skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These are some of the biggest corporations in the world, with resources to push back on behalf of their users---if they wanted to. Heck, at least Yahoo did something. At some point the PRISM collaborators took a calculated risk that their users would not find out, or if they did, it would be of no consequence to their business. Maybe it was the classified assurances, or maybe the whole "direct access" line for deniability. I may not have any say in NSA programs or secret courts, but I'm still a consumer and techie and can vote with my money and time. I'm gonna do my best not to support companies that actively build a surveillance state.
Mountain View is in SV. It's their second largest campus:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/2009/nov09/11-2...

But Microsoft Research might be more relevant:

"Located in Mountain View, California, Microsoft Research Silicon Valley was founded in August 2001 and now employs about 75 researchers. Our research work focuses on distributed computing and includes privacy, security, protocols, fault-tolerance, large-scale systems, concurrency, computer architecture, Internet search and services, and related theory."

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/labs/siliconvalley/defau...
It's like git-annex ( http://git-annex.branchable.com/ ) on an embedded linux box with a different front-end and ios support.
I love how every other first world country has universal healthcare, but the US still would rather try this first.

"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else." - Winston Churchill
I think jzelinskie's point is that if they make no changes on the main branch in their fork then they can fast forward that main branch.
Thing is, there's nothing else that runs natively, it's just Gecko on SurfaceFlinger. FirefoxOS' UI is entirely implemented above that in HTML+JS. So there is no infrastructure that can be opened up to allow native apps, it would have to be written from scratch.
I invested in a clinical trials company many years ago (operating an investigative site), and I'm curious what kind of traction you've gotten from the big pharmaceutical companies?

I totally get how it is a compelling story for investors, but I have serious doubts about adoption and use.

It was my experience that data and sound record keeping was a secondary to approvals. Many times paperwork was "corrected" and patients were excluded because of serious adverse events. Unless your model is to help identify exclusionary criteria retroactively?
There's a difference between cutting your losses because an idea just isn't worth your time, and putting in the work to get a bring a good idea into fruition. Sometimes its hard to do this, especially when you have proven to yourself that the idea work. The hard (tedious and mind numbing) part becomes scaling up your idea and convincing other people that its worth something. It takes a lot of tenacity to see even a good idea to the end. Great post!
It will reach a point where people are embarrassed to admit they use a service. That will be the motivation that get's them to quit.
NSA’s Snowden case review focuses on possible access to China espionage files
>Microsoft often "competes" by trying to strangle competitors revenue streams even when outside their core business, where they are happy to lose billions on Bing and their online division if it also reduces Googles primary revenue stream

Err, Microsoft was involved in search in 1999, and Hotmail predates Gmail, so I don't know what you're talking about.

>Microsoft often "competes" by trying to strangle competitors revenue streams even when outside their core business,

You mean like Google with Android(to compete with Apple), Google Apps(Office), Chromebooks(Windows) ? They still make 95% of their revenues with search so all the above are outside their core business designed to hurt competitors revenue streams. They have succeeded quite well with Android, not making much money but stopping Apple's revenues.
Microsoft made more fuss and put up a better fight against FOSS than here, for this, for its users, its core ideas and values nothing... oh right, money and power is above all.

Or is it just so that all these companies, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple got something big in return for their cooperation with NSA?

Perhaps they will or got intel on their international competitors?

As so many people seem to be involved in this, at every company sysadmins, managers, developers etc, perhaps many of them want to leak but dont know how, they are close to the devil so to say and fear they cant really do anything about it as they already know the extent of the surveillence?
I can see how "but maybe that's just me" (and the entirety of the first paragraph) could be read as snarky, but that's not how I meant it. It was a non-rhetorical question: what should a company like Microsoft do when faced with a court order? Does compliance with such orders make "privacy" campaigns nonsensical, if they still have meaningful privacy protections compared to competitors? Also, IANAL, but as far as I know Microsoft can't violate the 4th amendment, only the government can.
Sure, the quantity of information increases, but more details about what's behind a slow, low-grade or even plastic lens does not necessarily lead to a better photograph, just one with higher resolution.

I don't doubt that a better sensor behind SLR-quality graph lets you produce better output in Photoshop. But sharper lenses with larger apertures and better autofocus systems means that when conditions aren't ideal, the same actions taken by a user result in a better photograph for no additional effort at all.

I suspect part of this is because cell phone manufacturers know exactly how to throw EEs at a problem to make better electronics. That's their core competency. But the democratization of cameras with high quality senors needs to be met by the democratization of high quality optics. Right now the demand for (good) optics is pretty small, so they can continue to be rare/expensive specialty items. If OEMs want them the way Apple wanted displays in 2006, there's a decent chance the market could make it happen.
Or perl hackers. "I think there's still a big streak of Modernism running through the middle of computer science, and a lot of people are out of touch with their culture. On the other hand, I'm not really out to fight Modernism, since postmodernism includes Modernism as just another valid source of ideas." http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html
Many times in engineering the users are other engineers. Complexity only where necessary. The OSI layers beneath this layer are much more complex for those reasons. But in the end they are still simple parts to an overall complex computing and delivery system. Each engineer, if they are good, simplify things even for other engineers, this leads to less hurdles on the next platform innovations.
In other words, businesses can't/don't "just" pass on costs to consumers.
But most businesses need those profits to expand and innovate. If they require a certain level of profits to accomplish those goals then the recourse is to raise their prices for the next round of profits in the hopes being to accomplish those goals.

Now, if we're talking about a company that just puts all those profits in the pockets of their upper management then I suppose who cares. But the smaller companies, those that survive on razor thin margins and need every penny they can get to keep going, those are the companies that have to constantly adjust their prices to deal with tax liabilities.
Miners of this type can be pointed to other cryptocurrencies that use the same proof-of-work function.
Look at it from the DC government's perspective. Wal-Mart is trying to get something valuable: access to a highly lucrative market. The DC government wants to get something in return: fewer people who require public assistance.

The cost of living in DC is extremely high. If most of the jobs created by Wal-Mart leave the employees still requiring food stamps, subsidized housing, and free clinics. What's the point to DC in allowing them here? They may as well have kept on paying those people the food stamps anyway, without the added harm of destroying the small business Wal-Mart is no doubt going to steamroll over, and contributing to the homogenization of the US into one long blur of identical national chain stores.

DC is not interested in subsidizing Wal-Mart's labor costs. If Wal-Mart can't afford to pay an actual wage that a person can live on without government assistance, then they aren't actually running a profitable enterprise. They're just leeching off the taxpayers.
If somebody took me to 'couples therapy' on date two there'd be no date three.
"but instead I got a gratuitous, tired, over-used, boring, ad-hominem about Republicans that added nothing to conversation"
I'm definitely in agreement with the last point. However, I originally said that good C# code contains a lot of LINQ, not that C# code with a lot of LINQ is necessarily good. Deferred execution is something that confuses people, but frankly, it's a concept they need to learn. It's been in the language since yield return got added in 2.0.

LINQ's deferred execution was the right choice for performance, but it's the hardest one. You've got to know when to call .ToList(). I'm not denying that I've seen people evaluate the same expensive list 100 times, use a join when precomputing a Dictionary would have been much faster, close a connection before the result is actually evaluated. But I've never seen C++ programmers say you can make mistakes with pointers, so don't them.

Clojure's lazy sequences are guaraanteed to evaluate once, but that comes at the expense of storage. In particular, a query like the one in the original blog post will evaluate multiple intermediate lists that then need to be thrown away. And indeed, they've introduced reducers to address this, which behaves more like LINQ.
I want to remember to all of you the campaing that microsoft was/is doing in the last months -> http://www.scroogled.com/

motto: "YOUR PRIVACY IS OUR PRIORITY"
Yeah, now it seems a bit mh... ironic. Not because i think that google is more privacy friendly, but surely microsoft is not at all.
Yup. I'm really glad to see that you guys are working with Incanter now as well.

BTW, as a total aside, I'm a big fan of Clisk. I think you nailed the API for functional image manipulation. I'm interested in seeing an OpenCL backend for it. If I get anything working well, I'll be sure to contact you.
Riddle of the Script: How Linear B Was Solved
Vanity Metrics in Medicine
Wouldn't Ubuntu Touch and FirefoxOS be competing in the race for 5th place? Windows Phone has third place locked up, and Blackberry is a very strong 4th place right behind them.
I believe the current situation is that Congress blocked the closure, and Obama has not pushed it as a major issue since then.

He did sign an executive order laying out a high-level plan for transferring the detainees and closing Guantanamo (http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/closure-guantanam...). But it was not implemented particularly quickly, and Congress eventually prohibited further progress on the plan (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/dec/8/congress-deal...).
I never said any of those wouldn't exist, but I'm a firm believer in rewards. Right now a janitor is rewarding himself with a paycheck so he can do what he wants otherwise the flip side is poverty.

Here's the thing. Let's say you made $100k per year working 40 hours/week with benefits. If I were to pay you to not work but get a smaller wage (keeping your benefits), what percentage would be acceptable to you? 90%? 80%? 50%? What is it worth to you to not have to work?

There is a number that most janitors would probably accept. I think a fair number of retail employees too.
My fellow Americans. As a young boy, I dreamed of being a baseball, but tonight I say, we must move forward, not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.
Cool project. Just an FYI, all of the text on your site is very hard to read and sort of garbled from my machine.

Chrome Version 28.0.1500.71 m
Windows 7, 32bit
Thanks for the correction. Resist those requests would be the thing I meant. I won't correct to not make your comment look wrong.
If per-person, population of the US is currently about 330 million. Doing the math, that's $3.3 Trillion per year in payments to be made. Social Security expenditures in 2008 were about $615 billion. There are obviously other programs that people qualify for, and I'm specifically excluding Medicare/Medicaid because they're health programs, not living-expense programs.

Even so, if the income guarantee program were implemented, expenditures in this arena would go up by about a factor of 4 to 5.
Nestio is a relatively new startup in NYC that helps aggregate listings among other features, but it doesn't seem to be a disruptive startup from the perspective of solving the issues you mentioned.

I went through a broker and a super fast, easy, and great experience, but I was also wary of dodging some of those spammier looking firms you see on Craigslist and other places. Good luck finding no-fee places on Craigslist, don't even try. No-fee seems to be viable only if you scour the city for buildings that display their management info and you swoop in at the right time to claim a place directly. Alternatively, take over someone else's lease.
Do you think the government would jail someone of Steve Ballmer's stature

Perhaps... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwest#Refusal_for_NSA_spying
The statement "people need to work 40 hours" is already obviously false. There are lots of people who don't need to work, because they already have more money than they could ever spend.
I agree with the author entirely.
> The regulatory minefield

Ha! The FDA review board for a drug is allowed to own and trade pharmaceutical stocks, receive cash incentives and guarantees of future employment from companies under review, and generally relies on the summary findings of the company to make their decisions.

It is as much of a minefield as the FCC is to the Family Research Council, or congress is to big oil.
Chemistry is a much better example.

Spill a little dimethylmercury? Welp, you're dead.

Sign something with your DSA key using a dodgy PRNG? Welp, you're dead.
Too many people mistake one-liners for wisdom and/or wit.

... see what I did there?
That you're condemning Azure based on the name of the business unit its produced in and the location of sales and marketing people in a company makes me think that even if we'd named it "JOnAgain's Special Cloud!" that it would be unlikely to have been of interest to you.

(Edit: obviously by "we" I mean "my employer Microsoft", not that I had anything to do with any of these decisions.)
Leftist Platform: "I'm taking yours, f* you."

Yeah, this line of discussion is going to get us far.
No he didn't say they were bad, he was just agreeing with the person that said they were bad. But I think it's fair to say that the tone of the discussion implies these two people feel negativity towards the GOP's platform without stating why.

Disagreeing with someone's idea doesn't inherently make that idea bad. People who have the notion that another person's idea is bad solely because they disagree with them with no other evidence is simply a shallow person.
I think you need to keep his earlier words in mind:

> So suppose this wonderful community has been a great help to you over the years, and you’re trying to figure out how you can help out around the clubhouse.

In other words, what's the most effective way to be charitable and give back to the community?

> The going conversion rate for those to dollars is around infinity:zero.

That's arguable IMO. I'm not saying it's a straightforward payout, but I don't think they're not worthless, either. Hiring managers and recruiters will attempt to look up your profiles (if you haven't provided any), and having a stellar reputation within a community is assuredly not a bad thing. While it may not net you a larger offer, it might serve as a tie-breaker if nothing else (especially if the other candidate has a lot of negatives associated with their online profiles).
Right. Nevertheless, this tiny little menulet might be a nice starting point for all those people who are not too experienced with secure shell sessions.
Why 2 Birds in the Hand May Be Better Than a “Hobbit” Skull
Nope, we hit below SurfaceFlinger. gralloc and direct gl, actually.
HTTP improvements are necessary. If this raises the bar past what some developers can manage, that's unfortunate, but necessary -- the current system actually prevents what better developers want and need to do.
I think it would make a lot of sense to have a BI and to also double-down in R&D to improve all levels of understanding and capabilities in the fields of AI and robotics. The protestant work ethic is deeply engrained in this society, but perhaps now we should be thinking in terms of "how do we free as many people as possible for pursuits they haven't yet found" -- and investing heavily in removing jobs that the most hours are worked in.

The necessary investment in all levels and types of STEM would be huge, and the result would be tons of technology that can be used to replace current work. To prevent the technology from simply being used to make a very small number of people rich, vast amounts (if not all) of the research should be released as free & open source technology. I do admit however that FOSS is not a pancea to address concerns of excessive wealth concentration - and taxes will continue to play that role.

In a sense, the wealth created by the increases in automation will be captured back in the form of taxes, and use to fund additional investment in automation as well as a basic income to sustain all the residents of the society which decided that it was worthwhile to try to abolish work, instead of continuing to fetishize it as a moral obligation.
I think the tech has gone CPU > GPU > FPGA > ASIC.

Makes me wonder what will come next.
What's he using in the video to give the almost path bar effect for the prompt in terminal?
I'm working on an independent web publishing platform with decentralized social networking features:

http://idno.co/

You can see me kick the tires over at:

http://werd.io/

I'm considering funding further development through a patronage model (like NPR: "brought to you by ..."). I wonder if anyone else here has attempted anything like this?
Best of luck.

I think you'll find that becoming known for creative applications of code (e.g. Python) against certain niches will far outweigh trying to become a "Python thought leader."

Since you mentioned an interest in Internet marketing, you could quite literally write the book on, say, how law firms can attract new clients through their websites, and use that as lead generation for lawyers who want to understand the terrain (this Internet thing and how it can make the firm more money) but understandably don't have the time between lawyer-y things to actually do it themselves.

One things I'm REALLY big on is providing free educational seminars for a particular niche. You could call up a handful of local law firms, let them know you're an author who just wrote a book on how law firms like theirs can get more clients automagically through their website, and invite them to an in-person seminar where you'll dive further into the subject. You just might sell a few copies of your e-book this way, but more importantly, you'll be able to sell at scale and in a way that's not as intimidating (to the lawyer who realizes you're trying to close a deal) as a one-on-one meeting.
You are only a quarter right (or whatever). The incidence of corporate taxation can fall on various entities including the consumers, the employees, and the shareholders. The better argument is that corporate taxation is double (or triple) taxation, as the corporate income gets distributed down to employees and shareholders, which then gets taxed again as personal income and capital gains.
You don't sound like a hacker. You sound like somebody who types a lot in order to change the patterns of lights on their monitor.
The Art of Sleeping in Seminars
Er, so, not rolling over for bullshit requests is a very good thing (telcos take note), but I'm not seeing a difference here from any company that doesn't comply with improper requests, but does comply with "proper" ones, just a matter of scale:

"The government began sending data requests to Ashdown 15 years ago but the entrepreneur, who launched his business in 1993, acquiesced just once - at the advice of his lawyer. He agreed to hand over the data only after receiving an FBI request accompanied by a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2010. Local governments and police in Utah were behind most of the other formal inquiries that he received."

(except that he confirms that he received and complied with a FISA order)
Low-Dose LSD for "focus, creativity, & emotional clarity"
Eidos Disables Your Guns in iOS Deus Ex, If Your Device is Jailbroken
Is it necessary to consume energy to perform computation?
What a fascinating idea, a shame they didn't stick with it!
As a wee lad, I uploaded my first bits of HTML onto Xmission's shared hosting in 1997. Good memories. Thanks to them, I didn't have to succumb to Geocities advertisements.

A few years ago, they launched a cloud platform: http://www.stackable.com
I bet that Microsoft engineer who told us Skype was not re-built for spying is feeling pretty silly right now.

I know his excuses seemed "reasonable" (if you're a smart liar, you don't try to blatantly bullshit someone on their face - you find a "good reason" to hide it), but it was no less of a bullshit excuse as Microsoft's earlier rejection of WebRTC (and they ended up supporting it anyway - guess they didn't feel that strongly about that security claim to begin with).

This was the same way. Yes, it may have improved Skype's reliability a little bit, but I honestly doubt that was the main purpose for doing it. As we learn in this revelation, they don't seem to have a problem with adapting their service to suit NSA.
http://www.faa.gov/other_visit/aviation_industry/airline_ope... is really interesting.
>I'm sure the fact that the SLR's sensor is physically sixteen times larger has nothing to do with it...

He's agreeing with you. When consumer-level devices boost megapixels, they don't usually boost the sensor's physical size.

The explanation I've heard is that the denser you pack the sensor elements, the more interference they receive from each other. This is why digital images become grainy at higher ISO, and why the problem is worse with higher-megapixel cameras (when the sensor size isn't also increased). SLRs can go higher than P&S cameras while maintaining acceptable levels of noise because their pixel density is lower (even if there are more total pixels).

In this particular case, they did make the sensor larger, which is great. But this is part of why more megapixels does not mean better.
It was only a matter of time until the materials got good enough for this to happen.

I'm always surprised that these teams never seemed to try and recruit pro athletes for this kind of thing. I've got a friend who's a professional cyclist and his 30 second power rating is something like 1100 watts and I'm sure at a minute it's only degraded by 50-100 watts.
Valuable rare metals up for grabs in cities
Moscow-Cuba flight skirts US airspace, prompts speculation Snowden is aboard
What, you can't do that conversion in your head? :)
Subjects enrolled in clinical trials fall under informed consent and are outside HIPPA/HITECH. We actually take steps beyond either of those standards to ensure the data, costing pharma billions to create, is not breached.
Lot of people get shocked and die too. Ask any electrician or bench tech or radio tech how many times they have been "bit". I'm professionally trained to work on nasty stuff and I ended up in the hospital due to an untrained persons actions on a job site. And I've lost a few colleagues due to antenna raisings/maintenance gone wrong.