skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Trust us" will never be good enough. Not when accused are not able to know the charges against them. Not when you can be held indefinitely without judicial recourse. Not when prosecutors demand ludicrous sentences for accessing a public API. Not when the executive has the apparently legal ability to assassinate opponents without oversight.

No. Sorry, there can be no trust in such an arrangement. You want trust? Don't have secret courts.
If you guys want to remove those ads from your newsfeeds, check out this javascript I wrote: http://programmerhrishi.blogspot.in/2013/05/get-rid-of-those...
This sort of illustrates the striking difference between the American intelligence programmes and the European ones. While the Europeans are not necessarily better, they are at least public and - yes - you can request the information if you so please (of course, you cannot ask them to remove it).

I am not advocating the European logging of internet traffic, but I will give them the very least credit they deserve: Being public. The Swedish FRA, the Danish Logningsbekendtgørelse, the German Vorratsdatenspeicherung, etc.; while bad themselves, they are at least public knowledge.
In response to #1, I know my uncle had to close his private practice (he is a practicing doctor of 18 years now and had his practice for 8) because of absurd costs and time investment in doing bookkeeping and playing hardball with everyone. He closed and is now working as a surgeon at a major hospital, but says he likes it a lot more since hes actually a doctor now and not a barterer or economist.
1 & 2 == "12" - Now THAT I call unexpected behavior. :-/

Interesting language though.
> if I have two different web apps in two different windows (or simply two different sets of task specific tabs)

I would continue the argument and say that having "tabs" be a concept related to grouping together behaviors of specific applications into self-contained task units was an anti-pattern that we got used to only because window managers failed to innovate and application-specific tab containers was then a simple fix that could evolve from multiple-document interfaces: there is no good reason why I shouldn't be able to take a Terminal tab and a Chrome tab and have them be part of the same window.
Perhaps, but perhaps we should have a bunch of different types of people making these requests to add some noise to their filters.
> Why is it so terrible that Amazon know your shopping habits? Honest question... I can't think of anything that would apply to most people that would be bad and come from Amazon knowing your shopping habits.

I think you are putting the onus on the wrong party.

It's easy to imagine a scenario in which Amazon might be nefarious or incompetent with my data, or in which they may share my data with another party who is. However, I don't need to demonstrate that these scenarios are likely in order for me to desire privacy: If I am merely undecided about who I want to share my data with, then the rational thing for me to do is to not share my data.

To my mind, it seems immoral to release a product that shares search data by default and without notice.

> Sometimes I feel like people are against this as a matter of philosophy...

Absolutely. Are "matters of philosophy" a poor way to inform actions?
Why would I use this over coffeescript/underscorejs?
> No one buys more than Medicare, so it's not surprising that they get the best rates.

It is almost as if a public option might be economically efficient.
U.S. Border bars Psychotherapist with drug research in his past (2007)
Thing I found most interesting about this is - it allows you to 'Share' your results on Google Buzz, Google Reader and, most shockingly, Facebook.
I'm not sure why every new layout decides to remove the CAPS LOCK KEY. I imagine coders aren't the inventors of these layouts.
Welcome to reality. The truth is that there never has been a "free world". But the upside of that is that people who struggle to "get it back" are approaching closer now than at any previous point to creating it.
Especially since the German Verfassungsgericht has ruled the 'Vorratsdatenspeicherung' to be unconstitutional and had ordered that saved data has to be deleted.

In many recent rulings we Germans have the impression that the Verfassungsgericht has defended and also slightly extended our basic law (Grundgesetz) against the politicians and in favour of people's rights. This gives the Verfassungsgericht high respect.
What's even their reasoning for having the Court secret? That terrorists will threaten them or attack them? Come on, that has the be the fear every single judge has to live with, and I think a normal judge who has to decide on a drug lord's case has a lot more to fear than some random terrorists, just because they agree to letting the NSA spying on everyone.

I think being secret has a lot more to do with them being able to abuse the laws, and not letting the public know about it. There's no good reason to keep the FISA Court secret.
Google Trends for "open source"
This is an actual thing:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/14717826/
The obvious question is you why you believed were living in a free world while the US was kidnapping and torturing foreigners, while threatening countries by telling them they'd be bombed back in to the stone age?

I do very much agree with your points, but I don't understand why this issues is a tipping point. Since I began to understand politics, I have been as wary and skeptical of the US government as I have been impressed by the good achievements of the US. I've not believed in the idea that the US leads any sort of free world for years.

Or, if you are honest, is this the first issue that you feel affects you? Were you confident that you wouldn't be rendered, bombed or drone struck? But now you can be sure the NSA have your data and that it might actually matter?

If so, Im not judging you in any way. Its just I think a lot of people are possibly in that boat too, and it also might highlight why still a most people seem to dismiss this. They think it isnt or wont be a problem for them.

What has been blown for me by all this is the notion of freedom of speech. While we in Europe seem to have given that up, I used to think the US hadn't.
Sure, why not. I'm not against that. This has to happen on a case by case basis.
Opening bell
There's another set of articles bouncing around but I wanted to dredge this particular story.

The story is of a respected psychotherapy researcher for a Canadian university. Andrew Felmar's profile is here: http://www.andrewfeldmar.ca/

This story was also covered here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/aug/08/closeddo...

The gist is: In his distant past, he researched the effect of various substances that years later came to be classified as illegal substances. This was in Canada, and he attempted travel to the USA. He was declined entry to the USA as the border agency Googled his name, found his research, and considered him an admitted drug user.

The point of posting this in light of the NSA and PRISM revalations is to show that you needn't have done something wrong or be doing it today, that there are examples of people who have found their past re-defined by the present and that they now breach some rules that would not have been considered back then.

The message I took from this at the time was this:

When Feldmar looks back on what has happened, he concludes that he was operating
out of a sense of safety that has become dated in the last six years, since 9-11.
His real mistake was to write about his drug experiences and post this on the web
, even in a respected journal like Janus Head. He acknowledges that he had
not considered posting on the Internet the risk that it turned out to be. So many
of his generation share his experience in experimenting with drugs, after all.
He believed it was safe to communicate about the past from the depth of
retrospection and that this would be a useful grain of personal wisdom to share
with others. He now warns his friends to think twice before they post anything
about their personal lives on the web.
No. Users are fickle and unpredictable.
If the Americans were spying on foreign powers, or even my country's politicians I really would not be surprised.

For some reason they appear to be spying on me, specifically.

I do find that surprising, yes. Shocking, even.

Scary, certainly. What will they do if I say something they don't like? How will I know? Who is deciding whether what I am saying is acceptable?

Because I am against this spying, have the Americans started monitoring me more carefully? Will they contact my government for more information?

My job is contractor to a local business that receives a lot of business from my government. Could that be affected by my private communications? One of my friends is a bit of an anti US nut. Will my communications with him put me at greater risk?
Xmonad has a 'Tabbed' layout that does just that. I'm planning a tiling window manager for gnome 3 that takes the idea further, treating switching to a tab and opening a URI with a UI similar to Firefox smartbar.
America: A review
There's no need to factor in anything, those statistics come from actual outcomes of past crashes.
So, most interesting for me are the well known compression utilities:

Compression Compressed size Decompresser Total size Time (ns/byte)
Program Options enwik8 enwik9 size (zip) enwik9+prog Comp Decomp Mem Alg Note
------- ------- ---------- ----------- ----------- ----------- ----- ----- --- --- ----

7zip 4.46a -m0=ppmd:mem=1630m:o=10 ... 21,197,559 178,965,454 0 xd 178,965,454 503 546 1630 PPM 23
WinRAR 3.60b3 -mc7:128t+ -sfxWinCon.sfx 22,713,569 198,454,545 0 xd 198,454,545 506 415 128 PPM
xz 5.0.1 -9 -e 24,831,648 211,776,220 103,692 x 211,879,912 2482 36 660 LZ77 26
bzip2 1.0.2 -9 29,008,736 253,977,839 30,036 x 254,007,875 379 129 8 BWT
gzip 1.3.5 -9 36,445,248 322,591,995 38,801 x 322,630,796 101 17 1.6 LZ77
compress 4.3d 45,763,941 424,588,663 16,473 x 424,605,136 103 70 1.8 LZW

I think a very good compromise between speed and size still is bzip2, so i will stick to bzip2. Seems to be in the middle between compression time, decompression time, memory and size.
Surely the point is to prevent knowledge of their activities from being public because it would be helpful to adversaries?
You haven't been living in a free world for a while. You just hadn't realised.

I've just posted another story that I felt illustrates this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6001546

It's the story of Andrew Feldmar, of something legal in a different time and place being deemed illegal today by a different country, and the consequences.

I remember reading that in 2007 and having it dawn on me that we are not living in a free world.

We've been living in an age of innocence and naivety, we should've woken up a while ago, but are only slowly beginning to now.
I think there could possibly be a problem with the definition of alief. I think it's being used too broadly.

As the wikipedia article says, it includes 5 sections of disjoint ideas. And law of contagion is directly reffered to with the feces shaped brownies or clean bedpan drinking.

It seems I could attach any reflexive-emotional response and call it alief. That doesn't seem correct in the language of psychology. Their terms are usually much more delineated.
While this piece seems to be reasonably balanced, well informed and above all honest about the Ubuntu-experience, this one sentence about launcher-support for web-apps stood out as plain wrong:

> These are not only innovative but great ideas that are being offered from the world of Linux, not by Microsoft or Apple, in a new way never seen before the Unity experiment.

The ability to pin web-applications to the launcher was really introduced in Windows 7, with ability for the web-site to add custom-actions or shortcuts to the icon, accessible through a right-click context-menu.

Chrome allows you to create application launchers without all the browser Chrome, which to the OS looks like normal apps. Afaik this was even based on some third-party app which did the same thing (although with Webkit and Safari) on OS X.

We've also had this ability to add shortcuts to web-apps as "normal" apps on our mobile devices for quite some time.

To me his statement basically seems very uninformed. Or am I missing something crucial here?
The headline should say "browser" not "brower", unless Wii decided to rename the browser to something cuter
Does anyone know the etymology of the word "Alief"?
It was suggested to me that I get a grasp of basic concepts before going there. I found it fairly easy to make a very very basic application with series of buttons that worked etc via objective c and the interface builder, but had no idea what I was doing when I hit code (which was the whole point of playing around). I have a better understanding of some coding basics now that I have done a small amount of python (Zed Shaw). Maybe it's time I went back to objective c - you've got me thinking... Thanks.
As I understand it, there sort of is the same health care across the EU. There is an EU healthcare card which means any EU citizen gets treated in any EU country. The systems are different, but in the end we can all get healthcare free at the point of delivery. No absurd bill.

The details of how each country does it are different, but the result is the same. No insane bills to stay alive. No poor turned away or treated like second class citizens.

I have to say, of all the things I cant get my head round about the US, the health care system is the biggest jaw dropper for me. Not only is it not universal, but the people who run it make incredible profit out of it. Seems mad to me.
What caused the Asiana crash at SFO?
In what way is that unexpected, given then & is string concatenation?
BBC's Bottom Line did a podcast on alternative banking earlier this year, which might be of interest when discussing this topic. Especially about M-Pesa, which is truly disruptive in Africa.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01qkmwl
I would be highly surprised if mails (even spam) wouldn't be scanned for steganographically hidden messages (no insider knowledge though). Hell, I would even want this for my own antivirus functionality.

I would be surprised if your stegospam wouldn't have a red flag raised by any scanner which utilizes advanced heuristics. Especially since your stegospam utilizes a form of steganography which is already described into great detail by e.g. David Kahn in The Code Breakers (nice crypto history book).
Isn't this what the NPTA was started for anyway?

What is the surprise here? "Agency created to torture puppies is torturing puppies"... really?
Is it not simply just belief with an A in place of the B? It sounds to me like a self-consciously coined neologism, perhaps related to A's position before B in the alphabet, suggesting that aliefs come before beliefs in some sense.

EDIT: a brief look at the original paper[0] doesn't give any immediate answers, but it seems to confirm my guess:

"Alief is a more primitive state than either belief or imagination: it directly activates behavioral response patterns"

[0] http://www.pgrim.org/philosophersannual/pa28articles/gendler...
I agree that it is written a bit casually, but can you explain what the "easily spotted lies" and the misconstructed arguments are? Also, who is "they"?

I know this is not on the official line of most articles that make it to the frontpage, but I thought a different perspective that tries to analyse the motives of Snowden's helpers might be interesting.
Too bad it doesn't have list comprehensions. That's something I sorely miss when writing most mainstream languages apart from Python. (I know CoffeeScript has them.)
Bytecoat - design & position UI on iOS easily
ByteCoat is a simple library that in future will contain stuff only to simplify programmer's life in iOS.

Its first piece, category on UIView contains some neat methods for managing relations and position of frames just easily without counting anything.

The goal is simplicity. An iOS programmer is able to learn a feature within 10 minutes.
For me, this actually was the tipping point. In social groups I hung out I was usually the guy who'd defend America on numerous accounts, but in the last few weeks I've been bombarded by a load of information which I find to be truly chilling.

By the way, it is interesting to note how we separate our past history from our active perceptions of the place. America's early history is not too bright -- we did some of the most batshit evil stuff you could think of: genocide of Red Indians, slavery (which to me when I really sit down and think deep about, sometimes, seems worse than just killing a person -- it's fucking killing the very dignity and respect every human being is owed, it's depriving them of any and all pleasures to life). I don't think we've made much amends for it -- the cycle of poverty still persists for a lot of African American folks, there are rather few social programs that really try to help them in meaningfully substantive ways. There are folks alive to this very day who faced system institutional racism from our government.

We did some pretty evil stuff during and after the Cold war too -- someone linked this in another post yesterday: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio... -- this one truly shocked me:

Researchers in the United States have performed thousands of human
radiation experiments to determine the effects of atomic radiation and
radioactive contamination on the human body, generally on people who were
poor, sick, or powerless.

It has suddenly become a lot more uncomfortable for me living in America in these few weeks after some reading (especially as I'm actually a foreigner to this land -- I escaped a different country through asylum some while back). It is apparently completely uncontroversial that United States experimented on poor people with radioactive contamination... how do I know the US won't poison me with some biological weapon as an experiment, or because I'm currently unemployed (and thus poor)?
I just tried the latest daily build. For some reason Unity dash stops working smoothly once I change the resolution from 1024x768 to 1680x1050. Might be because of my dated graphics card (ati firegl).
Not at all, because when you have monopsony pricing you end up below market price, which drives marginal producers out of business and ends up reducing supply. It's the same reason the argument for the government buying up all the food and distributing it doesn't work: because no one would go into a business where they are guaranteed to make a loss.
Actually some EU programs will reply to you that no data exist "to their knowledge", while data actually does exist.
At least the NSA ain't lying. :P
> Took me over 2 years to pay all of it off. It pretty much wrecked my personal finances

Why did you pay it then? Tell the hospital you can't pay and move on with life. If you do well financially pay it then.

> threats from collection agencies finally forced me to put it all on my credit card

I don't understand this. Why do you even answer the phone when they call? Or open the letters they send?

Just ignore them, and when you are ready to pay, then pay the hospital directly.

Completely ignore the credit collection agencies. They are utterly impotent, especially when it comes to medical debt which has no effect on your credit score.

I mean it - completely ignore them. I don't mean answer the phone, listen to the threats and ignore it. I mean utterly ignore them. You have caller ID.

Any letters get placed unopened in a box.
Ah, of course, I don't know why I have written Cantor. It's too late to edit now.
I don't know where you live, but here there is urgent care that will do everything regarding a single injury for a flat fee of $150, including x-rays and follow ups up to one week.

Look for something like that where you live.

They treat uncomplicated broken bones too for the same flat fee.
Calling her "the grandmother of the data centre" (original article's title) seems like a really dumb way of wording what she is famous for...

You could call her a popular author and key person in UNIX networking, but for all we know she has never worked a day in a "data centre" in her life, unless we're going to expand the definition to any room with computers in it (or servers?).

I am really not trying to foofoo this, her going missing is bad news, and she created some really key books, I just dislike the way the title/article tries to spin it so it makes sense to the lowest common denominator - while also completely mischaracterizing what it is she is even famous for.
I, for one, believe that this kind of tactic is detrimental to the country in the long run.

Their objective is clear and a "legitimate" even thus not "ethical" attempt to protect "the country".

However, this only works for a while. While nobody sympathize with your cause anymore, the artificial barriers and protection are useless, as information will leak literally everywhere, since everyone wants to you see you fall.

This seems to be a common way for countries to fall after reaching their apex.
I somehow misread the title as something like "The theorem that prevented me from falling in love with math". The article actually still made sense up until the very end where I expected the author to turn out as a finitist.
Note that there is a huge difference between compression levels in xz (LZMA), while there is almost no difference between bzip2 levels. This benchmark uses the slowest 9th level. If you try lower levels, e.g. xz -3, it may give better compression ratio and better compression speed than bzip2, and, being an LZ77 algorithm, much better decompression speed. Here's an example with different levels: http://pokecraft.first-world.info/wiki/Quick_Benchmark:_Gzip...

Also, I recommend using parallel versions (pbzip2 or pxz) if you have more than one CPU core: compression is highly parallelizable, so if you have 2 cores, they can half the compression time.
Voratsdatenspeicherung has nothing to do with the secret services. It is a tool for the police they can access with a warrant. The BND is not complaining that this is currently ruled unconstitutional, they are simply not affected.
> At least the NSA ain't lying

Sorry, wrong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYgkjczoBYk

It appears to be highly likely that were it not for the recent leaks, NSA would have just outright lied and told you that they had no data on you.
You're going to miss the interpreter. I started programming with python too, and now I'm moving onto Java (for Android), and while static typing is nice, I really miss being able to just try things out in a few seconds.
Working with a GUI framework is very different than web development and CLI.
Actually Korean pilots (civilian) are also known to have too strong a respect for hierarchy. I remember seeing an episode of air crash investigating where that was officially reported as a factor, so it isn't even just the military where that can be a risk.
Hate to say that, but thats exactly the way OS X works for ages.
Breaking rules has consequences. The 4th Amendment is a rule that says the government cannot conduct illegal searches. It should follow, then, that the consequences of a 4th Amendment violation include the inadmissibility of any evidence the violating search was used to gather. Otherwise it's not a rule.
I would guess it doesn't even do deconv. but only adds a simple high pass filter to it. That would explain the parameter choices (sigma is the std. dev.).