skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Edit: I wished I'd read rayiner's sibling reply elsewhere. It explains the point I'm trying to make in a fashion that's about 100x better.
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To the extent that revealing an E.O. doesn't endanger national security or other legitimate government purposes I agree completely that it should be public.

However I don't agree that it's safe in general to rely on a given Administration's "interpretation of the law". As Snowden has pointed out, the Administration can change... you should assume that what is permissible under the law and Constitution is actually being done, if that actually worries you.

So if the law says that the Government can intercept foreign communications pursuant to a trap-and-trace it's probably a good assumption to make that the Government is actually, at some point, trapping aforementioned communications.

I mean, if this was working just like a normal law enforcement scheme then you'd already have to deal with the possibility that the government is tapping a communications channel pursuant to a regular Article III warrant to investigate communications of a terror cell for months at a time. Presumably this wound theoretically still accumulate enough data (and metadata) to theoretically wreck your theoretical world should a theoretical despotism come to pass.

What an E.O. should do is to define where an Administration will focus its limited resources in enforcing the law. Perhaps they will decline to fully defend laws that are anti-homosexual in nature. Perhaps they will avoid aggressively going after marijuana usage (would be nice!). But even in that situation, if you cross state lines to buy weed you're still technically breaking the law and should be prepared for consequences of that; the E.O. could change tomorrow, after all.

And besides all that, what if they guy making an interpretation is at a much lower level. An individual cop might make a snap decision, do you expect them all to mail you a Policy & Vision Statement each month?

Even if that did, it would be hopeless to try to push the edge of 1000 different "lawful ways to enforce the law". Assume anything the law permits might be done.... and even then, it's hard enough to fully comply with all the law, even the ones that clearly fall within Constitutional guidelines.
It's for Doug Engelbart. The inventor of the computer mouse. He died today.
I spoke to the NSA at a career fair. They weren't full-time recruiters, so I asked them how much they ran into brick walls of politics and bureaucracy in their day-to-day work. Their response was "well... not all of the time". I walked to the next booth.
You'll still get "the requirements are handed down to us" though, which is the classic Eichmann defense.
Does anyone know the status of PHP drivers for RethinkDB? I'm surprised there aren't official drivers out yet.
It is possible to run a VM inside Docker and still retain some advantages of containers, but not all of them since there is a "VM" in the sentence :)
OP here. Per PG's recommendation, the site can now take any username/password. It does not require your hn username or password.
It is always interesting to see a site where many users are all about free market and generally libertarianish thinking Craig should provide the infrastructure for them to monetize off of, because information should be free or something.

I guess we need to heavily regulate these digital monopolies, coerce them somehow.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrOZllbNarw
That was fantastic! Thanks for sharing this. Hope to see more stuff like this arising.
The account in What the Dormouse Said says the sound was intentional audio feedback:

"Engelbart referred to the on-screen cursor as a "bug" or a "tracking spot," and there were occasionally odd buzzing sounds in the background as he executed commands at the keyboard. The group had been experimenting with using the computer to generate different tones depending upon what was being executed, as a way of creating auditory feedback."

Looks like a pretty uniform buzz, too

http://i.imgur.com/BbaGsCu.png
That link is brilliant, well worth listening to.
For postgres I've been using several threads, each with its own connection, and all going through the same transaction (using the number exported by pg_export_snapshot()) - with this the speedup is quite big (c++ project using libpq).

I expect that if I move to binary format for inserting it might be even faster. I'm basing this since my reader is binary and that made x3-x4 improvements for my data set/computer/etc.
I found this part particularly interesting: "Our business is apolitical, okay? We do not generate the intelligence requirements. They're levied on us. And so if there is a requirement for foreign intelligence concerning this issue or this region or whatever, then that is [...] what we are going after. That is the intelligence target we are going after because it is the requirement."

I think as engineers, we have a certain degree of responsibility for how our work is used. To say your work is apolitical when you're in the business of spying on people is quite the statement, especially if "people" is basically everybody. (I am aware that the speaker is probably not an engineer and it wasn't an engineering recruiting program, but the same can be said about their field, I'd assume.)
Picasso was famous for bartering sketches:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100916104440AA...
most websites that don't function with cookies suck anyways
This was a fantastic post, and though i havent implemented the service personally i have used it and the discipline shows.

very insightful article.
Can one run a server & still maintain personal privacy?
It seems to me that whether one is talking about email, or chat, or files, the closest thing to true personal privacy is if you own the machine itself and you have personal possession of that machine (e.g. it is sitting in your private residence).

On the other hand, most residential ISPs explicitly ban the running of "servers" as a part of their contract:

"... you are prohibited from running servers for mail, http, ftp, irc, and dhcp, and multi-user
interactive forums ..."

Sure there are hosted solutions like EC2 or Linode or Rackspace, and a gaggle of smaller players too ... but this is still hosting your stuff on someone else's metal, in someone else's house.

Let's say for example I want to run Debian Server on a machine that sits in my basement, and I want to run an email server, a web server, and sshd so that I can do my own file syncing. Technically this violates my contract with my ISP. (let's set aside for the moment the myriad issues with running one's own email server)

The other issue is that (at least with my ISP) upload speeds are capped at a v. slow speed compared to download speeds. It would be an issue if I was off-site (e.g. not at home) and I wanted to sync up or transfer large files FROM my home server elsewhere.

So ... what's a boy to do?

seriously what are my options? No google fiber here.
Well, it somewhat worked with religious martyrs of various denominations. I'm thinking of Christian martyrs and Islamic ones for example, where the act of resisting was in itself a way to transcend death.

I think in the end it's all a matter of how you sell it. There wasn't a unifying story for all those enslaved africans to rally behind. In the end there needs to be a narrative that pushes people into openly rebelling against the status quo.
UA/Digital Marketing/Growth Hacker Opportunities
Get in touch if you are looking for something in this space. We are working with several companies (including y combinator alumni) that are looking for a*grade people, especially those with mobile experience
Freedom of Identity and its role in the current world transition.
We do this in robotics (research) all the time, eg. for image and pointcloud processing. I've implemented algorithms in plain python, numpy, and then OpenCV / PCL. When a compute-intensive task starts becoming painful, it's profiled, improved, and/or eventually forked into a C project with python-friendly wrappers.

I acknowledge this is very anecdotal... but my (previous) labs observed a tradeoff in developer productivity in Python vs C, and deemed Python worthwhile (avoiding classic premature optimization and whatnot).
even if it's not the only game in town, sometimes you don't have Verizon reception in your house/apartment (ex: Marco Arment).

(That being said I have only used Verizon and T mobile. Our land line is AT&T though :( )
The TSA hardly has a shortage of employees. Why would the NSA have problems? I have more disgust for TSA than NSA currently, albeit by a very small margin.
email address is simon.bromwell@robertwalters.com
On Technical Entitlement (2012)
Which is absolutely your prerogative - as long as you're not asking anyone to pay you for the service or to base their work on yours.
Quite true. The policy makers and intelligence directors can't have huge spying apparatuses if they have no engineers willing to build them.
Erdogan was democratically elected but so was putin and so was saddam hussein. The problem (and the primary cause of the dictator slur) is that Erdogan sees elections as a one shot thing - you elect me, then you get out of my way.

From day one the protests were not about democracy, but about civil engagement, something that doesn't really exist in Turkey. It is this lack of accountability, a fundamental part of democracy that makes Turkey's political system undemocratic.

Erdogan believes that "democracy is a bus, you hop on, go to the destination and get off". Democracy without engagement in a broken electoral system isn't democracy, it's a rigged game. That's the problem the Turks have, and that's why they're calling him a dictator (which in the view of some may be right or wrong).
There are some weird sentences in this that make it very confusing:

"Installation of a Trojan application from the device manufacturer"

Ok, so the manufacturer of the device is shipping a trojan on my device. Isn't there a bigger problem in this situation?
"Once the rocket goes up, who cares where it comes down? That's not my department", says Werner von Braun.
Thanks! Interestingly, one piece of feedback we got was that the site made bitcoins seem like play money. They definitely have real-world value though. I just used it to pay a friend back for an Amazon order.
That's like saying teaching in school is useless, because if I need to know something, I'll ask someone.

This point of view is value-destroyingly cynical.
Engelbart: Augmenting Human Intellect
wow. never been that angry. but me + my partner found it useful to work through this book - http://www.amazon.com/The-Angry-Self-Comprehensive-Managemen...

i am sure for many people it would be better to see an expert, but if you're the kind of person that would rather fix things yourself then that book contains lots of useful advice and exercises (the basic idea is that you learn to recognise what is happening, then control it, and finally use it; it's not trying to stop you being angry, but it's trying to turn it into a force for good, rather than an out-of-control mess).
Ghostery doesn't block "cookies", it blocks content from blacklisted sites.
As I understand it, it's the news media's job to sell papers to people or people to advertisers. Presently this has arguably not enough to do with informing the populace, but I don't see that this is substantially more the case now than historically.
If "galactic tall tales" sounds like something you'd enjoy, Santiago would make the $3 minimum bid worthwhile.

It's not what I'd call high literature, but I found it very entertaining and have both Santiago and the sequel on paper.
Limiting the decisions I make
Except that she controls most of the media companies in the country right now, and the "monopolies" she is fighting are any newspapers, radio stations or TV channels that remain independent.

http://contenidos2.tn.com.ar/2012/12/09/medios2.jpg

The few purple dots in that map are the only remaining independent media companies in Argentina, all the other red ones are owned directly by Kirchner or indirectly by cronies and such, but subservient to her nonetheless.
New Twitter Ad Targeting Strategy
Can you point us to a thread where someone actually said you can't get arrested for resisting arrest? That's a nonsensical belief. You do not have a right to resist arrest.
Nope. Zerocoin is.

(Disclaimer : I'm a fervent Bitcoin supporter, I like its pseudonymous property and discard any anonymat claims. I've never used zerocoin because I don't have any use for it.)
Hacker School's filtering process seems to work well. I've been in two batches, and it has continually surprised me how they manage to bring so many smart people together, yet avoid the outwardly-arrogant assholes that seem prevalent in a traditional Computer Science or Engineering university setting.
I dunno, I haven't made this up, I just have a wild imagination...

Besides, I play the hosts game with advertisers.
I have no sympathy. They willingly represent the organization. Nobody is forcing them to stay. They could leave, but they don't, thus implicitly accepting it.
Interest is not only to protect the bank (or lender) against inflation. It's also (one of ) the way that the bank gets paid.

For a moment suppose that there is no inflation, no fraud, no bankrupts and no administrative commissions: If the bank gives you $100 and you pay in total $110 then the profit of the bank is $10.
I would assume NSA roles have much higher requirements in education and training.
Its a good speech. I transcribed it a while back:

Why shouldn't I work for the NSA? That's a tough one. But I'll take a shot. Say I'm working at the NSA, and somebody puts a code on my desk, something no one else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, 'cuz I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East, and once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels are hiding. Fifteen hundred people that I never met, never had no problem with, get killed. Now the politicians are saying, "Oh, send in the marines to secure the area", 'cuz they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, getting shot. Just like it wasn't them when their number got called, 'cuz they were pulling a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some kid from Southie over there taking shrapnel in the ass. He comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, 'cuz he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so that we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And of course the oil companies used the little skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices. A cute little ancillary benefit for them but it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. They're taking their sweet time bringing the oil back, of course, maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fuckin' play slalom with the icebergs, it ain't too long till he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now my buddy's out of work. He can't afford to drive, so he's walking to the fuckin' job interviews, which sucks because the shrapnel in his ass is giving him chronic hemorrhoids. And meanwhile he's starving 'cuz every time he tries to get a bite to eat the only blue plate special they're serving is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what did I think? I'm holding out for something better. I figure: fuck it, while I'm at it why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected President.
It's a somewhat common problem faced by recruiters, with different levels of severity and different levels of justification. For example, in the '90s and early 2000s, MSR recruiters trying to get researchers to jump ship from academia got sometimes combative questions, especially from grad students, relating to Microsoft's business practices. In most cases the MSR representative had little ability to respond to those questions, since they had nothing to do with business strategy, and possibly didn't even have any particular knowledge of it. About all they could offer was that working at MSR itself was different, and you wouldn't be related to the controversy. Nowadays it occasionally comes up with Google recruiters, though not very often thus far.

Oddly it doesn't seem to come up often with recruiters from companies that I would think have considerably more questionable practices. When oil companies and defense contractors recruit in engineering departments, they typically don't get much flack. Maybe computer scientists have more of a idealist mindset.
As things are, this is one of the few points of contact for public feedback with the NSA. They describe themselves as apolitical tools for the administration, well, that's a pretty big hammer to give a future unknown with no public oversight.
Wow I bet this girl is real proud of herself. But why is she trying to have this debate with recruiters? How immature.

I hope NSA switches up their recruitment a little bit, make it easier for technically qualified people who aren't exactly choir boys to get a job there. I'd love to work for them.

Surveillance isn't going away, and I bet the technology side of it is fascinating, full of interesting problems.
"BART pre-emptively shut down the cell network prior to an #occupy protest"

This is not quite false, but potentially misleading for those uninformed. They turned off repeaters they owned; the ground blocked the signals. There was no active interference.

Anyone can, of course, draw whatever conclusions they want given the facts, but (as I understand things) those are they, and hopefully we won't get off on "BUT JAMMING CELL PHONES IS ILLEGAL" tangents.
It's an important topic, but like you I preferred when HN was an oasis of tech away from this nonsense.

Unfortunately, politics have invaded our tech oasis, and I don't mean HN. The politicization and militarization of technology is undeniable; at this point, retreating to some new oasis and denying it won't make it go away. While I do want a site where I can see more articles about Erlang and lambda calculus, for now at least, I can accept the pressing need to maintain focus on political issues that undermine our ability to build the technology we want and have it used for good instead of evil.
A lot of people just don't care. They want a job with other smart people and neat technology where they can do math in peace and quiet.

See also "You don't need to worry if you don't have anything to hide" etc.
Indeed, Argentina lacks the ability or manpower to launch a worldwide program like PRISM but it has more than enough to do similar things to its <40MM population.

That and a set of laws that allow the government to make life a living hell to any dissidents: had Snowden been Argentine getting his passport cancelled would be the least of his problems.
That's the plan: make library defined pointer types first class.
But it was. Consider the following sequence of events, though please do not construe this as approval of the police officer's actions - I don't approve of how he acted and think all charges should be dropped.

1. Police officer tell old lady to depart.

2. Old lady starts gathering her stuff.

3. Police officer loses patience, hustles old lady along.

4. Old lady whacks police officer in face. < This is the felony assault

5. Police officer places her under arrest.

6. Old lady declines to cooperate. < This is the resisting arrest part

Now I share your (probable) belief that the police officer brought it on himself by bullying an old lady and that she was somewhat justified in defending herself against his assault. But when you're arrested, you're supposed to go along with it and dispute the matter in court, where a judge may throw the charges out or (...various other possibilities...). Even if the original charge is dropped or never filed, failure to cooperate is considered a separate offense.

(BTW in legal terms an 'assault' is is the threat of unwanted contact. Actual unwanted contact is a 'battery' and need not be particularly dangerous - it's the unwelcome aspect of it that crosses the threshold of legality, although the degree is what determines severity of sentence. I mention this to avoid a side argument about whether the old lady presented any sort of serious danger to the LEO.)
I think he means an application which is "signed" by the manufacturer but actually comes from a malicious third party.
Recently discovered "undelivered" messages from yacht carrying Evi Nemeth
Indeed. Engineers need to understand that the things they build may be "cool," but they have higher-order consequences beyond that. Just because we can build something doesn't mean we should. I mean really, didn't anyone learn anything from Jurassic Park? :P
I browsed the website briefly but didn't see any actual science.

Is there any data showing that this idea is actually feasible? It's certainly a lofty goal but I just don't see it panning out.

1. How will this system be useable for navigating in remote areas, like the desert, the ocean, or the wilderness, far from "seismic forces" produced by power plants? I don't need a navigation fix when I'm on the highway between Vancouver and Seattle. I need it when I'm in the Russian Far East in the middle of a forest. I need it when I'm trying to get my tanker to New York and it's cloudy.

2. I imagine that most generators work on a very small band of frequencies. I.e. Because generator designs are all fairly similar, I'm sure there are hundreds of points on the Earth's surface that would seismically "sound" the same to this receiver. If there are 6 plants with the same generator, and 3 are in California and 3 are in Germany, how does the receiver know if I'm in California or in Germany?
As Federal employees, the men and women who work at the NSA swear an oath which dates back to 1884:

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God."

Rather than instantly pass the buck about the scope, context and impact of their domestic surveillance work, perhaps the recruiters on this clip should re-read this oath and think about what it really means; what their responsibilities are to the citizens of the United States; and what kind of country they want their children and their children's children to live in.
And clicking "proceed anyway" is exactly what a lot of users will do.
Well, as is the headline just makes him sound like some oddbal inventor who didn't do much else worth discussing.
I agree in general, but i disagree it's "quite a statement".
People generally won't do jobs they believe morally or other conflict with their values. So they come up with ways (some may say "delude" themselves) to believe they don't, IE "Just following orders".

A good example are prosecutors and defense attorneys.

I've met many prosecutors who believe it's okay to put away people for many years even if they personally have doubts about their guilt.

I've met many defense attorneys who believe it's okay to get people acquitted, when they've confessed their guilt to the attorney.

This isn't because they are amoral people at their core, it's because they have a job, and want to be able to sleep at night while still doing that job, so they convince themselves.
There is a pretty well maintained community supported PHP driver -- https://github.com/danielmewes/php-rql.
For me, this is by far the most reassuring submission on HN this week.