skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Re : auditing cloud providers / higher security or assurance infrastructure.

1) If you bring enough money to the table, you can get them to let you in the doors and look at whatever you might want.

2) Rackspace ( http://www.rackspace.com/blog/compliance-standards-and-regul... ) (and others) currently hold audit certifications and will sometimes show the certification reports. Some things to look for: SSAE16 SOC 1,2,3 (type 1 and 2) , PCI/DSS , ISO 27001, etc.

3) AWS is setting up a .gov region. I'm guessing that this will have a higher security bar than the rest of the regions.

4) google is rumored to have a Fort Meade presence, I would guess that the average googler wouldn't be allowed to use that infrastructure.

5) Rather than renting from a single cloud, for higher security installations someone like Booze Allen Hamilton would help you build out and run a more custom solution rather than take a share of a pooled resource.
In PHP you can have non-alphanumeric variables like so:

$org->{'spring framework'}->orm->jdo->{'transaction aware persistence manager factory proxy'}

I'm not sure if you can do that with PHP namespaces though (and I'm too lazy to test this):

use org\{'spring framework'}\orm\jdo\{'transaction aware persistence manager factory proxy'};
Also NAL, but the problem for these types of scenarios (and yes, I agree it's a problem) is that you have to prove specific harm. It's not enough that some jerk in the government might be able to violate your privacy with such-and-such a program as then the Supreme Court would have to overturn essentially the entire government.

You'd have to demonstrate you were actually harmed by a program, which is going to be difficult for someone on the outside of these programs to ever prove.
Let's say you get rid of currency. What incentive do farmers then have to produce enough food for everyone? How does that produce more water?

Why would the goal become 'how do we feed the most people with the resources available?' Wouldn't it be: 'how can I gain the most advantage from the resources I possess?' With or without currency, that remains the goal.
Forecasts Are Always Right
Decrypt the Same Message to Different Strings
I hate that language bar so much (I work on a lot of 100% JavaScript projects) that I installed Stylebot (http://stylebot.me) just to get rid of it.
Is this site still available somewhere (e.g. reocities)?
I joined the Discrete Optimization course (at Coursera) last weekend (almost one week late) and all the lessons where already available.

Some people seem to have already done all the assigments, judging from the leaderboards.
Oracle might not accept bug fixing donations.
But it should accept bug fixing patches from an independent developer. And that developer might accept a bug fixing donation.

That's where a service like http://freedomsponsors.org comes in handy ;-)
Apple Finds It Difficult To Divorce Samsung
I'm trying an approach where I 'register' for everything I might be interested in since then I get to view the class archive.
Too many shiny things around.

We live in the world where newness is absolute truth criteria. Those who don't want to know history filter content by freshness. Now, there are so many of them that applications have to constantly redesigns themself. Changing back and forth, catching trends.

I know cause I've also believed in novelty, all old looking content was in my blind spot. Things changed once started to read academic papers. It appeared those who are confident don't use distraction to share thoughts.
Pobre Extenuado
No, governments have and will do whatever is possible to commit act of wars against any country to serve its own interest. But the issue is that in this digital era, the power that governments exercise is exponentially larger than in the past and the room for potential abuse has also grown substantially with it. History has show that even with little power (as compared to now), many great awful things have been done.

Things get progressively worse and people get used to them. Today it has been revealed that all our communication channels are tapped. People will make arguments that they have nothing to hide and even if not, they will soon forget and learn to live with it. Tomorrow, governments around will ask for your fingerprints and retina scans (this is already happening in India). People will meh and get over it. Then they will install cameras everywhere and try to track all your movements. Given the amount of electronics surrounding us, cameras would be just another in heap and people won't budge. We are technologists and we know that though hard, these things are possible to implement at a national level.

You said that the solution is to ensure that good people are elected. It is very much important to do that asap. The system is turning more opaque every second. As governments accrue more power over the lives of citizens, it will harder to take govt down if things go wrong. Snowden did what is defined as "illegal" but the law is wrong in the first place. People are moaning over the internet that what NSA is doing is unconstitutional but has it achieved much yet? Petitioning the White House isn't probably going to get any proper answer. NSA didn't ask people whether they were OK with such surveillance, it was all decided behind closed doors. Even in a system where you can openly ask representatives and govt about its actions and they are not answering, so just think of the future when questioning the government's motives will land you a red ticket.

I am genuinely worried.
>IMHO any type of coercion or blackmail of any leader of any country is tantamout to an act of war against the citizens of that country.

That is quite a bold statement and I think greatly reduces what nearly every government would consider an act of war to the lowest bar possible - namely embarrassment. An act of war is broadly something that would have a direct, immediate and lasting impact on a large segment of civilian, non-affiliated, non-combatant, non-hostile persons. Your ideas don't meet that threshold and persons within their own governments would likely be held to those same "war" declarations.
#Muckedup Tuesday: Networking, Pitching & Business
I'm not familiar with the first or the third, but the second example you cited is working as intended. No 3rd-party developer ever types this (and I don't know if anyone at all ever types this or if it's machine-generated), and the long name is meant as a form of documentation for anyone reading the header file.
I'm saying that they should further promote the usage of everyone of those technologies everywhere, all the time, by all the people of these United States.

Protecting us from enemies that could coerce future leaders has the great benefit of also protecting us from the NSA.
>The solution is to ensure good people are elected and that good oversight and accountability controls are in place...

The issue is that you can't simultaneously have accountability and secrecy. If nobody knows bad things are happening then nobody can hold anyone accountable.

This is the theory behind the FISA court etc., to provide a body which is responsible for restraining bad actors. But then the court itself is secret and you fall into the same trap: The court hears from the government but not the target or the public or the EFF or anyone with an incentive to argue the contrary position, which encourages it to have a strong bias in favor of the government, and the outcomes are secret so the court itself has no accountability to anyone and becomes a rubber stamp.
If there was an API for uploading files I would use this for a static blog :-)
PlaceholderURL.com
"National security"

Even your crimes are secrets to be withheld from you.
First of all, thanks a lot for such an awesome tool!

I think graphite would greatly improve by having the "web" part split into different apps/packages (API, graphing and frontend/dashboard).

That way, people could install whatever they wanted. Imagine "only" having to improve the backend while other people create amazing dashboards (which, right now, is already happening anyway... there's such a fragmentation in the available frontends...)

I'd love to help with the split if you deem it worthy & if you need a hand :) I will create a GH issue anyway :D

Again, THANKS!
The thing about hardcore conservatives is that they're perfectly happy to use all that security state apparatus against people they don't like, such Muslims, people who work in abortion clinics and so on. I've run into a surprising number of people who advocate militarizing the border with Mexico on the grounds that 'it worked for East Germany.' Realistically, most of those people were untroubled by the Patriot Act etc. until Obama took office, so I don't think they're reliable allies.

I do think a Congressional review is in order, but my prediction is that nothing much will happen until the US is fully out of Afghanistan in 2014. At that point the AUMF may be rescinded, which would also make it a good time to review the Patriot act. With the mid-terms coming up the GOP might try a campaign based on liberty as you describe, especially since their base is likely to be pissed off about immigration reform, not having a victory celebration for leaving Afghanistan etc.
Hollywood likes to have movies where you can clearly distinguish between the "good guys" and the "bad guys"; well, everyone is realising that America is clearly not the former.
What are the "negativity crap"? How do you beat others?
So Percona is able to create a customized fork of MySQL for you? won't that create a maintenance problem in the future?
I mean, you won't be able to get official update releases anymore.
No, no you can't it's tau/8.
Perhaps you should experience it for yourself as I and others have, and see whether it remains just an internet meme.
It doesn't. By definition, translation should not add meaning, just preserve the original. It is not possible to turn an arbitrary text into poetry by any mechanical means.

A poem by Ginsberg or any other good poet is the densest medium of communication. The message may be a bit ambiguous, but the mean rate of reception is still high: You tend to love it or hate it.
This is seriously ambitious! Glad to see it, a tool for cloning existing boxes was the first thing I went looking for when I started using Vagrant.
Not really, at least in the U.S. common law meaning. Do you mean there's a difference between "legal" and "moral"/"right"?
I would say that all of those languages, while "officially" C-like (as Go is), all stray much further from C than Java or C++ (as Go has). Particularly Perl, Python, and Ruby, which are dynamically typed which singlehandedly eliminates neutralizes a great deal of "C's baggage".

I wouldn't describe C# as a language that I like, but I think it too has benifited from breaking the mold of C more than Java did (though I attribute most of it's superiority to its designers simply making better decisions in several places). Named and optional arguments stand out in my mind as ways C# did something that had no precedence in C, while Java still has not. (There is that double squiggly bracket trick, but you have to admit that is pretty shoddy).
The original title was garbage. The only thing at all it told me was that the article was somehow related to Java. I did click on it when it was the original title, and was very disappointed to see it was just a bad answer (which has at this point been deleted by the SO mods) to a stupid question.

The new title, on the other hand, tells me this is going to be about absurdly long factory classes, almost certainly using Java, and that I should probably be expecting humor rather than, say, a long article about an obscure interaction in Java that produces amusing results (which is what I had hoped I was getting with the original title).

It also happens to be the title of the linked "article" as well, which I believe is what HN says you should be using rather than editorialized titles.
The thing I figured out is: don't buy cars at dealerships.
I believe that your reading is incorrect.

The border patrol can and does regularly put up blockades on major thoroughfares, stops everyone, and potentially could choose to search anyone that they reasonably suspect was recently out of the country or is illegal.

This is not hypothetical. I personally have encountered this when I was stopped and questioned both on the I-5 just north of San Diego, and on secondary streets in Los Angeles. Neither time did they choose to search me, but I saw others that I believe were searched.
Yeah, that's exactly what I mean.

The confusing part of your posts has been that you seem to have been portraying the retention of 'str' as a necessary behavior. Nobody disagrees that it's a permitted implementation, only that it's the one correct or best implementation, and it's made worse by the inconsistency between the two cases, which itself invites confusion.
> it's often been suggested that design patterns indicate missing language features.

Exactly right. In previous decades, had they been using modern terminology, calling conventions would no doubt be covered by plenty of "design patterns". We don't speak of calling conventions that way now because languages provide that for us.
If I and the other constituents of my district elect a representative to a government office and then it is later discovered that a foreign government previously collected coercive personal information on that representative and used it to benefit the country it represents at the detriment of the citizens that elected that representative, then that most certainly constitutes a unilateral action that has "a direct, immediate and lasting impact on a large segment of civilian, non-affiliated, non-combatant, non-hostile persons."
THE Java® SE 7 Edition of The Java Language Specification [is] 670 pages long.

Unfortunately, among the major industrial programming languages, that is far from the longest specification out there. Moreover, some of the major industrial programming languages don't even have a standard reference specification. Notwithstanding its length, the Java spec is actually fairly efficient and well-organised in comparison.
I believe you can refuse to comply with those checkpoints.

As an aside, the ACLU's "Constitution free zone" campaign isn't referring to citizenship checks†; it's referring to a DHS employee's insistence that being within N miles of anything that could be considered a border subjects you to warrantless border searches. Which, again, is something you can find a SCOTUS case refuting.

† Unfortunately, it's now apparently the law of the land that the police can demand identification from citizens, which is one of the great BS decisions of the last 20 years.
The protests around the world: The march of protest
In the answers to the original question, somebody mentioned that gcc will convert branches into conditional moves, but only at -O3. I never use -O3, because it's frequently slower than -O2. In another answer, somebody pointed out that the ternary operator always generates a conditional move, which I never knew.
Globalized message passing (aka events) has flaws. You basically have to structure your events into namespaces, module:channel:event. When entering code written by someone else, you have to gather where events are going to and coming from; if you're lucky you solve this with a grep search, but if event strings are built in a dynamic way, you won't find it without prior knowledge. There needs to be a better solution.
That allocates a closure. Now if you want it to sit around forever, then hey it is working as intended. Otherwise, it does "leak" some memory that will never get reclaimed by the GC.
Harleys are just really expensive. It's more about the whole Harley image than it is about the machine. Like any other designer label.
EDIT: if anyone know how to make line breaks in HN please tell me... it just took all my stuff and snagged into a single line :(

Put a blank line between points that you want to separate, like this:

- Point 1

- Point 2

- Point 3
Given there are more engineers working on MySQL now than any time in its history, I think Oracle is pretty committed to it. MySQL is about fast, OracleDB is about enterprise. A great many companies will run MySQL for things like web applications (especially those that need scale) while running the critical internal systems on OracleDB.

I don't think the MBPro/MBAir comparison is quite right. I think it's more like MBAir versus Mac Pro: it is very easy to see a single person having both of them and utilizing both of them extensively.
Its a conditionally convergent series; you can re-arrange the terms to add up to any real number you like (or diverge). [1].

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_convergence
You can do the math yourself if you want, though estimating the cohort size may be a bit challenging:

http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/2705802-a-morbid-...
It would be great if Android collected all the permissions that are commonly disabled for an app and then presented the permissions on an app-by-app basis sorted from most disabled to least disabled.

This way users of any app in the Android ecosystem can rely on the wisdom of the crowds to quickly see which permissions people who know better commonly disable.

Should every user look over the entire list? Yes, in an ideal world. But since that isn't realistic, the best we can do is present them with those they will mostly likely want to disable right at the top.
> The issue is that you can't simultaneously have accountability and secrecy. If nobody knows bad things are happening then nobody can hold anyone accountable.

That's true. That's what needs to go into the design of accountable systems. In the end you have to trust people in a system that must have secret parts, but that doesn't mean there are not ways to design oversight systems to reduce the risk of regulatory capture and lone wolves, and still expand transparency to much higher levels than currently exist. I would even argue it's possible to do without appreciably compromising operational security.

Organizations like EFF or ACLU are actually a great idea in that regard, IMO.
not to sound flip, but wasn't Color supposed to be doing something special with sound?
Journalists could go for "chilling effect." The AP has already complained of it in practical terms.
As a non US resident I'm mostly worried about the attitude that non US citizens are completely worthless. Basically the attitude of US is that we can be tortured and all our communications can be read. All in all we have no rights whatsoever. Do our property rights even hold?

Because of that I've recently started to think about moving away from US based services. I've maybe grown overly dependent on gmail and dropbox. Does anyone have any ideas on how to move away from such services? It seems that the email address is the most difficult one, it's a rare service that allows me to change the email.

Should I just purchase my own domain and handle all my mails via that? What about dropbox replacements?

(I can't wait to visit US eventually for SIGGRAPH or similar, it's not far fetched anymore to think that this very comment might prevent my entry to that country)
Can you try to describe the purpose in a couple of sentences? I'm having a hard time figuring it out so far from the site and from your description.
I neither know nor care. It doesn't make geometry any more difficult to conceive of it that way, so I've been happy to do so. I do a lot of compass & straightedge type geometry for fun so it wasn't hard to adapt.
> Then, if your answer is no, you have the obvious problem of trying to stop them, which is basically impossible.

Are you sure about that?

My takeaway from all of this is that we, as a population, need to invest heavily in counter-surveillance technology and employ it everywhere. Even if we were to succeed in legislatively prohibiting the NSA from conducting widespread surveillance, what about other countries? It would be at least as dangerous for China to have the information the NSA is gathering as it is for the NSA to have it. This is a wake up call that something needs to be done in the way of making mass surveillance as difficult as technologically possible. The vulnerability in our infrastructure that the NSA is currently exploiting is one that needs to be patched.
I disagree to an extent. For some classes (it's quite variable), the forums can be of great quality, and it can be greatly enriching to be learning the material (and educational tangents that occur in the forums) along with lots of others. It's just not possible to get a cohort of people learning things at the same time as you on your own.

In fact, I am kind of hoping that a community is made where people can get together and study any educational material themselves. Coursera still lacks upper-level classes; it would be great to use the great aggregation of the internet to find a group of people to study advanced material together.
As More Attend College, Majors Become More Career-Focused
I've made a debounce example and compare to an Angular.js promises encoding: http://gist.github.com/swannodette/5888989
DuckDuckGo uses yahoo's search api which is powered by bing. Yahoo research has released the most innovative papers on search but nobody is there to take this from research to product. Instead you find google and bing implementing yahoo's research, its amazing the quality of stuff that comes from there. I also noticed that a few of yahoo's top researchers going to their rivals and then working on search. This is why i didn't believe in the Marissa Mayer hire but i am hoping for the best. She is taking yahoo from a company with high intelligence to being a more low level media company like AOL, therefore most of their talent is going to waste, there is so many products they could be pushing out. The billion they dropped on tumblr could have be used to fund all those researchers crazy ideas, give them 10mill each to build intelligent applications that makes peoples everyday life easier, instead of buying CRUD startups to reach this goal.

If you look at yahoo latest earnings most of their money is coming from the Alibaba investment and their hedging of the yen, which seems to have been used to help pay for tumblr. Yahoo cannot buy their way out of this, just like steve jobs could not buy Apples way out during the 90's instead they had to use their human capital and innovate their way out. I don;t know who should have led yahoo but i do know that their biggest strength was their human capital which is being wasted and marginalized. It's even more evident when your competitors are implementing the research successfully and going further.
awesome tutorial. if you need a free Python IDE (based on VS) to try the exercises in, we just released PTVS 2.0 Beta: http://pytools.codeplex.com.

for you gurus, it's got a cool new feature: debugging Python & C++ together: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJaKQ94lBY
>> The branch in this example is essentially random and so pretty much impossible to predict. I would classify it as a pathological case.

It's a highly contrived example, and it's a little bit misleading.
Tarn gladly accepts donations and will send you a crayon drawing inspired by the game. I don't think he will let you (collectively) dictate development priorities because of it though. Dwarf Fortress is his baby and most of the players respect that and support him in wanting to keep it that way.
Sencha's ExtJS and Touch frameworks are miles ahead of this...
The recent version is the New Horizon mission: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons and http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.htm...

It was launched in 2006, and passed by Jupiter in 2007 (to do some experiments, photos and gain speed). It will pass by Pluto in 2014 and will take the firsts detailed photos of Pluto.

It will reach 100 AU in 2038 (Voyager 1 is a little more far away) so to see what is happening there using current technology we will need to wait ...
One thing is missing: package importing and the related gotchas.