skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
His basic point seems to be that the government should be allowed to do it as long as we don't hear about any specific abuses. There are two problems. The first is the one he points out: when everything is classified and anyone who notifies the public is subject to the treatment given to Manning and Snowden, even finding out about the abuses much less holding those responsible accountable is extraordinarily difficult. The second problem is that the really bad abuses of an accumulation of power like this are so bad that we can't just wait until they happen before we do anything about it.

He also says some questionable stuff. Like this:

>We asked for this. We did so because we measured the reach and possible overreach of law enforcement against the risks of terrorism and made a conscious choice.

Everyone in Congress who read the Patriot Act before voting on it voted against it. So no, we didn't. We had a gut reaction to a tragedy, somebody pulled a defense contractor wish list out of a drawer and they passed it in a moment of sorrow and anger. The country is only now starting to reach the point that we can have a rational conversation about anti-terrorism without the pain of a recent tragedy allowing self-interested warmongers to goad us into an overreaction, and it's time that we seriously reevaluate what we allow the government to do on our behalf.

And I'm reminded of what John Oliver said hosting the Daily Show when all of this came out: "I think you're misunderstanding the perceived problem here, Mr. President. No one is saying you broke any laws. We're just saying it's a little bit weird that you didn't have to."
Sadly, this article is stuck on GNOME vs Unity, when the base system runs so much better without all that extraneous UI stuff.

I'd rather start off with a minimal install, and build it up as I want, rather than tearing apart someone else's mess, in the quest for my preferred balance of frugality and productivity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developing_country#List_of_deve...
Yes. More abstractly, prime numbers are those that generate prime ideals. This is a definition which generalizes to much more complex algebraic structures.

However the last vestiges of the question about what definition was most natural didn't get settled until surprisingly recently.
My favourite is http://www.regexper.com/ which seems to be simpler and more visually appealing (no affiliation).
The rule existed in traditional English Common law from long before the U.S. declared Independence.

Being that the Fourth Amendment itself was a reaction against General Warrants and Writs of Assistance, it's hard to imagine the founders would have wanted even less protection here than English law already provided

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusionary_rule#History_of_th...
I would love to see this kind of study done comparing different programming paradigms (i.e. functional vs. procedural vs. OO vs. logic). Some concrete cognitive data on how lisp-like languages may or may not actually make programmers more productive would be quite fascinating I think.
I'm running 12.04.1 at the moment. On a Thinkpad t60, which came out in 2006 or so. The screen redraws as fast as I can move it. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that I don't use Unity or any other desktop environment.
Have you looked at Oracle Coherence? It's pretty light weight and has clustering features as well.
Django-postgres-fuzzycount: fast / fuzzy PostgreSQL counts for Django models
what happened to htomail.com ? ;)
http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/search?e=id%3AZYTVOj4...

. . . . . . .

Pulled from a search farther down in the comments section: Why was this a question... ever?

http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/search?e=id%3ApBuWinP...
In

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6000791

is

> (as the court is the last defender of the constitution)

and in part I was responding to that, and
other claims, that the SCOTUS is
the 'last word' or some such. And recently there
is a Jefferson quote on one of the related
threads here on HN where Jefferson
in effect says that the SCOTUS judges
are no less corrupt, etc. than people in
other branches of government. The
conclusion is that, really, the last word
and too often the crucial word on
what is constitutional has to
be the voters who tell Congress what
to do and/or push through a
constitutional amendment. So, I
was trying to be realistic and correct
about the real role of the SCOTUS
in protecting, say, the Fourth Amendment
and not to push politics.
Oh, sorry for being presumptuous then. I'm not aware of the recent history.
AFAIK most of the major Scheme implementors are involved in the development of the Revised Reports, and most implementations implement the report to such an extent that libraries can and are written for multiple runtime with little modification (many SRFIs specify standard Scheme implementations of the APIs they suggest). SRFIs (which specify additional functionality like binary io and more complex list functions etc.) are more pick and choose, but the ones that are implemented are pretty standardized. (srfi 1 for lists, srfi 13 for strings, etc.)

I think there was a bit of disagreement over R6RS in that many implementors felt it was too bulky and un Scheme, which is why there is a R7RS small and a R7RS large. Because of that some implementations decided to stay on R5RS and extend it with sometimes de facto standards.

I think most people will write for only one scheme implementation if it is for a project and not a library, though. Racket for example seems like a sort of extended scheme, though they still participate in the standards process. Libraries supply notes on how to adapt them to various implementations and it is normally trivial to do so as long as the required SRFIs or extensions are available in some form.
Flash is still going to be easier to work with than HTML 5, so for animation it's an ok choice to start with. I wouldn't recommend staying there though. Learn some flash and then branch out to other technologies (both HTML and higher-end animation software).
There are also a number of extenuating differences between his Baltimore example and PRISM, the most critical being that the recording of data in Baltimore was limited both in time and scope by the case it was being collected for. Presumably once the investigators either caught the culprit or gave up on doing so, the payphone taps were removed. They also were only allowed to tap phones they thought might be relevant to that particular investigation. The war on terrorism used to justify mass wiretapping, on the other hand, will literally go on forever and relevant data could be anywhere. Terrorism is not an enemy that can plausibly be captured or defeated (like a drug dealer or the Nazis), nor is it localized to a few city blocks or ISPs or websites, therefore there is no limit on how long this data will need to be collected for or what sort of data might be required.

I'm all for brief and limited surveillance authorized by warrants tied to a specific case (e.g. his Baltimore example), what I find unacceptable about PRISM is exactly the thing Simon glosses over as irrelevant, its scale: virtually unlimited in both duration and scope.
I'm aware they're working on it, but last I looked there's nothing usable yet.
Their (Mint's) modifications are much harder to disable as well. If privacy is a real concern use another distro like debian or arch or ... etc. but don't use Mint which has had questionable browser modifications for a long time.
The "Fox Bravo" is actually "Class Bravo", and you're right, it's a reference to the SFO Class B airspace. I can't edit my comment any more or I would fix it there...
NSA gains power from US Court
Some napkin math:

There are ~2.5 million miles of highways in the United States, for the sake of easier math and a lack of statistics let us assume that this length of pavement is responsible for all of the vehicular nitrous oxide emissions.

Transportation contributes 30% of total NOx emissions [2]. Lets assume that the average highway is 4 lanes wide, giving a width of 62 feet.

Surface area = 2.5 million miles * 62 feet = 29 356 square miles.

The authors add 2.67 g per square meter of C-doped TiO2 (which has a lowball estimated cost of ~$750 per metric ton.)

This gives us 203 000 tonnes or ~$150 million. This has to be applied 3x a year (at least) to maintain ~%60 of maximal effectiveness of the TiO2 (20%) over the year.

A generous estimate is that it is sunny ~1/3 of the time.

So to bring it all together, $450 million of raw materials would result in a (1/3 * 60% * 20% * 30%) 1.18% reduction in NOx levels.

[1] Original Article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhazmat.2013.02.012 (behind a paywall)
[2] http://epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/n2o.html

Edit: Updated math, I used the wrong percentage of the contribution of motor vehicle traffic, the correct figure is 30%, nevertheless the conclusion that this would be a colossal waste of money still stands.
The title is a little misleading. Titanium dioxide has been known since 1967 [1] to act as a catalyst for oxidizing a wide range of compounds, including nitrogen oxide (i.e. smog). Since at least 2002 it has been known to significantly decrease smog when applied to road surfaces [2][3]. The contribution here is another study (behind a paywall [4]) providing evidence for TiO2's efficacy at reducing smog.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanium_dioxide#Photocatalyst

[2] http://www.italcementigroup.com/NR/rdonlyres/1F30E487-C0A2-4...

[3] http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1...

[4] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304389413...
Hard to offer suggestions without knowing rough size of data - depending on how much money you're willing to cough up, even 1 TB is in the range of "can fit in the memory" territory.

Having said that, Spark is really great for running iterative algorithms and will definitely fit with what you have described. I suggest staying away from building it on your own using riak/redis (atleast until you have ruled out spark), as you will run into lots of operational issues like handling failures, resource allocation, retries etc.
I think so. To learn digital animation there are two parts:

1. Learning to create assets, storyline, etc.
2. Learning the runtime environment (HTML5, Flash or something else).

I would concentrate on 1 first and use flash, and then decide what environment I want to use later. The reason is there are so many resources for flash, and secondly the HTML 5 toolsets are a bit fluid at the moment.
Chocolate Ice Cream, 0 Fat Homemade
> Why should I use a language that forces me to know about RAII and the difference between C pointers and "language provided idioms" to begin with?

No one asked you to. I don't like Eclipse that much personally, but I did not go to their page and say "Hey, you know what, I hate Java so your product sucks!". (I have deep respect for Java and the Java community, BTW). But frankly, as someone who has not written a line of code in C++ - however bad it may be - you're not really qualified enough to preach the world about its utility.

> I'll buy your "modern C++ is safe" argument if you buy my "modern Java is fast" argument.

Yes, the JVM is an engineering marvel - we all know that! What we also know is that it is adept at hogging all resources you might have(unless you learn how to use those bazillion -X<options>) - so no, thanks. I prefer compiling to native code and having total control, and in cases I don't want all that, I might just stick to Go or Python.
I see how this is interesting but I can't get over how the author says, "When contrasting this with Eric's video", but "Eric's video" is a different program than the novice programmer. Maybe this is me being too pedantic.
If you're familiar with the history of constructivism and the corresponding foundational debates (never truly resolved) of the early 20th century, then it is clear what I am referring to.

If you're not familiar with that, Constance Reid's Hilbert! contains a surprisingly readable history of this debate for non-mathematicians, disguised as a biography. For another accessible popular reference, The Mathematical Experience walks through this in a variety of levels of detail (you get out of it what you have the background to get out of it, but it is enjoyable anyways).
So basically belief is conscious while alief is subconscious?
Strengthening Human Adaptive Reasoning and Problem-solving
It's also impossible to track all the exposures that lead to cancer that then killed the person. A "benign" form of radiation is a hard sell these days - I'm not buying it.
This is a great policy and common law argument.
But, much like the parent comment, can you point where in the text of the 4th amendment (or the constitution) where it says anything about an exclusionary rule?

Because if we are going to argue policy and common law, than we also have restrictions that don't appear in the text, but appeared in common law, as well.
Thanks, but I'll keep using the word "doubt".
This paper is about carbon doped TiO2, its synthesis was patented in 2005 and is much more effective than regular TiO2.
I’m not aware of many eye-tracking studies specifically, but there has been a lot of research done on the general subject of how we read and understand code. Search for papers on “program comprehension”.

To address (some of) your specific point, I suspect part of the appeal of functional programming languages is that they naturally promote describing the data flow of the code. In contrast, imperative languages inherently dwell on control flow, even though it’s often an unimportant implementation detail. It turns out that even when we’re reading imperative code, we’re trying to figure out the underlying data flow anyway, so why not cut out the middle step?

I also suspect part of what holds back functional programming languages from wider acceptance is that when you’re modelling something where time/order matters, the control flow is not an unimportant implementation detail. You have to work harder to describe it in a functional language where you get a lot for free with an imperative programming language.
This would be a great quiz to give during a job interview if you're hiring a web developer.
Hmm, I got 24h shipping in basically every German bookstore way before amazon arrived on the market (to the store, of course, not to my home address). Did that change in the last few years?

I think one of the big factors of amazon right from the start in Germany (and probably Austria and France, too, both of which have similar price laws) was that you could get the books to your own address, and that pretty quickly. That combined with the browsing experience (part of which was the novelty) got them established, and later on the expanded product range and the recommendation engine cemented their foothold. So I would say it's not all just about the price, although I'd be very interested to hear about pricing arrangements with the publishers, especially in the early years where they didn't exactly dominate the market.

To me, the biggest boon of amazon was getting English books easily and without a big markup (straight USD/EUR rates, not some fairy tale wiggle factor). Programming books were quite a bit cheaper (German books were almost always hardocover only, and with a fixed price, of course), never mind novels (ages to translate and almost every trilogy becomes a hexalogy in German).
> Tuples shouldn't be differentiated from lists primarily in terms of mutable vs immutable.

This. In particular, tuples are for collections whose length is fixed and meaningful, and for which you could give names to each field. Lists are for collections whose length doesn't correspond to anything in particular and which you could imagine growing and shrinking.

As an aside, django makes this mistake and confuses people: using tuples where semantically they should be lists, presumably out of a desire for immutability.
I have friends who publish periodically through publishers, and those who self-publish. As lifeguard mentions, publishers tend to require tremendous resources from authors, by way of huge marketing pushes/travel, blogging, promotion, marketing, etc. I'm not so well informed about the cost of production via publishers, nor the buy-back of unpurchased books from B&M stores.

For those who self-publish, they still do their own marketing. E-published people invest the least cost (i.e., no printing), and perhaps equal time on marketing/promotion. Paper-published people invest more up front because of printing, but perhaps reach a wider audience if they can get their books into B&M stores and because like it or not, many people still prefer paper.

This is admittedly unscientific; my sample size is about 20, though some of them blog about their experiences, and refer to their own circles of authors and their experiences, as well.

As for your proposed book topic, sounds like a wonderful idea to me.
That was fun. I hadn't played with any of the new css selectors.
As we continue to shove more and more bits down a single strand of fiber, 100gb+ interfaces are going to continue to be more important, though. It doesn't scale to send 5T down an optical system if you still have to break it out into tons of 10gb LAGs to use it.
> The best practice is to just use a tuple (immutable) instead of a list to begin with.

No, that's not good advice. Tuples are not just immutable lists. See below.
Pretty cool tester, I think #2 isn't correct, at least in Chrome and Firefox, the third article doesn't match: http://jsfiddle.net/Ldgdh/
The original quote was: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." [1]

[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Santayana
slightly more credible source - his attorney on winny's case confirmed he passed away 7/6 6:55 pm JST due to a heart attack. http://danblog.cocolog-nifty.com/index/2013/07/post-9e47.htm...
I'll second the "done" suggestion. I'm fairly new to web development, I got quite a few of them right simply by guessing, but it quickly changed to the next question before I had a chance to analyse and internalize why my guess was correct.

That said, I dig the format. It's interesting to be presented with a piece of unfamiliar syntax, and then be expected to work out it's meaning.
Thanks for your input. We're roughly talking around 5GB of data. Data growth should be linear in the next 6months. Money is not a big concern. Speed of iteration is key.

We frequently run different processing algorithms over the entire stored dataset (stored data doesn't change) and update the calculated features each time. Not sure if this helps narrows things down. Thanks
Fascinating! Thanks very much!
I can vouch for storm. If only for the fact it's pretty easy to setup (especially compared to hadoop) Being able to leverage zookeeper for coordination allows you some extra capabilities for coordination as well. With that being said, just watch how you build your bolts/spouts. There's lots of ways you can send data in to the system, but in general , storm's documentation has been superb to work with.

I built a mini library for myself to auto construct the topologies based on a set of named dependencies to handle bolt/spout wiring. Aside from that, the builder interface for it is really nice if your data pipeline doesn't change.

There's good support for testing with a local cluster as well.
Thanks for the suggestion. Looks very interesting, but couldn't find much information about it besides on Oracle.

How's the community and use cases for Coherence?

Thanks
The scientists and engineers ended up confident enough in the implosion design that Oppenheimer recommended to Groves that Little Boy be dismantled and the U-235 used to build two or three implosion bombs instead.
What sites or services exist where an average person might legitimately need that much throughput? The most common "bandwidth hog" that I know of is video (specifically, Netflix and Youtube) and even those won't use more than around 5-6 Mbps per stream.
Effectively, no judgement is ever really final. This is because, in a democracy, we must constantly acknowledge that our judgement could be wrong. Separation of powers, as you correctly describe it, manifests that acknowledgement by providing an avenue to contradict every action. Congress can pass a stupid law, but the President can refuse to sign it and the SCOTUS can deem it unconstitutional. The President can sign a stupid order, but Congress can impeach him. SCOTUS can make a stupid decision, but the President can refuse to acknowledge it and Congress can rewrite the rules.

It's not easy in any case, and there are a lot of hoops to jump through. Generally speaking, each branch declines to take their nuclear option by acknowledging the implicit threat available and compromising beforehand. Obamacare and DOMA are both recent and useful case studies for this interplay; ignore the content and the rhetoric and just look at the mechanics of what each entity did and when and why.
Thanks for your suggestion. Do you have any specific readings for me to look into for building bolts/spouts for sending data into the system?

Thanks
I thought the article would be about using titanium as part of a carbon-fibre composite not hunks of (alloy) metal as ribs, that seems so old-fashioned.
It's part learned jargon and part ritual... also (though I don't know) probably easier to hear in a headset than on a low bitrate mp3 recording.
I think the point of the concept is actually an antithesis to doubt. It basically says you can believe x is x, yet continue to treat x like y. You could say this is "doubt", but then you contradict your belief that x is x. Just like the sterilized bedpan example. If you truly believe that it is indeed sterilized, why are you hesitant to drink from it?
> They already force retailers to not give discounts for using cash.

It's been illegal to prohibit stores from offering cash discounts since 2010; those contract terms are no longer enforceable. That was part of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
That's why the program should be expressed as a conversation! We don't know what we want so we should start vague, get feedback, provide clarifications, and so on. The conversation with the computer must be a two-way thing!
It's unfair to say the reverse when Amazon were only making a loss to monopolize the market.
However, Apple didn't care that book industry were gouging the consumer - no printing costs, no shipping costs, no packaging costs .. why should eBooks be the same price? Greed!
I don't buy eBooks on principle. If the price was reduced accordingly, so that the book industry maintained its profits - that would have been fair and equitable.
From my perspective, neither Apple nor Amazon had this goal in mind.
Is it some sort of coincidence that this article came out today? The timing makes this feel like a Boeing PR piece that was spun into a story to distract from the plane crash. It was mostly about the mill, Avisma, and it's importance in the aerospace industry, and the inclusion of Boeing in the article felt really forced since pretty much all Airline manufacturers are buying titanium from Avisma.
Similar but asymptotically different. In insertion sort, if your partialy sorted list is [1,5], and the next element to insert is a two, you would scan the list until you arrive at the five, which. In the system I described the partialy sorted list would be represented as [1,_,_,_,5], and you would update the second element so it would be [1,2,_,_,5].

EDIT: After thinking about it, you could do the insertion step in O(1) time if you use a linked list instead of an array. The part where insertion sort gets its log(n) factor is in scanning the list, which can take (on average) no less than log(n) time.

tantalor is correct in identifying this algorithm as pigeonhole sort.
Agreements with private companies protect U.S. cable data surveillance
Btw, I found out about this from her (Tamar's) Wikipedia page, after enjoying her Big Think lecture on the philosophy of politics and economics(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm8asJxdcds) I highly recommend the lecture.