skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's pretty impressive how Greenwald, Snowden et al are organizing the staggering/trickling. They're not just releasing any old info at periodic intervals. They seem to be anticipating the responses NSA/USG will give to particular leaks (e.g. analysts can't run searches, there are checks and balances) and choosing next leaks based on how they can prove those NSA/USG statements wrong.

It's like the Socratic method for public/government relations.

The goal seems not just to be exposing the magnitide of this surveillance system, but also the government's systemic disregard for public mandate in the USA right now.
I think the main thing I'm objecting to is the possibility of multiple paths through the function. Doing it this way there's only one possible flow: a series of calls that pass blocks to validation objects (that then may or may not execute them).

Compare how smalltalk didn't have a conditional control flow statement. Rather, the boolean type has a polymorphic method that takes a block and then executes it or not.

The other nice thing about this approach is it makes the language simpler and more regular because it's implemented using standard language constructs rather than a special statement. E.g. you can write a "gather" function that takes a collection of monads and returns a monad of the collection, and this is generic in the monad (so the same function works to turn a List of Futures into a Future of a List, a List of Validations into a Validation of a List, etc.)
Makes sense, reddit is just another aggregation site. It's not too often it generates original HN worthy material.
Poul-Henning Kamp: """With expenditures of this scale, there are a whole host of things one could buy to weaken encryption. I would contact providers of popular cloud and "whatever-as-service" providers and make them an offer they couldn't refuse: on all HTTPS connections out of the country, the symmetric key cannot be random; it must come from a dictionary of 100 million random-looking keys that I provide. The key from the other side? Slip that in there somewhere, and I can find it (encrypted in a Set-Cookie header?)."""

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2508864
I can't count on a site like this being around in six months or six years to get my time capsule. Some things are still best done in analog.
VideoCore IV Programmers Manual (Raspberry Pi)
that's the joke - http://i.imgur.com/3Gpey.jpg lol
> What does it take to get American's outraged about something?

sex
>If you're ever in a room and everyone is checking Facebook on their cellphone

I don't know how many times i've seen people just constantly checking FB, twitter, etc in social situations instead of you know, actually socializing-_-
Kamcord (YC S12) - Fundraising [video]
Well well, a couple of people are starting to wake up. I was nearly despairing that the impact of what Snowden was saying would be lost in the snowstorm the government was trying to create to obscure his message by attacking the man.

It seems the message is getting through, and that is a great thing.
Business does whatever it can get away with. The workers qualify for all kinds of government benefits because they don't make enough to live on. McDonald's Profits $8.5 Billion per year. Should taxpayers but subsidizing McDonald's?
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/07/30/fast-food-w...
Thanks Jayro, five people have expressed interest in the few minutes this post has been up, so fingers crossed!
> weed out the bozos swiftly without tying up the whole team.

I bet there's a trick to that. You should sell an ebook.
The only person to be tried at this court was Citizen K.
Teach music to 3rd grade students once a week...I love music but never wanted to do it professionally. It's super rewarding when a few of the kids pick up an instrument and actually learn to play over the course of the school year.
Could be worse. Where I'm located in the Philippines a local making typical pay would have to spend an entire day of wages just to afford a 1/4 pounder w/ cheese meal (approx $3.75.) I don't know how much McD's employees make here, but I'm assuming they make minimum wage (approx $6 / day) which is actually a very good job here. Many local businesses in my area use loopholes to get around the minimum wage laws.Though minimum wage varies by job classification. The minimum wage for domestic helpers for example is something like $2.50 per day.

Edit: Just to clarify, these prices are for the McD's in my city in the Philippines. So, imagine that your local McD's is a luxury meal which costs the equivalent of one day of pay.
I am graduating phd bioinformatician, most likely going to transition into industry. It's very easy to be caught up with the self importance of academia because you are essentially in a bubble. It's great to be passionate about science, but I really dislike religifying academia. It's almost expected of aspiring academics to live like monks and just to be okay with shitty pay and long hours. That's bullshit and academics take it while constantly assuring themselves that "it's important and they love it". I am sorry that I am coming off as extremely cynical, but I really don't think propagating the idea that pursuing pure science is somehow more virtuous than other professions helps with the situation.

And in my opinion, as inexperienced as it might be compared to more established scientists, computational biologists are ready for biology, but biologists are not ready for computational biology.
George Zimmerman
Music search engine app feedback please
simplify searching for a song or album.
Scenario 1: You find a boy who is lost and take him to the police station. The family gives you $500 in reward.

Scenario 2: You find twin boys who are lost and take them to the police station. The family gives you $500 in reward.

Would the fact that you get the same reward regardless of the number of people lead you to act differently in the future? So if next week you found lost twins again, would you let them stay lost or try to sell them on the black market because you know you'll only get $500 when you think it should be $1000?

Or is doing the right thing its own reward regardless of whatever amount you get in recognition for acting honorably?
I still love using multiple monitors (I currently dedicate an entire 27" monitor to a single full-screen terminal with tmux as the "window manager"), but it is really nice having the know-how to do the full development cycle from a terminal. I used to be afraid of command-line stuff and I think it really held me back in some ways. Because I used the terminal only when forced to I never could remember how to actually use it beyond the most trivial stuff, which just made it more frustrating when I had to. And I never could find a true tiling window manager on OS X that I liked; tmux works great for that out of the box. I still want to experiment with an xmonad-based workflow on Linux, but I haven't really had a reason to yet.

My job forced me to get over that, and though I can still appreciate a good GUI-based editor I don't feel any need to switch to one anymore.
If you had most of these things I think you would have a good shot at a compbio position:

- statistics, probability, and especially probabilistic inference

- nix/gnutools

- multiple scripting languages (Ruby, Python, Perl, BASH)

- at least one data-oriented language (R, Octave)

- understanding of molecular biology (read Molecular Biology of the Cell)

- applying machine learning tools to new problems

- understanding the major high throughput biological technologies and the kinds of data they produce, along with the current tools used for processing the data

You could pick up all of that in a year of intense self-study, and less assuming you already have some of those skills.
The obsessive discussion about phone records is such an obvious straw man. Phone records are just the tip of the iceberg. It's all the other communications surveillance that we should be talking about. They'd be happy to give up phone record dragnets because they know that's not a useful repository of information anyway.
Take away their Twinkies
I would like for the "Edit" button to work.
That's Orin Kerr's take on what happened, but Kerr is not Swartz's lawyer, who, once again, disclosed what the actual threatened sentence was for Swartz.

And, no matter what DoJ's press releases say, facts are facts; sentences are not as a general rule computed by adding up all the possible maximum sentences of every charge.
1 thing I appreciate about memcached is that it is always fast. Redis has a wider variety of features and capabilities, which can come back to bite you if/when the whole app is slow due to some poorly thought out Redis query -- especially likely if you're using Redis to do multiple things, such as (1) store temp cache data and also (2) store user account data.
In the context of a browser, I doubt that the standard 20-50% difference applies. That difference is what you see when measuring JVM code against optimized C++. In the browser world, that kind of pure speed doesn't happen because achieving security means layering all of the bounds checking and such back into the code, erasing one of the major reasons why the JVM code is slower.

In C/C++ you have the option of not performing those kinds of checks to get speed. In a secure browser, you don't want to take that risk unless it's absolutely necessary.
What does it take to get Americans outraged about something?

Suggest that professional game players should take sensible safety precautions.
I believe we have an open and shut case of the No True Programmer fallacy.
>It's much easier to express yourself using language than by drawing.

I've done a lot of programming at the white board and it involved a lot of drawing. And I suck at drawing. But I was able to get my ideas across to others.

This might also be of interest: http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/communication.htm.

You might also want to consider that people learn and communicate best in different ways:

* Visual Learning - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_learning
* Auditory Learning - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_learning
* Kinesthetic Learning - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinesthetic_learning

and others.
It is my professional dream goal to submit to SIGBOVIK
This works a lot better than the included "Vintage" mode.

I've spent the majority of the past 15 years in vi(m), and have recently switched to Sublime for working on projects with many, many files, plus mouse support.
No need to point to projects that are based on tutorials. Lots of githubs are nothing more than that at this point.

If you're going to go the coding route, put up a working page, publish a blog entry about it, publish a working app, etc.

The key is to show effort (I spent time on this) and relevancy (I'm solving a problem that you might care about).
I think most people assumed the government was always doing this , and just accept it will continue to do this. To most people its not that far from the police being able to get access to similar records. The whole secret court aspect flies over the heads of the masses
They offered $500 as a nice and thankful gesture. If you wanted money, take it and don't cry about not getting more. You're not entitled to more money nor do you deserve more.
This is all I got.

1) Write often.

2) If something sucks, make it shorter.

3) If it still sucks, make it more specific.
> shitty pay

I can see this complaint in humanities academia, but pay in the sciences past the PhD student level is pretty reasonable. You could probably make more elsewhere, but it's not like you're scraping by on ramen noodles as a bioinformatics professor or anything. Postdocs typically make $50-60k, and professors start at something like $90k at the minimum, easily up to $120k, $150k, or more after tenure, especially if you're in a hot area like bioinformatics, have made a name for yourself, and can get a position at a top-30ish place. Unlike in tech, those salaries often come in places with a lower cost of living than SF, too (at least if you want them to). Six figures goes pretty far in Atlanta, Austin, Urbana-Champaign, Ames, or Raleigh, for example.

You could beat that in industry, but either way you're making solidly in the top 10% of U.S. salaries. And if you really need more money, most universities will let you do 20% consulting time, or do a spinoff startup. There are admittedly other reasons not to go into science academia (the list is pretty long, actually), but fear that you'll have to take a vow of poverty doesn't seem like a strong one.
A nice example of the problem with natural language is Treason Act 1351[1] (this is still current law in the UK!), written in Anglo-Norman. This is problematic, as our understanding of the language is incomplete. Notably, in this case, there is no agreed upon meaning of "pvablement" — it means either "provably" or "probably": a rather major difference come a court of law!

[1]: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Edw3Stat5/25/2
Apologies if its bad form to post a reference to my own github.

The VPU documentation is now at stage where enough instructions are described to do useful work.

I am about to begin writing up a set of tutorials for beginners who want to leverage the VPU.

We are looking to push forward with a robust port of GNU Binutils for VideoCore IV, and seeking contributors.

Similarly we are looking for contributors to help with ports of GCC and LLVM.

Some Background: The SoC in the Raspberry Pi has 3 processors / instruction sets - (1) An ARM v6 @700MHz for userland, (2) a VideoCore IV VPU @250MHz with dual core, dual issue and 16-way SIMD integer vector processor for running the blob, codecs, 2d acceleration etc, and (3) a 24 GFLOPS shader processor (QPUs) for OpenGL ES and OpenVG.

Understanding the QPUs is also under way at https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv-qpu. Currently we are able to intercept and disassemble the QPU fragments generated when compiling OpenGL ES shaders. I have also begun injecting my own fragments, and am looking forward to creating a signal processing API or mini OpenCL type library to exploit the 24 GFLOPS.
The Scala driver has some ORM features and I've been throwing around the idea of creating a java only version of the driver.. I guess you could use it now but would run into some of Scala odd method naming when trying to access from from java.
Ah, I didn't know the freelance thread could also be used for seeking job positions.

I think it would be better if it were separated into two different threads, freelancers that are needed/freelancers that are looking for work, and those that are seeking full-time/part-time/internship employment positions. Perhaps my wording didn't properly convey that.
Under the current administration, I'm hoping we even get any sort of meaningful response to the pardon petition (https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pardon-edward-snow...).

I'm holding out a tiny glimmer of hope that Obama comes to his senses enough to pardon for the domestic pieces. It doesn't seem likely, but doesn't seem to directly contradict what he's said, and maybe Obama can pre-emptively compromise with me for once...
Give me a break. Black Hat was started as an excuse to get companies to pay for their infosec teams to attend Defcon. I was at Defcon in the '90s, and spoke at the second-ever Black Hat; my partner Jeremy spoke at the first.
That is an awesome rant.

People don't know what they don't know. And making things look easy seduces them into thinking that "looking easy" is the same as "is easy." Jon Livesey, an engineer at Sun and later SGI used to quip, "It is easy to say, like 'largest integer' is easy to say, but actually pointing out what that is, now that is a different story entirely."

Engineers recognize when a detail is missing and ask about it. Annoying as hell to people who "just want it done" but essential to the task at hand.
I think those all come with fans, they have two PCIe connectors, but they are the fragile edge connector style, so those two things rule them out for a lot of embedded applications.
go read about jekyll you are on internet
That should also be true of nginx, but it's pretty well represented now.
A nipple slip.
When I read the title, I thought this article was going to attempt to glean the webserver type/versions of all the servers in the hacker news Web cluster (if there is one).. That would be kind of interesting actually.. If not to only see if they keep them all at the same version/OS/updated etc. you could do this same thing on any one big site over time and the results could be interesting.
What is astonishing by that? They can easily be splicing fiber cables taking a copy of most Internet traffic and recording either the actual call or just the from/to/length info and his answer is totally correct. It is actually a really terrible question.
And these days you can go ahead and create quite a few short-lived objects without worrying about it, as long as they're elided by escape analysis.

With judicious use of off-heap memory for regular structures it's simple to erase much of the crap in the heap, and reduce already-tiny GC times even further.

Never dropping a frame is another goal entirely, though, and for that I still believe you need a separated rendering/animation mechanism.
I have a webapp that suffers from the chicken and the egg problem, people may not know they need it until they discover what it does. I know it's a bit off topic, but I would like to know if anyone 'would pay for that' ... the webapp is http://www.organizemysearch.com
Speak for yourself. Stallman is a massively influential thinker that has indisputably changed the world positively. A lot of the world has reshaped itself to attempt to resemble Stallman's dreams. His contribution was to have the dreams and to share them in material ways, and he didn't even owe us that.

You're in the bizarre position of criticizing him for being right. You're expecting Stallman to figure out a way to market to you, rather than expecting yourself to figure out how to evaluate arguments and evidence rationally. Think about that for a minute, and then explain to me why that wouldn't make more sense.
Often advanced degrees at universities are much more expensive (http://datascience.berkeley.edu/admissions/tuition-and-finan...) than an intensive program such as Zipfian and take much longer. I hope that private education institutions (such as GA, Hackbright, Dev Bootcamp, etc.) can coexist happily with traditional universities, as they each fill a different niche. Universities are in the business of training researchers and professors (and do a great job at that) while alternative educational companies aim to produce industry practitioners (similar to trade schools).

I highly recommend internships and they are wonderful if you can get one. Unfortunately not everyone can be so lucky, either due to lack of experience/technical abilities or an advanced degree (not everyone goes to college). I believe these alternative educational routes are democratizing such industries and many of them offer scholarships and tuition assistance programs.
It would make a lot more sense to just sell the vulnerability to blackhats than to spend time and effort (and expose yourself to more legal liability) by trying to take advantage of it yourself.
The US legal system is case law. of course, that makes interpretation even more non-deterministic, as you depend on your $10,000/hr legal team to dig up favorable ruleings
I suspect this is the answer.
>Consider if we were having this conversation in person, there'd be more "real social interaction", and I'd be forced to note you as an individual, probably recognize if I met you again, and you'd be more to me than an 11 character username that doesn't consider HN and Reddit social networks, for better or worse.

Let's keep things in perspective here. If it weren't for HN, you and the parent probably would have never met.

I don't see how you can degrade a connection that otherwise wouldn't exist.
Configuration manager for golang
IANAL but I don't think it's possible to parse laws with that degree of certainty, or to determine an upper bound for "all possible interpretations," as different people can disagree as to what the "spirit" of a law is, or should be, or could be for the forseeable future.

The US Constitution is pretty straightforward, and people are still waging petty wars over individual words to wrest their idea of "intent" from the Founding Fathers. You're suggesting a formal procedure for legislation which might have some merit, but I don't think it would remove politics or human bias from the process.
NSA Response to XKEYSCORE allegations
If I used a LinkedList in my code instead of an Array will it speed things up?

It depends...
> It's so weird to me how in some areas of the law (criminal law, for instance) the "gray area" is embraced and fully considered, where in other areas (IP/business law) decisions seem to be so black-and-white.

Ah, this is mostly the tension between "balancing tests" and "bright-line rules" in jurisprudence. I worked in criminal law for a while, and it's basically statutory, which means mostly bright line rules for prosecution. Sentencing involves more balancing tests, that's probably what you're thinking about. Though there are even some mandatory minimums that are bright lines.

One of the balancing tests you hear about the most is actually in IP law, the fair use standard. (People sometimes casually talk about fair use as if it's a list of four bright line criteria, but that's not really correct.)

Bright line rules are handy in that they add clarity for everyone following the law. Businesses that want to establish processes in explicit compliance tend to prefer bright lines, for example. Balancing tests are important when you're safeguarding the rights of the people against the state, or when individual cases will have unique mitigating circumstances that are too numerous to foresee or account for in a hard and fast rule. Balancing tests help add lenience, or help customize the law to particular situations. That's why you might see more balancing tests in sentencing, or in constitutional issues.

UPDATE: Statutes also tend to be more bright-line, while traditionally, judges made common law with more balancing tests. The US (thanks to the UK) is considered a common law jurisdiction, since we have some judge made law, while most European courts are said to rely on civil code. This is oversimplistic though, because these days European judges are more willing to look at precedents and adopt customs based on prior cases, and many US jurisdictions have implemented "uniform codes" which attempt to codify many areas of the law formerly left to judges. Everyone's a bit of a blend now, just with more of a common law or civil law flavor. (Pending correction from any European Advocates out there, of course.) Moreover, some judges develop bright lines, and some statutes call for fairness tests, so it's all blurred now.
Silicon Valley And Adult Toys
Examining Silicon Valley's approach to adult toys
I think the point octo_t is trying to make is that you don't really find blog posts on porn sites that exclaim how awesome their stack is or postmortems on their latest attacks. They just take care of business instead of taking part in the common masturbatory technical blog post (pun intended).
Also: What does everybody expect from "the debate"?

Is there a way we can get out of this mess? I currently don't see any, besides the one with massive loss.

Please, anybody, correct me.
Suffering the unbearable burden of a single exit point just so your refactoring tool has an easier time breaking up the code isn't a trade worth making, especially when it's the single exit point that's probably making it too long to begin with.
The deadline's approaching. My money is on "We are unable to comment on an ongoing investigation."
Note: I'm a foreigner.. :t