skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The NSA Has Inserted Its Code Into Android OS, Or ...
Over a decade ago, it was discovered that the NSA embedded backdoor access into Windows 95, and likely into virtually all other subsequent internet connected, desktop-based operating systems. However, with the passage of time, more and more people went "mobile", and as a result the NSA had to adapt. And adapt they have: as Bloomberg reports, "The NSA is quietly writing code for Google’s Android OS."
The only way you can truly guarantee you haven't been rooted is to at least trust your compiler. Even if you have the compiler's source code, how are you compiling it...?
> Someone's gotta sell the meth, work at McDonald's, mow the lawns (well, not mine... I mow it myself), make the firecrackers, clean the toilets, etc.

and someone does indeed do those things, but imagine if there isn't anyone to do it because everyone is so well educated that it's "beyond" them. Those jobs will "get done" initially at a higher price, but then because there's profit to be made, a smart individual will inevitably invent a machimne to the job, and thus, the total output of society increases (sure there's a turbulent period of transition, but that's acceptable in the grand scheme of things).
I tried to pip install plotly with python 3.3 and got some errors. Is it Py3 compatible?
I always thought that rfc2616 felt more "pure" since it didn't mention cookies. I mean, http was supposed to be stateless right?
As a general rule, as you add memory to a VM, your overall throughput grows, but unless you're extremely careful, the length of individual GC pauses may go up (which is a concern in a GUI app; you don't want to block the main thread). Of course, all of this is highly dependent on GC used.

> the 2GB chip on my S4 is the same as a 512MB chip on an older iPhone. This generally means that it is just as fast to access the 2GB of ram on an S4 compared to the 512MB on older devices

Not necessarily. Your S4 has a memory bandwidth of either 8.5GB/sec or 12.8GB/sec (depending on if it's the Exynos or Snapdragon model). An iPhone 4S has memory bandwidth of 6.4GB/sec. So, you can read your whole memory in 230ms or 158ms (in theory; other limits will show up). The 4S can read its 512MB memory in 80ms.
I do not think you understand the definition of hyperbole.

I live 40 minutes outside of Seattle, in a rural area that is considered a great destination for a full day weekend bike loop. Our highways are curvy, have very little shoulders and are regularly traveled by speeding logging trucks. I am a former biker. I know what I have seen and it is just not a safe hobby. Your disagreement with the reality of a 50 ton truck traveling blind corners at high speed will be of little solace to your family at your funeral.

Hyperbole is a word reserved for exaggerated claims. I am not exaggerating. It is a dangerous hobby here in the states, and the biking community might as well be shaking their fists at rain clouds.
I'm a native english speaker and I have no idea what that means either.
Google is one well-known example that used to require a minimum GPA, even for people with years of experience:

http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2011/03/27/i-interviewed-at-goo...

http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2010/09/how-t...

That's why the recent announcement that they've found zero correlation between GPA and job success was such a big deal:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...
Ordinarily, I wouldn't. I don't think I should have to pass an ideological purity test to put forward a descriptive argument about how FISC works.

But I found this article because Paul Graham twerped (approvingly) about it, and bothered to comment because HN was an easier place to disagree with him about the quality of the article than Twitter.

In doing that, I didn't want the thread to become a gigantic pointless fight about who does or doesn't support the surveillance state. It was a courtesy, is all.
I assume by "non-native", you mean "non-idiomatic"?

Since I recently went through coworkers writing "bad" (by which I mean non-idiomatic) Scala, and repairing the situation, I can say that it was surprisingly easy to lay down "functional constructs" and the result was amazing. The code became reliable, well-structured, and easy to leverage. Switching to Scala for our projects -- including introducing procedurally minded programmers to it -- was a huge win for us.
Here's an extract from a pilot's post who was instructing in Korea. Don't take my word for it, take his:

"The Koreans are very very bright and smart so I was puzzled by their inability to fly an airplane well. They would show up on Day 1 of training (an hour before the scheduled briefing time, in a 3-piece suit, and shined shoes) with the entire contents of the FCOM and Flight Manual totally memorized. But, putting that information to actual use was many times impossible. Crosswind landings are also an unsolvable puzzle for most of them. I never did figure it out completely, but I think I did uncover a few clues. Here is my best guess. First off, their educational system emphasizes ROTE memorization from the first day of school as little kids. As you know, that is the lowest form of learning and they act like robots. They are also taught to NEVER challenge authority and in spite of the flight training heavily emphasizing CRM/CLR, it still exists either on the surface or very subtly. You just cant change 3000 years of culture.

The other thing that I think plays an important role is the fact that there is virtually NO civil aircraft flying in Korea. Its actually illegal to own a Cessna-152 and just go learn to fly. Ultra-lights and Powered Hang Gliders are Ok. I guess they dont trust the people to not start WW III by flying 35 miles north of Inchon into North Korea. But, they dont get the kids who grew up flying (and thinking for themselves) and hanging around airports. They do recruit some kids from college and send then to the US or Australia and get them their tickets. Generally, I had better experience with them than with the ex-Military pilots. This was a surprise to me as I spent years as a Naval Aviator flying fighters after getting my private in light airplanes. I would get experienced F-4, F-5, F-15, and F-16 pilots who were actually terrible pilots if they had to hand fly the airplane. What a shock!"

The whole post : http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/518568-asiana-flight-cras...
Which is to a large extent why Java GUIs were essentially a failure, but it still has a large niche in high-performance server apps; you can usually get away with >100ms pauses there.
Am I the only one who assumed <blink> was making a comeback when they read the title?
> I would love to read a similar run down on what amount of money, intelligence and human resources the US has pured so far in the Venezuelan opposition.

How much money is given to Venezuela is public.

http://gbk.eads.usaidallnet.gov/query/do?_program=/eads/gbk/...

It takes some time to make sense of this data. The funding agency and the implementing agency are usually the same. I personally am not familiar with some of the agencies, so I have to read about them on Wikipedia. The "funding account" seems illuminating. The "implementing partner" is I think who got the money in Venezuela, but all we get is the implementing partner "type".

All the same, it doesn't look to me as if any money is given to opposition political parties.
This is really awesome. The only thing that keeps me from using it right away is that it doesn't seem to have much activity. Anyone have the DL on the creators of the project and if they're maybe monetizing by doing support etc?

Would love to use this, just worried about getting stuck up the creek without a paddle. Many forum questions appear to have been lingering there for months without a response.
I'd like to see a transcript Carlin's Seven Dirty Words embedded in every website. Acquiescing to puritanical fools merely encourages them.
For only 1 second, then I remembered reading about the Blink project.
I would say that about Python, and probably anyone can say the same about his own pet computer language.

I like some of the Haskell concepts, and it seems to attract very smart folks that are heavy on math and CS jargon. This reflects on the materials and channels around the Haskell community and IMHO makes everything more intimidating than it has to be.
That's an interesting case I hadn't seen before, so thanks for the link.

Some of the related pages don't seem to be available at the moment, but from what I could see it looks as if that approach still gets hung up on questions of decidability, and doesn't have a very powerful concept of the regions where effects apply, which has been another interesting aspect of the wider research so far. It's good to see someone else working on the field, though.
Canvas is only marginally slower than the native 2D drawing APIs (it is a thin wrapper for Skia on Android and CoreGraphics on iOS), but it still uses only a single CPU thread for drawing on both platforms. To use the GPU, one has to turn to the -webkit-transform CSS property which, under certain circumstances, promotes the element to a GPU buffer. Only once WebGL becomes accessible will the mobile web have a drawing API that is more efficient than the standard windowing APIs.
The -h option is supposed to sort numerically when the numbers are in "human readable" format (i.e., 42k instead of 42137), as in the matching -h option for ls (and other commands). And the "+4 -5 -h" will sort on the 5'th column. It works great if you aren't using -h (sort +4 -5 -n, with a regular "ls -l" command). Also, works if the number is in the first column (as in: du -h |sort -h).
> But which is it, are all Java and C# Android/Windows Phone apps unacceptably slow or are some types of apps not really doable in those GC languages?

He didn't really say either; he pointed out (correctly) that for certain applications in a memory managed language, you'll want to essentially avoid using the GC, and you'll certainly have to be very cautious of it. The extreme case was old J2ME games, which usually worked by allocating all the memory they'd use as a large array at startup, and doing manual memory management thereafter.

In general, you can do just about anything in a memory managed language, but in some cases, especially games, it may actually end up a lot more work than in a non-managed language.
One more thing that is coming (back) with Chrome 28 is packaged apps - stand-alone browser-based applications with access to file/network APIs (think Mozilla Prism/Fluid.app). I'm surprised they didn't mention it.
One per year? Compared to cars, food poisoning, bathtubs, ladders, and almost anything else you can think of, that's close enough to zero to be a non-issue.
Is something you share with hundreds of people "private" whether or not the government can see it?
I like it, going to have to start using this more and can't wait for the desktop app.

Just a heads up, when creating a new document in ios 7 beta 3 on the ipad there is a crash. Author, what is the best way to send you the crash log?

Just something to look into before ios7 releases.
> This article is not very balanced. It is basically just saying that all software written for a VM is stupid. That the concept of Garbage Collection is an abomination.

Er, no it's not; it's pointing out a number of ways that it's problematic for GUI apps (and especially games) on highly resource-constrained mobile devices.

> The truth is that VMs are incredibly successful and aren't going anywhere. I mean, look at the rise of VPS!

He wasn't talking about that sort of VM.
App to book flights for spontaneous getaways based on user criteria.
A web app for when you need to get away from it all, and it doesn't matter where you go. Built leveraging the Hotwire and Foursquare APIs, a bit of PHP, a bit of jQuery, and a whole lotta love.
The same self-interested political forces that keep the number of doctors low are also fighting against automation.
> f'(x) is negative for all x, and f''(x) always has the same sign as x.

Say, let f'(x) = -e^{-x^{2}}, and f''(x) = 2xe^{-x^{2}};
f(x) = \Int{f'(x)dx} = -0.5sqrt(pi)erf(x) + C, where erf is the error function(, OK, I cheated with Wolfram Alpha, and never worked out the integral part myself).
I highly doubt they would do anything to stifle Dropbox's syncing functionality in iOS. Apple is still focused on selling iOS devices and ensuring people keep buying iOS devices, they will do anything in their power to keep you happy.

Limiting Dropbox functionality on iOS would be met my swift user opposition, something that doesn't guarantee recurring sales.
> And that whole talk about GCs sound awefully familiar. Didn't we have the very same conversation in the mid-90s when Java came out?

Yes. Fortunately, all of those problems just went away, and now we use Java for writing GUI desktop apps all the time! Why, imagine how terrible it would be if Java GUI apps were slow and awful and tended to mysteriously pause when there was a nasty GC cycle!

Oh, wait.
GNU Hackers Meeting 2013 — Paris, France
I don't think people concerned about NSA spying are "irrational." I think they're overreacting, their fears are unlikely to come to pass, I think they're wrong about the scope of the 4th amendment, I think they're wrong about how much of the public shares their views, but I don't think they're "irrational."
While that is true, you could have accomplished the same thing through a special syntax that marked a function as "pure", and establishing the constraint that impure functions cannot be called by pure ones. And then only allowed I/O through a set of impure base functions.
Perhaps I have not delved into the right parts of puppet (e.g. I have only scratched the surface of custom types) but I have spent a LOT of time using it for general configuration management and I can say that it doesn't even bear a passing resemblance to ruby. You really can't make the argument that using Puppet makes you a ruby shop.
this thread details the whitelisting process.

https://community.mcafee.com/message/240277
Lot's of clients are stuck because they use Telepathy:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16891

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29904

Libpurple doesn't seem to move either:
https://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/11221

Those are major libraries which are used on the desktop and mobile, and that's probably the reason why you don't see actual clients with ZRTP support.
So because people filter the internet... we should self filter to get around it.

That's an uncomfortable realisation for me. :-(
I'm highly considering Oregon states program. although its really for Post Bacs with science degrees.... the dept is abet accredited http://main.abet.org/aps/AccreditedProgramsDetails.aspx?Orga...
The Jaded Developer, or Why The World Needs Some Technical Willy Wonkas
...a man who is now in disgrace himself because, in a weird twist of fate, a recording of him was leaked and broadcast on TV.
The irony!
Live by the sword, die by the sword.

NSA = Nothing Sacred Anymore

One would think that with the past experiences of US President's wiretapping enemies and the resulting scandals, that the current administration would seek that fabled "moral high ground" and not stoop to such low levels.

However, at this point, Snowden doesn't really have too many options...
Objective C GC wasn't around for a long time, and never really worked well; in particular, using it with C stuff (and Objective C apps tend to use C stuff all the time, directly; there's no equivalent of the JNI) was very messy and error-prone.
> "said he was troubled by the idea that the court is creating a significant body of law without hearing from anyone outside the government, forgoing the adversarial system that is a staple of the American justice system."

What bothers me is why a civilised country would even consider that type of system constitutes a court of law.

Dictators and tyrants around the world use pretty much the same model and no one in their right mind would call those legal systems.
R + LightTable would be lovely. As almost everyone else, I use a gross combination of the R GUI (Mac), Emacs, and Sweave.

I am not a huge fan of markdown other than as a "with benefits" convention for text documents, but I see a fair amount of superiority over Sweave/LaTeX for short documents and literate programs.

I see that most people use embedded LaTeX for expressions in various markdown implementations. Is this canonical or is this the result of 'improved' implementations such as Pandoc, etc.?

Btw, OP, you got your $2.99 - royalty from me because I want yet another reason to tell people there is no reason for them to have their laptops open in meetings.
Samsung Asks For New Trial on Apple's '381 Patent
Have you written any Haskell? As a Ruby dev, I found your statement to be true until I actually tried to write a program (an actual one, not a toy). Fluency came only when I had to write code.
The supply of doctors is not restricted by the AMA. The supply of doctors is determined by the number of residency spots available to new graduates; that number is entirely determined by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS). Thanks to the Balance Budget Act of 1997, Graduate Medical Education (GME) was dramatically slowed due to decreases in Medicare funding of residency positions. [1]

As long as we require physicians to be US trained and to have completed a US residency, the bottleneck will be GME funding. To fix that, the AMA or any other concerned citizen can lobby Congress for an increase.

[1]: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=182532
>What's the secret sauce that makes Starbucks so successful? They made it a comfy place to hang out...the "3rd place" between home and work where you can go and feel welcomed.

Starbucks even gives you free refills on coffee (plain old brewed coffee, not any more expensive drink) if you pay with their combination prepaid/loyalty card. Clearly Starbucks seems to have no problem with you staying there for quite a while, so long as you do it often.
Internship at Virool - Summer/Fall 2013
About Virool:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IJqdmsycKQ

There are over 1.5M videos being uploaded to the web every day and more than 95% of them get less than 1000 views.

Enter Virool.

Virool is a self-serve platform that distributes videos across its network of Facebook apps, mobile games and blogs. Whether it’s an agency promoting their next viral hit or a musician looking to become a YouTube sensation, Virool is a service they use to reach the right people.

Today over 100,000 advertisers use Virool to reach more than 30 million people with their videos every month.

____________________________________________________________

Who we are looking for:

+ A person with a go-getter attitude, looking to accomplish any task at hand.

+ Marketing and Sales Experience is a plus

+ Someone who is able to learn fast and adopt quickly to different situations

+ A creative problem solver

____________________________________________________________

What’s in it for you:

+ You will be exposed first-hand to what a fast-growth startup looks like

+ You will be working out of our office in SoMA, San Francisco.

+ You will learn a lot about online advertising, video advertising and viral video promotion.

+ You will interact with customers first hand every day

+ You will work closely with sales, marketing and executive teams to help them achieve their goals

+ This is probably one time opportunity to join Virool at this stage.

+ Breakfast, lunch and dinner are provided at the company.

____________________________________________________________

To apply, please send us your resume and why you want to join Virool at jobs (at) virool.com with the Subject “Virool Intern 2013”.

Bonus: please send us a video of you telling us why you want to join our company.
Google asked for a transcript when I interviewed (late 2008, about 3 years out of school). I told them I could get them one, but it would take 2 weeks and my other offer was getting antsy. That was the last I heard of it. My offer letter arrived about a week later.

Very often, things that are hard & fast requirements aren't actually. According to the media, Google was in a hiring freeze when I was hired and wasn't hiring anyone. According to the blogosphere, they only hire people with 3.7+ GPAs, yet I had a 3.0.
I've long wondered if we might have had better alternatives via WWW-Authenticate if major browsers had made it straightforward/possible to write auth plugins. (Actually it probably is possible, but AFAICT not without non-portable munging about in NPAPI.) If Mozilla actually do something to integrate Persona into their clients, will they do so in an open, repeatable way (with an API accessible to extensions) or will it just be more of the same oddball one-off coding that supported NTLM?
>And as an aside, isn't the Russian space program always "beleaguered"?

a decade old story about one of the unsuccessful launches goes this way - "the salary wasn't paid for several month, so not much work was done, once the launch date came within a month the government finally paid the salary and the satellite was built really fast, though some testing and some other things didn't really make it ..."
Isn't it just supply and demand?
"Every time" as long as you ignore WebRTC, Media Source API, among others.

Chrome has always had privileged special, non-standard APIs for their browser apps and extensions. I wonder how blown your mind will be when you find out Firefox does too?
What benefit does that have over what's actually there?
Well, I sure would prefer Venezuela to receiving the Bradley Manning treatment.

I think Snowden would do a lot for his cause if he faced the Obama administration in court.

However, it's cheap to ask others to be martyrs. Can't really blame him for saying "Okay I risked a lot by leaking this but I am not going to spend the next 20 years in a cell if I can avoid it!"
Your use of the word "squatter" is somewhat offensive. I'm sure of the coffee shop owners/employees asked them to leave, they would comply. Squatting is a legal term and typically implies hostility towards owners/rightful occupants.

For one, it saddens me that when I travel and need a place to drink coffee/eat a snack and catch up on email, I might be viewed as a "squatter" the minute I pull out a laptop...
At least for me, no wifi = no business from me for the coffee shop.
I want to think it is courage but I suspect it could be a phone call to friend or family from a police investigator or the description of a car on a public news or social channel, or seeing a neighbor notice the dent in the car. At that point he might have realized his only 2 options: get arrested or turn himself in.
He really mentions the software problem more as an aside (and it's not like Android on x86 is painless; where there's ARM-only native code, it is JITed to x86 similarly to Apple's old Rosetta thing, which hurts performance and impacts power usage); the greater issue is that Intel isn't really ready (as of now, the Atom SoC stuff is still on an old process node, and has extremely weak GPUs), and it doesn't look like they will be anytime soon.

Also, of course, Atom isn't really all _that_ much faster than modern ARM.
Pilots of Asiana 214 relied on automatic speed control
Look, I'm not being a dick here; they're two-person tables. The three tables on the left, and the counter here were non-laptopped:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rawle42/5596804624/sizes/l/in/p...

The four tables on the right were singly occupied, as well as another wall-row of four tables behind the photographer. None vacated, and none ordered more during our time eating there. By my napkin calculation, we paid the cafe 10x what the coffee/laptoppers did.