skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Allegations of widespread, unchecked analyst access to NSA collection data are simply not true. Access to XKEYSCORE, as well as all of NSA's analytic tools, is limited to only those personnel who require access for their assigned tasks. Those personnel must complete appropriate training prior to being granted such access -training which must be repeated on a regular basis.

I call bullshit!

If what the professional liar's agency says is true, how do they explain an admitted low level analyst, working for a non governmental 3rd party corporation, gaining access to the alleged trove of NSA secrets claimed by Snowden?
> And to the statement that access is audited... how many analysts were fired for overstepping their ethical obligations? Is that information collected or released?

I wish it were public. Apparently analysts do get caught and fired for mundane things like looking up ex-wives so apparently someone is checking. But that doesn't mean everything is being audited either.
At 20fps, could you make a 3d camera app by the user moving their camera in space and then correcting for stabilization with the accelerometers etc telling you point in space and using the multiple view points as individual cameras.
Sprinkler system controlled by a Raspberry Pi
> except for young children

Am curious why you put that qualifier in. Is it just that you think people have to play MMOs to become bored of them?
Who wouldn't help a lost boy for free ?!
YES! I want guaranteed, risk free
INCOME from Algebraic Geometry!

This, this is lovely
DCT is already lossy [1], so the statements around 8 megapixels are completely pointless, and worst of all, its 1990 lossy technology. Wavelet transformations completely destroy any DCT.

That said, if their emphasis is on producing pictures with minimal time delta at highest resolution, algorithms used for still pictures are out of place. Video compression algorithms still use DCT and wavelets, but they do so only after they have reduced redundancies between series of pictures, a process that tends to work significantly better than anything you can get out of these lossy transformations when you want to preserve quality.

Of course, eliminating redundancy in a series of pictures might have tipped them off to the fact that the image sensor isn't actually producing fresh pictures at the rate they want.

1: as used in JPEG. The transformation itself is perfectly invertible, assuming infinite precision arithmetic.
Xbox One is designed to be always-on for 10 years
I'd certainly agree that they certainly exist in the wild but I'm less convinced that they're particularly hard to avoid if you understand the lifecycles of what you're working on
That browsers are a tough problem with a difficult-to-internalize object lifecycle and a bunch of edge cases makes this tougher, for sure; my stuff is games-focused and so, yeah, I have a relatively simple problem set.

But, all things considered I'd rather Somebody Else (because Somebody Else makes browsers, I don't) spend developer time making a fast system secure rather than running a slightly more secure system up against the hard walls imposed by any managed language one would care to name.
Rule: you're allowed to use all caps to name any language that originally had to be programmed on terminals without lowercase letters.
The way you get better at X is to do it. For pretty much all X. Additionally, you can seek feedback, or go back after a while to look at old work with a fresh eye, or find other ways to measure your impact. You can also look at other people's stuff and steal tricks. But basically you just have to do it.

It's definitely true for writing. For a long time my vice of choice was mailing lists. Lately it's Quora, because you get a lot of feedback, and because you know you're writing for someone specific who actually wants to hear what you have to say, and because you get to read other people's takes on the same thing.

But the specifics don't matter. Just keep writing and reading. You'll get there. Just listen to Ira Glass: "Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through."
No, Snowden even mentioned that the audit rate was rather low. 2% or 8% or something like that, and elsewhere in this thread someone pasted a direct quote of his that analysts are indeed not given full permissions to do anything.

But the NSA is saying that all analysts don't have full powers; that doesn't mean that the permissions they do have are not still overly broad, or that programs like these don't need much more transparency.

You can't so much as send a nuclear ship to sea without their engineering department being audited (almost literally) up the ass to verify they won't break the reactor, so there's surely more that Congress and DoD can do to ensure proper oversight of the NSA.
That's a really interesting machine vision problem and a lot more complex than a JPEG codec. :-)

I wonder how long before we start to see Kinect-like infrared cameras mounted on phones to make the depth problem easier to solve. That would be cool!
The Most Efficient Office in the World (and it's run by the US government)
Thanks. It's much easier to get visa to Canada than States, that's why I don't have a problem with lower salary.
Yahoo's Buying Binge Continues With Lexity Acquisition
I would say that specific statements by multiple whistleblowers constitutes evidence, if not proof.
Lots of jobs for PHP devs in Canada. Definitely look in Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa, Calgary or (if you speak French) Montreal.

Ottawa, Calgary, and Montreal have pretty cold winters but the living costs are much higher in Toronto and Vancouver. There's a few other smaller cities in the southern Ontario area (London, Windsor, St Catherines) where there should be some job opportunities as well.
As are you.

How many times are you willing to allow someone, or some agency, to repeatedly lie to you, before you decide to become skeptical?
And more to the point, WoW is still going to be the genre definer for the next five years. That's not exceptional on Blizzard's part, though: winning an overwhelming amount of market share lets you coast. It doesn't mean the merger didn't have significant negative effects. (Yay double negatives. ):
Nah. If you want it to be that simple, then you'd just use a hosted Wordpress. Static site generators are for people who like to tinker. Or at least have the option of tinkering. I use Jekyll because I want to know then when I need to do something different than they expected, I can make it happen without inordinate fucking around.
Why is Microsoft still all-in w/Windows RT?
NSA, short for:

Nope, not Saying Anything.
Working, no matter how many hours, does not dictate what you get paid. Your value in the marketplace does. Fact is, fast food workers aren't very valuable and are easily replaced. Hence, they get paid very little.

If you can throw touchdown passes like Brady or Rodgers, you'll get paid millions. Can't do that? Ok...then if you could perform brain surgery, you'll get paid less than top NFL QBs, but still in the millions. Can't do that? Ok...then if you could write code or perform accounting work, you'll likely get a decent 6 figure salary. Can't do that?

What can you do? Flip a burger? Seriously? There is no value in that. Bring something to the table in order to get paid well. Bring some skill, some education, some certification, some licensing. Bring something instead of whining how your lack of skills and education cause you to be poorly paid.
Do those 50% believe the system is working as intended and is not being exploited by special interests? I don't think any republican or democrat agrees with that.
If you send an unsolicited email to someone you don't know that begins with a question like "What did your path from beginner to master look like?", you're unlikely to get a response even if you had Shakespeare ghost.

The "master hackers" you are targeting probably haven't carved out time to answer all the random email they receive and their mental mail filter is probably pretty tight.

"What's was your path from beginning to master?" is a big contemplative question. Answering it properly would require someone to pause and reflect over what could be a 20-40+ year journey and then take time to distil it down into an email. That's a lot to ask of someone you don't know

Instead, get a dialogue going with a relevant two or three line email that can be answered quickly and doesn't require someone to write their memoir in response.
Best of luck! Canada is an amazing country. You will have a good quality of life and you are doing good for your family. Btw ... I love Poland as a tourist :) Toronto has a sizable polish community as far as I am aware.

Canadian companies are a bit strange when it comes to "Canadian experience". I strongly suggest taking a continuing ed course at a local university (especially if that lets you access the career center at the university).

As the other poster said, salaries are lower but livable. Recent immigrants in Toronto/Mississauga often rent parts of houses (e.g. a floor or a basement). It lets you save on rent. Some places have weird restrictions with respect to getting a drivers license. You will find out.

Canada is a wonderful country overall. Like any place, it has some issues. I wish you and your family the best of luck!
Thanks! I am not affraid of Winters, I am looking for new experiences.
Yes, CPS is essentially that and available in any modern language, or can be emuated by setcontext(2)/getcontext(2). However, it can become a mess very quickly.

Another option is monadic style, which will pass error checking along. I believe it will work well for this example, and can be implemented in Go, most likely (I don't know Go, bur it seems so).

Of course, the real problem with this code is that it is not decomposed properly. Nested error checking is the first sign of it, as somebody else already rightfully noted in the thread.
How long till x buys Medium and/or it goes out of business and decides to shut everything down, like Posterous, et al?
A TCP/IP Tutorial
So the summary is "JPEG encoder written in assembly with NEON instructions saves images faster than Apple's encoder."

That's a cool feat and is a little damning for Accelerate.framework, although the way techcrunch writes it I expected a new kind of fast cosine transform.
Zynga sues maker of Bang With Friends
"...captured using intelligence generated from..." is another of those trick phrases.

It doesn't clearly imply that without the program they wouldn't have captured those terrorists.

It doesn't clearly imply that any reduction in scope of xkeyscore would have let some of those 300 terrorists escape capture.

All it means for sure is that data from xkeyscore is part of the picture they looked at of those 300 terrorists leading up to their captures.

I wonder how many bona fide terrorists the government captured from 2001-2008.
Yes, The iOS App Store Still Makes Developers More Money
Here I thought the analogy worked well for that exact reason. They're both very complex problems. That's why both fields are still in the state that they're in.
> Would a secret court that advertised its location be more palatable to you somehow?

For me, yes, what is secret about a secret court matters.

Classified proceedings? I think there could be room for that, within reason and with some kind of oversight.

A court that makes a secret of its existence? No way. That makes oversight more difficult -- one of the few who oversees it can't make a democratic issue of how it operates.

A court that makes its rules and workings secret? Nope.

A court that makes its location secret? Not sure if that's particularly bad if everything else is on the level, but I also don't know if it's necessary, and keeping the location secret seems like a step towards forgetting it's there and what it's doing. So I'm less comfortable with that.
I think the real reason is more along the lines of what they are suggesting.

Programming means writing obscure ASCII codes.

Programmers are afraid to use any tool or language that doesn't look like source code or is easy to use. Because if you are doing that, then you aren't programming. And therefore, you're not a programmer.

If its not complex or difficult for normal people to do, then you are not really programming, and therefore not a real programmer.

All programmers are therefore afraid of tools that make programming easier, because they are afraid they will be judged by others as not being programmers.

This is the main thing holding back programming.
The USC has been available in HTML or ASCII for many years. From house.gov, gpo.gov and cornell.edu, to name a few sources.
Thank you! Unfortunately, I never studied, could it be a problem while looking for a job?
SAIC job posting for 'XKEYSCORE Systems Engineer'
I don't understand. My argument is simply that value can be destroyed, and that people can still benefit during this process even when the value being destroyed greatly dwarfs the benefit. There's nothing about that which requires the cost and benefit to go to the same place.
Thanks, that's a much better article.

> extended some of that research to create a new algorithm

> 10,000 lines of hand-tuned assembly code

> optimized out pipeline bubbles using a cycle counter tool

Color me impressed. It sounds like they really pulled out all the stops.
10 Gadgets College Students Don't Need
> Obviously there are ethical issues, but peoples' ethics are much more pliable than most of us like to believe.

The irritating thing about this is that most of us aren't taught ethics. Most people don't take philosophy courses. Most people don't take civics courses. We're expected to just figure it out through osmosis.

It's not about pliability. Most people never actually develop their own approach to ethics.
They like, read our emails, man.
Having shared a few beers with John Papandriopoulos (at an AusCTW workshop), I can vouch that he is capable of doing great things in signal processing. He's a smart guy [1].

G'day from across the ditch John and I'm glad to see things are going well! (from John D. in Sydney)

[1] http://www.rmit.edu.au/browse/Current%20students%2FAdmin%20e...
>people published because they actually had something to say

I'd much rather see news alongside ads or behind a paywall than news which was paid for by a group with "something to say."
I find the comments extremely interesting given DropBox's fate to date.
I have a campaign to get the word semicircled used in place of pivoted, but no one seems supportive.
Nvidia Shield is a game geek’s dream device (hands-on review)
Also see http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...

which discusses social anxiety, and compares cognitive behavior therapy without direct interaction over the internet, vs group cognitive behavior therapy.

That said, it's difficult to deal with confounding factors if you only see your patient during assessments. And the possibility that staring at a monitor is itself a form of phototherapy comes to mind.
"no analyst can operate freely" would contradict Snowden's assertion that he personally could target anyone
You are right on the loss: it's purposefully introduced as a quantization step after performing the DCT, and before losslessly compressing the resulting coefficients with Huffman and encoding to the final JPEG bitstream.

Despite all of that, JPEG has now become computationally tractable. I remember the days where it took tens of seconds to encode a JPEG on a commodity machine. Now, with the help of SIMD, we can encode a high quality image in msec on a mobile device.

Fortunately you can choose the quantization matrix that determines the amount of loss. Even if you were to choose a unitary matrix, no human, not even superman with his laser eyes, can "detect" the quantization noise.

For SnappyCam, I chose to invest in JPEG a little more because it's a ubiquitous standard for still image compression.... and with the right hardware and algorithms, quite tractable.

I'll consider adding a JPEG "quality setting" so you can choose the amount of loss introduced... sounds like a great idea to me.

The idea behind SnappyCam was also to code each picture independently, and not rely on motion prediction or video codecs. If you try and pull a single frame from a HD video you might be disappointed: they compress the YUV dynamic range (studio swing) and it looks washed out, even if you land on an i-frame.

Lastly, as far as I can tell, the image sensor is yielding complete scans with each frame. I'd hazard a guess to say that any motion prediction or frame deltas might actually slow the whole chain down.
Integer overflows, which require no mitigation other than getting a computer to count correctly, are extremely pernicious; they pop up even in systems that were deliberately coded defensively against them. There's an LP64 integer bug in qmail! And that's just for counting. Avoiding UAFs requires you to track and properly sequence every event in the lifecycle of an object --- and, in many C++ systems, also require you to count properly.

No, I don't think they're straightforward to avoid.

I think it seems straightforward to avoid memory lifecycle bugs because it's straightforward to avoid them under normal operating conditions. But attackers don't honor normal conditions; they deliberately force programs into states where events are happening in unexpected ordering and frequency.

I don't even know where to begin with the idea that it's acceptable to sacrifice a couple memory corruption vulnerabilities in the service of a faster browser.
Why do you dismiss Uber as being a leader in self driving cars? If anything they are in a better situation because as self driving cars get introduced, they can incrementally switch over from 100% human drivers to 100% self driving.

Since they know where people are going, they will be able to make best use of early self driving cars that have limitations. For example if the first self driving cars aren't allowed on freeways, or a restricted range, then Uber can send human drivers for journeys requiring them, and self driving for the rest. Uber will also have a lot of credit cards on file which is a significant advantage.

Perhaps there is an assumption that self driving cars will follow the existing private ownership, idle 23 hours a day model. I expect it will be the other way around where they are owned by companies who try to maximize utilisation.
The Government Lied About Being Able To Read Your Email Without A Warrant
I'm an American, and I am greatly concerned that our government has overstepped its mandate as well as abrogated the public trust by perpetrating this travesty.

I never considered Snowden to be a "traitor," I consider him to have made a great sacrifice in order to bring this situation to light, especially since the past revelations flew right under the radar, so to speak, regarding the AT&T revelations years ago.

Sure I like cat videos, and other inane content, but I also am abhorred by dragnet surveillance.

I completely understand the possible consequences of such surveillance, and am dismayed when people cite "Godwin's Law" whenever I draw parallels between the current spy atrocities and those of the Stasi.

I fully realize that our next president could have even fewer reservations than Obama about furthering this draconian system as well as ramping up the encroaching police state we see here today.

Thus I refuse to cease talking about this issue, as I want people to be aware of just how slippery this slope actually is.
Well, given that Haskell 1.0 didn't use category theoretic structures in any serious capacity and it's IO was based on lazy streams, I'd say it's already made things easier in Haskell.

How long did it take for calculus to make things easier for most people?
Billionaire investing $1.2 Billion in chip plant in Argentina
I am actively trying to watch some videos on Bitcast at the moment. I love it by the way great concept and great way of setting it all out although I am hitting a wall with a 404 when trying to view a video.

GET https://data.sublimevideo.net/js/kcvkz080-beta.js 404 (Not Found)

This makes it quite hard to watch the videos.
How come it doesn't let me downvote you?
My preferred definition of LUA is "Lua Uppercase Accident." ;-)
Sad Music Made By Sad People For Other Sad People
If one were especially paranoid, one could note that the massive increase in debt from the Iraq war makes the "starve the beast" approach to government [1] much more plausible.

I don't think the US far right is quite that farsighted or quite that cynical. However, I've historically been too optimistic about the American power elite, so I wouldn't take my word for it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
This was the first video in the AngularJS bundle FYI.
Oh, come on. There's such an obvious difference of situations here it's not even worth going into.
Where did you get that idea of consensus? A lot of languages do not even have a return statement, neither does lambda calculus. Furthermore, CS community has long abandoned statement based languages in favor of expressions and relations which do not feature "return" for onvious reasons in forms other than equalent to jump.
Follow the Money: Why the European Funding Ecosystem Needs to Mature
You shouldn't be ashamed. "This is not Reddit" is a BS thing people who have no sense of humor say on here.
The Grind
Maybe they're just yelling the name of the language.
People don't like early returns because sometimes they return before some basic cleanup / must have function component is run. Normally added by someone unfamiliar with the function accidentally. Go's defer statement makes this much less of an issue, you bind your work piece with your defer piece so that early returns are fine.
Raspberry Pi’s Eben Upton: Open Source Lessons from Wayland
Hey, thanks!

The Australian Communications Theory Workshop was such a long time ago--what great memories. :-)

What are you up to these days?
Are data scientists whom are in demand today dealing with neural networks and machine learning, or are a large majority still working with large sets of data and running correlation analyses/regressions? Your response above seems to indicate that it's not overly complicated.
I like to imagine an IQ pyramid, with money generally flowing upwards. Although in reality it is probably a combination of IQ and bastard-ness.

Anyway, this is how I think of the poker economy.
Or you could just use individual frames and bundle adjustment.... even via free online software like 123D Catch. ;) http://www.123dapp.com/catch
Sheisse. Thanks.
Yeah. As much as a flaming atheist as I am, I regret that people aren't spending as much time getting an ethical education as they once did.

I suspect that one could teach an excellent non-religious Sunday School class by only asking difficult questions. The only people who scare me more than people who have never thought much about ethics are the ones who think they know The Answer.
That's precisely why I qualified it with "doesn't directly affect me".
He was found guilty on every charge except aiding the enemy. Why do you think he was acquitted?