skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Nothing forces the government, or any other entity, to publicize its interpretation of law until it is challenged in public court.

One of the key objections raised during this controversy is that perhaps the executive should be forced to reveal its interpretation of the law. What public policy objective is served by keeping this secret? Bear in mind, we're not talking about disclosing detailed information about US military or intelligence operations. It's not something like "John Smith is an undercover agent in Country X," or "The NSA now has a tap on a router at such and such location." Rather, we're only talking about disclosing the executive's opinion as to what the law means. What danger is posed by simply publishing theories as to a law's meaning? Would enemies really derive any advantage from knowing this?

> The gist of the DOJ's argument is sound. The key thing to understand is that the FISC court is not making law.

This is partially true. The court is not writing statutes. However, they are (presumably) creating a body of case law. And case law is law. Yes, it is merely an elaboration on statutes and prior caselaw. But it is new law, nonetheless, in the sense that it decides legal questions which previously were undecided.

Just as one should be concerned with the laws created by SCOTUS, one should be concerned with the laws created by the FISA court.
Massengil tax.
I mostly agree with this. Any rational business model would probably require some demand and usage based pricing, and if you are using a shared car the same way you would if you owned it (i.e. commuting to work during peak hours, weekend trips), than it should come out to roughly the same cost as ownership. However, in high density urban areas, parking is still a real pain. In my opinion, this is really where the potential for driver less cars is. A dedicated parking spot can be expensive, and street parking can be a nightmare.
Don't $^%& with the douche mafia!
If they have not received raises after spending many years with the business, then it's unlikely that their years of experience matter.

And if their years of experience do not matter, they would be replaced with lower-cost younger labor well in advance of them reaching particular age group considered "older".
>>> the original article that inspired the term

It's not one article. There were many others. The term was coined exactly because Fisk produced a lot of content that resulted in well deserved debunking, not just one questionably racist article.

On top of it, the guy seems to be a proponent of Internet censorship[1] - which of course doesn't make his ME dispatches wrong, many other factors do - but add to the portrait.

>>> Sullivan an unapologetic member of the far Right

Err, how exactly a person that publicly supported John Kerry, Barack Obama and Democratic Party and identifies with them on many issues - from same sex marriage to Middle East policy - qualifies as "far right"? He calls himself conservative, but I can call myself the Pope - it wouldn't make me one. He's a moderate liberal with some libertarian leanings, nowhere near "far Right".

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/anonymous-commen...
A New CEO Will Totally Turn Around Barnes & Noble's Dying Industry
Mouhaha. "unprecedented success". They just managed to sell a lot of boxes with ONE game per system. The Wii is probably the first console where you have the lowest number of games sold per unit on average, because so many casual gamers bought it and left it lie in the dust after playing with it a couple of times.
I find that my comment scores are higher and my comments more civil if I delete some of the comments I make. These days, I tend to write it, read it, then half the time delete it.

What you might want to do is give the commenter themselves a signal, more explicit than just a bad score or being grayed out. A message could pop up by the comment saying "likely to be downvoted, you are advised to delete this" - and see if more self-policing helps.

Also, if you have some signal that occurs before votes or other comments show up (like a lot of eyeballs on a comment with no upvotes), then maybe you can use that to give users an early signal to delete their comment.
Rather than worry about me, perhaps it might profit you more to worry about government encroachment on your rights.
> For sufficiently large definitions of massive it is indeed prima facie evidence for the simple reason that the government exists to serve the people. If the people disagree with the government's actions then the government is, by definition, wrong.

What about when a sufficiently large proportion of the population want to hold a minority in concentration camps? Or hold a minority to slavery? Or prevent them from being legally wed to the one they love?

Many bad and wrong things have passed because of mob justice.

> Since his guilt or innocence is a matter of fact not opinion the analogy is deceptively unhelpful.

Since when has public opinion been based on facts alone? All history is one long string of examples of seemingly all sides misleading the public, if not lying outright.
It took me a while to notice the Chrome bar that said this was translated from German. Wow, I wouldn't have thought so otherwise, it's impeccable.

When's the deadline for this?
Deal: Learn To Build iOS Apps With This Video Course
Keeping current margins would mean 1000% profit margins since the actual cost of ownership is surprisingly low. The cabby's cut, down time, and the medallion's costs (both up front and in supply restriction) make up the vast majority of fare today.
Can you describe that in terms of an important system, somewhere, which would not exist but for your contributions? If so, more on that story, less on the technical detail. If on the other hand none of your work ever gets used in anything important, then that's a non-BSy reason to change what you're working on. (Believe me -- been there, done that.)
Traditional Italian Lemon Ice
7.3 is not positive. It's zero. It's borderline statistical error compared to their past successes. And competition is coming in 2013, with very strong hardware and software to back them up. Of course Mario will keep selling to some people, but Nintendo is done for for this generation in home systems.
Where I work, the physical document is first scanned into an electronic form (multipage formats like TIFF or PDF, usually). The electronic document is then imported into a proprietary redaction program (there's quite a few on the market, most copier/scanner vendors have an offering).

It then assists with the initial redaction by performing OCR on the content, allowing you to quickly search for sensitive information. The software provides built-in tools for blacking out sensitive sections of the document - some even provide configurable overlays/stamps on the blackouts for why that section was redacted.

Then one or more humans manually go over the documents to make sure that nothing was missed. When they are happy with the results, the document is finalized into a TIFF or PDF document with the pages flattened into single image objects (so you can't just delete the black boxes - they are now part of the embedded image).

The original documents do not need to be harmed in any way, they just need to be able to be scanned to start the process.

Conversion to an image format helps to ensure that if the source was an electronic document that sensitive original source metadata or proprietary document format binary blobs don't inadvertently leak redacted information. If a physical copy is required, you just print it.
Your expensive vendors sit on security patches for weeks and my free ones shoot them out almost immediately. Why is that not a business concern?

I don't think it's zelotry, there are a lot of advantages to open source software you aren't going to get from Microsoft. If you are an edge case and you happen to stumble on that race condition bug are you going to have your engineers black box test and reverse engineer someone elses product illegally while they wait around for Microsoft support or have them look under the hood, patch the bug and move on?

What the big licenses fees get you is accountability, which is of course a huge thing, but what open source gives you is control.

I think if your business is software, then open source makes perfect business sense, especially if one of your assets is a team of competent engineers.
Exactly my point. If you're making changes to mission-critical things, you need to have both reliable information on how long those changes will take, as well as rollback plans to cover the risk of things going wrong.

Randomly clicking things like "change my email system" buttons, then complaining afterwards that it didn't work how you expected is the sort of mistake most of us have made at least once.

Once you've suffered through those mistakes, you tend to view phrases like "expected behavior" and "seemingly a mere administration change" a lot more suspiciously.

If it's mission critical, don't "assume", don't "expect" - things are often not as they "seem". As they say "Trust, but verify." Yeah, Google (or Rackspace, or MessageLabs) will _presumably_ "get it right", but when the consequences of "presuming" are business-destroyingly-high, verify the presumptions first.
Indeed, especially in the era of mobile which tend to focus on remote control solutions to problems.
I like Scripted a lot - funny that you work with Paul B. also ;-)
Play With An MIT Tool That Visualizes How The NSA Can Map Your Relationships
Depending on how you value your time, a $300 computer will run circles around a 10-year-old computer, and will be far cheaper than the time spent trying to shoehorn modern applications onto old hardware.
the cost is so high probably because it is not ready to be released to the general public.
Except that when Nintendo does so, MS and Sony will have "super-HD" titles to show off. It's the Wii all over again, with 10 years backward hardware. Nintendo can't win this fight without innovative concepts, and the WiiU's one if clearly a failure : it does not appeal to gamers or casual gamers. Their Nintendolands is not a Wii Sports. So what you have left is nothing but a Gamecube, but probably even worse than that. The Gamecube was more or less at the same level as the rest of the competition at the time in terms of power, now Nintendo will have a hard time proving 1st party titles are enough to sell.
How the NSA Could Hack (Almost) Any Browser
Toyota Prius reaches 3 million units sold worldwide milestone
Facebook Messages Can and Do Spark Arrests
FYI: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/event.html
Well, that's also when they lost most of the most creative people they had as well.
But when do we stop to ask why we are living in this constant state of hyper-fear? When do we start asking whether the scale of our "security-state" is asymmetrical to the actual threats? When do we ask how much Terror is still left in the War on Terror?

IMO, it really started in earnest on 9/11. It's like people are in this strange state of psychological terror without realizing it. I swear, we've never recovered on the whole and it feels like something on the PTSD "spectrum".

Of course this fear has been fanned and used to justify an egregious power grab, costly wars, and untold billions in profits for the security-military-industrial complex, and so much more. See The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.

Is it a coincidence that fear is so very profitable or that people are willing to give up their freedom to quell it?

When do we shake off this fear and say "enough!"?
BeagleBone Black Part 2: Linux Performance Tests
You realize it's public data, right? When I tweet something, I don't expect it to be private. HN knows a lot about me too.
"To a Very crude first approximation, you could expect KDE to be 201 times slower than ratpoison,"

Uselessly crude. What matters is how much code is on the critical path and how long it takes to run, not how much is loaded into RAM. A JPEG library loaded into memory that is not used when switching between windows doesn't impact window switching time. Contrariwise, KDE may have many thousands of times the latency if it tries to do many DBUS calls or something for an action that a simpler window manage would simply perform in-process. And it may not matter because "many thousands" of times the latency may still end up below the human perceptual threshold anyhow; 5ns vs 5ms is a whole lotta difference, except it sort of isn't when it comes to humans, both are instant.
Wouldn't that location be those distant lots that are always empty now? That real estate is mostly wasted today because nobody wants to walk 2-3 miles and transportation options are either slow, expensive, or unavailable. You call your car right when the show lets out (maybe you can even set an alarm 10 minutes before its over if you're a good planner) and it's there after a comparatively short wait. Even overly congested airports like JFK have abandoned lots within a 10 minute drive.

I also don't see the point about traffic jams. How would they be any worse than a parking garage hemorrhaging visitors at the end of every event like we have today? I can't see the situation being anything but improved by having the cars already out on the side of the main road ready to head in the right direction.
Just an FYI, but your choice of series colors for your graph are very difficult to differentiate as a colorblind person. Might consider changing one of the colors.
Of course. One of the interesting aspects was the extent to which the west instigated and funded these organizations almost from inception.
Kademlia is also quite fun to implement! It's a great example of a distributed system, and me and a couple of friends actually made our own in golang (https://github.com/maxsnew/kademlia-go). We also decided to build a fault-tolerant, secure file store on top of it (https://github.com/jontonsoup/tin-foil-hat), as an educational experience.
There are already dedicated personal video recording devices that can do this. When you're just recording video (and not doing any other functions) it's easier to extend battery life, etc.

http://www.amazon.com/Looxcie-Wearable-Bluetooth-Camcorder-C...
Inside GitHub #1 - Freedom
I'm in an air cast boot thing right now and until recently I was on crutches. I'd say 16% is about average for people willing to look me in the eye and speak to me. Most people deliberately avoid eye contact desperately so they won't have to offer you a seat.
Ask HN: Travelling in South America - is there good Internet access?
Hi HN. I'd like to travel around South America but I was told that internet access is not great there. I still want to go but would need regular access for work.

I guess my question has two parts:

1. Where would you recommend going (ideally it has to be reasonably cheap)

2. What is access like from Hostels / Internet cafe's / Hotels?
Note: Webcams apparently need a fair amount of light! This app is definitely in the time waster category but well-made.
It is inconceivable that a democratic society ruled by law would even have a notion of secret law, secret courts or secret interpretations of law as it is inconceivable that I would ever get a constitutionally guaranteed fair hearing. We are falling down the rabbit hole.
Not too hard to point a phone at someone and pretend to text.
But... but... how?
But callbacks also don't have any concept of paralelism and its trivially easy to code all() yourself once and then forget about it.

The hard problem that promises solve are

1. Its more similar to regular code versus explicit CPS (no pyramid of doom, use "return" to return values, can store promises in data structures or pass them around to other functions)

2. Error handling. Regular Javascript has try-catch blocks for exception handling but those don't work with async code. Promises let you use exceptions in async code without having to worry about error callbacks.
Help Honor Marek Mieleszko
Resource-Level Permissions for EC2 and RDS Resources
The annoyance is that it makes his article less effective.

It's like letting cool come before functional.
Power to the people: the democratization of engineering
If it's in a public place where there's no particular expectation of privacy - in particular, if you are not party to the conversation but can clearly hear it and are visible to the parties talking - it doesn't seem like it would run afoul of recording laws.

The statute applies to "confidential communications" -- i.e., conversations in which one of the parties has an objectively reasonable expectation that no one is listening in or overhearing the conversation.

http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/california-recording-law
The gap between embedded systems and desktop systems is lessening.
a) We knew who the enemies were. We let civilians out of the city before it was attacked.

b) We didn't gas or nuke them. In terms of the amount of conventional firepower you can bring to bear on enemy combatants... there's no limit.
I'm not questioning that Morales had to land in Vienna, I'm questioning the reasons behind it, because I haven't seen countries giving "Snowden was on the plane" as a reason to deny airspace.
When you interpret law in an expansive manner, allowing the government to spy on people, you create law. It ought to be public. All of it.
Play2 Json Interpolation & Pattern Matching
The GBA and DS lines were pretty significant hits.
Birmingham Amps Up Research With New Linux Supercomputer
In the very few documents I've had to redact (PII, not tyranny :P) I actually used white boxes instead of black to waste less toner, but yeah it's the same idea.
Sourcery (YC W13) conjures a full-stack Ruby on Rails craftsperson 
Sourcery

... is a sourcing platform for the food service industry. Currently the majority of $220B wholesale transactions in this sector are handled by phone calls, fax machines, paper catalogs, and emails. We're bringing this industry into the modern era and organizing a gold-mine of data in the process.

We are handling sourcing for top chefs across the Bay Area: from chefs running Michelin Star restaurants to those serving top tech companies. We are based in San Francisco, and work closely with our users, frequenly popping by their busy kitchens for product feedback and fine dining.

Our team of techies and food industry experts is funded by all-star investors, including Dustin Moskovitz (Facebook/Asana), Joe Lonsdale (Palantir/Addepar), David Tisch (TechStars), Jeff Epstein (Bessemer/Priceline), Adam Pisoni (Yammer), etc.

We're hiring!

We're looking for developers and data pioneers who are eager to help us grow rapidly and seize this market nationally.

Our lean and beautiful codebase is built on Rails 3.2, prepped for Rails 4; All the good stuff - Postgres, Redis, jQuery, and github; Building with happiness in mind - flat organization, continuous integration, awesome peeps.

Send us your github profile, and let us know what caught your eye in this post!

-- jobs@sourcery.us
> Would enemies really derive any advantage from knowing this?

Probably, yes. All sorts of things leak information, and "we don't do X" seems like it could easily be useful. That said, the question arises how much whatever marginal security against foreign threats actually means to us, as weighed against cost and freedom and good governance (which are partly a matter of security against other classes of threat).
Get RobotsAnywhere from us ( mkb@robots-everywhere.com ) it doesn't have audio and saves single frames for that reason, it's also optimized for low bandwidth.

And you can drive a robot with it.
Don’t laugh off Winklevoss twins’ Bitcoin ETF
> If you rent, the cost of staying may be completely out of your control. Indeed, it may not even be possible.

That's arguably a feature, not a bug. Rents generally don't skyrocket without cause, and they usually don't skyrocket in isolation. If you're living in an area where rents are increasing rapidly and your income isn't keeping pace with the cost of living (of which rent is typically a substantial component), you probably have very good reason to consider whether you're in the optimal location.

On the other hand, there are people fortunate enough to have purchased a home in an area that has done well since their purchase but who still struggle with an increased cost of living. You see this a lot with people who are on a fixed income, or who bought in an area that has experienced a boom. Yes, these individuals might be able to sell their homes at substantial profit, but they'll still have to move once they sell.

> My house is mine, and some of the things I have here just aren't available to rent.

Your house isn't yours unless and until it's paid off. This may not apply to you specifically, but a lot of people who call themselves homeowners are really homeowners-to-be in about a decade or two or three.
Christies Online Auction: Iconic Technology From the Twentieth Century
In a strange twist, I think one of the problems is that the more we celebrate the American ideal and elevate it above other nations, etc., the more difficult it becomes for people to mobilize for change, or even believe that change is necessary.

It's a strange groupthink that makes anything our government does the de facto morally superior action. It's an inherent trust by the masses that turn questioners into conspiracy theorists. The irony, of course, is that mentaility among the populace is perhaps the single most destructive threat to a true democracy, which demands vigilance.

And all of this is propped up by a corporate-political state that controls a media, which works tirelessly to maintain the image while also distracting us to no end with trivialities.
The real news is that optical scaling will soon be available on OS X, with a simple system call. This is pretty neat for anyone writing graphic design apps.
Have you never had to indicate how many bytes you are sending over a stream, say in the Content-Length of an HTTP response? Have you never put strings into a byte buffer?

But that doesn't matter. Let's say you are correct: when working with strings, you more often want the rune length. It still wouldn't be the right decision, given the other design decisions of Go, because it would have needlessly complicated things with only arguable benefits. Let me show you what I mean.

The len() function works with a whole lot of things: strings, arrays, slices, maps and channels. For the first three, len() returns the number of bytes involved. This is because all three are backed by an array, and so sensibly have similar semantics. It would have violated the principal of least surprise for anyone who knew the language to have an array-backed storage not return a byte count. Both the language developers and the users of it would have to special-case strings, in code and in their brains.

Now, they could have decided to do it anyway, but then another surprise awaits. What happens when you take a slice of a string? Oh no, more special casing and more complication for everyone.

The Go developers do special-case where doing so would clearly be a win for their users. Consider range, which iterates by runes over a string, potentially moving the index on the underlying array forward by more than 1 on each pass. That is clearly going to be the most common usecase the user is going to want and so was worth doing. It also eliminates many of the usecases where getting the length of a string in runes would matter to you. Not all, but a lot.
I certainly wasn't trying to make Austin look unattractive to anyone who thinks they might enjoy that lifestyle. Depending on your stage in life and needs Austin is likely one of the best places in America to live right now (assuming you don't mind 115 degree heat during the peak of the summer). I absolutely love visiting my family there and often spend weeks at a time in Airbnb's when I visit.

All I was trying to do was show another extreme, in contrast to the OP's and situation in San Francisco right now. Some people absolutely love San Francisco and probably thrive in the tech scene here, but that doesn't mean it's great for everyone or every startup.