skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When you receive paper from the government under FOIA, you are required to pay for the photocopies. Responding to your FOIA request isn't a mission directive, so it doesn't deserve budget money. It's just something the government has to do. You are requiring the government to use resources (toner, paper, time) so you have to pay for them.

Surveillance by government is the same way. Police and three-letter agencies are using engineer time, bandwidth, and potentially rack space of service providers complying with warrants. They compensate providers for those resources.

Similarly, if the police kick down an apartment door, they're supposed to compensate the landlord for the cost of a new door. If your municipal police department wanted to wiretap your cell phone, they would have to pay Verizon/AT&T/whatever a monthly fee just like you do.
Even if that were true one would think that with all the resources Apple has they would be able to handle a DDOS. It would be nice if this was intentional but sadly judging by how long its been thats very unlikely so DDOS is possible.
You're right, I just went back and checked the article in the Times [1]

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/magazine/who-would-kill-a-...
Haskell/Snap ecosystem is as productive as Ruby/Rails.
That's a similar mechanism to a warrant canary. I like it, and haven't heard of it being used, but I doubt the effectiveness.

Though, I suppose if a company suddenly had to take down their datacenter video feed for unspecified reasons, that would be tell tale.
I was able to access them for quite a while even long enough to read complaints about the outage. Wonder if they just turned them off to prevent all the would be posts about the downtime
Silver seems to fit in with the Grantland side of ESPN, but also seems too big for Grantland. It will be interesting to see how he fits in on that network, given his more complicated analysis. He never seemed nearly as compelling on TV as he was in writing and as a fan of his work, I hope his TV presense improves as a result of this new deal. I think he's certainly earned more than a blog at the NYT.
Specific and limited investigations should be secret for a given length of time or until they are complete, and can't obviously be disclosed during the investigation, that is quite normal. Just as the identity of witnesses is sometimes protected during a trial. However methods and the extent of programmes should never be secret, even if that means investigations are less effective. Otherwise so much can be secret that no-one truly knows what is being done in our name, and there are no practical limits on the power of those who manage the secrets.

All this is quite well established in other areas of police-work and prosecution. We have specific, individual warrants with normal judicial oversight for a reason, and broad general warrants giving carte blanche to follow certain rules in collecting data simply shouldn't be allowed, because there's too much scope for abuse.

So I think there is a third way in the middle between making all investigations completely open, and allowing secrecy to consume every operation of government.
>we must do something
>this is something
>we must do this
I'm sure that the same efforts and patience invested in negotiating with the man would have bought them the assets. Bully is bully dude got mad.
Segment.io is hiring technical support, iOS engineering
Wow, the nihau safaris look amazing -- a bit expensive, but I'd really like to go (with a camera or an 1886 Winchester) for boar, someday. Although I'd rather turn it into kalua pig rather than a trophy.
could someone run an isp with a completely public inbox, so that they couldn't receive a FISA without it becoming public?

are companies obligated to have a private means of contacting them?
The design of nissan.com takes me back to the days before the '.gif' patent war.
Indeed, in those places which kept the Crown, the Crown's immunity has often been abolished or heavily modified.
There's a pretty good core of active users. Definitely not all of them. About 1 in 10 becomes a regular, with about 2 - 3% checking the site almost daily. Around 20 - 25% use the site once a month. No idea if these numbers are any good, but they're getting better every month.

When I initially started the site, I did some reddit advertising, and while I got a decent number of sign ups, most were one and done accounts. Organic exposure has definitely been way better than paid advertising for me.
I'd like to point out that the linked free ebook (pdf) is an excellent short read about pricing strategy:

http://breakingthetimebarrier.freshbooks.com/
Ask HN: Any cool innovation in e-commerce startup?
Is e-commerce very unsexy thing for startups nowadays?
I looked at nissan.com, and its a shame that the site is basically internet trash and lame ads.
I imagine if someone tried that, the NSA/FBI would merely say, "hey, head down to our office, we want to talk to you about something."
While this HN post is certainly guilty of the puffery you describe, the actual site is just a collection of resources this professor thinks are useful for various categories of grad students.
Clients are not all sophisticated, just like consumers are not all rational. Much (most) of legal work is indeed paralegal work. That's my point.

The legal industry has been adopting some computer technology as it becomes available. The courts have barely changed since the 1700s.
SML#: a new Standard ML family programming language
Thanks!

I was just thinking the other day that it'd be cool to be able to scan games in. I think my data source has UPC data in it, but I don't think it's very well filled out.
This is an interesting line of argument that I hope someone puts before the court.

Previously, search in a legal sense combined two elements that we've always blurred together:

1. Collection of data

2. Intepretation of the data.

So when a human searches, they are comingled. Light enters the eye, is processed into images in the brain, is elevated into consciousness and draws connections in the front cortex and elsewhere.

But an automated system can do it in two stages. The pictures could be recorded and never analysed.

The question is whether the act of searching includes both data gathering and analysis as inseparable parts or whether they are seperable. And if they are seperable, where does the search reside: in the data, or the analysis?

Reversing your analogy, the NSA approach is like the police having housefly-sized drones in every house, keeping HD video of everything that goes on. Most of the time, nobody sees it. The data is gathered but not analysed.

Is that search?
Meet the teenage hacker hero who's starting her own dev school in Kenya
How is using an editor making them Lisp users? Are users of Google's flight search engine, written in Common Lisp, making them Common Lisp users? Are AutoCAD users Lisp users?

How many Emacs users just use it? How many already need help to configure .emacs ?
State secrets completely undermine the concept of judicial checks on government power. This isn't a new idea, it's been heavily criticized since Bush has been in power and expanded the use of it:

> Glenn Greenwald alleges that the Bush administration attempted to expand executive power, as evidenced by the unitary executive theory propagated by John Yoo. The theory suggests that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, cannot be bound by Congress or any law, national or international. By invoking the state secrets privilege in cases involving actions taken in the war on terror (i.e. extraordinary rendition, allegations of torture, allegedly violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Greenwald opines the administration tried to evade judicial review of these claims of exceptional war powers. In effect, this is preventing a judicial ruling determining whether there is a legal basis for such expansive executive power. With that in mind, applying this privilege makes impeachment the only possible means left for Congress to exercise their duty to uphold the checks and balances constitutionally intended to prevent abuse of power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_secrets_privilege

Since impeachment is a highly unlikely scenario... if a government action is unconstitutional and citizens have a no way of challenging the constitutionality in court due to the government deeming it's actions were a secret, then how is the government not deciding what is considered constitutional or not?
Five Cool Things you can do with an Umbrella (2012)
I came to say the same thing. I can't believe the article didn't trace the practice back to Campbell's book, especially after mentioning Star Wars (which Lucas pretty explicitly based on the formula in the book). To be fair, Campbell was writing about archetypical stories in human societies, not how to make a movie. Lucas correctly saw that they were one and the same.
Had to find some way to pay those attorney fees...
> Do you know if there's any plan for them to release an android app that would let my phone sync?

I use K-9 Mail on Android with Fastmail. They both support IMAP IDLE, so you get immediate push notifications of new messages.
Apparently the man's virtue and principles worth more than whatever you would put instead of those "internet trash and lame ads"
The charts on Yahoo Finance (very good website, btw - I'm unaffiliated) adjust for splits. This is why you don't see any discontinuity on split dates.
People who say Ballmer is a bad CEO based on the stock price really aren't paying attention. He took over at the height of the tech bubble. Microsoft's PE (and everything else) was a joke. Since he took over revenue and profits have increased by an impressive amount. The only reason the stock has been flat is that it was extremely over inflated when he took over.

(Certainly he has made mistakes, but frankly I think he's done just fine. Windows phone 7-8 have been pretty good, just slightly late. Xbox has been pretty successful. Azure has been fine. Bing has been the only real failure/money loser, but at least it might be holding back Google to some extent. That was the whole purpose anyways.)
Sales = Revenue
I think it's a waste of Nate Silver's intelligence to work on something like sports, when there are many other bigger problems to potentially be solved with the help of statistics and prediction.

Why might ESPN be a good option for him? Can someone help me see the other side of this? It's totally his decision to make, and I'm sure he's looked at his options rationally, and life circumstances and past experience and etc. certainly play a big role, but I'm curious.
Wow. I think the source code belongs in The Daily WTF. Just look at this gem:

<form name="menuform4">
<p>
<select name="menu4"
onChange="window.open(menuform4.menu4.options[menuform4.menu4.selectedIndex].value);
return false;">
<option value="http://www.nissan.com" selected>People's Opinions &nbsp;</option>
<option value="http://www.digest.com/people/page_1.shtml">Page 1</option>
<option value="http://www.digest.com/people/page_2.shtml">Page 2</option>
<option value="http://www.digest.com/people/page_3.shtml">Page 3</option>

(Snipped about 500 lines)

<option value="http://www.digest.com/people/page_503.shtml">page 503</option>
<option value="http://www.digest.com/people/page_504.shtml">page 504</option>
<option value="http://www.digest.com/people/page_505.shtml">page 505</option>
</select>
</form>
</font></strong></b>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
This always makes me sad and I'm shocked on the few occasions (rarer every day) when change is correctly counted back to me: "5 cents make 7 dollars, and 5 more dollars is 12. Have a good day."
What matters where you want to do business.

Only if you're a hardware startup.

If you're doing software as a service and you can deal with latency issues, you can operate many places where US patent law doesn't apply to you or to your customers. Canada and Mexico have high speed connections to the USA and Germany or Korea aren't so slow either.
Was what I thought too. Maddox would perfectly match the sort of semi-incompetent, this-guy-seems-creepy surveillance that someone who wants to cover their ass would do. Anyway, XMission is not that small, so there's no way of knowing.
Dumb question, but the author kept running a TOR node at a site he knew was under NSA surveillance? That doesn't strike me as very responsible...
Nate Silver's background is in sports - that's really where his statistics-magic got started. I imagine sports is one of his passions, and he's now gotten to a point where he can combine that with his skill in statistics at the same scale as he was with politics.
Continuing that I wonder if you could have webcams in nearly every area of the building and make it all publicly accessible.
I pay for Tumblr by providing information they use for various purposes. Information has value, and is being exchanged for a service.
If only he had gotten the domain for his first name, he wouldn't have to worry about legal issues.
I say Ballmer is a bad CEO because of the stack ranking employee evaluations and the rampant smothering of prototype technologies that later turned out to be valuable in favor of "core" technologies - you know, the two behaviors that are absolutely toxic for a tech company.
For all the children who will get interested in statistics because of their favorite sport it's pretty cool. That might not be the answer you were looking for, but as someone who grew up collecting baseball cards obsessively I think it's great.
I find it comical questioning his decision to choose sports (or anything for that matter) when he is famous and incredibly accurate for his predictions. While I agree sports may not be the best use of his ability, I'm sure he's done the math for choosing his next career step.
What Actually Happens At The End Of Trading Places?
Alive Shoes: Y Combinator
Actually I admit to not knowing much about the topic, but from the original dailydot article, it seems there are 2 levels of flagging involved - NSFW and Adult. The Adult category is the one that's been completely blackholed. This article seems to be deliberately trying to confuse the two types.
I'm a new land surveyor.  How do find the formulas for this table?
This example is used to figure the cubic feet of fill used in a proposed pond. Further down the table I would multiply the total cubic feet by 2 and divide it by 54 to find the total cubic yardage of fill needed for the proposed dam.<p>This is the link to the rest of the table:<p>http://i.imgur.com/JtJRIww.jpg
The Westwinster system has some distinct advantages. All leaders of the executive branch are directly answerable to the electorate. The Head of State is a figurehead whose absolute surety of office means she needn't be a political figure and so some parts of the machinery of government are more trustworthy. The fusion of legislature and executive means that the executive must be exposed to the view of Parliament at all times. The fusion also means that governments usually form quickly and so can govern with some confidence of expeditiousness (vs endless hearings), while bicameralism provides an inbuilt mechanism of resistance and review.

Meanwhile, Americans think the President is some kind of God-king. The powers a President has are granted by Congress, the money is voted by Congress. The President has enormous day to day influence and power, and could at an order destroy billions of lives. Yet the President has no guarantee of a workable Congress and Congress has no incentive to work with a President.

The only thing that can cause the Washington system to act collectively is some terrifying outside threat, and all they will ever agree on is the kind of madness that's led us to this pass.

So, actually? The Westminster system is pretty damn good, constitution or not. Americans think they're badasses for having a revolution. One. And a civil war. One.

Britain's constitutional system is more thoroughly underpinned by blood and terror and war and suffering than the USA's. By a long shot.
Typically AutoCAD users are not AutoLISP users. (By the way, AutoLISP conses are also immutable, although you have complained that the immutability and resulting "persistence" of Clojure lists counts against calling it a Lisp.) But typically Emacs users are indeed Elisp users, because they read, write, and modify Elisp code. That's why there are several thousand Elisp repositories on GitHub.
The comparison with an early PC is not imaginative.

Think of the original Sinclair ZX81 with 1K of RAM and 8K ROM. Swap out the Z80 for a 6502 to get approximately the same register count. Without a screen to worry about (it took up too much RAM + CPU time) and you could do a lot, e.g. 1K chess or, as the adverts said, run a nucular power station with it. You could also service I/O with hardware interrupts.
This example is used to figure the cubic feet of fill used in a proposed pond. Further down the table I would multiply the total cubic feet by 2 and divide it by 54 to find the total cubic yardage of fill needed for the proposed dam.

This is the link to the rest of the table:

http://i.imgur.com/JtJRIww.jpg
Said app in question: https://sensortower.com/ios/us/yeah_us/app/pumped_bmx/527173...
I think it's important to note that they sided with him while he was saying what they wanted to hear.

Reddit/MSNBC had it easy this past election, because they could say what they could be optimistic and listen to the experts at the same time. My disillusionment with political journalism will be fully validated during the next election won by Republicans, when Fox is on the side of 'science' and MSNBC says that 'science' can't be trusted.
I wonder how much simpler our browsers could be if we didn't have to worry about rendering and styling this breed of dated spec-breaking insanity.
Adobe Lightroom

All photos stored locally on a RAID 1 array
Foldered by year/yyyy-mm-dd
Then tagged based on content of the photo

Everything is backed up by nightly via Jungle Disk.
These successes are always great to read about!

I recently broke top 50 in the Productivity category with my first app, which brought in over 5,000 downloads and counting. I didn't receive "new car" money, but I have already received a few freelancing clients because of it, which surpassed my goals.

Fantastic execution, and good luck with all of your future projects!
Programming without Text Files
Yeah, he should build a social mobile webapp to help find your car keys instead.
Is it OK to steal a customer?
"There are villains in this world. They used to hide beside the road and beat then rob travellers."

Nah. They've always been lawyers.
Direct link to the story:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/justinesharrock/what-is-that-box-whe...
I have to respectfully disagree. While I think the ideas have merit, the book reads like "the secret" or some other motivational junk. It feels simplified or dumbed-down to the point where it doesn't feel authentic anymore. He got the wrong person to write his story, IMHO.
I don't think we really disagree. A 3-act structure captures so many situations that it has no bearing on the quality or originality of a story. It's just the simplest definition of a story possible: there is a beginning, a middle, and an ending.
encrypted mail messages are secure

What is secure? If government sezies your key, in some jurisdictions they can compel you to release your passphrase (if one is required), then they can go back and decrypt absolutely everything you ever sent. (OTR gets around this but this is largely by leaving the network layer location privacy / initial authentication / key exchange problems out of scope.)

Finally, traffic analysis is pretty powerful. Even if Eve can't read your messages, she can see who they went to and when (and maybe who they in turn communicated with afterwards) and thus easily determine probable relationships - Tor based endpoint, or not. (Hrrm ... but two Tor based endpoints, on the other hand...)
> Can someone help me see the other side of this?

Your profile says you dropped out of college and are currently backpacking the world. Is that a waste of your intelligence? Why or why not?
It could also be because the Daily Kos' founder also cofounded SB Nation, one of the larger networks of sports blogs that are well regarded in the baseball analytics community, so it's likely that Silver had some connection/comfort with DailyKos.
For some reason I didn't see that he'd said, "during compilation". Perl is an interpreted language, so there's no compilation stage. A compiled language is modified in this way using a preprocessor. It doesn't really make sense to claim it's possible to inject code during compilation, that's the entire purpose of a compiler, to generate machine code from a syntax tree.

But code generation and execution during runtime, which is what I think you meant, is capable in any language with eval().
So this is like Teespring for shoes? What's your profit as a designer?
I use WineBottler - it's quite nice.

They have a 1.6 series build but it's one of the release candidates currently - should be updated fairly soon.
The first to market with support for iOS 7 are obviously going to have a huge advantage over other App developers. the SDK being down for every developer without access to alternative platforms for their dev stack are now put back on schedule plus the length of the outage. Again, first to market in such a large market is a huge advantage, providing social and technical momentum, making or breaking careers and enterprises for those who depend on Apple's generous
returns. Entire companies can be birthed or go splat due to variables like this. It's a risk they app devs are aware of, but that doesn't mean it isn't a Big Deal.
Either put your portfolio or have a condition that I can chose not to play if I don't like the work. Ofcourse, in that case I don't get the code.
Be careful not to draw too many conclusions from this. Specifically, it applies to entertainment, because what people really want, given a requisite basic level of quality, is to consume the same entertainment their friends are consuming. It applies far more weakly to tools designed to solve problems.
Nice to see that people sometimes asking "what for" question.

I think it is what could be called "Haskell syndrome" when people tend to write abstract things in "very fancy way" without asking that simple question.

There are tons of blog posts like "look, I could write this abstraction in Haskell this way using this kind of monads!". Well, you can, very clever, the question is - what are the chances to encounter this abstraction in real-world problems? Isn't there a straightforward but less fancy solution?

Should I really have "all this fancy stuff" to process onClick events which can be done in 3 lines of plain ugly JS?)
He'll certainly continue his elections work for ESPN's sister network, ABC.

There might be more worthwhile things he could work on, but sports and politics are what interests him.
You don't mention the trigger that brought on the panic attack but just in case you overlooked the obvious I'll mention coffee. Excessive coffee especially on an empty stomach brings on anxiety attacks in many people myself included. If your in a stressful situation or environment the effect may be magnified. Here is a short article you could read on coffee's effect that mirrors the conditions you described.
http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=50...
I wish you the best.