skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't work for the NSA, but I've worked at a contractor for several research oriented things they've been involved in (unofficially - the money comes through a non-DoD part of the government). Because what I worked on was geared towards research in language technology and related fields, my view might be a bit skewed, but here's my impression.

There's a fair number of people who do seem to believe that they're working to help secure the country. Many seem to stay where they are because they get paid well and work on what they're interested in (many PhDs who joined out of grad school or shortly thereafter.

One thing I find interesting about all of this NSA spying stuff is how it relates to the pervasive concern I've seen on the part of people working in intelligence about potentially using data containing personally identifying information, particularly of US persons. I do wonder if the scale, scope, and invasiveness of the spying as reported is actually that great.
You can kind of think of it as a small-mid size private contracting/gardening/pool-service shop imo. Some of those companies are well entrenched in their communities and pull down a really healthy amount of revenue reliably every year.
He was making $125,000 per year, and $200,000 was the most that he made earlier in his career.

Here's the math. $150,000 average - $44,000 for income taxes. Subtract another minimum of $3k to $4k per month for living expenses, given he was in Hawaii.

Snowden likely couldn't have saved more than $35k to $50k per year.

It would have taken him a decade or more to save the kind of funds required to both buy citizenship and live on it.
Yes, I aggre, it still need some work to be good, any help is welcome !
not in my zsh.
Yeah, that's in the mix - it just feels like a mental leap, as for years my only savings have been in retirement funds, where I've focused on mutual funds. Plus I have a bit of a problem with the market just because it seems like however deep you get into the abyss of researching stocks, behaviors, fundamentals, etc - there will always be the finance firms who will have access to better information.

On top of that, the media is full of inaccurate stats of how good an investment the stock market is, long-term. They'll say things like 8% net (after inflation is accounted for). I did my own study(1) and over my investing lifetime it's been around 3.5 - 4%. That makes a huge difference in all the sample spreadsheets out there - for someone who maxes out on the Roth since age 18, that's basically the difference between being able to retire at 62 with $2 million, and having to continue working at age 62 with savings of $500k. I guess it seems like there's more control in investing it in my own business.

(1) - Looked at dates/amounts of my entire retirement contribution history, pretended I bought S&P-500 index fund each of those dates, backtested using Yahoo's "Adjusted Close", ran an APY/XIRR calculation, subtracted avg yearly inflation over same rough time period.
Unless you're a member of the trust fund set or have a full ride scholarship, attending an expensive liberal arts college is not for you. The main people being priced out are the middle class, not the poor or rich.
Sorry, I thought this was common knowledge.

Doesnt large house take more energy to heat? Don't people in the burbs drive more?
Just google for 'suburbs environmental impact' you'll get thousands of hits/studies

http://www.nbwctp.org/resources/the_environmental_impact_of_...
" if you want to be good to the environment, stay away from it. Move to high-rise apartments surrounded by plenty of concrete. Americans who settle in leafy, low-density suburbs will leave a significantly deeper carbon footprint, it turns out, than Americans who live cheek by jowl in urban towers."
My favorite is: We're first. Assuming we make it out of the solar system and so on, then just imagine the practical jokes we get to play on future civilizations: Whoopee cushions crafted out of gas giants, mysterious "ruins" that have no bloody purpose at all, ancient stone tablets that end with "Assuming a spherical cow in a vacuum..."

Some archeologist, 20 millions years hence: "Oh god, not /these/ forerunners again."

It wouldn't be all bad, being first.
Where are the macrostructures? We don't see Dyson spheres or other evident macroscale engineering.

This might be a stupid question, but could the Red Square Nebula be considered a candidate? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Square_Nebula
Ignorant how?
You think the NSA story is "vastly more important" based on your calculus of how it might be abused and how likely it is to be abused. Don't you think people are entitled to come to differing conclusions about that without accusations that they are brainwashed by the media? Because that's basically what you're doing when you reject the impact of the democratic process in all this: people can't be trusted to hold their own opinions because they're guided to opinions by the media.
By most accounts, that process could have taken years. Hong Kong has an extraordinarily slow legal process, and there was an endless line of lawyers willing to take up his defense case.

At this point, if he's not very very lucky, he'll be back in the US against his own will in a matter of weeks or months.
> Patriotism originally meant you were willing to sacrifice something for your country

Yes. That's why Snowden is a patriot, not fat bald men sitting around in a climate-controlled building in Utah, listening to mp3s of private conversations (and posting them to Youtube -- we're certainly not very far from this).

Those NSA characters don't sacrifice anything. They probably look like Newman of Seinfeld fame. Calling them "heroes" is hilarious (as well as Orwellian, but we're used to that).
Found no live-examples to run. WebCL's not supported by my browser. WebCL's not integrating with the WebGL rendering pipeline (no buffer sharing, no atomic synchroniczation primitives etc.)

I'd suggest solving a few fundamental problems with the technology first, sorry to rain on the parade.
Now if only our lawmakers could follow suit.

Just one example of the namecalling and emotional backlashing. The ironic thing is that 6 months ago Harry Reid was called an "idiot", and afaik Reid has returned the favor to House Republicans recently.

http://dailycaller.com/2013/01/07/louisiana-sen-david-vitter...
They probably were laughing while releasing this since the sigint apparatus of the EU and the US are one and the same.
How do I configure my own stack if I need to? For instance, I would like to use Ruby 2.0 and Rails 4.0 instead of Ruby 1.9 and Rails 3.2?
Nope. Ubuntu and Debian are not at fault. They have to pick a version of Ruby which runs the user applications that Ubuntu and Debian package, which will be kept working throughout the support period of the OS release. Everything else is secondary. They don't get to upgrade versions half-way through the release cycle, either.

This is why it's not realistic to expect to use the system ruby for development: that's not what it's there for.

It's also worth noting that the version of Ruby in current Debian Stable (which is 1.9.3-p194) will in all likelihood be deprecated by ruby-core 2 years before the next Debian Stable release. Again, this is fine for Debian, because they have taken on the responsibility of keeping working the user applications which rely on the system ruby.

If you're complaining about the system ruby being so out of date that you can't develop applications on it, you're doing it wrong. The system ruby isn't for you.
Linking bitcoin address to email address doesn't sound like a step forward in privacy...
Charlie Rose interview with Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies (2009)
Well, now I have to put on a shirt.
Exactly. Both our chancellor and our president are rabidly pro-US. Our Minister of Justice is probably the only person in the government that cares about this at all.
This is true, a lot relies on people noticing and people tend to not pay attention. The last time I was at the airport, the couple in front of me split to two different security lines. They had mixed up their ID's and funny enough one agent noticed while the other let the lady through.
Idea: A decentralized Twitter using Bitcoin blockchaining
regardless, I loved the Idea - It's like Dropbox for my apps. :)
just putting this here :) setInterval(function(){$("#trapsButton,#gatherButton").trigger('click')}, 2000);
Didn't mean to sound condescending - it would be very fascinating, especially if we would find evidence of common ancestry and other similarities. Wouldn't exactly be the cantina in Mos Eisley, though.

However, as you point out, we live in the middle of an enormously rich biota need not stare at the stars to find new life forms. That's quite amazing.
I know this technique is probably not going to be used for good purposes, and I'm sure we'll have to apply a new patch to fix that vulnerability in our (legal) code, but I still tip my hat to the clever hacks who came up with this attack.
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is actually distinct from the "real" Nobels. It is also even more of a joke than the Peace Prize, often.
"This doesn't conform to my current view of the US government, so I will now baselessly criticize and flag this submission!"

- Hacker News 2013
Ah so the NSA has another NSA monitoring it...and then I guess it's turtles all the way down.
The irony of using centralized social cloud service to organize anti-surveillance movement.
Ah yes, I was confused by the ABI level. They ship with 1.9.3p0 which you shouldn't use. The currently recommended version is 1.9.3p392 or p194...
Just going from your own numbers, he could have saved about 70k a year, if he was motivated. Right? (150 - 44 - 3.5 * 12)

That said, yeah, probably not enough to retire on.
Yeah, I was struggling working it out too, but eventually managed to use it and it's pretty great. I found that the file search works better than ctrlp (and you don't need to wait!), and other options like listing all open buffers and switching quickly between them is really great. Another interesting feature is the line search. I'm used to search using / but this one instead of highlighting the text as you type, it fuzzy searches and eliminate all other lines. Pretty neat.

Overall, I think it's worth the effort I went through to install it. Hope I find time to write a 'Unite guide for dummies (like me)' some day...
I'd never mess with mind-altering drugs. You don't tweak a Ferrari.

EDIT: Guys, relax. It was a joke. You think anyone goes and calls their own mind a Ferrari seriously? Jeez.
Creating bootable USB drives for capturing the contents of memory
We ditched PgPool for PgBouncer for connection pooling from our webservers. PgPool tries to do way to much, and the documentation is horrible. PGBouncer been rock solid compared to PgPool.

I'd love for PgBouncer to poll the servers it's connected to and automatically talk to the master, so in case of master failure I would only have to promote a new master (and STONITH) and PgBouncer would auto-failover to the new master.
Generally, in the US military, officers (which include virtually all pilots) and senior enlisted actually do take into account legal (constitutional, other laws, and rules of engagement) concerns in making decisions. Even in combat, decisions about what weapons can be used do have legal input (i.e. can we blow up a mosque? What if it's actively being used to fire on us? Or what if it just has a spotter in it relaying fire missions to a mortar team elsewhere in a crowded village square?).

Junior enlisted, yes, generally just follow orders from their immediate superiors.
Obama, Cheney and Snowden's revelations
If you want to stay ignorant, be our guest.
I'd pay extra for Australian located email hosting too. Or even a European option.

Also, since we're talking feature requests: 1) contacts syncing via CardDav and 2) Calendar.

Contact syncing is vital though. It's really a killer at this point.
What type of technology would allow us to be absolutely certain that a piece of information was only used for an explicit purpose?

My first thought was a chain of custody with public/private key encryption for viewing the information. Perhaps file systems that record access?
It's not that simple. The airline has to agree to let him fly without a passport, and assurances from Ecuador that he'll be allowed to enter might not be enough to convince them to to that. Also, there probably aren't any direct flights from Moscow to Quito, so he'll need cooperation from some other country, and possibly another airline as well. That's conceivable, but might not work out, and Snowden probably wouldn't know that it's not working out until he was in handcuffs.
> The whole ruby ecosystem is a nightmare for system administrators.

It's getting better.

John Leach over at Brightbox has a ppa with up-to-date binary ruby packages: http://blog.brightbox.co.uk/posts/next-generation-ruby-packa... https://launchpad.net/~brightbox/+archive/ruby-ng-experiment...

I'd suggest giving them a go, and mirroring them inside your infrastructure if they work for you.

It's very annoying that checkinstall doesn't Just Work for recent ruby builds. If it did, I'd suggest that every time.

> It get's really interesting once you use puppet to install an RVM ruby version.

Yeah, don't do that.
That personal attack is uncalled for.
The idea of considering your job trivial is a benefit, and computer development has the succinct ability to share efforts amongst a huge area of disciplines, and thus it is that a hackers career is largely 'hot-swappable' around the world.

I'm the son of a man who stayed at an engineering job for 25 years. This is his largest regret, as it pigeon-holed him into the mentality that he was incapable of applying his vast talents elsewhere in the engineering field. As such, the company that he pledged allegiance to made every effort to keep his pay and benefits below the industry standard, and this was made possible by the environment he hired himself into initially.

Computer development is one of the few jobs that you can seriously apply yourself at no matter where you are in the world. Why not take advantage of that fact?

Responsibilities are another problem. It's a personal issue if you've decided to burden yourself financially with children, a mate, and things that are generally seen as the normal routine of adulthood, but that, like I said, is a personal issue that must be dealt with on a person to person basis.

As for those with technical ability being more likely to also have social problems -- how is limiting the exposure to interviews and social interactions exactly going to help improve the individual we're talking about? It's important to be flexible. To defend a position by saying that person X is deficient too much in this way to have the means to get job Y so he must do job Z is a recipe for disaster. Social interactions are practiced, and the assertion that we should dissuade those that lack in experience from practice is wrong, in my opinion.

Of course , there are legitimate roadblocks in social
psychology that could prevent them from landing a job with no fault of the person, but if they got that initial job it means someone saw something in them that they related to value, and if that happens once it can happen again for them. No reason to think that anyone, ever, is stuck.
Ted Ulle Has Passed
Keyword is 'in association with', I am not talking about multi-core in general.
worst analogy ever, especially for a post that so thinly veils your misguided feelings of superiority.

ferraris were meant to be tweaked, what do you think the entire field of motorsport exists for? from F1 all the way down to the local DE event at the local track, cars are tweaked endlessly, with passion. you won't find any shortage of tweaked exotics at your local autocross, either. if nobody "twaeked" cars, you wouldn't have ANY of the improvements in performance, safety, and comfort you find in your modern automobile.

and furthermore, a HUGE aftermarket exists for ferraris (and other cars, expensive or not) for the sole purpose of tweaking them and making them go faster, safer

there is no philosophical difference between the manufacturer "tweaking" cars, a privateer racing team putting together a specialized hill climber, or an enthusiast "tweaking" his own car in a garage while drinking six packs. none whatsoever. it's people, working on cars. period.

it's incredible there are people on HN like you. i'm a little shocked to be honest.
It's 80 chars right now, so that can't be done without sacrificing some golden buzz tech. And without that buzz tech, you never would have seen this...
To be clear, "self-replicating probe" includes all technologies that can transport, at a minimum, human genetic material, a record of all human science and technology to date, and creche-building technology to a distant star. So a few grams or kilograms of bootstrap molecular nanotechnology, computing material, shielding, some form of reaction engine, fuel for deceleration, and fired by the hundred from a solar-system-wide array of magnetic accelerators or accelerated by lasers. More likely the human genetic material will be absent in favor of emulated human minds.

Or think about actual humans, something large that we'd recognize as a starship, and a vast amount of antimatter. Much more spectacular, and much less likely, because of the amounts of energy involved in getting the job done - and all that just to ship things that could be build on site.

The point being that even if you say that we'll never build self-replicating technology (which is essentially the same as being a vitalist) then given the time scales involved - if every step in the probe network takes 1,000 to 10,000 years of resting time to build a complete organic human civilization before kicking off the next series of probes - it still requires a short time span to visit all stars in the galaxy in comparison to the age of the galaxy.
Again, you're not looking at the entropy.

Anything you can generate without much more unpredictability from a plain English sentence is not a significantly better passphrase than a plain English sentence. Better? Yes. And I credited you for that.
A Gender Reversal On Career Aspirations
I talked to Jeff recently -- they're doing cool stuff with immens. AFAICT, Superconductor does a couple of things differently. First, it is DSLs for making new visualizations, not running analytics within ones they've prebuilt. Second, Immens uses server preprocessing -- we do not require it, and only use it to drop data loading from 5-10s to < 1s. The idea of a render cloud is great (others do this as well), so I've been chatting to Spark folks (http://spark-project.org/) about a backend to compile our DSL into real-time graph processing on the cloud. A shorter-term option may be to extend our CUDA/OpenCL backend to use new multi-GPU extensions.

RE:WebCL, WebCL is simply one of our compilation targets. We can also compile to multithreaded C++, JavaScript (naive or typed arrays), OpenCL, and CUDA as well. For the web space, I'm working on an accelerated alternative of (workers+asm.js)+WebGL, and going from WebCL to RiverTrail isn't too big of a leap.
Not specifically for general data tracking, but when I read this the first technology that sprang to mind was Ben Adida's (http://ben.adida.net/) Helios Voiting system (http://heliosvoting.org/):

"When you cast a vote with Helios, you get a smart tracker to track your vote all the way to the tally. No one knows how you voted, but you can track your vote and everyone can check the tally. "
Cool!

For a poor, but effortless, way to try out a HUD, the OBD app Torque has a HUD mode that inverts the display. Put your phone on your dashboard while driving at night, and you get a HUD-like effect (with a different focal plane).
Every human generates DMT, every night.
A Eulogy For AltaVista, The Google Of Its Time
There is something we all have to do now:

Never give 1 cent to these companies, again.

Our only vote with them is our dollars.
>As for those with technical ability being more likely to also have social problems -- how is limiting the exposure to interviews and social interactions exactly going to help improve the individual we're talking about? It's important to be flexible. To defend a position by saying that person X is deficient too much in this way to have the means to get job Y so he must do job Z is a recipe for disaster. Social interactions are practiced, and the assertion that we should dissuade those that lack in experience from practice is wrong, in my opinion.

I never suggested not trying or giving up. I was simply relating that for such people its often extremely difficult to find a job. The fact that I keep trying is the only reason I'm not living in my car right now.
I agree. It seems better to spend your time investigating the company and to try to obtain information about the interviewers with the purpose to discover some common ground, rather than to learn dozens of algorithms by heart, just to forget the a month later.

Interviewing is a social event at least much as it is a technical one.
BAH had a contract to support netops and hired Snowden.

Ah, the modern version of the Nuremberg defense. "It was in the contract."
This is a good example of why I don't have the enthusiasm most of this community has for Lessig. His single issue lately is money in politics, to the extent that he seems to be blind to anything else.

The criticism which he linked to primarily pointed out that he was speaking well of a company that exists primarily to enable the surveillance state. My reading of the mention of contributions to politicians in the last paragraph was to point out that this company is contributing to people who Lessig almost certainly does not agree with politically.

But Lessig's response is entirely focussed on not being tainted by any contributions.

He seems to get it what the root of the criticism is: " The essence of the criticism is that Palantir is a bad company, or that it has done bad things, or that it has been funded by bad people."

But his response is "I am completely in favor of questions being raised of anyone like me (meaning people trying to push a particular public policy) about whether mentioning a company or their product is done in exchange for money."

No one ever raised this question. It's not a suspicion. I think what we'd like to know from Lessig is:

1. Do you think it's okay to engage in wholesale spying on Americans, as long as it's subject to what you consider the appropriate oversight?

2. If you don't like spying, are you speaking well of Palantir because you don't think they are involved in it, or are you just interested in the one aspect of their technology and not trying to promote the company as a whole?
Interesting idea, I'd like to know more. Is 'The Ascent of Mind' by William Calvin what you are referring to?

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0595161146/
It's analagous to media DRM. Nothing "works" if the user has admin access on the viewing device. And the only way to ensure that is a "trusted computing" chain all the way from processor boot.

Which is possible, but you have to lock out any viewers who can't demonstrate a secure chain from boot to viewing app (so you can trust the viewing app is "yours" rather than the device owners).

And there's always the analog hole. Unless you can rely on a 'Eurion' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation)-like mark to stop recording, people can always capture data at the point of display-to-retina.

The only other approach is the after-the-fact blamethrower, where you tag each copy steganographically so that you know who was the original source of any leaked or circulated copies. That wouldn't stop a Snowden though.