skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some years ago, I took a course in the nature of continuing education. At my own -- not inconsiderable -- expense, at a well-regarded university (not a for-profit venture or the like). The professor was, IIRC, a member of the tenured, full-time faculty.

A considerable portion of each class was devoted to his lamenting the difficulties of an ongoing move in residence he was undergoing. He seemed quite preoccupied with this.

The course text was in C. He admitted to cribbing lecture notes from another faculty member -- I no longer recall whether these used C or C++. As a result, he often didn't seem to understand the lecture notes he was using.

He "decided" that the two languages were "close enough" that we should do our work in C++. Needless to say, for many of the students, this was more than a bit confusing.

I left that class partway through, as a thorough waste of time. And, as it turned out, of money.

Never again...

I am quite sympathetic to grievances with the position in which universities are putting younger, untenured -- nor even full-time nor insured -- faculty and instructors. It's downright abusive.

The other side, for all that there are many good faculty and administrators, is a level of arrogance and ignorance that... at a minimum, does not deserve the financial remuneration it is receiving.

The system is rotten, from both sides -- entitlement, and exploitation.

----

P.S. I'll add that, previously, I'd taken a maths course from that same university and campus that was taught by a part-time instructor / lecturer / I-forget-the-title-they-used. Despite the instructor's... "lesser rating", he was first rate and was really engaged in and with the class. It was excellent.
NVIDIA hardware with compute capability 2.0 and support for CUDA 3.1 (e.g. Fermi chips) have recursion.
Do Scientists Pray?
Didn't you know, any sufficiently complicated Python framework contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Ruby on Rails.
The service you seek is to gain knowledge and abilities. There is a body of evidence to suggest that you cannot gain that knowledge and experience without making considerable effort, and that the role of the instructors, be they professor or lowly TA, is to give you the opportunity. As such, getting easy-to-understand explanations, perfectly produced and complete notes, and attending entertaining lectures, is not the best way of achieving the stated goal.

Many lecturers are indeed less than ideal, and many instructors similarly fall short, but just because the students give them poor ratings, and complain about work loads, that does not mean that they are not being given exactly what is needed to achieve their stated goals.

You don't get physically fit by listening to work-out videos and watching people jog in the park. You have to go out and do it yourself. People hire personal trainers to devise a plan, and then to shout at them to make them stick to it and to put in the work.

Maybe that's a good analogy. Maybe to get good at math (and programming) you actually need to put in the work, and true learning is born from the effort and confusion you go through before enlightenment.
Elections have plenty of problems. Do you have a better solution?
This is the way we were taught pretty much every subject in our university. It doesn't work. What happens is, nobody studies anything during the semester (because nobody checks their progress), then there's a one or two week cram session before the oral exam, and after that you forget everything forever.

P.S.: I'm not from US, in our country you could get education for free
Which is ultimately a presumption that the professor still cares about teaching after they have earned tenure.
1) the information had already been published.

2) wildly speculative and wildly inconsistent with all of Greenwald's other behavior.

3) I imagine you have some kind of conspiracy theory to justify this one?

In this case, the simplest answer is that a dead man's switch gives Snowden a bit of additional leverage, and that Greenwald mentioned it to help the reporter interviewing him understand the dynamics of the situation.
I understand all of this, but the people who ask me for laptop recommendations don't want to hear it.

Refurbs are a good point that I had forgotten about. Often, though, only higher-end machines are available (for the same price as a new low-end machine) and the base-level models don't come down in price much.
Ah, if we could buy knowledge the way we buy a haircut! Your comment is a perfect example of how the consumer viewpoint has taken over our society. As incredible as it may seem, there can exist professional relationships that are fulfilling, meaningful - even useful - and do not take the form of an exchange of money for something else. They are not what your $40,000 pays for - most of that is administrative bloat these days.
Conrad Barski's Haskell Tutorial
I was fortunate enough to have a teacher at a public high school whose methods were very similar to your's and Mr. Dijkstra's. The professional attitude and crisp procedure he brought to the classroom extended to even peripheral considerations; he wore a suit every day and addressed each student as "Mr." and "Ms.". Respect and attentiveness were obligatory, but reciprocated.

Though a chronically absentminded student in nearly every other subject, I excelled under his system and completed homework every night, an accomplishment I can say with certainty I never once again achieved in high school. While the knowledge acquired from other courses has atrophied over the years, those classes are still as lucid as ever in my mind.

It may take an initial period for students to become acclimated to this environment, there may even be some push-back, but I think a very formal, cerebral learning climate is beneficial in many cases.
Next time read the article you're commenting on.
LXJS — The Lisbon JavaScript Conference
How To Increase Genesis Footer Column Widget
If, say NSA and BND co-operate, NSA listens all but Americans and BND listens all but Germans and both exchange information. Everything is covered.
There isn't one. He could publish it if he wanted to. He just doesn't want to. That page is ancient. And none of this has anything to do with this story.
Perhaps Dijkstra would've understood that Euler was obtaining correct results while working in an era when mathematical rigor was (by modern standards) almost entirely absent. To appreciate Euler's work in context would almost certainly prevent one from considering him a poor mathematician.
Term::Colorizer (Ruby)
Way cool. Not sure I'm a fan of the syntax-highlighted code snippets to the right and in black text on the dark blue background though. Might like to see it closer to the content, and with more contrast.
> for example a near-real-time flight application.

Primarily latency. Now, ideally you'd like the entire subsystem moved off disk into volatile memory, but for some things you're going to have to read from disk. I can imagine cases where that wouldn't be easily feasible if the drive had NSA crypto.

"Regarding the Russians: Oh, I see, now. Yes, you're right that if country X cracks our encryption, we can't assume that they didn't get help from <insert China or Russia here>."

Right, but its more than that in the case of the Iranians. The Russians have a long and documented history of assistance to the Iranians and the Syrians.
Wouldn't a easier path for decrypting SSL be to go directly to Cert providers and hit them with a NSL?
"It would be difficult to implement effectively, therefore it is likely to not exist."

Of course, the judgement also takes into account the extreme consequences for the company implementing it if discovered, and the unlikelihood that that company could be legally compelled to do so, which was the case with all recently revealed examples of companies cooperating with the NSA. (Never mind that we have not even seen hidden /software/ backdoors forced by the NSA - merely systems that were known to be interceptable being intercepted.)

The same argument also applies to trusting the CPU itself: although it would be more difficult to insert a generic backdoor and ensure it could be exploited easily without compromising performance than to backdoor a random number generator, this is a matter of degree, not a fundamental difference in the argument. Though you may not trust the CPU either, I suppose, but in that case not using rdrand won't save you.
Due to the UK's key disclosure laws (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#United_Kingd...) encryption doesn't help. If you don't provide your key to the government they can put you in jail for up to two years.
Address space randomization is not something you should worry about unless the attacker is already on your machine, that is, it's irrelevant for passive attacks.
New backdoor in HP server products
What did you use to generate the gif?
iirc renegotiation in openssl is mad broken, in which case, mad props to adam :)
Is There Racial Bias in “Stand Your Ground” Laws?
I did read it. Did I miss something that invalidates my counter argument?
Oh, I didn't realise TACK was your proposal. Now I'm wondering why it wasn't included in TLS in the first place. It sounds very reasonable, but the more valuable (to me, at least) functionality is the ability to have even self-signed certificates be trusted (i.e. what Convergence does). Why is Convergence blocking on TACK, by the way? It sounds like the two would be complementary. Is it just the notary load that is generated when looking up the certificate on every request? Can't that just be cached?
Same error on OSX 10.8, ruby 1.9.3p392 (2013-02-22 revision 39386) [x86_64-darwin12.0.0]
North Korea is known for many things but not, as far as I can tell, traveller's having their data seized. If anything it sounds similar to the way travellers to the US are treated. Care to elaborate on your comparison?
When it comes to profs of the stature of Dijkstra it doesn't matter what you pay the school.
That's basically the reason I'm staying with Firefox.
I use Tree Style Tabs [1], however, which gives you a hierarchial view of your opened tabs.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/
The latter. Leaving hunches and feelings aside, I'd point to a piece of anecdotal evidence: There was a This American Life story some time back about the life of some drug dealer/pimp in the 80s (or 70s, can't remember). As an aside, he told the story of the "genesis" of a prostitute. In short, he showed how, by gradual emotional manipulation through her boyfriend, they turned a "normal" girl that hung out with them into a prostitute.

I kind of cling to that one story, because it answers a question that I've had for a long time. Given that you're prostitution is not your dream job and that it is generally shunned by society, how does one become a prostitute?

For simplicity of the argument, I've assumed that the professions of pornographic performer and prostitute are mostly similar.
http://askubuntu.com/a/107735/65847
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6031114

Other submissions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6026289

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6026605

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6026661

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6034914
I agree, as I stated above in another comment. When asked whether the burden of proof is on them, I replied: "It is. That doesn't mean we have to marginalize people who have theories, even if they don't have any evidence to back them up. My approach is to entertain all possibilities until they are proven to me to be false. In that way I attempt to avoid tunnel vision."
The UK is beyond unreasonable with that nonsense. What if you ask a foreign partner to create a key and secure the device without telling you until you are past the border or out of the country? What if you were collecting atmospheric data?
Ouch. The assignee does not seem to care or understand why this this is a problem.
As a college student, I built a small form factor pc just so I could transport it as carry on when going home.

Even though it fit in the dimensions specified on the airline website, I not allowed to carry it on (they didn't even bother to measure it) and it didn't boot when it came out the other side (I found an "inspected by the TSA card inside the case and most of the components unplugged).

When travelling, I recommend taking something "normal" (I'm in robotics now, and they don't bat an eye at a bunch of tiny robots and tablet-like devices in my bag).
> This blog post is the third of a series of posts
> dealing with the results of the Debian systemd survey

Previous posts in the series

http://people.debian.org/~stapelberg//2013/06/09/systemd-blo...

http://people.debian.org/~stapelberg//2013/07/01/systemd-tra...
This is difficult to process.

Does rng-tools effectively do this?

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/urandom bs=512 count=1

Or is someone doing the (more) sensible thing of saving the random state at shutdown and reloading it at startup?
If you hadn't provided a link I would have assumed you were joking. What happens under this law with people who carry USB sticks with truly random noise files on them?
Oy, people, this is obviously referring to the cases where such costs are reflected by disinterested / unhelpful teachers, which I at least would argue is the vast majority when compared against those who use their benevolent dictatorship to good effect. Such cases are a waste of time and money, and you have essentially no recourse, and no way to prevent it from happening to others.

Schools are not exclusively populated by wonderful teachers. Not even close. As nice as it is to give power to those that are, it also gives power to those that aren't, probably disproportionately so due to sheer numbers. Should we be celebrating and continuing a practice that is a net harm? Is it a net harm?
Really - front page? Read the comments. The bug was filed based on a packaged image for EC2. As stated there: rng-tools is not a required package for Arch.

edit: I understand the concern of RNGD_OPTS, but still think that if you're installing rng-tools you should likely know what you're doing with it. As stated by rng-tools:

"... Using the standard open()and read() system calls, you can read random data from the hardware RNG device. This data is NOT CHECKED by any fitness tests, and could potentially be bogus (if the hardware is faulty or has been tampered with). Data is only output if the hardware "has-data" flag is set, but nevertheless a security-conscious person would run fitness tests on the data before assuming it is truly random."

...so, in all reality the flag should be unset forcing the user to select a hardware, or other RNG device. /dev/random is likely a very bad idea as a default.

So is any simplified facility that caches data from places like random.org and provides it as a continuous stream of large pools of entropy? It'd be nice if a data source such as that could be used as a simplistic way to bootstrap the entropy pool on a new system.
Simple tests can overstate the impact of search-engine advertising
Exactly the same here. I like the idea that startup semantics will be much more unified across a range of distributions and that more sysadmin knowledge will be common - particularly in terms of writing good 'init scripts' for custom services.
If we're being spun by the super blackhole in the middle of the galaxy, then it kind of makes sense to have one.
Of course, I am ignoring the proprietary tool chains in all of this. But again that depends on being able to find interesting stuff in your IP to backdoor. I would recommend using vendor IP as little as possible.

Don't use a vendor Ethernet module! I could see that as a great place to attach a scan-chain backdoor.
rng-tools is supposed to feed entropy from a hardware random number generator into /dev/random, but feeding it /dev/urandom instead adds fake entropy.
Conversely, in Sweden where it is indeed mostly free that has created a culture where university is just "something you do" and where the education provided is not valued in the same way by students and has become commoditized in a way which I would argue is detrimental. There's a balance to be struck somewhere. I'm from Sweden but studying in the UK and I think the university culture here is far superior. That being said the recent hike in fees here is probably a move in the wrong direction.
True, this would make things a lot easier for the ship.
When A/B testing, you need to always remember three things:

The smaller your change is, the more data you need to be sure
that the conclusion you have reached is statistically significant.

Is that a mathematically provable result? It seems hard to conceptualize what a 'small' or 'big' change is. I would have expected another argument along the lines of "If you make more than one change at a time, you are not going to be able to know which one of your changes caused the result".
But do you trust the fab to not insert a backdoor into the CPU? How could you know? An FPGA's generality complicates backdoors.
Except the situation would be reversed : they would have more experience and samsung would have to catch up.

I think that's actually pretty smart on nokia's part.
Can't help but think of: http://xkcd.com/538/

sorry
This must be the first time in the recent history (that I remember) when Opera chooses not to release for Linux (and BSDs).

Jimmy doesn't like this!
New Utah NSA center requires 1.7M gallons of water daily to operate
>That's beautiful I think. Yeah I know it hasn't exactly taken off and flask and friends surpassed it but I still like it.

That reason it still hasn't taken off is that Aaron is very like Zed; they are grasshoppers. They get bored easily from doing something.
This is the same in the USA and most countries. "The border" (really, any ingress point where you haven't passed CBP) is effectively a rights-free zone. It's important to remember that you should have nothing that will cause you difficulty if it is seized, copied, or damaged no matter how you enter the country.
Changing Behavior
For more details:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/306313/python-is-operator...
aren't points 1, 2, 5 already in chrome, and have been for some times?
> you can't trust it to multiply correctly

That did happen at one point, and cost Intel an estimated $475 Million[1]. Of course, that was (presumably) an unintentional bug.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug

--

I don't consider SMM or microcode updates to be above suspicion; Ken Thompson's's Reflections on Trusting Trust suggests that nothing is above suspicion.
In truth, no. I've heard this stated by various people, among them Tim Pritlove, who said it in one of his podcasts (I think it was NSFW, but I'm not sure). Nobody I've heard it say has pointed to evidence. It is one of those things that appears plausible to a lot of people from personal experience. This of course means, that it might be wrong.

There seem to be some people trying to collect data about the correlation between availability of pornography and the level of some crimes, but I'm still waiting for something conclusive.

Not that it's easy. Quantitative sociology is, due to the interconnectedness of the system in question, a mess.
You don't go from zero to mass production in a year. Without signs of life it seems very unlikely the deadline will be met.
> The assumption here is that Amazon also have paranoid level security and their employees are 100% honest..

Add 100% competent to that too. I expect a bug is much more likely that a dishonest sysadmin or dev.
To sell a book as something extraordinary.
Greenwald has been writing about this for a while.

http://www.salon.com/2012/02/22/nypd_spying_program_aimed_at...

http://www.salon.com/2012/02/28/the_nypd_spying_controversy_...

http://www.salon.com/2010/11/28/fbi_8/

http://www.salon.com/2011/09/29/fbi_terror/
They do not have a sense of humor. This would be a cute way of writing a blog post about your day(s) spent in detention before being sent back to your country of origin/citizenship.
I choose to not monetize my website (http://www.stratigery.com). I saw advertising very obviously corrupting newspapers in the 80s and 90s, and I view that corruption as part of why newspapers didn't adapt to The Internet. I decided to avoid all that potential bad influence by not monetizing.
Dijkstra's standard would have included number of publications, which perhaps only Gauss or Erdos would have toped.
Realtime Reykjavik Traffic (speed & heading) using D3, Leaflet and socket.io
The Julian Assange Show: Noam Chomsky & Tariq Ali (E10)
IPhone's problem isn't bleeding market-share
I find it interesting that Maemo/Meego was not mentioned as an option. Nokia had a platform they could have built off if they could have settled the internal politics, and they could even have made a compatibility layer to submit Android Apps to their store if they wanted to.

I think this, along with failing to see the threat from iPhone/Android will go down in history as one of the biggest business mistakes.
Well, I don't know. I had an upper division thermodynamic class where the professor was an admitted bad lecturer. He had two policies. One was if you had an A grade already based on the mid-term exam and weekly assignments, you need not take the final exam. The other was if your final exam grade was higher than your mid-term + homework, you get the grade from the final. I personally rarely attended the lectures and walked out with an A prior to the final. Friends of mine also did not attended, but passed the final exam. A number of people who regularly attended the lectures failed the class.

From this experience I formed the belief that a university lecturer can actually be counter-productive to the students learning the subject.
It could have been an adjunct professor, folks who can be 4 to an office or have no office at all. Some of my best teachers in college were adjunct professors.
That is possibly overstating the case. Depending on demands on performance and/or control it might make sense to sacrifice some stability... but it does count against the stability of the system.
> The only people who claim this are those who have no idea what constitutes anything near blue skies research.

This is simply untrue, there is a great book by Terence Kealey: "Sex, science and profits", you should check it: http://amzn.com/B0045JKEQ2

> So your plan is to incentivize private R&D by abolishing IP. Hahahahahaha.

No, private R&D do not require additional incentives beyond those arising naturally by market forces.
..but play catch up to what? It's not like Nokia has outdone themselves by customizing Windows Phone.
neat! inspire to try to replicate this for myself, i implemented it in python and svn. could use a bit of a touchup to get the width right, but mostly works. code as a github gist and a screenshot in imgur.

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/5995140

http://imgur.com/vehDl2r
Somewhat related personal anecdote:

I sometimes hang out at a popular hackerspace in San Francisco.

Recently, a member was kicked out for several reasons, one of them being that he was caught showing a teenager how to use tools like LOIC. He claims that he was just doing this as an educational thing; but a few members who overheard him claim that he was definitely encouraging him to use it for nefarious purposes.

I've been in presence of that member at weekly meetings, and he's definitely amongst the most vocal supporters of Anonymous, offensive hacktivism, etc. I didn't think much of it until I was talking with an older member that I consider trustworthy, who told me he heavily suspected him of being an agent provocateur.

I'm not sure how likely it is, but in the face of events of like that, who knows.