skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With advanced tech, there is no need for them to build probes. Eg. use wormholes to peek in to any location in the universe, or some other teleportation system. Probably that's why you can't see them.
Source: Sci-fi films.
> When you act in public, you are, definitionally, not acting privately. There is literally nothing to be done about that

It seems that lately we're redefining what "public" is when it comes to the other privacy issues that are in the media spotlight recently.

> It's utterly silly to think that a person can exist in society without anyone else knowing they exist

There's no disagreement there, but do note that in no way did I attempt to make that equivocation either.

There is a distinct difference between someone knowing you exist or seeing you drive by, and someone having extensive, journalized, cross-referenced data, stored potentially indefinitely for perusal at their discretion. You will never know of this person or the fact they're studying your data.

Right now, there are only 3 states even pretending to place responsible restrictions on the usage of this particular data. That is the issue. Of course we will not be getting rid of ALPRs, but we can certainly make sure they're used for reasonable things. The potential for abuse is huge, and that's why there's outrage over the issue.
Pour a Little (Lucene) Sugar in Your Scala
> It's the main hosting service for most developers' source code

I seriously doubt that.
Don’t Call Me “Girl,” Sir: Women, Tech, and a Chat with Olivia Munn
I would argue that Javascript is not lexically scoped because the scope of a variable definition does not depend on the lexical structure of a program (with the sole exception of function boundaries). This is true even to the point of multiple definitions having no effect on the scope of a variable.

I think that what you are arguing is that Javascript is statically scoped.
Immortality, actually.
This article is full of holes itself.

The actual headline he's decrying is 'Millions Of Gigabytes Collected Daily'. This is, according to the estimates and information he includes in the article, an accurate estimate. It is also suitably vague given the uncertainty over the estimates - it means anything 2 million gigabytes, up to 21 (the theoretical limit). We just don't know, what we do know is the ambition is to collect every communication, and they are nearing that ambition in reality, if only for a few full take days at GCHQ - the storage capacity in terms of internets/day at NSA I'm not sure on, does anyone know what their current capacity is?

Put another way, no! NSA and GCHQ are absolutely not gathering and/or analyzing that much data per day.

How does this follow? What has analysing got do do with collecting?

It’s an inconceivably big number meant to frighten readers.

2 petabytes per day would be just as frightening, and yet is well below the theoretical limit - I don't think the exact numbers here matter, this is an estimate meant to show just how much information is being collected.

But he saves the most bizarre assumptions for last:

As a group, and barring some sort of vortex, 550 analysts could only listen to 1,100 gigabytes of phone conversations per day, and that’s if they worked 24 hours per day and listened constantly. In reality, it would take 18,918 days or 51 years for 550 analysts to listen to just one day’s worth of fiber optic data gathered for Tempora.

Is he seriously contending most of this data is only telephone conversations, that collection without immediate analysis by a human being is not just as dangerous, that humans actually analyse each piece of information individually, without using filtering algorithms?

This comparison is far more misleading and inaccurate than the headline he decries.
According to the NSA[1], their Utah center is "measured in zettabytes"

Let's break this down:

>1,000 gigabytes is a terabyte.

>1,000 terabytes is a petabyte.

>1,000 petabytes is an exabyte.

>1,000 exabytes is a zettabyte.

>1,000 zettabytes is a yottabyte.

Assuming they use the Microsoft standard to count and not 1024 bytes to a kilobyte. Let's assume they have 1 yottabyte of data storage. That's 1000 zettabytes. That's 1,000,000 exabytes. And, finally, that's 1,000,000,000 petabytes.

At a rate of 22 petabytes per day it will take approximately 45454545.45 days or 124,533 years to fill only the Utah data center. (Thank you Wolfram alpha [2])

So the scary answer to your rhetorical question is that "Yes, the NSA has the storage capacity to easily, if not comfortably store 22 petabytes of data per day, or even 500 times that without breaking a sweat."

----------

[1]http://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/

[2]http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281%C3%9710%5E9%2F22%2...
I thought this was going to be a list of all the services who can fuck off, like AT&T and Time Warner Cable, with an API to either: launch a DDoS attack at them, formally fuck them off by sending them a letter or a proper complaint to the correct address, while connecting your social media accounts with the correct hashtags- updating your status. Telling actual _people_ to fuck off caught me off guard...then I got the joke of applying an API to everything, especially if it's easier to do it in person...You should add mailing real letters if enough people request the service.
> 1.) well, extremely unlikely with a lot of philosophical rammifications

How can you say it is likely or unlikely?
This is a really interesting idea presented in a miserable article. It feels like it's just rehashing sci-fi tropes. and there's no discussion of the "The new calculations, reported in the International Journal of Astrobiology"
Looks great ,would love to talk more about it , what's the best way to reach you?
550 security guards each in a little stadium of cctv's

always watching
Reminds me a bit of people who say "Apple is the best! My phone died but they replaced it on the spot."
That is weird; I like brew better than macports so far. It hasn't failed me, as long as you keep everything updated.
I succesfully installed on iPad, Dropbox link worked, local wifi server worked, but VLC does not recognize mp3 audio files - am I doing smth wrong?

Also the description in AppStore is rather limited, I would suggest to expand it - indicate all available features and goodies.

I used this link

https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/vlc-for-ios/id650377962?mt=8...
So you're ignoring customers in other countries because you can't communicate with them? Why are you not immediately hiring a native speaker/coder to expand your market there?

Or is it an IP protection issue in that you've found that certain countries (China?) will steal your evaluation code and run with it?
For those interested, the article below is a study on what happened to the inhabitants of the nearby island Little Andaman after it was settled by mainlanders. Infant mortality rose (to 40%), malnutrition and disease increased, and life expectancy, even excluding infant mortality, was approx 35 yr.

http://www.culturalsurvival.org/ourpublications/csq/article/...
I don't get why you keep suggesting that the GPL is incompatible with the appp store but the LGPL isn't.

Also, what limits the usage rights is the app store, NOT the GPL.
Well, if you break narrow thinking that only high tech(electricity/metal) civilizations can explore galaxies. Everything is forces interacting each other and one object can only interact with so many other object, but totally not interact with anything else beyond its capabilities of understand, perceive/see/hear. Everything could be crawling of life we do not perceive/understand/detect.

Humans operate in very narrow band of frequencies, thanks to technology we widened the band but it also presented us with new problem/revelations. Some made religion from science and ran into a wall.

"Earth" was so intelligent to grow people. If Seed is intelligent to grow plant, why not earth?
> "we have standard servers and a high speed connection in the US." - https://www.fastmail.fm/help/overview_about.html

so that's a non-starter then, for someone looking to escape the snooping that makes Gmail annoying.
Yeah, possibly -- focus will be on filling out bitcoin data and other currencies first though.
> It's not about inequality, it's obvious that the rich should get richer faster.

That the rich get richer faster and hoard more and more wealth while others fine their wealth decreasing over time is inequality.

> And it's not necessarily a problem, because even the super rich can't spend all of what they earn, and that money ends up being recycled in the economy (investment, etc..).

This is the trickle down theory, which is not true in any way whatsoever. Wealth does not get reinvested or redistributed in a way that reduces wealth disparity.

> It's rather about: is everyone getting richer ? And the answer is clearly yes.

This is demonstrably false. Don't confuse the availability of consumer goods with wealth. In the US, for example, actual wealth for low and middle class people/families has been declining for the last 30 years or so.

> Even the poorer people are getting a bit more than before and can afford a better life than their parents.

This is not true either. Homelessness, poverty, and unemployment rates are measured and we know that there is no long term downward trend for these things even as wealth disparity gets worse.

> That's what abundance mean: it's not about who gets the biggest share of the cake, it's the fact that cake is growing and everyone gets more cake than before.

Tell that to the people that are homeless or go hungry every day.
Clojure and LLVM
Read this: http://nsa.gov1.info/about/about.html

Total HDD shipments are ~135 million per quarter[1]. If every one of those drives was 4TB, entire world production would be about 2 zettabytes yearly. 1 yottabyte would take 500 years of current HDD production.

http://www.storagenewsletter.com/news/marketreport/trendfocu...
LMAO. I just burst out laughing so hard. Why is this platform not open source :)?
Agree that 21 year is not a usually relevant anniversary, but as I wrote in another comment, starting from this fact it has started a country-wide discussion on the role of police, secret services and government in fight to mafia, so it is common to see news about this topic these days in Italy. Even if it only is 21-year anniversary ;-)
In today's world, vegetarians have access to various non-animal sources of protein that our bodies cannot produce on its own. This has not always been the case. Regardless, the point is our bodies need certain things to be healthy, and those things are historically mainly found in meats and vegetables.

And I won't argue that we eat more meat than our bodies need. But then again, we eat more EVERYTHING than our bodies need. Most of that is likely due to our survival instinct that makes high calorie food taste appealing- protein, fats, and sugars.
Detroit files for Bankruptcy
An don't forget Vegas ;-)
You're not the first to wonder ^^

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5866047
This should use POST instead of GET, because you are proposing an action.
There are a number of misrepresentations in this article.

He talks of the impossibility of the 550 (where has this number come from?) GHCQ and NSA analysts reading all this data. As if people are claiming that humans are individually watching it themselves. Even if they were, he completely ignores the obvious method: that machines under those agencies' control are the ones collecting this data, in favour of a hand-waving 'it's impossible'.

His statement that it's illegal for the NSA analysts to read these communications nicely sidesteps the strong evidence that they are doing it.

Even the focus of the article, the 21 million GB claim, tries to stoke up something much madder than what actually happened. The Guardian's reporting of the potential volume of data on the cables is not 'wild' in any sense. That the telephone game translated that potential figure into an actual one is not desirable, but also not particularly surprising. Notably, he doesn't take the opportunity to find out the actual average data rate on those cables and correct what he's criticising.

Of course, he also takes the opportunity to ladle on some criticism of Greenwald and the Guardian, and play up the 'it's a complex issue' angle which discourages any kind of public outcry.
I second this. I just finished the last book of the trilogy last week and it was great.
"well, extremely unlikely with a lot of philosophical rammifications"

Whether it's likely or unlikely is just a guess, we don't have a good estimate of the probability. I believe we're the only civilization in the universe.

What do you mean by philosophical rammifications?
Cassini to image the Earth tonight
I don't understand this at all. This is a personal blog. That means that the people who read it do so for no other reason than that he's interested in what he has to say. A blog is a platform to say whatever you want to say. If that's thinly veiled advertising, then so what? What you consider advertising someone else with a different background might consider insightful. I don't understand the dishonesty charge. There's nothing he's 'supposed' to be doing with it. So how could someone say he's pretending it's something it's not?
thanks, cjm712 -at- gmail
I'm suggesting that your suggestion that we solve those medical problems for them while introducing them to the negative cultural influences of modern society is not really a fair trade.

Especially when these people(and possibly a handful of others in the Amazon) are literally the last remaining people on earth to be unaffected by modern man.

Edit: See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6069163
Having used Adblock (currently Adblock Edge) and Ghostery/Disconnect for so long, I haven't seen ads in ages. It's actually a bit jarring when I use a computer that doesn't have ad blocking enabled... everything suddenly gets so cluttered.
A: It's too early to tell if it failed.
B: If it were to fail it would be exactly why every other Microsoft failure has ever failed. It is simply ahead-of-its time. We all know that Microsoft had smartphones and tablets years (not decades, but close) before anyone else. The only reason that they failed is that they offered too much - consumers were simply not ready for those capabilities and those capabilities scared them. The iPhone 1 was stupid enough (sorry, it's true, my HP IPAQ or HTC TyTN II could do more than the iPhone 1 could ever do) to not scare the market.

A confusing name: Is "RT" all that hard, or if it really does confuse someone "that Microsoft tablet" would work just as well.
Where are the apps: true.
A better alternative exists: no. A simpler alternative exists. The market isn't ready, let's not confuse consumer perception with complexity.

Mark my words, in 6 years time Apple will come up with exactly the same thing and everyone will lose their minds over how innovative and truely revolutionary it is: simply because the market is ready for a product such as that.

Let the Surface RT (and WinMO) be a lesson - you might have a game-changer of an idea, but it is worthless until the majority of the market able to comprehend what you have to offer.
Bomb-derived C-14 shows that the human brain generates ~1,400 neurons per day.
But most people never use the distributed part of git, other than having the repo on their local computer.
They wouldn't have to give that up by writing a text log. They'd just be presenting more than one source of truth about the the log, from less secure to more secure.
Maybe just stop telling it's a DDOS when it's human errors ?
Ah ok. Firefox bad. Chrome good...
Didn't zedshaw already design something like this? Where is he when you need him?
I was thinking:

/python/:from

returns 'Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries! -:from'

Not quite as classy, though.
> what problems in the GNU userland utilities do the BSD utilities address?

Simplicy for one since BSD utils are developed in a mostly non-fractured enviroment. I gave one example in a previous post. That isn't the end of the story, but it's a good start.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5640751
Have a go at redesigning iOS7
So far, Google hasn't shown ads in search results that look like other search results though. This seems like a shift for them.
Bruce Lee, who kicked Norris's ass, was an atheist. Ergo, creationists lose, "chuck norris facts" notwithstanding :)
And then there’s Springer[0], one of the largest scientific publishers worldwide, and Springer[1], one of the largest tabloid owners worldwide.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springer_Science%2BBusiness_Me...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_Springer_AG
If the story isn't interesting or relevant to the people here, it won't get seen. If it's inappropriate, it will get flagged. Pay no mind to the "what's this doing on my HN?" chorus.

Aside: I've opened nine comment threads this morning, and every one of them had a "why is this on HN" comment.
the NSA and GCHQ have way more than 550 employees and I guarantee that the remainder is not all just janitors, secretarial staff and management.

This article and most others have failed to mention the technological force-multipliers (the bread and butter of HN) that their developers, sysadmins, and other technologist are constantly working on.

With the right search capabilities and filtering that 21 million GB gets a lot smaller.
I found the idea that we are the dependents of self-replicating alien machines entirely possible. We still do not have a clear sense of how life began on Earth, or how rare the conditions necessary to begin life are. If life began on some other rock in space and got transfered to Earth in its very early form, it would be far to say that it was a self-replicating alien machine.
Yeah, I've visited websites for years that I felt were very well designed in regards to being open and having a nice amount of whitespace. Seeing the same site on someone else's computer is a bit heartbreaking.
Yeah, but everything to do with their reputation. before 8 months ago, I never recommended Bitbucket to anyone. Now I do based on the knowledge that GitHub has a loss of connection at least once a month.

The company I worked for used GitHub as the source for its build systems releases. If you can't do releases because GitHub is down a few times, I'm sure the dev/ops team will start looking elsewhere.
You can also think that "Life" is everything.
Puddle of mud is life, it have streams, layers, densities, changes, reacting to environment.

How does one cell in your body knows about you?
How does that cell understand your perception?

Our understanding about life could be exactly like that one small cell perceives life. I think Life is not a chance, it is just a process that pops out wherever it can in whatever form it can. Diversity of life is dictated by environment in it.

A ocean is so complex form of life also.
Rocks around Saturn is very complex form of life.

All it takes is just definition.
Looks that way - which says something about the maturity of the bitcoin system.
Docs, tests, profiler, race detector, linter, build system. Go ships with everything.

I love Go.
One could argue that signing up for a Google service is enough to form a "business relationship" with them. Just like how if you buy a new pair of rocket skis from ACME, you're likely to get promotional email from them featuring sales on anvils.
Isla: a programming language for young children
Nice article. I would love to know more details about some of the specific examples, though. Like this one:

Yellow Freight used to have some 700 “end of lines,” Powell says, which are sorting terminals where cargo is transferred to its end customers. Powell developed a model that delivered a counterintuitive message: Trucks were traveling farther to get to the customer with so many terminals. Today, he says, Yellow Freight has 400 end of lines. “That was the right number,” he says.

I can understand 400 endpoints being more efficient for some overall process, but I have a hard time seeing how it could reduce miles travelled without some sort of unmentioned complexity (like sending stuff to the wrong endpoints through confusion). Or maybe it includes miles driven taking stuff to the endpoints in the first place? That I could see.
I have always been of the mind that if they wanted to come here they would have already and it wouldn't be pleasant.
Because of using the Samsung Chromebook for a while with ChromeOS, I started getting very used to that way of working. I write code 70% of the time, which is not very nice on a Chromebook indeed, but because Crouton is a chroot, I ended up with a rsync/git chroot which takes a few minutes to install and is almost always synced with my server both at home and at the colo. For most of the work that $249 thing is just definitely good enough. And if it breaks / gets totally destroyed / whatever, I have everything back in no time and ready to work.
The ultimate guide to deploying a Meteor project
I don't think they should be given credence, either. But I think everything looks like a nail because everything is a nail. That is, every behavior can be explained by evolution. We just might not have the right one for a specific behavior.
The enterprise version of GitHub might be a middle ground.
Is there something about this post that got it killed automatically, or did I just get banned or something?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6069755

edit: Oooh, I'm guessing the reference to H a ckaday?
lol. They got me there. I missed that it was a parody site XD.

The analysis is still good though, assuming that the data center does have a one yottabyte capacity.

However, let's redo the analysis with a 2 zetabyte assumption, keeping in mind that the full data capacity of the center is probably not purchased and set up in a one year period:

We have 2,000 exabytes. That is 2,000,000 petabytes. That is 90909.1 days or 249.1 years. There we go, that sounds better! They can now only store a little over 10x the 22 petabytes per day comfortably.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2000000%2F22+days+to+ye...
Bit Hacks | MIT Video
You can do that with any language that has an eval function. Eval takes a string and feeds it into the interpreter.
How many 4TB drives to store 1 YB?

Assuming 80% fill factor for error correction & redundancy, it's 3.1 x 10^11

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281+yottabyte+%2F+4+te...
>the fact that we have not detected or seen any evidence of alien probes in the solar system suggests there have been no probe-building civilizations in the Milky Way in the last few million years

How does that compute exactly?

There are ~300 billion stars in the Milky Way, which is ~100k light years across. I can't even begin to think about the travelling salesman problem involved, but even with many probes, many civilizations, and travelling close to the speed of light, I'm guessing it would take some serious time to get around to visiting each star.
I've lost the ability to flag in the past couple of months, for no reason I can discern. I seldom used it unless I thought the story was very off-topic.

Only thing I can think of is accidentally fat-fingering flag on my phone, then a mod revoking my ability in retaliation.
Can't work out all the bugs without running the thing you built.
The title of this post is misleading because it implies that the USSR believed it was a hot dog stand.

Either use the original title from the article or add the words "it was actually just a" before "hot dog stand".
And I used it for as a codename for a project I was tossing around here on HN a while back as well. I hadn't heard of the animal, but a nice little random project name generator suggested it and I thought it was fun. Cool word, cool animal.
But the messaging system is idempotent! The behaviour of 3rd-party endpoints is undetermined.

This calls for a standard! The Fuck-Off Protocol, or FOP, will soon have an rfc, a mailing list, and three incompatible implementations.
It doesn't crash safari though on my iPhone. Loaded in like 5 seconds for me.
Gigya: Only 2 Percent Of Social Sharing Happens On Google+