skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The other dangerous thing about this attitude of, oh, it's only foreigners, is that GCHQ and other US allies routinely sweep up communications from all over the world (in the case of GCHQ probably mostly from the US). So if you send information to Europe from the US, you're being spied upon, and the information relayed back to the NSA. The same goes for citizens of the UK subject to NSA spying who have data or contacts in the US. This distinction between us and them is used to tranquillise dissent in the US even as the NSA blithely ignores their own rules.

In our increasingly connect world, does it even make sense to define rights based on where a person lives, or what country they happened to be born in? We should expect the same basic rights (right to a free trial, right to a free press, protection from torture) to apply to all people even if citizenship of a nation confers certain privileges.
You are factually wrong.

You, as a US citizen, are most certainly protected from my government by the German constitution. Not when it comes to all basic rights in the constitution (only Germans have freedom of movement, freedom of labor and freedom of association), but most are universal and apply to every person.

The US constitution is out of date and simply wrong on this point. Human rights are universal and every human has them. Citizenship shouldn’t come into play. (I really hope that when it comes to freedom of movement, labor and association the limitation on Germans can also be lifted one day. For now the pest of nationalism lives on and makes lifting those limitations a practical impossibility. To me it seems clear that morally it is very wrong to have such limitations.)

Oh, and by the way, breaking moral rules is a hell of a good reason to raise outrage. I don’t understand why you seem to think that something being legal is reason to not be outraged.
But should they do so without oversight and without limits?
The threshold is periodically increased to allow for karma inflation, but usually that gets announced, and I've not seen anything recently. As far as I'm aware the threshold is still at 500 - nothing has turned up in my search of HN to suggest otherwise, but search is poor at finding this sort of detail.

Are you confusing this with topic downvotes? They don't exist. Do you know where to look for the comment downvote link? It's a small gray arrow under the upvote arrow just to the left of the name of the commenter.

If none of this applies then I can't help you.
..eh, that's just a flag.

No, there are better reasons to think Norway is hilariously patriotic.
The article is titled "I used ... and switched back" not, "why you shouldn't use DDG". It's by definition subjective, and if this person found better results 99% of the time, then that's a good reason to switch back. Those students studying philosophy might like DDG better, and that's perfectly fine.

200-300ms is a difference that you can feel. This is not about losing that time, this is about waiting for your results a little bit longer which adds friction and annoyance. If you can't understand that then I hope you're not in charge of any user-facing interfaces. It's the reason sites use CDN's and cache pregenerated pages, it's the reason why DNS systems have edges distributed all over the world, it's the reason why Github improved reaction time from 1 sec down to 300ms in their latest update, etc...
Big Nerd Ranch - iOS Programming Solutions
Windows 8.1 Will Have Fingerprint Password Support
Author: please consider open-sourcing your code. NewsBlur and FeedHQ do it and they are profitable. Plus a huge open source Haskell+Ur exemple would be a very good thing for the community. I'm more inclined to choose FeedHQ or NewsBlur as my Google Reader replacement of choice because I know it will be possible to use them even if the authors don't want to work on it anymore.
This is "validated" in a pretty weak sense.

I think the paper is (perhaps a slightly different version of) this one: http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.1739 in which the researchers found evidence that favours the hypothesis "the D-Wave device is doing quantum annealing" over the hypothesis "the D-Wave device is doing classical simulated annealing".

That's very interesting scientifically (though it's not clear to me how far they've ruled out other basically-classical processes) but it's important to notice what it isn't.

It isn't evidence that D-Wave's device can perform the operations usually denoted by the phrase "quantum computing". (So far as I know, no one thinks it can.) So, e.g., there is no known way to use it to break RSA encryption, no matter how well it does the things it does.

It isn't evidence that there is any problem D-Wave's device can actually solve faster than a classical computer.

It isn't evidence that there is any useful problem D-Wave's device can actually solve faster than a classical computer.

See http://www.archduke.org/stuff/d-wave-comment-on-comparison-w... for some comparisons between the published performance figures for D-Wave's device and simple software running on (one core of) an ordinary laptop. The laptop comes up faster every time, even solving the exact problem D-Wave's device is designed to solve.

That doesn't rule out the possibility that there may be other instances of that problem that D-Wave's device solves much faster than anything you can do on a laptop (but no one seems to have found any) nor the possibility that some future version of D-Wave's device may be much better because it scales better (though Alex Selby's figures aren't particularly encouraging on that score). But claims that D-Wave, now, have a useful quantum computer don't look very plausible.
You know what's narcissistic? That this is in the front page of a site called "Hacker news"
Packer mentions continuous delivery in the intro documentation[1]. Is there a scenario where you install the result on existing systems or do you rolling deploys with new VMs all the time ? I'm specifically thinking of services that need to maintain state like databases where the second scenario is not very handy.

[1]: http://www.packer.io/intro/use-cases.html
I think it is an improvement except for the right menu. The list is harder to parse and the order is just completely wrong. The four most important links (Code, PR, Issues and Wiki) should always be on the top of the list.
[Javascript] Background Gradient Generator - Saher Team
Ok, if your going to ignore 98% of all programming languages out there and focus on say the most popular 20 it's not that bad. However, there is a long tail to programming languages and some of them are actually simple, strait forward, and still useful for large progects even if not the 'Enerprise CRUD' variety.
No, I think you do have the right to raise that issue. That's why we have "international" human rights. But even those didn't all exist from the very beginning. People have to fight to introduce some of them to that list. Didn't the EU recently say that Internet access is a human right?

I think being able to use anonymous speech should be a human right, too, if it's not already, and a right to reasonable privacy. If there are no proper legal structures internationally for that, then maybe there should be.

Net neutrality is also not a law in most countries, but seeing how carriers are increasingly salivating at abusing their power so they can charge different content providers for their content, maybe we should be looking at net neutrality becoming some sort of international law, too.
Tory Burch Ballet Flats
> Is the european model better?

Better? Depends on who you are, I guess If you are part of the lower classes you have far better support systems available pretty much anywhere in Europe, with the exception perhaps of a couple of non-EU/EEA states. But just like the US, there's huge differences depending on where you are.
What happened to FreedomBox?
It definitely looks like we'd _all_ now need FreedomBox, like yesterday: https://www.freedomboxfoundation.org

Does anybody know why that project seems to be dead?
I'd love to see a code example!
The race never ends in Formula 1
Stroke fire takes too long. After waiting for the first one and getting a second wait, I quit. You should make it faster until you have acclimated the user to the slow pace.
Ironically enough, they exhort their users to install HTTPS Everywhere and yet it doesn't work on their site.
No one is saying that at all. I am amazed that people still do not understand the problem.

And that really hurts, hurts us all.
it seems to have a bug...if you close and revisit the page again, all the timers are reset...so you can gather stuff instantly
I am afraid anon1385's text puts the 200-300 year old rise of nationalism in a wrong light.

Before that nationalism, people were not global citizens, quite opposite: their circle of life was even smaller (in a geographic sense). Cities, city-states and small kingdoms. England alone was a patchwork of small quarreling kingdoms ( http://www.thehistoryofenglish.com/pics/heptarchy.gif ).

So the rise of nationalism widened people's perspective, it was a step towards larger geographical areas being united and living in peace within themselves.

So the nationalism was progress. Maybe Germans started to fight wars against the French. But at least now you have countries and larger scale organization, not just a patchwork cities and city-states and local warlords fighting their local neighbours.
And in OpenSuse, Arch and Slakware. Looks like to me the trend is set.
I switched last December and do exactly that and am very happy with that solution.
Call it extra cognitive load if you like but I find that DDG makes me think more about my searches and direct them using !bangs. I feel better about this than blindly letting Google take me where it wants.
Constitution is the highest form of law. IANAL but from what I understand all laws are made in such way that they shouldn't contradict constitution. If laws openly go against the constitution it weakness its position as the supreme law of a state/nation (for better or for worse).
DDG does have its own search engine, but it also takes advantage of the dataset Yahoo/Bing collected.
What worries me is that their spying "partnerships" are so broad, that NSA receiving data on Americans from GCHQ, and GCHQ receiving data from NSA, works effectively as themselves doing the spying in their own country.

So then this argument that "we don't spy on our own people", implying that "we have no data on our own people" is potentially misleading to the extreme.

Of course, NSA already spies on Americans, but other countries (Canada, Australia, UK, and others) might not be so "brave", and they could be getting data about every one of their citizens from NSA, which makes it just as bad as themselves doing all the spying. So the "legal boundaries" of these spying agencies are effectively useless.
That's not true. The outrage is often mentioned as violation of privacy, as a police state, as spying on innocent people. If it was some rule breaking legal reason, then the FISA courts should make US citizens happy, but it demonstratidly doesn't.

However it appears the people outraged font consider me a full person.
Lately if I see a post starting with "Unless you have been living under a rock", I stop reading.
Seriously?

I find it much easier from an admin and dev perspective. It is less forgiving, that is correct, but that's a good thing. Oh and the documentation is wonderful compared to MySQL.

Plus it works properly.
But you certainly are protected by the Finnish constitution. At the start it says like this: "All humans are equal in the eyes of the law".
Epoxy.js -- Elegant Data Binding for Backbone
The same argument can be used for flying saucers, because hell maybe in the next 100 years we will have flying saucers.

Anyways, my field is likewise peripheral to quantum computing (computational E&M) but having worked in HPC OEM the NSA buys lots of equipments that would be used for conventional password cracking. We would expect them to stop buying that stuff when they broke the speed-of-light and got a quantum computer.

What they most likely have are novels ways to do collisions on different algorithms. Such as the MD5 collision scheme used by the recent 2 US/Israeli viruses.
Google Keeps Up with Timely Search Queries

...by tracking you.

you can't win every time.
Author is allowed his opinion and choices. I am staying with DDG because I value privacy more.
And I'm surprised they need to at least respect the law of the nation they are working over.

Also I'm surprised people are acting like the being a corporate scumbag is something weird. Corporate scumbags are by their very definition corporate scumbags and must behave scumbaggy.
I'm really surprised that the author did not try this option.
Mass manipulation and the 5 monkeys experiment
Learn C in Minutes
Reader_archive creates a custom Google Reader archive including all read items
Deep Belief Networks
I assume the russians have him until he gives them all the information he still has which has not been leaked to the media yet.
Basically, on your passport, you have both "european union" and the name of the issuing country.
I kind of feel sorry for Sean, that he had to shell out several million dollars to have a magic wedding.

I just got home from San Francisco City Hall, and post nuptial boozing on the way back. It was just one wedding after another, with a couple thousand people cheering each newly wedded couple.

I'd be willing to bet that the people who showed up at City Hall tonight were happy as clams with their cheap ass county seat weddings. I was just there to witness it all, and was bowled over by the whole scene. But I guess if you're stinking rich, you've got to put one over on the Jones...
dude, free as in freedom, not free beer
The after party
Which are those papers you are talking about? I would love to read them at some point. Do you have them at hand?

Edit: Here they are: http://www.research.yahoo.com/publication
You can construct a new series such that every term in the old one is there. However, if you try and rearrange the terms you end up with a backlog that coverages to the difference between the series. Which is why the actual series converges in the first place.
US army blocks access to Guardian website reports about US govt surveillance
Hey, I am really sorry for posting this. I didn't know it was posted earlier too! I thought this might be a good post to discuss on HN. Is there any way of knowing if the content is posted earlier on HN?
It's not dead yet. David Miller has been untiringly maintaing Clojure's CLR implementation for years now. Clojure CLR right now has feature parity with Clojure JVM. core.async is still alpha (it's also an external lib), I bet that once it reaches some stability David will add support for CLR in a weekend (as it has been usually).
Unfortunately that doesn't mean there is much community interest in the CLR port though, but David's relentless stewardship of the project is relentless.

Example: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/clojure/Kvefcae2W6s

Project Source: https://github.com/clojure/clojure-clr
What about the Mongols? Romans? I'm not seeing the distinction. Can you please explain?
Well, the whole thing baffles me. Why haven't Greenwald or Assange provided evidence of his safety?

Assange making claims that he had safe passage to Ecuador only to have that discredited calls into question anything he has said about his safety up until this point.
understood: without confrontation to the foreigner there is not need to take a stance on one's own nationality. There is no contrast to reveal it.
Culture is a big part of it, yes, but often 'nation' does include aspects of ethnicity. Like I said, the term is complex.

Nationalism is something people seem to naturally do. Whether it has a 'point' or not in 2013 is pretty irrelevant - if people are doing it anyway, it's important to try and understand it. While nationalism certainly does distinguish people, it doesn't follow that it dehumanizes others. Having a 'love of country' is perfectly compatible with recognizing the humanity of those not in it.

As for your last question, of course not. I'm a little curious why you asked me that. Do you think I'm some sort of racist for trying to explain a concept to you that's prevalent across the globe?
...he would still be alive , lol !
I was going to write a comment to this effect on one of the many threads related to this subject, but figured it would fall on deaf ears.

Americans should not underestimate the damage this scandal has done to the American 'brand'. Growing up, I was the Americophile of my friends. I loved American culture, I aspired to live the American dream, I fully intended to pursue American citizenship later in life.

This is only the latest in a long line of realisations, but my view couldn't have changed more. I don't even want to visit the US again, let alone pledge my allegiance to it.
You can always just do this as well.

State.stores.wood = 99999; State.stores["alien alloy"] = 99999; State.stores["laser rifle"] = 1

World.water = 60; Path.outfit["energy cell"] = 80; Path.outfit["cured meat"] = 40; Path.outfit["grenade"] = 10
Pretty neat! I found a bug though. I think all my villagers got eaten by a best :( But it keeps saying "3" next to "gatherer", even though there are 0 people, it gathers 0 wood, it says 0/4 population, and the up arrows to increase other resources don't work. Very confusing.
Failed States Are A Western Myth
You're allowed to state the obvious. I will still write this comment.
Catalyst yes, but there's degrees of problems. Within this scope, the question is "should people be allowed to improve themselves" - denying that because it would exacerbate an underlying social problem still exacerbates that problem.
you can by using this: https://github.com/broncowdd/googol

it parses google results on the server it is hosted on, and generate a page you can use without being tracked.

test it here: http://googlof.com/
There is another important reason why you, as a US citizen should be worried about spying on non-US citizens. Now that everyone knows about this, other countries are probably going down the same route - in fact, it looks like some already are, and this is going to be net loss for everyone - both US citizens and everyone else.
I went to this expecting to find a slightly puzzled reaction along the lines of, "even given the leaked surveillance, we all know that our own governments are doing similar stuff to us all the time and that we are protected neither by law nor by convention against it".

I know that's a bit of an overstatement but it's particularly amusing to see Snowden sheltered by two of the world's most enthusiastic users of surveillance, namely Russia and China.

FWIW I'm in the UK, where we're a lot luckier than most in terms of accountability, oversight and convention, but don't have an explicit constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure. That said, it often bemuses people in Europe to look at the US and see almost no protection for what we understand as a basic right of "privacy".
This concept has been formalized in Munich: http://www.transnationalrepublic.org/

You can have multiple transnational republics, based on ideas. :)
There's a gap of a millennium between the 18th century and the link you posted. I was taught William the Conqueror of Normandy came and, well, conquered around 1066 and mark the turning point in England's society by the introduction of the Feudal System. If you we're a mere peasant you tended to stay in your village and work the land for the knights/barons. They might not be interested in nationalism at that point.
They also have a custom blacklist of spam sites that will not show up in search results, even if they are indexed in the Bing dataset.
You're skipping about 1000 years of history there to make your point. By the time of the rise of nationalism, many parts of Europe had shifted back and forth in control between larger empires for hundreds of years, and it mostly was not a continent of tiny little city states and small kingdoms any longer. The era of the city states started fading quickly after the renaissance, and were in the first place mostly limited to small parts of Europe - most of Europe had seen ongoing consolidation of smaller kingdoms for a millennia or two by the time nationalism became a factor.

See this map from 1713, for example: http://victoriavane.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/western_euro...

Even of the smaller states, many were parts of larger empires for most of their existence, though the control might shift back and forth between empires.

E.g. Germany did not exist as a united country, sure, but the Holy Roman Empire (not to be confused with the Roman Empire) encompassed most of the smaller countries on the territories of present day Germany and at various times part of Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Austria, France, Switzerland, Poland, Croatia, Slovenia, Czech Republic. Even within the Holy Roman Empire, many of the constituent states were at various times larger than their succeeding present day European states (though there were also many smaller states).

Nationalism in many instances erected substantial new borders in Europe in places where borders meant little to ordinary people before.
i'm doing that too, ddg have no picture search, right?
The Declaration of Independence states that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men 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." Gendered language aside, the idea of the founders was clearly that rights derive from one's innate humanity, and do not derive from government largess. This was the ideal which provided America's inner light; for all of America's mis-steps, the proclamation of this core ideal fanned the flames of some sort of tendency towards goodness.

This ideal is all but gone. Today, the American government baldly proclaims that rights do not belong to human beings, but are conferred only by citizenship. the starkest example of this remains John Yoo's rationale (embraced by the Bush administration) for why the Geneva Convention does not apply to the Taliban: that the rights guaranteed by the Convention were not human rights, but rights granted to combatants of UN member states. Yoo argued that human rights did not exist, and that rights derive solely from citizenship.

To be fair, the roots of that doctrine long preceded the Bush administration, and have continue to grow since. But when I look at framing of debate about rights -- and this applies not only to the NSA spying, but also to the outrage over the fact that the US President would order the drone assassination of, gasp, American citizens (as opposed to the thousands of other non-combatants he has killed in the same way) -- when I see this, it becomes clear that the ideals which inspired the declaration of independence are long since gone.
Using context is quite different from people not seeing alternate points of view. If someone is interested in LGBT issues, it's more likely that the "Pride Weekend" is what they might be interested in, especially if the search originated in San Francisco.

If someone is mostly interested in philosophy or psychology, that, and they see articles which they are mostly interested, the fact that "Pride Weekend" might be a bit lower down in the ten natural search results doesn't mean that some abstract "alternate point of view" has been excluded from their world view.

I suspect people use the term "Google Bubble" mostly as an abstract FUD, as opposed to anything that they can definitively point to. This kind of context-aware searching is something they can "point with alarm" about, but it's actually a good thing, not a bad thing.
The 3D spinning globe favicon is a nice touch.
Someone here on HN said that this one scrapes the web page linked to by the feed item oif the feed only contains teasers.
Make clear what you mean by 'nationalism' before you use perjorative words like pest - as if your assertion is axiomatic.
I'm not 100% up on exactly every aspect of this, but why would Assange lie?