skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If they came out tomorrow and declared that they don't spy on the US, I would probably believe them.

Do you know why?

Because there is a complete trust asymmetry between the leaders of some states in Europe and the leaders of the US. When the last government was formed in Germany[1], a guy from the FDP (free democratic party) regularly took his notes and other inofficial documents from the coalition negotiations to the US embassy and presented them to US personnel there, while the negotiations were still going on. Guess what his punishment was, when it came out.

Nothing.

So it seems the leaders of Germany consider the US to be so trustworthy that its spying on them is not seen as problematic. Why would these same people even consider spying on the US, especially since, given the quality of German intelligence services, it is highly unlikely that it would go unnoticed by the US?

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=...

[1]Germany has a coalition government, meaning that two parties govern together with thematic areas of government assigned to either party.
So, Snowden is disappeared in Russia, and Ecuador halts Snowden's asylum request. We've had no update on Snowden's whereabouts since his (missed) flight to Havana, and don't even know if he's actually in the airport he's reported to be stuck inside.

But let's blame this on Assange. We can spin this to make him look weaker for trying to help. That will help to minimize the effect both of their efforts have on the world. The "good guys" keep winning, and the "bad guys" keep losing.

God Bless America.
Most enlightening quote from Tarn:

> I feel like I'm still working on basic features
I'm not telling you what to do, I'm telling you what I like to do. Yes, I do sometimes use (pi * d^2)/4. It's not more efficient, and I didn't claim it was (though if I were concerned with efficiency I could argue that pi * d is a pleasingly simple way to calculate circumference).

I'm sorry that my personal idiosyncrasy bothers you so much.
I hear what you're saying, but I think it's a bit of a red herring. The real problem is the abuse, not the topology of the Net/Web.

That is, even if we all ran our own email servers, etc., the government could work with the ISPs to protocol-sniff or otherwise hook into our communications if it had the will. At the end of the day, data must be put on the wire (or in the air). Outlaw encryption above NSA-crackable standards (as they did for exported browsers/software) and away they go. This is not to mention wireless carriers which must be centralized to some extent. At the end of the day, it is not a very practical matter for many of these services to be decentralized, especially for those who are not tech savvy.

And, yes, we could try to evolve technologies which decentralize more of these services for the masses. And, we can hope that endpoint encryption wouldn't be outlawed (in fact, as we now all know, the NSA now claims the right to hold on to encrypted communications indefinitely as it attempts to crack them), but this is not unlike the cat-and-mouse between virus writers and antivirus companies. Stronger encryption would be cracked, data would traverse some centralized conduit, and the government would get the information.

The problem here is not the topology of the network, but the government's intent and its frank violation of our privacy, period. We are a nation of laws, and the government should be constrained, not by the limits of technology, but to the law itself and to both the letter and spirit of our Constitution.
Earlier today US national security adviser Susan Rice claimed the diplomatic consequences of the Snowden revelations were not that significant [1]

She was wrong. This is a diplomatic disaster for the US.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/29/edward-snowden-p...
Free Speech Zone you say?

Time for a "Arrested Development" scene! http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xohzz1_lindseys-cage-dance_...
Brunch | HTML5 application assembler
Fair enough, as mentioned, it was not targeted at you. Sorry if I didn't make that clear enough.
I was mainly summarizing my impression of the (sad) current standard of debate in interested circles.
We're saying the same thing. I'm using that as an example of why it seems like radius is the right one. Of course we have no examples, but we do know that an alien intelligence would be free from the historical accidents of humanity. "Mathematics is the only truly universal language", as Sagan would say.

Here's a similar argument: In mathematics, do we measure angles in radians or diameterans? Why is that?

>that is not the only way to define a circle

Ok, let's hear 'em! What rigorous definition of a circle is more simply expressed in terms of diameter?

The only one I can think of is, "the smallest volume shape that can contain a length D line segment at any angle", but that seems contrived to me. I shutter at using the solution to optimization problem as a definition, except when there is no other choice. What's worst, it seems like a trivial derivative of the radial definition, just with extraneous concepts tacked on.
My car has a top speed of about 100mph, but I usually only go at up to 70% of that. I think they should refund 30% of the purchase price.
The rest of the world likes to spy on the rest of the world.

At the government level, intelligence agency jealousy is about the only thing being generated by US spy programs (particularly since the US is substantially cutting in its allies, most of them have known about this for a long time).
Ok... I'll bite.

He predicted deflation as part of the economic crisis, which hasn't happened. He's mentioned that in several posts, most significantly in this one:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/13/missing-deflatio...

He also frequently writes about the state of macro economics, the politics involved, the different camps in the debate and what can be done about it. For example:

So here’s what should have happened: economists propounding these other
approaches should have said, “Gosh, I seem to have been wrong. I need to
rethink my approach.”

Oh, and by the way, I have done that. As I’ve written before, I rethought my
views about liquidity traps and currency crises after the Asian crisis of the
late 1990s; I rethought my views about advanced country debt and deficits
after making a wrong prediction in 2003 (although in that case my mistake was
in not taking my own model seriously enough).

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/29/varieties-of-err...

And that same search will turn up many, many posts where he talks about intellectual honesty and validity of different arguments, ranging from "this guy is lying" to "I disagree, but this is a reasonable point of view".
> The idealist's battle against tyranny on one side and anarchy on the other is strewn all across the pages of history. Some idealists lost their way. But the ideals, "Safety and Happiness" – really, the entire Declaration of Independence or the UN Declaration of Human Rights – the ideals don't die.

> They are self-evident. Like 3.14159 and 2.71828.

sounds, I'm with you on this one, being intrinsically inalienable -- incapable of being separated -- as in Plato's Republic,
where the individual is homeomorphic to the enveloping state(cops, donuts, coffee cups are topologically equivalent therefore flock together) that you conduct your
own personal House, COITUS(Congress), SCOTUS, POTUS, and JUDUS founded on the certain conviction that the mathematical constants will be in the sky tomorrow, we can improve our municipal safety officers by serving EQUAL EXCHANGE(tm) coffees:

http://equalexchange.coop/products/coffee
'Secure' interpreter? Fair enough. I'm afraid that would likely make it harder to get started though. Not to mention that JS probably has support for better graphics assets than a regular text game interpreter.
You can create a chaotic map with a simple formula, but those don't appear often in the real world. Give me the formula for the weather, or to predict the next earthquake, or to model turbulence.

If the stock market movements were normally distributed, crashes would be extremely rare. Something like 1 every 10,000 years. Virtually all economic models assume something to be true that we know isn't.
Views can all be straight html if you want them to be, and there are plenty of plugins for other types of templating. The Scala templates just attempt to leverage the language since you're using Scala with Play anyway (unless you're doing it with Java). The docs could use some love though.
"Movies and plays get much of their power from the resonances between the structural layers. The congruence between the theme, plot, setting and character layouts generates emotional power. Computer games will never have a significant theme level because the outcome is variable. The lack of theme alone will limit the storytelling power of computer games."

Mr. Sterling goes on to recommend not worrying about the above, and instead focus on computer games as a unique medium. However, it does bother me, when I'm up late at night, my mind is wandering, and I think about how great it would be to take a break from my usual work and spend time writing a computer game.

All my favorite computer games have significant storytelling, but it seems like a zero-sum tradeoff sometimes -- the more you constrain the outcome and guide the player along a small number of paths, the more effectively you can tell the story, but the game becomes less interesting by equal measures. Maybe there's some art to finding the right balance.

(By the way, this was from 1991, not 1981, as the HN title indicates.)
Germany as an ally has known for a very long time, dating back to the split between West / East, that the US was spying on it heavily. The only difference with the latest program revelations is, the German politicians have to pretend to be upset about it as a dramatic performance for the people they represent.
Facebook implementing advanced HTTPS to minimize NSA interception
> Why not just use Scala?

That's what we decided!

And now that's what we do.
Note also that a common bottleneck for array processing is memory bandwidth. Multithreading something that is memory bound will not get you much speed.

There are tons of optimisation, new representations that can be experimented with for arrays. While NumPy is already reasonably fast, I am convinced you can get much faster by expanding it (within or outside it). String/Object arrays nowhere near as useful as they could be as well.
MI5 spends a lot of its time and energy keeping an eye on US officials in the UK. Presumably the opposite happens too.

This is the "legit" spy game that mostly I find acceptable. Again, its merely about understanding intention. Each side has to verify good intention to proceed with confidence.
sprintf does not know the size of the destination buffer. That's why the newer snprintf, which takes a size as a 2nd parameter, is recommended.

(I say newer, but according to manpages snprintf is defined by SUSv2, from 1997, and C99, from 1999; so they're pretty old by now.)

You could probably have the compiler warn, provided (1) the destination is still an array and not a pointer (2) the format string is known at compile time. But that's a very different thing. (Most compilers these days do warn about any calls to sprintf, recommending snprintf instead.)
Heh. But while it's silly to put too much into measuring yourself against arbitrary lists, reasonably good ones like this should at minimum be a guide to "Here be dragons". As in areas that are messy and/or otherwise complicated enough that you should make note so that you'll know to study them if needed in the future. Mixing metaphors while still staying reptilian, so that you don't one day ask yourself "Why have I found myself in an alligator infested swamp?"
Not really, no, at least not without some context. Lots of people use python and numpy on very large computers. Also, running time is not the interesting metric: dev + runtime is. The tradeoffs depend on your team, the problem, etc...
Refreshing the page will clear any console shenanigans you've added (unless you changed state).
From her project description[1]:

My objective in my project was to create a flashlight that runs solely on the heat of the human hand. Using four Peltier tiles and the temperature difference between the palm of the hand and ambient air, I designed a flashlight that provides bright light without batteries or moving parts. My design is ergonomic, thermodynamically efficient, and only needs a five degree temperature difference to work and produce up to 5.4 mW at 5 foot candles of brightness.

5 foot candles is about 54 lux.
30 to 50 lux is minimal illuminance for reading.

[1] http://www.googlesciencefair.com/en/projects/ahJzfnNjaWVuY2V...
I don't see how this could be. Uninsured motorist protection for my wife is $22/6 months and $19/6 months for me (older car). Compare that to $130 and $120 for liability. It would seem that I am much more likely to run into someone than it is for someone who is uninsured to run into me.
OP: This is your ISP.

Per your methodology we have adjusted your rate based upon services rendered. We are also adjusting your bill based upon exemplary upload performance.

((6.89/7)+(0.78/.75))/2 * 80

Amount Due: $80.97
Before software eats the world, it’s going to have to figure out its tax status
I don't know where you get the idea that the purpose of the Constitution is only about how the government functions. It is clearly the majority of the Constitution, but plenty of the Constitution is about what people (American citizens) can or cannot do. Constitution says you have to be eighteen to vote, you can't own slaves, and you can't sell booze from 1920-1933.

I think a lot of people are viewing the Constitution how they want it to be (a set of ideals about liberty and even then only the ideals they espouse) and not what it is (a legal document with centuries of practical use). You can say America is not being moral actors about how they are treating foreign people who don't live within its jurisdiction, but the Constitution has very little to do with this issue. To say it does is cherry picking what you like about the document without acknowledge the realities of it.
Just out of curiosity, what's the Chinese expression? Is it a 成語?
Pulse updates its Privacy Policy
The Diamond Age is also a sickening crapsack world filled with immensely dangerous uncontrolled nanotechnology. And of course the mandatory Neal Stephenson lectures on programming and bizarre sex cults.

That said, Snow Crash was an even worse crapsack to live in.
What nation needs to capitulate to end the "war?"
This was from 1991, not 1981 as the headline here indicates.
There are two widespread misconceptions about quantum attacks on cryptography. The first, which you avoid, is that it's devastating to all cryptography; quantum attacks make some brute force searches faster, which would be a reason to consider AES256 rather than AES128, but do not directly threaten typical block cipher cores.

The second misconception is that quantum attacks ruin all public-key encryption. But that's also not true. What's actually true is that the most widespread public-key algorithms are mathematically very straightforward and are thus maximally exposed to quantum algorithmic advances. That implicates RSA, the classical DLP algorithms like DH, ElG, and DSA, and most probably their EC variants.

But there are many public-key algorithms that are not as mathematically straightforward as RSA or DH. McEliece is an example of a public-key system that uses binary error correction codes as a trapdoor function; lattice crypto uses the closest vector problem instead. These systems are all pq-crypto candidates.

It's likely that if the day comes where, say, quantum IFP solutions can start addressing numbers larger than 21, we could swap RSA out of TLS for a pq public key system.

In the meantime, moving aggressively to pq public key is silly. We have a hard time just getting sites to use TLS at all, let alone TLS with forward secrecy. The post-quantum candidates we have now are significantly slower than RSA. A push for pq crypto today would harm security more than help it.
It says "their creator". You didn't spring up from a cabbage patch so something created you. The total context of what that means to you is up to you. The US is a free country, believe what you want. A lot of people died and do die to give us that, I'm grateful for them and for the US even though I wish and pray for a better choice in the next election.
How can Yahoo's mobile layout be so broken?? This is a major internet company!
http://news.yahoo.com/trapped-transit-orwellian-moscow-airpo...
OwnCloud makes its enterprise file sync service even more enterprise-y
All I'm saying is that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

It's possible that your security has been compromised and you are simply unaware of it. It's great that you monitor your network and take other security precautions. It would probably be even better if you also avoided running Javascript apps written by people you don't trust. Wouldn't you agree?
Node.JS: The Good Parts? A Skeptic's View [video]
empirically not true:

http://www.eleuthera.it/files/materiali/David_Graeber_Fragme...
Oh, well, if Vladimir Putin says everything's OK.

Good read: http://www.amazon.com/The-Man-Without-Face-Unlikely/dp/15944...
Although others that have responded to this thread have far more experience, I believe Peltiers are optimized to work in one direction. That is to say there is a hot and cold side, so I'm not sure it is as simple as adding an inverter. Not that you'd likely be using your hands as a heat sync anyway.

Yes, I realize this was meant as a joke, but I'm still curious if current can be reversed by just changing the gradient. Does it still work but maybe it is less efficient? Is there no difference at all?
A16z-Backed LendUp Now Offers Instant Online And Mobile Loans
Thanks. I guess you'll then take into account the variable bandwidth and charge me accordingly each month? Perfect.

-Your customer
This story has quickly evolved from one of a government violating its citizens rights, to one about Snowden.

Score one (more) for the government-media PR complex.
the quality of life of someone living in poverty has been increasing.
The 70's were no picnic neither.
TFA:

due to the temperature reliance of Peltier tiles, the flashlights worked better in colder temperatures (tested at 41 degrees Fahrenheit). The flashlight still worked in warmer temperatures (50 degrees, for instance), but the colder the surrounding temperature, the more the hand’s body heat can help the Peltier generate electricity.
I was curious about your comment so I did a few searches, and it looks like a major decomposition product is hydrogen fluoride.

According to Wikipedia: "Hydrogen fluoride is a highly dangerous gas, forming corrosive and penetrating hydrofluoric acid upon contact with tissue. The gas can also cause blindness by rapid destruction of the corneas."
empirical and historical evidence doesn't completely bear out what you are saying:

http://www.eleuthera.it/files/materiali/David_Graeber_Fragme...
If you drive into Manhattan your plate is scanned. Every entrance has permanent readers in place.
That is such a circular argument that it is impossible to determine where it begins and ends.
Who said anything about dedicated bandwidth? There is nothing wrong with the ISP putting more than 1000 8Mbps users on an 8Gbps uplink. That's just basic network engineering.

But there is a difference between shared bandwidth and insufficient shared bandwidth. If your network's uplink is at in excess of 80% of capacity during peak usage periods, it's time to expand capacity. Follow that simple rule and all your 8Mbps customers will get at least 8Mbps, notwithstanding that they don't each have 8Mbps of dedicated bandwidth.

Obviously that doesn't include the rare outlier demand spikes, e.g. what happens to the network during a sudden disaster when many people all at once want to communicate with loved ones, but even there you won't have literally 100% of your customers using their full allocation at once. Which means that as long as you can predict within an order of magnitude the peak usage during such events, you can install capacity sufficient to carry it, which will be less than 100% dedicated bandwidth for everyone. And let's face it: We want the network to keep working during a disaster if at all possible; that's pretty important from a national security perspective (and therefore if nothing else from a public relations perspective for the carrier).

Granted installing capacity based on expected peak demand means that if people start using more bandwidth then more capacity will have to be installed and prices will have to increase. But so what? Isn't that how the market is supposed to function? Demand goes up, price goes up. If you don't need a specified amount of bandwidth then don't pay for it and subscribe to a slower package. But if you pay for it then you should be right to expect to get it.
The government has more money and I have less. I'd be interested to hear your suggestions for a better descriptor?
I'm interested to know what one can be charged with for exercising free speech outside one of these zones...
Anarchist societies throughout history took care of the elderly and disabled. Do you have any evidence of your claims that they didn't?
Germany spies on the US government? In what way are we doing that?

In real life, the US has been always all over Germany with its surveillance. Easy, because of all the military installations and so many US personal here.
The first responsibility for a nation is to the security of its people. Everything else is an extraordinary distance down the line.

I know WW1/WW2 are a long ways in the past now, so it's sort of easy to forget the repeating cycle of nation warring, but history is routinely littered with civilization shattering wars. No sense in pretending everything is going to always be peachy, it's not. Knowledge is power, and at times far more valuable than standing armies. I think the famous quote: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure - is appropriate here.
I think it depends on the junior dev - if they 'learn' when they get their question answered, the productivity of the team over time most likely increases quite a bit; it's an 'investment' in future productivity.

If they ask and don't 'learn', but simply mirror / rote regurgitate what the senior dev said, it's probably disastrous to the team's productivity both then and over time.
That is what having an SLA ought to be for. OP paying for "up-to" service doesn't really have grounds here for either of these.
It's clearly a story that got garbled somewhere in the telling, but it's hard to guess at what the original problem could have been. I'm pretty sure Postgres has been included in all Debian releases from this millennium.
She should call it the Fleshlight
I can't wait for the visual editor!
> Isn't this the explicit purpose of the NSA, to spy on the communications of foreign governments?

In what deranged world-view does being "the explicit purpose" of something make it right?

(and it's not even their explicit purpose, otherwise they'd be called the International Spying Agency ...)

> And aren't EU members' governments doing the same thing against the US?

That's a childish argument. Frankly I don't care if Germany or France or whoever are spying on eachother too. An example from my work with kids, "but he's doing it tooooooo!" doesn't really fly with me, it doesn't matter, they shouldn't be doing it either, but I caught you, now clean that up.

While two EU states spying on eachother is an internal EU matter, I do wonder to what extent EU states are spying on the US. It sounds risky, though. I mean, if we catch a US spy snooping on our diplomats, we can't really throw them in Guantanamo, or anything ...