skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Though my own taxes help fund the IITs, and I never was hard-working enough to get through the JEE, I'm happy that we have the IITs setting at least some kind of an example for the rest of India. I am disappointed by the idiots filling teaching positions in most other colleges.

> do they not have a duty to give back to the people ?

I hate this attitude, not just in India, but anywhere in the world. Like Kennedy's "ask not what your country has done for you...". To start with, their own parents paid taxes to support the IITs too. Do we have a way of making a balance sheet for how my taxes were utilized? How much have I lost to supporting corruption? How much have I lost to supporting undeserving candidates who got in through reservation?

In case of IITs, you are, of course, neglecting all the private funding it gets.

> brain drain is a serious problem for countries like India.

Many Indians who have left have gone on to accomplish great things. Do you think they would have accomplished even 1% of that, had they stayed in India? Brain drain is not India's problem; it is an avenue for opportunity for many Indians. India's problem is corruption and unfettered democracy.
This system exists, is open source, is behind the German Pirate Party, and needs your support!

http://liquidfeedback.org/
You're talking about "delegative democracy" or "liquid democracy". Here's the software to support that:

http://liquidfeedback.org/

The German Pirate Party already uses this as their decision-making platform.

EDIT: Just posted this and discovered that quadhome and I had the exact same idea at the exact same time. :-) Whoops!
But failing that, the second most convenient thing would be "all politicians are corrupt, we can't do anything anyway, let's go shopping!".
In general, I don't think the protocol specifications call for some suites to be allowed with certain protocol and some not to. (There are some exceptions, when weak suites need to be deprecated.) In practice, it comes down to how library developers have implemented them. For example, in OpenSSL, you have SSL v2 suites, TLS 1.2 suites, and >= SSL v3 suites. I don't think there are any TLS 1.1-only suites.
newsblur isn't exactly like google reader, but it's likely close enough for your question.

Here are the stats that show when logged into newsblur as of this post:

Premium (Paid)Users: 7,534

Standard (Free) Users: 11,387

So it looks like 11,387 folks would at $24/yr (USD).
> I'm convinced nothing can stop genetic engineering in humans in the long run.

Note: the article talked about human enhancement in general, and mentioned cyborg-esque options like titanium bones. It didn't mentioned the most radical option of all, mind uploading, but I guess that was to avoid scaring readers away. (Mind uploading also have this minor "will it be really me?" problem.)

> This article suggests we will engineer away negative, selfish and competitive traits

(Emphasis mine.)

Err, I didn't read that. From what I read, the article said that we probably should engineer away such traits. And again, if a parent can enhance her child's school results by buying her the best arithmetic implant from Texas Neuro-Instruments, she will not limit herself to mere DNA modifications. Many of us already wear glasses, for instance.

I do agree with your main point though: technology-aided evolution will probably take a sharp and nasty turn, if ran unchecked.
There's been a resurgence. Last year there was a huge one in London. Large sound system, illegal space, thousand people.
I think this campaign is aimed at the wrong company.
> I believe a part of me feels like a coward for not saying something to the man in front of me at Costco.

I often wonder about this... Let's assume you have unlimited confidence etc.: even then, what would be a good way to react in such a situation that doesn't just lead to it being taken out on the kid later? It just seems hard as a random stranger to say anything that would be actually heard.

On the other hand, provided the kid gets abused either way; wouldn't it still be better for them to see that not all adults think that's okay? Even if they get another beating for it? I never was treated this way, and I'd like to think I would still want others to stand up for me, even if they can't actually help -- but I don't know, and it's really tricky to meddle with something as sad as this based on my own biases.

Is there any "professional advice" on this?
The Stasi has been around in some form or another until about 1990. A lot of us really have "been there".
> The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are a system of technical universities in India comparable in prestige and rigor to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or the California Institute of Technology.

Far from it. IITs are not even in the top 20 in Asia[1].

[1] http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/asian-uni...
And imagine how limited it's capabilities would be!
Space is full of canola?
This question I can only answer for holland, where I live.

Basically you can apply to any university and they will let you in. Sometimes you need maths, but mostly it is open. If you don't score 50 out of 60 credits in your first year you're out. You fail a class if your grades are too low, which is more frequent than would happen in usa.
Why bother? Google knows the BCC line - your email provider by definition has to in order to BCC the message, and it very much depends on them to properly scrub it out as well (I know for a while it was pretty trivial to see BCC's from most providers).
Ah, yes. But I was thinking of all the integers.

I know, I should have read the OP but I was too lazy.

Really cheeky, though :)
Entrepreneurs Get Better with Age
Northrop Grumman did a similar, but wider-ranging, thing a few weeks ago; blocking all sites classified as 'news.' This lasted a day or so.
On Disrespect, not Snowden: Analogy to why the US are acting the way they are
Introduction to Angular JS by David Mosher
So from Wikipedia, Boundless Informant uses 504 separate DNR (electronic surveillance program records) and DNI (metadata) collection sources known as SIGADs. In a 30-day period, they collected 3 billion data elements from within the US from these SIGADS.

And the PRISM document says it is the "the number one source of raw intelligence used for NSA analytic reports". Doesn't that mean that PRISM is the majority source of those 3 billion data elements?

And why did Page, Zuckerberg and Apple say they never heard of PRISM? Perhaps I am wrong but it's somewhat confusing!
WTF was he arrested for?!
I don't understand: there's nothing stopping you from reading what you want.
> even if the project runs out of money after a few sprints, the most important requirements will have been met. The product owner still gets to prioritise a backlog (the product backlog) according to business and user requirements.

Interesting, but if the team are choosing items from the product backlog there seems no guarantee that the product owner will get the stuff that they consider important done?

If the team assemble their sprint backlog, they'll do their own prioritisation which may not sync with the product owner's.
Grand Canyon Tightrope-Crossing Was Mosted-Tweeted Show Last Week
I have seen Indian non-IITians who are way better than their IIT counterparts at similar tasks. I also feel that good non-IITians are easier to work with and get the job done because they don't come with the baggage of some sort of entitlement.

But having said that, I do observe that an undergrad degree from an IIT serves as a reasonably reliable indicator of Engineering strength.
The German Pirate Party worked with this concept, calling it "Liquid Democracy"[0] and using the software LiquidFeedback[1]. AFAIK they abandoned it when discussions grew too large.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy
[1] http://liquidfeedback.org/
You say nobody is going to buy it, but doesn't this article show that Netflix "bought" into it?
I have had a foot in the games industry since a long time, being a IGDA member and attending a couple GDCE conferences, but never managed to really get in.

So I do know some stuff how the industry works, but your comment provided valuable information. Thanks.

As I do value my private time, I might never get in anyway.

Currently for my hobby game programming, cocos2d-x is the way to go.
Yeah, 9/11 definitely was a fabricated event...

People need to keep their comments reasonable and cut the hyperbole if they want to get anything done. When you keep crying wolf, people stop listening. Which is fine if you just want to always get the last word in, but if we're actually concerned with overreach and national security then choosing our messaging well and keeping our concerns focused, specific and provable with neat, incremental steps is the way to go.
You can already hook up this really sweet Github -> Travis CI -> Heroku bridge. Every push runs your tests, if they pass, deploy.

It'd be neat to modify this so that pull requests spun up an app you could play with. Travis provides an environment variable that lets you know if you're testing a pull request, hmmm...
That would be helpful but ultimately will not address this as it needs to be made clear to governments that they are not welcome in our private lives except under cover of a specific investigation and public warrant. Encryption would be helpful but if the government compels your email provider to hand over your stored emails or just email headers they can still get a lot of information about you even if you always use encryption to send/receive and try to encrypt content that you send. Even just your IP logs tell a tale of your location potentially over your entire life.

In addition to things you control there are many sources of metadata (phone records, bank records, online services, shopping records, web searches/visits, forum comments, unencrypted emails from companies and others) which are really intrusive if made public in aggregate, and with the recent assertion by the US administration that all these records have no expectation of privacy (because you shared them with someone or a company), encrypting just your emails will seem like a hollow victory when the government can collate and analyse all of your activity, online and anything offline which leaves a digital trail, for your entire life.

I do wonder whether the coming of age of a new generation, and the discovery of this widespread invasion of privacy in the name of fighting terror, will erode still further the allegiance to national governments we still feel and lead to supra-national collectives on the internet having more and more sway in our lives. After the hubristic actions of our governments and their pretentions to omniscience about our lives ('mastering the internet', 'total information awareness' etc), our interests as citizens seem to me much closer aligned with other users on the internet and far less aligned with either corporate or national interests.
File-Sharers Have Right to Anonymous Speech, Court Hears
Uhh, this is Earth, and we are all organisms competing for resources.

This is Earth indeed. Some dimly lit gravity well at the edge of our smallish galaxy, with no reasonable plan as of yet to get away. But hey, let's just burn everything on being better than the next guy, because just being happy for someone else, much less supporting them, isn't even an option.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality
Even if the intelligence governmental agencies exchange that in the US (and many certainly do), that doesn't mean they can't impose rules on businesses (expanding the privacy laws you mention) and other state entities to avoid using US tech services.

Sure it'd be hypocritical, but when did that stop anyone?
Former US general James Cartwright named in Stuxnet leak inquiry
Nasty turn how? It's only a problem when combined with allowing other, existent problems to go unchecked - i.e. the stratification of wealth.

Presuming the problem is that it's being done at all is fundamentally asking the wrong questions, not to mention strays far into violating rights like habeas corpus which creates a much bigger problem.
> file-sharers have the right to anonymous speech

This is an inaccurate distraction in your comment.
Look at some of the criteria for those rakings. They are heavily weighted towards how many international students and faculty they attract, research done by the faculty and grad students, the number of papers they publish and how often those papers are sited. IIT on the other hand is heavily focused on producing high quality under graduate education for Indian students.

Their goals simply don't line up with the metrics being measures by those rankings.
I stopped reading after the first sentence.

THE twin revelations that telecom carriers have been secretly giving the National Security Agency information about Americans’ phone calls, and that the N.S.A. has been capturing e-mail and other private communications from Internet companies as part of a secret program called Prism, have not enraged most Americans.

Apparently this op Ed contribution hasn't been pyong attention for the last 20 years (or actually hasn't cared until the latest bandwagon to jump on rolled into town) but all of this in the news has been in place way before Obama and extended by Bush like crazy after 9/11.

Check CALEA signed by Clinton in 94 requiring telecoms to spy on their customers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_L...
It's also important to remember evolution is not a process of general improvement, it's a process of adaptation for survival.

There is absolutely no reason for natural evolution to select for being smarter or stronger if it's not a good survival tactic - i.e. if it doesn't select for traits which allow proficient reproduction.

On a large scale "more evolved" is a meaningless term.
http://i.imgur.com/MI2GdZX.png
No, if you follow his tweeter feed, he means he would like to have GC strong typed language with the performance from C and C++.

This follows his ongoing Haskell experiments and with a short deviation to Scheme/Lisp.

I was just trying to make the point that known game developers do value GC languages for game development, even if nowadays that is still not mainstream.

I am old enough to remember the days C was considered too slow and together with Pascal was just used for prototyping ideas, if ever. Times change.
The US government's attitude is akin to an angry parent shouting, "how dare you!" at an impertinent teenager. General Alexander's statement that, "What Snowden has revealed has caused irreversible and significant damage to our country and to our allies" seems like a bland justification for revenge.
Yeah. It's an alluring idea though. I wonder what the real number would be - 2,000? 10,000?
Well, if you were coding in C++ I would say "have a look at TBB".

The thing is, text book implementations generally lack all the platform dependant details to make it efficient.
Vine Gets New Updates for Android with Front Camera, New Upload Manager
indeed, the WP theme is https://github.com/viewportindustries/starkers

can see here: http://blog.seanmartell.com/wp-content/themes/simplified/sty...
A Google spreadsheet should work for reading. Just use columns with date, start page, and end page. Apply formulas as necessary.
Which is why DefectiveByDesign launched a campaign against them:
http://www.defectivebydesign.org/cancelnetflix
'Nuclear Pasta' In Neutron Stars May Be New Type Of Matter, Astronomers Say
Google Maps Trekker
Okay.. Now i am going to be 'that' guy.. WTF is this on hacker news?
Microsoft? Maybe. But Netflix seems to have been working with both Microsoft and Google, and I think Apple, too, to make this work. So maybe they aren't just an idle player, and they may have been the ones trying to get the other major companies to do this for them (and others).
TL;DR: Bad parents shouldn't be bad.
IMHO, the work that has the most chance of making the difference is not in new software, but in new cryptographic techniques, and ultimately a standard protocol. Anonymous end-to-end auditable voting can and should be distributed, rather than relying on a centralized website on which to cast votes and present arguments.
> note the lack of front-page coverage of this story in the New York Times

NYT front page on June 20, 22, 24, 25, 26 -- five out of the past 7 days. Plus a front page mention on June 23. I know you don't mean your comment literally, but I think there's been a lot of coverage. There's some criticism that the stories of late tend to focus more on Snowden, but his part of the story is the only thing that's had material developments in the past week.

http://www.nytimes.com/images/2013/06/26/nytfrontpage/scan.p... (et al)
The weirdest languages
The German view is that Britain manipulated the financial markets and they fell into their own traps. Instead of setting up a sound economy, Britain lived of North Sea oil, dubious financial 'services' and speculation. But they can't admit that, so they put the blame on somebody else.

Now Britain is desperately seeking for a vision. Is it the revived Commonwealth? Difficult. Though there could be improvements. Britain has a huge trade deficit with India. What else? Is it a form of self-isolation? Alternatively the US could be the best partner and Britain can have a free-trade agreement with the US.

In my view Britain takes itself much too important. From here in Berlin we have many more difficult problems. We just need to look a bit east. Poland is a country which enjoys some growth and it would be much more useful to help them getting into shape and getting them up to the level of Eestern Europe. Even East Germany needs a lot of attention.

As an European, I have to say the EU is a huge success. Much of what I read in the newspapers is bullshit anyway. How often has the British press written that the Euro is over in a few days, survival possibility of a few percent, Germany is already printing Deutsche Marks, and more. Fact is, the Euro is still there, looking stable and the Eurozone is committed to keep it.

Britain may get out of the EU. Scotland may even get out of Britain. The interesting times will be more interesting than some think.
"Classified" remains classified even if leaked to remove ambiguity and possible sloppiness.

It is to avoid situations like: "this document says it needs to be handled as if it is classified but I am pretty sure it leaked last week so I will treat it as unclassified which is easier..."
I don't know, your reading of this is a lot different than mine. I never felt like it crossed into "the scary bad guys" territory.

The good-people-in-bad-systems thing reminds me of the HBGary story generally. I don't know that I would describe Aaron Barr as a "good" guy at all--I certainly would not wish to ever associate with him--but his motivations throughout seemed pretty banal. Ambition, desire to take down the "bad hackers" in a showy way, desire to defend institutions he sees as basically okay.

Furthermore it does not always have to be the case that good people are working in rotten systems. Some people are genuinely terrible. And even in the case of basically good people who actions are warped by a rotten system - I think any basic idea of moral responsibility prevents us from excusing them for that. And at a certain level I'm not sure what the usefulness is in continuing to call them "good people." It instills empathy and prevents us from constructing cartoon-images of these people in our heads, but it can cross over into becoming an exercise in glossing over worthwhile anxiety . . . "Things aren't really -that- bad, it's just a case of good people stuck in a rotten system . . . "

Finally, the feds coming down this hard on any journalist--it shouldn't matter that he's independent, and possibly kind of hackish--is an alarming compromise of free speech.

Stratfor: I just don't see how you can dismiss this as "just their job." This isn't even a potential op. It's the case of a private company openly toying with the idea of illegally executing some dude for personal reasons. That seems reprehensible in any context, and certainly worthy of whatever scandal it generates.
For me (as an American) it's a moral question. If the principles of the country are so fundamental and so sacred, why would you hold others to a lower standard? Spying on Americans, that's clearly wrong! Imprisonment without a trail, no way! Except for foreigners, then it's legal, so it's fine...

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all me are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

What is unclear about that?

I just don't understand that we live in a society where it is ok to 'deliver' freedom to others by force, but where we maintain that digging through every german's gmail account is 'legal' in the US, so it's ok.

It's not only hypocritical, but short-sighted. Why would a French company use Gmail or Exchange Online if the US maintains that it and any subcontractor can read their mail at their leisure with no real consequences? Why would a Belgian visit the US if they could detain him because one of his facebook friends got in trouble with the police when he visited Florida?
But your actual IP address still does not tell them your precise location. Unless they also separately get a log of what cell tower handled traffic for what IP addresses, they'd still be left with only the location of your local internet provider.
>True but have you tried to port an engine to run on consoles Xbox360 or PS3? 10x worse with special hardware hooks, crappy apis, older apis (dx9, custom opengl)

I have, have you?
Compared to the zoo of vendors and drivers on PC - console APIs are especially streamlined and beautiful. When porting from PC to 360 you essentially remove code or replace kludgy procedures with few lines. PS3's API is nothing like PC (no, it's not "custom OpenGL") so it takes a bit more time but, nevertheless, fixed HW platform beats generic APIs any day.
India should try to broad base its technical education and infuse quality among the large number of technical institutes which have sprung up across the country. Giving autonomy and aid to good institutions can be a beginning. IITs are good, but not the first or foremost requirement for the transformation of engineering education in the country.
Except it'll feel like someone else's body ...
Microsoft joins Google in demanding to disclose FISA requests
That's a legitimate question. Now here's a question for you?Are you a dad?
I agree that modern Android phones (mine [Sharp 200SH] has 4.1.2, dual core CPU, 1GB RAM) are pretty smooth, and seem more or less the same as modern iOS devices on that front. [Apple sometimes seems to go to extra lengths to put in little animations etc (e.g. the screen rotation), but I'd classify most of them as frills.]

... with one glaring exception: on my Android phone, at least, pressing the home button very often takes a good 1-2 seconds (sometimes more!) to take you to the home screen, with no visual feedback that it's doing anything. A second with no feedback is an eternity in GUI time. iPhones (and iPads), on the other hand, respond pretty much instantaneously to the home button.

I'm pretty used to this behavior, so I know to just wait, but it's still pretty annoying (one hits the home button quite frequently in typical usage).... Even if there's some property of the Android software that makes it challenging to do the switch itself quickly for some reason, couldn't they have at least provided a little visual feedback that it's doing something...?!
Basically, I imagine a political party, defined by the software it runs on.

You realize you are essentially proposing that we switch from the Republican Party vs. the Democratic Party, to the Vim Party and the Emacs Party- right? We all know how vim vs. emacs debates go down.