skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. That information is available to officers only when the situation requires it. I did have access to inmates' "travel cards" which detail their crimes and other information because I routinely transported inmates to other units; usually to medical or psychiatric facilities. I did not have the ability or occasion to compile statistics, but my best guess is that a lot of them were convicted of drug crimes. My best guess though is really no better than any random person's because there were so many prison units in TDCJ, and the populations of those units were classified partly based on their crimes. Most of the people I transported were violent offenders.

2. A huge and expensive tragedy of justice and of economic policy. Imprisoning people for non-violent drug charges takes what are often productively employed people out of the work force and turns them into a unit of negative productivity, taking with them, probably another additional person by the time you account for all of the officers and support staff needed for running a huge prison infrastructure. People imprisoned even for drug charges rarely re-enter the workforce, at least not at any reasonable level. After release, they are stigmatized and often victimized again through various ex-con hire subsidy programs.
I ran into a version of Nginx on CentOS had sites-avail/enabled.
One of my favorite nginx features I just discovered is that you can use a regex in the server_name and then you can use the capture as a variable later [1] ... this lets you serve domains or subomains from completely different directories without a new conf file or a reload.

I'm using it at http://www.utterson.me to serve up static Jekyll blogs on a subdomain.

I may be wrong, but I don't think Apache can do this (it can do regex but you don't get a variable).

[1] http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/server_names.html#regex_names
> Some states, like Indiana have managed to keep prices low at around $14,000 per inmate. While states like New York pay around $60,000 to keep its citizens behind bars.

OK, but what's the benefit? What is the damage to society and economy an average criminal causes over the course of a year? How much in property, lost trust, mental and physical injuries, increased spending on security, etc. does it cost to have the guy on the loose?

How much of that benefit are prisons eating? I'd love to see an analysis but my guess would be that housing an inmate for ~30k is a bargain.
I read Vanity Fair online quite a bit. They have excellent long articles on anything from the making of World War Z to Michael Lewis articles. I find the articles not only educational but very entertaining at the same time.
I also read The Atlantic online for current affairs.
Thanks for the comment onion2k - fair point. We definitely have a target market in mind with the app which is a younger demographic whose musical taste may not be completely developed just yet. Having said that, I'm sure you have a couple of friends you still turn to for tips on the latest and greatest?! As for favorites, again I'd agree with you but we've had a huge amount of interest from people trying to discover what sports stars are listening to before a big game etc. Social graphs are so subjective that this really is a binary type of idea. Some people will love it and use it a lot (hopefully), others will use other channels for discovery and stay away from the social curation side.

Thanks for raising this point so amicably though - I'll be sure to update the post with the links when we're live!
The most telling part of “1984″ is the appendix
Are there alternatives to Intercom? Their new pricing is quite pricy for the value they provide.
The article mentions several independent failures to reproduce.
You would need to define a monopoly differently than I to view Microsoft as a monopoly.
One of my early jobs (as I was teaching myself to program) was at a large consulting firm. The job didn't require any sort of programming. Many of the business processes at the company revolved around manual processes and data-entry/manipulation in Excel. After a month, I recognized a process that could easily be completed (more thoroughly and efficiently) by a script. I spent the next few weeks after work learning how to manipulate Excel, scrape data from websites, and package Python scripts as standalone EXEs. I showed my work to one of my colleagues who showed it to others. A few more iterations of this process resulted in my colleagues lining up to see what could be automated out of their processes. My job title hadn't changed, but I was then working full-time as a programmer.

After a while though, when I felt I was no longer learning as much as I'd want to -- I decided to look for a new job in the software industry. With my experience writing code at the consulting firm, I was able to find a decent job at a software company.

tldr: Programming is valuable for many jobs (not just software shops) and it is often easier to get your foot in the door and spend your days writing programs there.
Next time, just say it to your desk plant.
Guys, don't link to the community wiki, it contains a lot of obsolete or just wrong information. Always use official documentation: http://nginx.org/en/docs/
Algernon’s law - Can we artificially increase IQ?
6 hour 4K Video of the night sky
I wasn't aware of any when I lived in Ireland up until earlier this year. There is a fairly regular Python crowd that get together monthly if that floats your boat:

http://www.meetup.com/pythonireland/

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/pythonire...
Microsoft Unveils Three Bug Bounty Programs
I could imagine this article being talked about in the preschool, to teach little fellas, but on HN?

Of course it is easier to subvert 1 company than to subvert... well n>1.
I like just keeping a single "etc/nginx/sites" folder, including "sites/*.ON" in my main nginx.conf and then appending .ON to the sites that are enabled:

active.site.com.ON
another.active.com.ON
not.active.com
SF already has one of the most expensive programs in the country for providing shelter and services to the homeless. Homelessness is a national problem: if one city provides better services than others to get the homeless off the streets, it becomes attractive to homeless from other cities, who then basically get to free-ride on the city doing the spending.

44% of SF homeless have been in the city for less than 90 days[1]; the problem isn't that the city's welfare system is inadequate, it's that it's better than other nearby cities' systems.

[1] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/Homeless-p...
According to this it was 630 servers with pentabytes of data. I'm sure keeping those idle was a significant loss for Leaseweb.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9240179/LeaseWeb_wipe...
That's really messed up. More outrageous than the TSA... Thanks for the link and sharing the information. Why isn't this discussed more? I guess we only talk about news, not our preexisting long term problems (ex: prisons)
In other news, sky still blue.

I just spent the better part of a week rewriting a traditional Wordpress plugin to be an AJAX backed AngularJS widget. I have never before seen a system work so hard to discourage you from doing the right thing.

* Need to make an ajax endpoint? Create a global function, call wp_hook to register it twice, and be sure to die() at the end of it. Oh, and you can't selectively register on HTTP verb, plus too bad if you wanted to use the param "action" for anything.

* Want to serve some JS? Great! wp_enqueue_script has you covered. Unless you're plugin is included after the header. Unless unless you pass the optional "place in footer" flag. Unless unless unless the theme doesn't call wp_foot() (which is depressingly common). Good luck!

* Need to serve something that isn't JS or CSS, like a static HTML template? Fine! Just pass the whole path to the file! Since we don't do any routing other than cleaning up permalinks, every file has its own URL! Oh, just be sure to use plugin_dir_url() to get the base path. But despite the name that returns the path to the current file not the plugin so you should probably call it once in your plugin initialization file and cache the result in a global constant or something.

* Looking to do some safe SQL queries? Fantastic! Here's $wpdb->prepare. Which, by the way, doesn't have a named argument syntax. So if you have any optional params or dynamic segments in your SQL then you're going to have to prepare a whole query for each permutation. Oh, and I know you're building your queries by hand, but be sure to use "SELECT * FROM {$wpdb->posts}" instead of "SELECT * FROM wp_posts" just in case the table prefix isn't set to the default.

And that's just off the top of my head. Seriously, even assuming you know the right way to do any of the above (which in an environment that is quite explicitly aimed at being friendly to non-developers is far from a given), actually doing it involves jumping through countless obscure hoops. The simple fact is that making an ajax.php file and starting it with require_once('../../../../wp-config.php') or doing string interpolation into raw SQL, though horrible from both security and portability standpoints, are not only easier to write but make for clearer and more understandable code.
What's the inverse of this? "If we cut welfare, the homeless will go somewhere else." Seems legit, but not everyone thinks it's right to export your problems like that. Especially when your problems are poor, sick human beings.

Some people see a system that attracts the poor and the sick as, if not a fait accompli, at least a damn good start. Now we could talk about the problems SF has with paying for everything, but that's the opposite of homelessness.
The real issue is scale--it costs a lot of money to put a helicopter in the air, and that's a good thing because it ensures restraint in use.

Maybe Americans won't notice that aspect and assent to this sort of thing because it's "just like what's already going on". But if so, they'll be missing that due to the economics, it'll be a totally different ball game.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL#OpenGL_4.3 OpenGL ES 3.0 is fully forward compatible to OpenGL 4.3.
Training Data Scientists: Tools
In the middle of the discussion around NSA - Now a speech like this. Not talking about "cyber"weapons and free speech at all.
Talking indirectly about the east german regime, a regime that was build on a information system "STASI"... wait a second...
It is insightful for software engineers because we feel like we're building things when in fact we're just providing a service which will likely be gone and forgotten 10 years from now. That's why I find it's important to also have other pursuits that allow you to point at a permanent physical object and say "I made that"
On systems that have both, yes, they're separate. But that separation is something the distribution does to help you organize your rules — to nginx, they're all the same AFAIK.
Interesting question ohwp. I do think that recommendation systems are only going to get better. Lyrics and sentimental analysis are definitely going to play a part in that.

One of the main reasons we built Soundwave though was to take a more human based approach to music discovery. Personally, I'd take three friends who have similar hardcore tastes than me over any system (currently built) because I too was annoyed at how poor the recommendations were. Our app will hopefully reduce the friction in finding those people with similar tastes.
My Smartphone Made Me Dumb. I Fixed It.
Interesting how they're doing this Q&A in the same format and on the same site as Snowden's Q&A the other day. That looks like a much smarter move than putting up questions on some internal Q&A tool where people might suggest that they have a motive to censor questions.

For everybody reading into the ambiguity of terms like "direct access", Google seems to be trying really hard to remove any uncertainty about their position:

"There is no free-for-all, no direct access, no indirect access, no back door, no drop box."
ERP & CRM Software
EGA Futura develops a complete and easy-to-use business and retail management software, whether tangible or intangible goods or services, is the ideal billing inventory control and point of sale software solution with barcode processing. StockBase POS is 100% Windows compatible, launched in 1994 with over than 57,000 licenses sold worldwide. Keep your business competitive by improving results in today's marketplace. You need to track assets, billing, current accounts plus daily activities, which keep accumulating your workload. StockBase POS will help running your business, rather than you running behind it. You could be a step ahead of tomorrow.
In my view, you answered your own question with the second sentence. Sysadmins and linux hackers are no doubt familiar with this stuff anyway and used to reading through sysops-style docs and wikis.

Many other developers, we assumed, would not be as familiar with ops at first, and would prefer more of a basic introduction that walks through the steps and explains things clearly.
That's a lot of condescension in one sentence. Do you live in an American city with a large homeless population and can argue otherwise? I live in NYC and while I care about the problems of "the poor", I assure you the worries a lot of people on this board raise are legitimate. Even with the fares, the subway cars are often crawling with mariachi bands, hip-hop dance crews and good-ol' fashioned panhandlers pushing their way through crowds. I would love a free public transport system---but it'd be rather pointless if I can't get into a crowded subway car half filled with sleeping homeless. A solution to help the poor needs to be found---but belongs in another discussion thread.
It's distro-specific and it doesn't present by default in stock nginx.
I wonder what would happen if you normalize millennial views on PRISM by the amount of data stored online for each age group. Baby boomers and older groups may (probably mistakenly) feel they have less of their personal info online and therefore care less.
In light of the current PRISM disaster, DNSSEC does nothing to protect you.

Let's say Nation State A has all the data that prism has collected and Nation State B has the same exact dataset minus DNS traffic. Do you really think there is a lot that A can do that B can not?

EDIT: Changed hypothetical actors from me/you to state a/ state b. It made it seem personal and its not i was just being lazy.
Enforcing maritime law isn't "militarising coastal waters." Trying to defend what the Iranians were doing as innocent is disingenuous.

And a hot war is one where bullets, missiles, shells are flying around. Just because there's no declaration of war doesn't mean it's not a war. Let's look at a little history here:

Korean War - Hmm, no declaration of war
Vietnam War - Same
Grenada - Same
Panama - Same
Desert Shield/Storm - hmm, no declaration here either
OIF - Same
OEF - Same

So the pattern is pretty clear, that declarations of war aren't worth the paper they're printed on. And try telling the combatants on both sides in the above conflicts that they weren't in a hot war.
How to use PuPHPet to set up web development VMs with vagrant+puppet
Python PaaS: hosting which automatically scales apps without hassle
Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Thanks for the response!
Microsoft Announces Direct Cash Payments For Vulnerabilities
My impression is that this was much less of a problem in the US before the mid 70s when the Supreme Court decided that people which psychiatric problems couldn't be involuntarily committed if they didn't pose a danger to others[1]. My understanding is that things in Germany work like they did in the US in the 1960s.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Connor_v._Donaldson
Any recommendations for someone who is well-versed with C++ and Networking?
We used Videopixie for a number of our customer case studies. Their editing service was literally an order of magnitude cheaper than the studio who shot the video was bidding to edit.

The quality was great too, you can easily get multiple iterations and give feedback easily.
"I remember when I first saw the movie Robocop, and I thought: Privatized police force? Come on, not even in the USA the "markets will fix everything" ideology could go so far."

The CCA logo (as seen on the flag) even looks vaguely OCP-ish, like something out of the particularly '80s vision of the corporate future as envisioned in the original Robocop.

"spending less on rehabilitation doesn't just save money now, it also brings higher recidivism and so makes for a healthier future market for these corporations..."

Exactly. And let's not forget that these same corporations who run prisons also lobby for harsher sentencing, mandatory minimums, looser prison labor laws, and so forth.

It's a sticky subject because nobody -- politician, man on the street, mother of children, or law-abiding citizen -- wants to come right out and say that he or she is advocating for prisoner's rights. Nobody's ever won an election being "soft" on crime (at least not to my knowledge). So the prison-industrial complex has it pretty easy, as far as built-in political incentives are concerned. Ultimately their agenda is self-fulfilling, and the social externalities are highly negative. Costs may be cut in the short run, but as you suggest, recidivism means nobody in the system is ever really going to escape it -- hence, we're shortchanging the future to save pennies in the present.
Being explicitly "paid for" from a specific source vs coming from the general fund is a powerful political symbol, which has significant, real consequences whenever deficit hawks go looking for things to cut. It's easier to convince the public that you should cut something when you convince everyone that their money is being spent ("wasted"), as opposed to having a specific revenue policy to counterbalance specific spending. It's a lot easier for people to assume that massive, massive amounts are being spent/wasted when it's coming from general funds.
It is not clear at all. That version is heavily disputed, and reflects only official US Government's view.
Yeah, they're pretty common in the Bay Area too. S8 are still rare, though.

It's weird how German cars are so much more expensive in Europe, for the same spec, than in the US. And yet the US only gets the high-end/luxury versions of cars (engines, trims) from BMW/Mercedes/Audi, so the entry price points are comparable. (obviously even worse in places with high taxes or other restrictions; in UAE BMWs were about 2x the US price, and Singapore has the 100% tax)
*makes

See Muphry's law. :)
Just because the A/B test doesn't produce the results you expected doesn't mean it produced no results. Research scientists who don't prove their hypothesis don't say they learned nothing from the experiments, they just write a different paper.

Just to pick one example from this post; the whole-site redesign didn't change conversions. Did it change something else? More importantly, you now know that investing effort in a full re-design didn't really have any effect. Next time someone suggests changing the site, you have evidence that says it may not be worth the engineering cost, and maybe its better to focus somewhere else first.
With which encryption software?
Indeed, many of the "homeless" may have access to shelter-- it is more of a vagrancy problem. Vagrancy is an issue with any free public service or public space, from parks to libraries to train stations to free buses. You'd have to enforce limits to time on the buses and rules against sleeping and eating and that sort of thing.
Museum of Online Museums (MoOM)
Including up to $100k for platform anti-exploitation bypasses; I think Microsoft might be unique in offering a huge bonus for core platform exploitation; they are really serious about the core approach of making the OS and C/C++ runtime hard to write reliable exploits for, which is an interesting approach.

Also interesting because Microsoft was once publicly opposed to programs like these:

https://threatpost.com/microsoft-says-no-paying-bug-bounties...
>What can you tell us about the quality of life for prisoners in TDCJ?

Awful, No air conditioning, terrible food, not enough to do, terrible medical care, exactly what you would expect in Texas, only worse.

>Where is the line between giving prisoners something to do vs giving them to much?

Idle hands and so forth. Prison officials have very little with which to manage inmates' behavior. Anything that can stave off the intense boredom of incarceration would probably help in the management of prisons. Unfortunately for everyone, the Wyndham School System program (education for inmates) was recently cancelled in Texas to cut expenses. I expect that will just make it even more difficult for future ex-convicts to succeed in any meaningful way after release, increasing recidivism.

>Are we working on ways to keep prisons from being "Criminal University"?

I'm not sure what you mean, but we sure do seem to produce a lot of inmates in this country.
Mary Washington? That's about an hour outside DC, but the only place I can think of in VA that fits. I don't know the MD side very well, though.
For a multiparadigm langauge, C# 3.5 and up offer some solid functional programming stuff. Obviously if you want to go hardcore into FP you can find it in F#, but if you just want to do lots of awesome things with lambdas using otherwise-conventional OOP, C# is surprisingly well-equipped.

A lot of C# developers are stuck treating it as Microsoft Java, which it hasn't been for several years.

To me, the biggest problem with C# is cultural. C#'s user-community is entirely enterprisy... it's open-source adoption has been minimal, and that means that most C# code is still heavily stuck in a "cathedral" mentality where coders either use exclusively Microsoft libs (which are often terrible - no single company can ever be expected to get it right every time) plus some heavy wheel-reinventing, or maybe they pick up some gigantic vendor-backed 3rd-party lib like Telerik. There isn't the massive community of open-source developers like you see on other platforms.
A privileged user has nothing to do with it. Running as a non privileged user will not stop keyloggers, cookie theft, privilege escalation exploits, etc.
haha well executed trolling
I am reminded of this quote:

“This, milord, is my family’s axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation . . . but is this not the nine-hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y’know. ”

Written by Terry Prattchet, spoken by the Low King in The Fifth Elephant.

(quoted online from http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/terry%20prattchet)
Hey shavingspiders - no problem, happy to elaborate. In short, it's a way to find out what music is being listened to and where in real-time. It's not a 'connecting' tool per se because we keep the location info anonymized and aggregated (so you can see top played charts by genre/time in different locations). As mentioned above, there is also the social element so that you have an open graph of music listens amongst your network.

I take your point about Bono. Disclaimer though: I'm Irish so may be a little biased!
You have no idea if this is true, this is 100% speculation. Rates could rise dramatically, they could rise gradually (which is the most likely scenario), or they can stay at 0% for the next 10 years.

This is why buying a bond fund at a deep discount (these are at 10% discount as we speak) provides a nice cushion for all cases except the catastrophic "yields rise quickly" scenario. If you are worried about that, you should be setting aside some cash to try to time the market.
It's kinda depressing that this article is basically just a copy of one I wrote in 2010 and it's still something that gets attention as interesting stuff. Nginx documentation obviously still has a long way to go.