skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Until the Snowden episode, sending agents to track down leads that were statistically worthless was worse than just a waste of resources, because the problem US they're actually trying to solve is "how do we monitor suspects whilst managing not to give away how much we know to journo-bloggers so passionate about their right to freedom of speech they might publicly question why the government is scrutinizing their search terms".[1]

The intersection of "pressure cooker", "backpack" and visits to overseas countries not known for sponsoring low-level terrorism is perhaps not the most obvious criterion for identifying terrorists, so presumably they'd also have to flag most of the ~12,000 people who searched for "bomb-making" last month, for example, and perhaps some more innocuous ones like independent searches for "martyr" and "white house" or "chechnya" and "aeroplane". That's a lot of resource.

Now even if they're pretty selective about who they actually pay a visit to, they're going to return a lot of false positives. No big deal, except that pre-Snowden the programme is supposed to be a secret and even within the subset of people flagging the "possible terrorist" alert they're going to investigate far more journalists (common occupation) than terrorists (rare occupation). Which is a bit of a problem if their modus operandi is instructing police to knock on people's doors and ask them whether they were searching for X on the internet. Was this really PRISM's raison d'etre?

The alternate hypothesis involves a freelance writer famous solely for her number of Twitter followers embellishing her police enquiry story with some very topical themes.

[1]If I worked in intelligence I'd solve that problem by not telling local cops what potential suspects had been doing on the internet...
The just launched Google's Chromecast might change the situation. It seems to have the power to make non-smart TVs smart and the smart ones even more smarter.
This answer adds value to the discussion.

It's been said much of American culture arises from the self selection of those choosing to leave home and come here over the last few hundred years.

Similarly, the choice of geography and company of employment by developers tells you a lot. If you can't choose the individuals, choose the organization all the more carefully as its employees will have made a choice too.
I don't disagree with them. I'm just stating my opinion that making something "beautiful" by using a pre-made theme with a couple of color variations is anything but.
Chef: Cooking up great cloud servers
Pay Attention To Blog Headlines: Make A First Impression With Your Blog
In some ways, that's just additional motivation for his ultimate decision, and doesn't really make it less sad.
Someone posted this below which I find hilarious.

"Section Chief: You dispatched field agents without understanding the base rate theorem!? You're a loose cannon, McGillicutty...

McGillicutty: ...I get results!

Section Chief: Mathematically, you shouldn't. Ergo, you don't."
Walk Me Up Alarm Clock only stops when the user walks
An alarm app that only gets dismissed when the user walks!
Glad someone still knows about those things, and they are indeed useful. My parents have a few of these in their house, although there's are bigger and made for desktops. The OP's is basically a paper version of what my parents had for years.
New Moto X from Motorola
From FBI's website: "The New York Joint Terrorism Task Force brings together representatives of 49 local, state, and federal agencies to run down any and all terrorism leads, develop and investigate cases, provide support for special events, and proactively identify threats that may impact the area and the nation. We also have satellite Joint Terrorism Task Forces working out of Long Island, Westchester County, and Orange County." Source: http://www.fbi.gov/newyork/about-us/our-partnerships/partner...

It makes full sense that the FBI would get a report and share with local law enforcement (members of JTTF) to follow up. I'm still very skeptical that this all originated with google searches, but the story of "JTTF agents" checks out.
http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/contacts/index.shtml

Maybe the "Public and Media Affairs" department is the most appropriate for some honest self-snitching: nsapao@nsa.gov
supporting processor is one thing and supporting OS is another.

PyPy runs fine for example on x86_64, but does not support windows 64 natively (although windows 32bit version works fine on windows 64).

There was some work done to run it on Android, however it did not get very far and I'm not sure what's the status. For iOS there are quite a few problems, most notably iOS does not allow JITs (other than apple's own) to run on this platform - which means PyPy is mostly useless.
This is the Moto X. Can it save Motorola?
This problem isn't about funny employee names. It's about thick, untransparent software stacks that make simple problems difficult.

SOAP is maybe the most popular example and this is really why it's lost popularity against REST. However, similar "It works with values W, X, Y, but not Z" situations are found in any stack or standard that has too much magic going on. Rails certainly comes to mind.

This is the biggest argument in favour of using many small, isolated components rather than one big all-encompasing framework, in my opinion. If every piece of third party functionality you import into your project can be easily understood, problems like these shrink in size, because there's a limit to how deep the magic can go.

I'm very fond of the Node.js ecosystem for particularly this aspect (even though I dislike the language). There's a big bucketload of tiny components there, rather than 90% of the community relying on a single humongous framework, like is common for e.g. Ruby or C#.
Not sure about the financial side, the US government has a massive amount of resources to work with. The cost of employing 500 agents would be a fraction of the cost of say, a single military helicopter.
While I see where you're going with this, let's take a moment to remember that the Joint Terrorism Task Force is made up of individual law enforcement officers, not agencies. That is to say that not all members of the Whatever County Sheriff's Department are inherently part of the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

So it's certainly possible that three black SUVs worth of the local sheriff's deputies, all of whom were members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, showed up to question her about her internet searching.

Or this fiction writer is not portraying an accurate version of the events.
I use vim. When indenting with tabs, I can use "x" (delete one character) to remove a level of indentation. When indenting with spaces, I can't. The dedent command is more verbose than just hitting "x". If I forget when working in a file with spaces, then I have a three space indent. That off-by-one-character is harder to see and correct than a giant missing tab.

Why have one of the most common semantic units in source code (indentation) represented by four characters when there is an otherwise unused character that has already great editor support. Tabs work well in every editor I've used (except notepad.exe, which can't change their display width). Spaces only work well in smart editors.
Google fund things for all sorts of reasons. Other people having gcc is not a business risk, and improving security by maintaining a stable gcc might be worthwhile.
For the record, I always assert my rights, and I've seen both results. Since I was never breaking the law, it's always worked out in my favor.

I'm certainly not suggesting that people don't avail themselves of their legal rights, quite the opposite. I'm just pointing out that there can be potential consequences for which one should be prepared.

But I can tell you a significant amount of police officers will become very aggressive, and I've been threatened with arrest on numerous occasions.

Having the luxury of knowing several great attorneys personally and professionally is all that kept me from spending a night in a jail cell once when I refused a street search of my person.

Those YouTube videos exist because they show extraordinary events, not common ones. Ask anyone in Northeast DC how it went last time they tried to assert their rights.

>It is possible to get (and fight) and charge like Obstruction of Legal Process

I can also say that once charged, it's a lengthy, difficult, and expensive process to prove your innocence, even when it's blatantly obvious. The prosecutor wants a win on his record for his statistics, and will hold charges over your head or threaten to add additional charges to attempt to force a plea bargain. I've seen it happen all the time.

>I would not joke about having a kilo of heroin in your trunk as that gives probable cause for the search.

That would be the point. If enough law-abiding citizens force the police to conduct pointless searches, we could tie up resources. It's not a fully formed suggestion, just a blue-sky brainstorming idea of sit-in type legal activities to protest unreasonable search and seizure.
I just posted this on G+:

A Long Island woman named Michele Catalano posts photos of M-66 explosives (that look to me like extra-large firecrackers) publicly on Facebook. A few weeks later the local cops show up and ask her husband if they have any bomb-making equipment. Instead of drawing the most likely conclusion, she instead blames this on local Long Island cops MONITORING HER GOOGLE SEARCHES:
https://plus.google.com/112961607570158342254/posts/FWAVRVaN...
Exactly. How it is labeled isn't the important bit here. The fact that they showed up AT ALL based on what appears to be a confluence of Internet searches is what is concerning.
Eeehh, I didn't know what quinoa was either. Turns out I've eaten it on occasion, I just had no idea it was called that.

It's not exactly cheeseburgers.
No, as optimisations change both the AST and the generated code...
They don't. See:
https://plus.google.com/112961607570158342254/posts/FWAVRVaN...
http://names.whitepages.com/last/Null
The OP's problem is with the support for the exotic targets and the more recent additions to the C standard (C99, soon C11). CompCert targets only x86 and PowerPC, and does not support all the features of C99, not to mention the GCC extensions that everyone has come to rely on. In fact, in terms of these criteria it is uniformly worse than GCC 2.7.2.1 (although it is better at having verified, bug-free semantics).
SEEKING WORK - the Netherlands / remote

Do you need to make large amounts of data accessible and useful or are you looking for someone to help with defining and building your web application? Let's talk!

My expertise is in back-end systems for building automation (integrated building management systems, visualization and analysis of sensor data in large commercial buildings, data-driven energy efficiency).

Tools of the trade: Python (Django, Flask), SQL, JavaScript (AngularJS, Knockout).

tiberiu@tiberiuana.com
Deface (Rails) customizes views without editing the template
Of course—and it wouldn't make sense to expect the law of the United States to apply to foreign citizens.

Here's where I'm getting confused: if the laws of a country do not apply to someone who is not a citizen of that country, why do the laws of the United States let the US spy on non-Americans? (Or any other country, for that matter)
I'll still turn a profit; I'll just charge the actual customer what I was charged, plus a profit, plus some extra to cover slots I don't sell (or, alternatively, I'll just come in to those slots myself to pick up the refund).
Your landing page is not good enough. What does the map have to do with anything? What about opendoorio implies medical scanning? I probably wouldn't go get medical imaging from a company called opendoorio. Maybe Open Door Imaging. I also think you should list the type of scans you can help with (this helps with SEO and also give customers an idea what you're talking about) My first question was do you mean xrays or MRIs? If you actually have some customers that were quoted $X price and you got it to them for less than $X price use that as a case study (*results not typical). Have you looked into adwords?

What you're doing is actually fairly common (http://www.shoemoney.com/2008/11/04/making-money-with-local-...)
Go look up Harrisburg and how their trash->energy plant as worked out.
No, but with the help of everyone here we might at least get a statistical correlation going.
I'm curious if this page was even supposed to go live. There are _2_ references to 16 MB / 32 MB and also a "That's what she said" blurb.

Ouch.
Capturing unencrypted HTTPS requests and responses (as seen on BlackHat Arsenal)
An Internet Petition and an Overzealous Prosecutor May Have Doomed Aaron Swartz
> Apple is always bringing a bad UX to other people.

"And when you thought you were safe, iOS7 came."
Runscope Acquires RequestBin
Clicked both and compared the search results, they are the same except that there is a advertisement for backpacks from amazon at the top of the https version. ( I am outside of the US, so probably rather UAVs than goons... )
Thank you. I don't remember the last time I laughed this hard. I particularly enjoyed your seminal work on the Kurse of Dimensionality, "stemming from a desire to have access to certain subspaces of (R-Q)^\infty without appearing on reality TV."
Storage 16 GB standard, 32 GB version available online. 2 years 50GB storage free on Google Drive

Wait, so you get more free cloud storage than what the phone actually supports? Interesting.
Moto X 'always listening' phone launched by Google's Motorola
kee-noah
or better yet, make shortened versions of those URLs with bit.ly and post them on twitter with enticing body text.
w8... does adwords allow you to include JS into ads? If no, how he get his js into ads?
In the third world, the poor comb through garbage dumps seeking anything that might have value.

Obviously, I'd like to see that end. There are many more productive things humans can do that are far less of a risk to their health.

But imagine robots that are able to do it, either at the source or before the garbage is burned or buried or shipped off elsewhere.

A lot of work still remains before that happens, but one day robots will be carefully examining each item discarded and sending it to the most appropriate place.
Cupertino, CA - 1+ year contract (possibility of internal conversion)

Two open contract positions with Apple Inc. Work on an exciting team with some cutting-edge tech. Here's our current tech stack.

* LAMP (w/ PHP 5.4)

* Symfony 2

* Redis

* Ember.js

* Node.js

* Vagrant, Puppet

* statsd, Graphite, etc.

Applicants for this position should feel ready to deliver on all of these fronts. You're a strong, modern PHP engineer with a focus on delivering solid, unit-tested code. You're comfortable with working in Symfony 2, excited by Ember, and have a history of delivering great code.

Candidates with active Github profiles and open source contributions will be given strong preference. (Please include a link to your profile.)

To apply, send an email to jnettles at apple dot com with your resumé and any pertinent information.

Sorry, but we cannot sponsor H1B candidates for these positions.
There are still ad networks that allow advertisers submit Javascript? Or html for that matter? Good time to be a blackhat I guess.
The Inside Story of Moto X: The Phone That Reveals Why GOOG Bought MOTO
There's nothing wrong with the skills (you'll find similarly skilled people locally), but the communication and the pride in the work sucks from experience. This is true regardless of the remote culture: it's universal with outsourcing.
http://www.redbullstratos.com

Old news, I know. :P
The C syntax really makes this simple feature look terribly complicated.

It's a while since I watched them, but in the SICP video lectures, as I recall, the notion of storing functions in variables - as introduced in, like, lecture 1 or 2 - took about 0.1% of the time - if indeed that. And that's because while the principles are actually more complicated than the C example (due to the lexically-scoped variable capture), the syntax is simplicity itself.

Consider the issue of making a variable, which goes something like this:

(let ((x 1))
(set! x (1+ x)))

You have your "let", then the list of names and values, and then the stuff that makes use of them.

Now consider the issue of making a function:

(let ((x (lambda ()
(message "stuff"))))
(x))

(Well... maybe they called it define. I don't remember.)

The parallels are obvious, and indeed I suppose they deliberately chose this notation to emphasise the similarity between one type of value (e.g., an int) and any other (e.g., a closure). And so once you've got the hang of making a function that takes one type of value (e.g., an int), it's a small step from there to making a function that takes another type of value (e.g., a closure).

This is a dig at C and its ilk rather than the article. It's ridiculous that such a fundamental, basic primitive is given such a baroque syntax. But then C strikes me as designed for people who already know how to program so maybe the assumption is that most users will already know what function pointers are when they come to it, probably from being familiar with indirect jumps in assembly language.

This post is apropos of very little, I guess. I was just moved to comment after seeing six pages of stuff that still never got to the meat of the matter. So I suppose I should finish it like this: "</rant>"
What about the underwear bomber?

Why are we allowed to search for underwear without federal scrutiny, and why are we still allowed to wear underwear on planes?

Is there a line somewhere?
IIRC, police don't have a direct line to that sort of information. They have to submit requests to the cell carriers, which are rate-limited and capped such that the police have to be very discerning about which cases they would like to use the resource for.
Seems to me a member of a terrorism "task force" wouldn't need to ask whether a rice cooker can be used to make a bomb.

Note, I'm not questioning whether these men were members of such a task force. I'm questioning whether they're capable of asking non-stupid questions.
Last I checked, no one is "forced" to do anything. They are free to let the trash pile up in their homes, so long as they keep it from impacting their neighbors. Instead, the service of trash disposal is being offered with restrictions.
Ask HN: Shouldn't a recent CS grad know how to throw an exception?
I'm looking to hire CS grads for an entry-level Java developer position. The general hiring process is this:

1. Apply (or get referred by a recruiter) with resume

2. Provide one- or two-sentence answers to some simple prescreen questions

3. Do a phone interview with member of dev team

4. Visit office for a face-to-face interview, and complete a code exercise while in office

5. Receive offer of employment

Now what has happened several times is that a candidate will do well enough on #1 and #2, talk a good game on #3, come in for #4 and totally bomb because they don't know how to throw a freakin' exception!

I am completely dumb-founded by this. How do you get through a complete CS program in college and expect me to hire you as a professional Java developer without knowing one of the basic principles of the language?

Are my expectations really that unreasonable, or do CS programs in general neglect exception handling when teaching OO?
It's certainly a better option than putting it into a landfill, where the organic portion will turn into energy anyway, and the non-organic portion will do nothing but potentially pollute the groundwater.
Because a country is sovereign. It can do whatever it wants unless it steps on the toes of another sovereign actor at which point a diplomatic incident ensues. But by default a state is the highest human authority so it doesn't need permission to do anything.
Is Amazon really a low-margin cloud provider? Startup competitor calls BS on AWS
Oddly, (or not?) the images were blocked by AdBlock, leaving me really confused.

-----

Very similar specs to my current

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_Nexus

minor improvements in battery, and camera
I'm not sure how the fact these guys were not FBI but local police makes anything better. Are the guns local police has less lethal? Is local police search somehow less invasive than same FBI search? Does the same questioning by local police sounds better than by FBI?
Hm. I am disappointed Google refers to those helium balloons as "space ships". They're atmospheric balloons, not space ships, and there's a really big difference. Okay, I'll calm down.

Back on topic, I'm still looking for the specs...
Every Intro to CS class could take a week out of their syllabus as suddenly the assignment "create a calendar application that takes input as dd/mm/yyyy and prints the day of the week" disappears from textbook.

Although it would be quickly replaced with "create a calendar app to translate between Gregorian and Modern calendars."
'Robots' do sort garbage, but it doesn't work as well as humans, and it's probably suited only to certain types of garbage.
NYC. Problem solved.

0. NYC, like many big cities, creates a ton of trash (excluding writers and actors).

1. I didn't see anything about CO2/CO/COx emissions. Landfills are semi-sequestration. Burning is definitely not sequestration. It doesn't seem scalable. See also: http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_green_why_we_should_build_wooden_skyscrapers.html
Photons Last At Least One Quintillion Years
You should've ran that vodka through a Brita or DIY filter

http://gizmodo.com/5901746/vodka-alchemy-how-to-change-cheap...
I'll see you in 10 years when they get around to answering that FOIA...
So you're saying that a woman posted photos of firecrackers on Facebook on July 4th, and this may have contributed to a visit by the police? And this is supposed to be BETTER?

I agree that we need more information before jumping to conclusions, but the additional context you're providing doesn't give me much comfort.
Bla bla correlation and causation. I did not infere that ALL users whom exhibited the same online behavior got the same search. Other factors led the cops to the premises. To me the point was, yes they are looking at your search history. But as other users have pointed out, her husband could have been included in a 3-degrees of separation blanket warrant.
If true, this story is appalling. In order to do this, the Feds would have to have "fire hose" access to Google queries or have access to their servers to be able mine the search data of everyone, including US persons. Since a regular federal judge couldn't issue a search warrant for such sweeping surveillance on US citizens, it would mean that Google is voluntarily giving up all of its search data to government agencies. That would be a striking and disturbing revelation, given their adamant PRISM denials. It would be enough to make millions of Google customers run away from them.
Facebook Brings Home’s Lockscreen Replacement To Their Main Android App
I wonder why it says Android 4.2.2 instead of Android 4.3
Switching from one provider who definitely logs data and turns it over to the Feds to another provider that at least claim they don't log the data.

Granted, you still have to take DuckDuckGo's word for it, but I wouldn't call that "absurd".
This is a good story and people like this always fascinate me considering how socially awkward I feel.

I can understand the logic and even the motions but going from "That's a really good idea and I should be more engaged" to actually engaging with people are a huge gulf to people like me sometimes. Perhaps it's more of an excuse than it needs to be too.
I wonder what would be more difficult: convincing the world to switch their calendar, or convincing the Earth to speed up slightly then maintain a steady speed forever. I'll bet we could get the Earth to give us 365 days much more easily than getting its population to give us 13 months.
UN narcotics body warns Uruguay over marijuana bill
pretty sure Dwight did this (The Office, US version). That's where I first remember hearing it