good and bad ways. The good ways are mentioned in the article, everyone wants to keep everyone else happy so they all continue earning their bonuses. But what happens when someone does leave? The person who referred them will suddenly have their compensation drop. That could destroy morale and send that person looking for other employment. The problem could then possibly ripple throughout the entire organization.
" A former U.S. counter-intelligence officer following the Snowden saga closely said his contacts inside the U.S. intelligence community “think Snowden has been planning this for years and has stashed files all over the internet.” This source added, “At this point there is very little anyone can do about this.” "
Read as "We cannot confirm or deny the thing you requested exists because if it exists/existed it would be classified, and that includes your request of whether it exists."
"9/11 happened.. ho hum.. call me when it's over"

Imagine what the world would be like today if the US government had somehow managed to take this approach in 2001. (I say "somehow" because even if Bush and everyone around him wanted to do it this way, people were calling for blood.)

Here's what I see:

1. Al Qaeda remains a global nuisance but ignorable.

2. The governments of Iraq and Afghanistan remain more or less like they were. The population of those countries is probably differently off than they are in reality, but not necessarily better or worse.

3. The US federal debt is several trillion dollars lower.

4. The US economy is doing better.

5. No PATRIOT act, nobody rotting away in Guantanamo, somewhat less ubiquitous surveillance.

All in all, sounds like a big win. Do you disagree?
Part of the reason people had that expectation was that Congress had introduced much stronger regulation of telephone circuits in 1934 so it wasn't like just anybody was allowed to tap into utility lines.

I wonder how well we would take it if we discovered that in addition to the NSA, Gmail was also sending all communications directly to Joe Blow in Podunk, Indiana, for his personal edification and entertainment? After all, it's not like we had any expectation of privacy for our email. What laws would this violate?
Thunderclap: Restore the Fourth Coordinated Social Media Push
Or Dylan, sadly Apple killed the project back in the day.
Hibernate 3 with Spring
The huge potential for all this is to contribute these wonderful tools to Linux, but there seems to be reluctance on that front.

The code is there for the taking. FreeBSD has ported ZFS and DTrace. Guys at LLNL are using illumos ZFS code as upstream for ZFS on Linux. Others are working on DTrace.

One can wait for efforts like that to keep progressing, help in whatever way they can, or just use illumos based distros (e.g. SmartOS) now and not wait around. Choice is a wonderful thing.
No major US war in the past 50 years, including Korea, Vietnam, Iraq I, Afghanistan, or Iraq II has had a "formal declaration of war"; all were enabled by authorizations in the manner of the AUMF.
Good point about tablet viewing. I will try that out later. Honestly on a decent sized laptop screen, the site kept my attention for about 10 seconds before I started to think how busy and complex it was.
"targeting" equals "tries" now? Okie dokie.
That article may be worth reading, but it is about retiring "rich", not simply retiring. It assumes a yearly lifestyle cost of $200k per year, which is redonkulously high. You don't need to be "rich" to be economically "free".

Most people can live quite comfortably for far less than $200k/yr when they are debt free and (figuratively) sitting on a giant pile of cash, especially if they aren't tied to living in SV, NYC, etc.
Some discussion here on that:

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/29/business/how-much-for-a-li...
Saint Obama Of The Digital Inquisition
Agreed, I like to see some success stories than theory on paper.
Taxes on American HN readers would increase accordingly to cover costs of buying & operating new copiers.
Is Obesity Really a Disease?
>Imagine empowering Nixon with the abilities of today's intelligence community.

Imagine the President as an irrelevant figurehead doing the bidding of the NSA/Military.
The interesting part is that they have not gone for a custom graph representation on disk like neo4j et al, but are persisting the graph data as MySQL records itself.
YUP. I created a fake account with a new name and email. IT figured out who I was pretty shortly. Dont know how, but there are many ways they could do this. For one, I added similar friends, and used a similar name.

Its the facial recognition that really creeps me out though, and the fact that cops always are recording cameras at community events and protests. Supplier meet consumer.
Validate your users aren't using disposable email addresses
I think what you're describing is really a showcase of a pub/sub system, and you're probably using Redis for a feature which is not in its core concern.

Things like RabbitMQ do this very well. You can use HA mode with RabbitMQ and not have a SPOF.

Alternatively you can use Kafka (for really big traffic) or Kestrel for the same thing - they're less sophisticated than RabbitMQ but I see that as an advantage since they're simpler.
I only glimpsed it some years ago, but I got the impression that "anything the vendor can do, the attacker can circumvent one level deeper", especially as a criticism of TXT:

http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-dc-09/Wojtczuk_Rutk...
A slightly better, but still lacking solution is to run your own mailserver and encrypt all incoming messages, something like this https://perot.me/encrypt-specific-incoming-emails-using-dove... simple enough for any HN reader to handle.

It of course still doesn't keep out the scary folks, as they'll just tap the network beforehand, but it does raise the bar quite a bit from other 3rd parties snooping. Combine with a crypto-stick, https://www.crypto-stick.com/, and good practices on the mail server and you're in the best shape anyone can be until everyone encrypts their outgoing email.
Barry Goldwater too.
Why do people think the largest social network is going to make it so easy for them to delete their stuff? Your data is money to them. They don't give a crap about your privacy rights. Deleting/deactivating your account is doing nothing but making a tick in their database from visible to invisible.
I agree. What a wonderful job with the presentation. Kudos.
Had exactly the same happen - which was rather annoying. Spotify's loss was Rdio's gain.
It'd be nice if the text were selectable instead of an image.
"Each agency may promulgate regulations, pursuant to notice and receipt of public comment, providing for the aggregation of certain requests by the same requestor, or by a group of requestors acting in concert, if the agency reasonably believes that such requests actually constitute a single request, which would otherwise satisfy the unusual circumstances specified in this subparagraph, and the requests involve clearly related matters."

They would just publish one response and send us all a link to it.
Update: Apparently Jagger's jab drew boos. I suspect there were a lot of people in the room who are deeply invested in the politics that were being mocked from the stage.