skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Which is itself quite similar to the French Republican Calendar adopted after the revolution, and which was used for about 13 years. This divided the year into 12 months, each composed of 3 weeks of 10 days each. At the end of the year there were 5 'extra' days (or 6 in the case of leap years).

http://www.webexhibits.org/calendars/calendar-french.html
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/apple/apple-prs-dirty-little-secre...
Leo Laporte and several of the tech journalists on the TWiT network talk about it as well. I've actually heard this so frequently, I just thought it was common knowledge.
Apple's Future Products: Unlevel the Playing Field
Sorry, but this really isn't the place for this argument. We disagree, that's all I'll say.
Alright, that's a fair point. I still think it's a bit scary/sad that we need to worry about our public Facebook posts being potentially misconstrued by local police as grounds for a visit.
Those policies have a financial benefit for certain parties. Nobody gets rich from maintaining civil liberties. Can you think of a strong enough incentive to get this done?
"Potential terrorist" is a very vague term. Anybody who is alive and not brain-dead can be "potential terrorist". However I don't see how you explain the police asking questions about pressure cookers. Is that just a common thing - anybody that visits China gets a visit from the police that ask them if they make a pressure cooker bombs, just in case? Like the routine "How are you, sir? Is everything alright? How was your China trip? Did you make any pressure cooker bombs today? How about tomorrow? Good day to you, sir, then!".
Phrases like "... a dedicated Best Available Technology (BAT) program." give me cause for concern.

It amounts to "we're not provably worse than any of the other technologies that have been adopted"... aka it's far from the best available, which I'm sure is cost prohibitive.

That aside, I do have a lot of respect for the work that goes into this sort of chemical engineering - absolutely fascinating stuff.
Not all languages are compiled - sometimes line breaks are meaningful, and it would be good if diff tools work across all languages.
Everybody Google "backpack" "pressure cooker" "bomb" and tweet/facebook about it. Lets make these sorts of nonsensical and idiotic policies impossible.
The Subversive Selfie
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I read the report, it's still a single-source story from the person involved and their interpretation of what happened.
I would rephrase that to be "Bad outsourcing = bad management"

Even as a US citizen fluent in pretty much only English, if you give me terrible requirements or can't even express them clearly, I'll give you a terrible product. I would call my work intermediate to advanced though I can cite far more capable people than I, in any nationality.

I think the rep India gets in particular is the cultural shift. Almost all outsourcing when you hear of outsourcing tales went there versus any other country. Of course you'll hear horror stories and of course if you heard them you would likely assume that "India = terrible".

My personal experience is more that management is terrible and have an extremely difficult time properly describing specifications. That you're trying to explain this to developers who by in large are not as fluent in the language as you means this will be naturally more work than just communicating with people in your geographic region. If the labor is cheap but you're spending 2-3x as many man hours just explaining the requirements, how much are you really saving? This really goes for any nationality "offshore" to your own.
"is shipping trash from the UK to Norway and then setting it on fire better for the environment than burying it?"

Definitely! Landfill takes up a lot of space. Yes, it's buried underground, but there is a risk that harmful toxins or chemicals can leak into the soil. Landfill gases can leak into the air. A lot of that rubbish will not decompose.

The UK has a landfill tax to discourage excess waste, but unlike Sweden and Norway, we have not come up with clever, forward-thinking solutions to tackle the problem.
Not really. We utilize python-dateutil to help recognize the different date formats, but everything else we built ourselves.

http://labix.org/python-dateutil
The original commenter wrote:
"Our government is sending gangs of armed men to perfectly innocent citizens"

Local governments are governments too. Just because the Feds didn't show up doesn't mean this isn't highly problematic behavior. The fact remains that harmless private communication was used as an excuse to interfere in the lives of ordinary citizens. This is what is so problematic about it.

EDIT: After reading some more critical comments, I should state that I am ASSUMING what she said is true - that the agents actually asked her about Internet searches. I have to admit that she could just be making that part up.
Edward Snowden's LinkedIn Profile (maybe)
Between assisting the greater good and looking out for number one, they didn't seem to do enough of the later.

IANAL: They took a gamble by letting them in the door without a warrant. That opened themselves up to legal liability, regardless of "nothing to hide" innocence.

If they had found anything that looked suspicious, it would be a different story. They lucked out, this time.

A law school professor and a police investigator teach a class of law students why you can gain nothing by talking to the police:
https://youtu.be/6wXkI4t7nuc
Based on previous cases, it's not surprising: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/04/samsung-taiwan-market...
There probably is. For me though, the Libertarian Party gets close enough to the spirit of what I believe (especially when you factor in the "Radical Caucus" folks) and has more traction in terms of influencing public policy than any other libertarian / voluntaryist / anarcho-capitalist leaning group that I'm aware of.
> Articles like this -- even if they have errors or arguable non-best-practices -- should be recommended because they drive conversation.

I disagree. You could use the same argument to admit any old troll. As someone who's often critical of Go, I found the quality of TFA to be too low to be worthwhile. It gets a lot of things wrong and in my opinion breezes past many of the real problems.

More importantly, with new languages people are very quick to sling whatever FUD they can regurgitate against languages they've decided they don't want eating up the mindshare they'd rather some other language had.
Hey wait a second...I am quite intrigued by that "always on" speech core and that NLP core. Google has some great speech recognition tech(possibly the best). This is one area where they can really leave the rest of the pack behind, looking like cave men.
It's being reported that the bootloader is locked:

http://www.droid-life.com/2013/08/01/moto-x-bootloader-is-lo...

So that's that. I was waiting for this reveal before deciding on a new phone purchase, but that's not remotely acceptable for me. Looks like a GS4 Google Edition is in my future instead.
I love the idea of cop watch. The Justice Department's specific guidance that taping the police was one of the rare moments over the past few years that I've been very proud of the Obama administration.

I wish someone sold a discrete, always-on dashcam and personal cam that uploaded to a remote server, with an encryption setup so that only the user could unlock it. It would be useful for personal protection, both from criminals and the police. Little brother may be the best way to fight back against Big Brother.
The Mysterious Case of the Vanishing WHY
> It doesn't have to scale. You could sit and prepare for years for a single massive attack and get maximal value out of it. As technology improves, so does the ability to for a single malicious agent to kill or maim more and more and more people at a single time, which only gets worse when you combine multiple such agents into a group.

So, if we extrapolate towards the future, what you're saying is that the only way to prevent terrorist attacks that kill millions in a single blow is to abandon any and all privacy on a global scale? Because that's what i conclude taking your argument to its logical extreme.

Also, al qaeda didn't have any success attacking on US soil prior to 9/11, so it seems the NSA did some time travelling there. I might also point out that all the information needed to stop the 9/11 plot was known to the government at the time, they just didn't know they knew it. The NSA's warantless wiretapping wouldn't have been necessary to stop 9/11.
Thousands if not millions of people make business visits to Asia - South Korea, Japan, China - every year. How it can be otherwise if most high-tech equipment used in the US is produced there? Are you saying it is completely normal for them to get a visit from the police and get questioned about their kitchen inventory, nothing out of the ordinary here?
The researchers in the article are quoted as saying they don't know who's fault this is. That's B.S. It's absolutely the fault of the ad network/ad buying tool/DSP/whatever.

When you open up a platform to let people buy ads, there are loads of decisions to be made. The ones around "what content do we let people submit without vetting" are pretty simple. At Perfect Audience, self-service customers can upload static image banners and traffic those. We host them. No JS. No flash. If folks want to traffic those kinds of ads, we have an enterprise support play they can sign up for and we'll help them do that easily.

Letting anyone traffic js or flash files without prior vetting is hugely lazy. I wish they'd named the ad network they bought through so they could be black-balled and barred from the exchanges.

It's so easy to say no to crap advertising, and yet there's always unscrupulous players who say yes to it. There's no excuse. It's all their fault for just not giving a crap.

Edit: Also, when you get access to the ad exchanges, you sign a ton of documents and agree to be responsible for what you traffic in many ways. This network is dropping the ball.
SEEKING WORK - SF or Remote, periodic travel fine, contracts OK

Fullstack/Devops Ruby and Rails

Former sysadmin, now freelance Rails programmer, with backend and architecture/modeling chops.

http://careers.stackoverflow.com/erichill
Actually, I meant is a degree really required?

Personally, I left college with a couple of years left to go, when I realized I could make just as much money without a degree as with one, and I could teach myself anything I needed to know, anyway.

(I haven't regretted it in 15+ years of professional programming, for what it's worth.)
While I agree about the longterm effects of consents to searches or answering questions, but people just can't afford to risk standing on their rights. An arrest can cause bankrutcy or permanent injuries from brutal cellmates, and a warranted search can mean extensive destruction of property (just before this I read: http://search.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4041727&cid=44449...)
Of course we could expect this kind of behavior for you, as one of Hacker News' most notorious government apologists.
It was a pleasure email-chatting with Rob. He had never heard of Urine Therapy at the time.

Wheatgrass is a complete food. And even on this, my various addictions forced me back into cooked food, etc.
That's between lines, isn't it?

OTOH, 0x0d definitely counts toward the limit!
Indian Governments decision for the bifurcation of Andhra-Pradesh
If only there was some sort of nationwide grassroots group organizing protests, meetings with Congress and other political action on these issues... http://1984Day.com
Heating engineer
Isn't the stuff you search for encoded in the URL? Could they get it just by intercepting your web traffic?
"Deferential" has nothing to do with it. In a technical discussion, the focus should be purely on the content. Inserting one's self into it (such as by being supercilious) detracts from that.
Should I go to college or keep working in Silicon Valley?
I'm working at a startup as a Rails developer. I was hired straight out of high school, which meant being underpaid, though I've spent my time improving my skills. Long story short, the job market in Silicon Valley is really hot - I now have 2 outside offers in the $110-120k range (0-0.5% equity) at early to late-stage startups, and I might be able to bid the offers up to the 130k+ range. At the same time, I'm thinking about going back to college - a non-Ivy but top CS school (think Carnegie Mellon, UC Berkeley, UIUC).

One thought I have is that we're possibly at the high point of the current tech boom and that I should take a job while the market is hot, then go back to school when there's a cooldown. There's also the fact that as a fresh CS grad, 4 years down the line, I would be making roughly the same, or maybe just slightly more, as I could make right now (100-120k).

But I wonder whether going back to school after being in the industry for 2-3 years will even make sense.

Ultimately, I don't know how to weigh the social and educational experience of college against starting my career 4 years early. I'm not particularly concerned that a lack of a degree itself will hold me back in the future. Any thoughts?

Update: no college debt, parents thankfully have enough to pay for it.
In a sense "Americope" is already a reality. They have already used their power to divert the Bolivian presidents plane and restrict the airspace that Snowden might have used to get out of Europe.

When these Snowden leaks first came out I was hoping that Europe would stand up to the US but the fact is that many of the Intel agencies in Europe are either in on the various programs or benefit from them via funding or some sort of data sharing.
To say nothing of the bureaucratic fun that occurs when the US government is forced to work with itself in a JTTF-type situation.

1. Departments are territorial and image conscious (most being headed by elected officials or political appointees).

2. Individuals don't get promoted by passing up chances to work on those sorts of investigations. Even if they're nonsense.

If the feds want to check something out in a joint investigation situation, I can easily see 'federal agents want to have a talk' becoming 2 feds + 2 state/county + 2 local detectives.
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https://careers.microsoft.com/jobdetails.aspx?jid=111478&pp=...
Is it really that hard to catch up? I hope not.
Nothing that the US Government is doing can prevent against terror plots from succeeding.

Nothing? How utterly defeatist. People in all manner of ventures seldom act alone, and it is in those communications and networks that is precisely what the NSA (and the CIA, and the FBI, and the...) is targeting. Their wholesale capture is open to question, but it absolutely can thwart terrorism attacks.

Here in Canada we've had several potential terrorism events that were prevented by exactly that sort of action. Not by NSA type methods, but by someone in that network of associates coming under suspicion for some reason and it percolates out.

The idea that the government has somehow spared us from attacks on the water supply or nukes is absurd, since there aren't even any terrorists willing to try the simplest, lowest-risk kinds of attacks.

This is so profoundly broken of a thought process -- the "I have made my decision and I am sticking with it, logic be damned" -- that it isn't worth further consideration. It is a very good thing people like you have no part in safety and security -- by your failed thought process, things that haven't happened thus won't happen.
The current state of IT Recruiting
FOIA response on requesting your own phone metadata
Documenting your PostgreSQL database
Agitprop, regardless of validity, is useful if it achieves our ends.

You of all people know what a powerful adversary apathy is.

If lies were used to scare people into supporting these programs, they can be used to scare people into abolishing them.
The upside of this website is that it is immediately obvious that I am not the target market for this phone.
A brief web search didn't come up with any cost estimates of the Swedish facilities, but this page lists the cost of a singaporean one at about $500 million.

http://www.keppelseghers.com/en/content.aspx?sid=3028

It's possible that that's drastically different than the Swedish ones, but I fundamentally do not believe that any power generation facility is a terribly cheap facility to build or maintain. If you do, I suggest that that is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.
>Go look up Harrisburg and how their trash->energy plant as worked out.

Or look up Lancaster, PA (one county over from Harrisburg) and how their trash->energy plant "is considered a national model for waste disposal, featured in industry trade publications."[1], and how they (Lancaster county) are in the process of buying the Harrisburg facility.[2]

[1] http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2012/08/tale_of_t...
[2] http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/856655_County-waste...
seriously irlollin'. :D
I meant it as anyone who has been playing them for years has been there and done that, the thrill of them is in big part due to their novelty, there's a lot to explore if you've never played any mmo before, there's a lot less when you start to realize there all just reskinned versions of the same idea. MMOs are some of the more basic games in existence, the need to advance, that's my point.
Maybe you would but most people wouldn't. It takes guts to say no to six armed men with government documents, even if the law is technically on your side. They are very cordial and nice, they just want to ask a couple of questions, and they have the gigantic power of US government standing behind their backs. And you are in your pajamas and slippers and would you dare to say no to them, whatever the consequences would be? If you doubt what most people would choose, look how many people are completely OK with what TSA is doing. And that's your ass, literally, being inspected, not your kitchen.
Usually doesn't work that way, unfortunately. I can't donate my time through LLC and get a tax break, at least.
I can honestly say that in my course work I can't remember ever having to throw an exception. With that being said, I would think anyone who has done any work outside of course work should at least know how to throw an exception.

I know I did.
Arp spoofing works even over switched ethernet. With it, you can convince other machines that yours is their gateway, and then you can not only see, but modify all their network traffic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARP_spoofing
Exceptions are not "thrown" but caused, raised at best... The way Exceptions are provided in Java are bad if you'd ask me. Anyway you should expect CS graduates with experience in Python, Ruby, C++, Java, ML, Haskell or similar languages to be able to handle exceptions. Anyway. The question remains why you even want a CS graduate to do Java? Also there are slight differences in the semantics of exceptions in aforementioned languages though i.e. C++ Exceptions are "thrown" without operator new but is syntactically quite similar.

So. Do you think throwing exceptions is a must have for entry-level Java development? I don't. It is not important during most simple projects (which you'd do in your curriculum), is most often ignored or rethrown, or looked up and understood in a few minutes. Aren't patterns more important? Or general ideas? Java is just another language which will become a burden (Luke COBOL).
Just my thoughts...
Can it swap batteries? I plan to continue sticking with Samsung Galaxy (3/4) for this reason alone. The UX benefit of never having to plug the phone into charge and just quickly swapping batteries when it dies (or on the road) is amazing.
Also, "feminine mystique" and "wear it well, kemosabe" are both guaranteed to ruffle all the wrong feathers for many people, including me. I'm really surprised some of this copy made it out of a mock-up.
All 'smart' phones are always listening and watching.

Unless you take the battery out assume you are being monitored.
I'm aware people lie all the time. I'm aware that sometimes they get caught. I'm aware that when you owe millions of dollars to a bank, the auditors actually check this stuff.

"I didn't say you should lie or be a pirate. I said ignore the license."

And with that you lose the argument, and all credibility.
Tiny progress indicator library for JavaScript
Apple buys Passif SemiConductor
Java is not computer science
I dare you to fetch this link (see page 39 — "So you may use iron pipes, pressure cookers, fire extinguishers, or empty propane canisters. The point is that the inflammable substance needs to be contained in a strong container that would allow the pressure to build up and thus cause a damaging explosion."):

http://azelin.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/aqap-inspire-magaz...

That was authored by the AQ Chef, the late Anwar al-Awlaki, who was pressure-cooked by a Hellfire missile in 2011. His article supposedly guided the efforts of the Boston Marathon bombers.
At home, I only pick up for known numbers, and let the answering machine screen the rest. At work, they kind of expect you to identify yourself when you pick up the phone. But yes, what you suggest is a workable alternative, where allowed.
www.linkedin.com/pub/devon-null/73/ab3/a46
> In what other language are people still having holy wars over how to separate statements?

Probably most of the languages in popular use. It's just that the fight is usually directed towards another language.

JS happens to be one of the minority where the standard allows some flexibility and debate about usage.

> mysterious constructs like prototype, new, and apply

They're well-defined, so they're not particularly mysterious if you take the time.

> Are we seriously incapable of doing better?

Really depends on how much effort you're willing to invest in learning JavaScript, instead of trying to write the code you're used to from $OTHER_OO_LANGUAGE. Everyone unwilling to do that is probably never going to be capable of doing better.

This isn't to say there's anything wrong with finding another familiar set of abstractions friendly or personally productive, but personally, I find greenfield JS is pretty fun, flexible, and capable.

Then again, I think the same thing about Perl (which everyone knows is one of the worst languages ever), so YMMV.