skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Formal spec vs delivered software - there's a similar case here. In any real world organization, the formal written mission and rules are not exactly the ones that are in operation. Unionization especially public-sector unionization further disconnects employees from the rules and the techniques they are _supposed_ to follow. Now this could go either way, but considering the psychopaths and bums that the TSA hires, and the numerous cases we know of theft, I would say that unionization makes things worse with the rules and techniques.
"Heckler" usually refers to one or a few people in a crowd. Getting booed off the stage would be different.
It's not just a matter of platform customization, it's a matter of identity. Who remembers the author of a Medium article after one finishes reading?
Doesn't appear to include codes and standards which are included by reference such as NFPA, IBC, IRC, SAE, etc. (see [1] for a non-gov't project to publish those)

Nevertheless it is a very good thing to see the the gov't publish (most of) the law in an easy to use format.

[1] https://public.resource.org/
NSA Director General Keith Alexander at Blackhat 2013
Is it self-aggrandizing? I suppose I'm one of those people.

I was shocked by having this laid out as well but I really did just assume this was probably going on. It was technically possible, it was politically possible and it was financially possible. If I shared the worldview of the people doing this and been in the position to do this, I would have been itching to start this level of collection and data mining.

I will admit to part of it being satisfaction at no longer getting the "oh put your tinfoil hat away, no one would do that" response whenever it came up, which was always based solely on the old "I don't like the implications of this being true therefore it can't be" argument. It's also relief that there is finally a discussion about a subject that was previously only seriously discussed by a small number of people.

I take your point that the I-told-you-so gloating isn't helpful and doesn't reflect well on those who do it but I disagree that that was ever meant to discourage discussion, if anything it was anger at the fact this discussion has taken so long to occur.
Show HN: Diddums: a tiny mac app for Pinboard
According to the page, it supports both PhantomJs (Webkit) and SlimerJs (Firefox/Gecko)
And even that is absolutely fleeting. You're probably better off writing it on your own and submitting to Hacker News as the potential reach is much greater.
The tragic part isn't that the schema is given in XSD but that it's defined in XSD. What I'm lamenting (yes more hyperbole) is that a schema this important wasn't defined in a schema language that had clear semantics and composability rules, fostering reuse and adoption for related domains, of which we would expect there to be many. (Later, of course, the definition could always be extruded into XSD and other popular yet semantically stunted formats as a practical publication step.)
HeroLight is hard to read on that background and looks rough around the edges on a non-retina screen.
It's true you couldn't plow money into such a project. But I always wondered why, when confronted with a problem like this, you couldn't hire one smart organizers who hire forty dispersed teams who'd each follow a different lead. And hire another ten teams who'd be tasked with following and integrating the work of the forty teams (numbers arbitrary but you get the picture).

I suppose that's how grants are supposed to work already but it seems these mostly degenerated to all following the intellectual trend with the most currency.
I'm attempting to centralize many different sets of laws on PlainSite:

http://www.plainsite.org/laws

Feel free to contribute.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6136016
For what it's worth Medium has a really top notch team, and they are still iterating and exploring. This feedback will probably be valuable to them. I have found the Medium UI to be very good.
Ah... http://uscodebeta.house.gov/download/priorreleasepoints.htm
I thought Medium was a platform which you write for. You don't become Medium platform. They are running it like an editorialized magazine. Your articles are promoted by the platform and not just by yourself. So why not maintain your own blog and write for others as well?
What a lame article. I know so many people are praising the author here and happy for her 'return', but if this has always been the quality of her writing, I'm not impressed. Not the mobile app, but any kind of thinking or stress will reduce your will power, and thus according to you is making you fat. So you might as well stop thinking. Or, on other side, do diet control and exercise. 2nd option is wise, according to me.
If the minimum holding period for an asset was, say, 20 years, the subprime mortgage crash would have been much less likely.

One wonders what rules Microsoft stockholders are playing by. They seem to have the patience of a Zen master. Are their dividends enough to justify another 'lost decade' with Ballmer in charge?
Even better, Octopress in Jekyll allows you to simply add a published: false flag at the beginning of the post to label it as a draft.
Chrome did this since the beginning but didn't use that much memory back then. So clearly processes aren't the only answer.
Is medium trying to compete with wordpress? Maybe the simplicity is its beauty. Not many people care for all the bells and whistles that you can dig into with wordpress.

I agree that if you're thinking about analytics, etc then you've probably outgrown these simple platforms. In this case you should definitely consider running your own install because now it's your business, and not just a journal.
Why is Google doing this?
I think its quite understandable that they have the deliberations in private. Imagine if your customers saw every minute of your office's day. What irks me is that although bills are available, they are available in such a way that it is a fulltime job to even look for things of interest. With better machine-searchable formats, you could set up alerts for potentially interesting sub-components of legislation that is up for debate.

Edit: I don't endorse some skeevy lobbying activities, but that isn't the only influence, and there are some legitimately difficult choices that our reps make (when they're working right... so I guess rarely) that they believe are in the best interest of the country and their constituents. Many of these decisions would be made even more difficult and actually discourage much of what thoughtful and earnest decision making does exist.
You could just supply the jvm with the browser. Most browsers autoupdate nowadays silently in the background anyway.
To catch unintended effects of CSS or HTML changes across a site without having to manually check every page and try manually spot differences.
Do musicians have any control whatsoever in the longevity of their work? More specifically, will giving musicians a longer copyright term result in more music being listened to for longer?

I think that'd be a pretty specious claim. Did Jimi Hendrix set out to create multi-decade hits, did he know how to create multi-decade hits? It seems to me the longevity of particular genres of music is fairly arbitrary and hard to predict, in which case no incentives will result in their deliberate creation.

Hell, is there a particular social benefit to why a creative work - a snippet of culture from a particular time and place - needs to remain culturally relevant for decades at a time? Would that not encourage creation of work that appeals only to the lowest common denominator and avoid specific contexts that are only relevant to the creator's contemporary era?

To put into a specific example: would this cause people to create documentaries about war, instead of, say, the Iraq War? Do we not lose out if we elevate "relevant to the mass-market over 50 years" to a virtue?
"In short, that allows a lawyer to answer almost any question with "it depends," and start billing.
"

No, this is usually "lack of sufficient facts to answer question".

If a crime has 4 elements, and you've said you've committed 3 and maybe the 4th depending on how you look at it, the answer to the question "can i be convicted" is "it depends", because it depends on the argument about the 4th element.

If your followup is to claim that there should never be questions about whether you've achieved some element of a crime, it should be binary, that's simply impossible.

Crimes, for example, are often about intent and causation. Until science provides us with historical mind reading devices, and completely accurate point-in-time reconstruction of the world, we're going to have to rely on various theories and evidence (much like science relies on theories and evidence).

Even point-in-time reconstruction wouldn't solve all causation issues, because the issue is often a fairness one: Is it fair to hold the defendant liable for a crime X steps removed from his own action.
Look straight at their eyes, then roll your eyes back and say "oh.... yes. Like that."
> How can they feel good about what they are doing?

Didn't you hear? The system is used to help track down bad guys who want to hurt America.

It sounds trite, but people really and truly believe that the issue is just that simple.
Defcon and Blackhat were founded by the same dude. Why didn't they exclude feds from BlackHat as well? Guessing it was probably because that is their big money maker with all the corp/fed support.
There is no a priori reason to think that it isn't horrible in terms of CPU time. Anything that has to do more work just to manage memory is going to consume cycles, and usually a lot of them. In simple utility programs it might not be observable but in larger applications with more objects, or on slower hardware (phones, for example) the cost is palpable.

> We find that an existing modern implementation of reference
counting has an average 30% overhead compared to tracing, and
that in combination, our optimizations are able to completely eliminate that overhead. This brings the performance of reference counting on par with that of a well tuned mark-sweep collector. [-3]

Even the best tuned mark and sweep GCs are a drag on performance.

> Reference counting is expensive - every time you manipulate pointers to an object you need to update and check the reference count. Pointer manipulation is frequent, so this slows your program and bloats the code size of compiled code. [-2]

> "Unfortunately, reference counting is expensive in both time and space". [-1]

Also, the slide entitled "Why reference counting is slow" in some recent lecture notes go into some detail. [0]

[-3] http://users.cecs.anu.edu.au/~steveb/downloads/pdf/rc-ismm-2...

[-2] http://ocaml.org/tutorials/garbage_collection.html

[-1] http://www.rtsj.org/RTJPP/errata.html

[0] http://cs.nyu.edu/courses/fall12/CSCI-GA.2110-001/lectures/G...
I'm betting tonight on the news, this story will be eerily missing.
I suspect he's simply warning against mistaking the formal spec (US code) for enforcement.
When someone says two systems are comparable, it is a different claim than that two systems are equivalent. In order for something to be better than something else they have to be comparable. Dynamic typing can be better than static typing only because they're both approaches to typing (please don't confuse this example with an opinion); static typing cannot be better than lexical scope because they're not comparable.

We're talking about the cost/benefit of flexibility as evidenced by systems like Moose. It's quite irrelevant to my point whether Moose is better or not, so it is quite a stretch to accuse me of a straw man attack. For that to be the case, I'd have to have said that Moose is worse than (say) Python's OO therefore flexibility is bad and Perl is bad by extension. What I'm actually saying is that flexibility isn't free, it has a cost, and that the cost must be offset by other benefits. If Moose is better, that's a benefit that might outweigh the cost, but nobody seems to be interested in telling me how it's better when they could instead attack the argument, by, for instance, hauling out the well-worn stack of logical fallacy accusations. If I sound irritable, it's only because I start conversations on HN in good faith expecting, you know, a conversation, and these kinds of vitriol-powered slamfests are not what I have in mind. Am I a troll indeed.

Edit: One need not know a language to find oneself in a niche where that language might be more appropriate. I didn't mean that remark to offend and I regret my wording. I certainly wasn't out to troll. That said, surely you do not believe one must learn a language inside out before knowing whether it is appropriate to a domain. I know many languages and work in several domains and never find myself thinking Perl would be better. I might not be in the right domains, but if we were having this conversation about C++, Java or Haskell it would be easier to rattle off a few example domains rather than scoff at the question.
Interestingly that's not the part I find new or staggering at all. I suppose that's just an exceptionally cynical worldview at work? No matter how "sacred" the trust I always expect this amount of power to be misused to this degree when it's secret and consistent with the ideologies present among those with that power.
Does anyone have Jon McCoy's contact information? Twitter? I want to send this guy a big thank you for standing up for our privacy.
I believe you, but I didn't make the connection until today. To me, "with friends" seems like a common part of speech.
It's probably already been done several times over. There are tons of homemade static site generators languishing out there.
Coincidence theorists, the ones that believe whatever they're told by whatever authority figure they believe in this week, are the ones with stunted cognitive abilities.

"Terrorists are the problem we must address" is no different from "Satan is trying steal your soul" or "Commies are gonna destroy our way of life" as a means of manipulating the more gullible people in a population. It's worked for centuries.

"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and those are the ones you need to concentrate on."

-George Bush, repeating advice given to him by Robert Strauss
It's been a while since I've looked into this, but last I knew it was legal to listen to any band you want, but illegal to transmit on any band for which you don't posses the required license, if any.

Then there's all kinds of rules about transmit power. For instance, last I knew you could transmit unlicensed on the public FM and AM radio bands so long as you're under some minimal threshold - I think it was 1W.
> Firstly, their belief is supposed to reflect the ideology of the US citizens in general. If it doesn't, either they are not being administered as well as they should be or they are purposefully.

I think this is a very difficult question to answer. If you're a lowly NSA tech tasked with something seemingly mundane (say, writing some automated tool to be used by an internal billing dept), at what point do you refuse to contribute to an organization that may be operating against the will of the people? Who is responsible?
// PSD is not my favourite file format.

I see bro...
Experimenting with NeverWet + Electronics
Grails 2.3.0 RC1 and Grails 2.2.4 Released
Audio here: https://soundcloud.com/larrymagid/nsa-director-general-keith
Not that much of a pun, really. Just a funny-sounding portmanteau. That being said, official names of things by the government usually sound very ridiculous, so this is definitely much saner.
And (apocryphally) "largest number of patches per byte" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEFBR14#History_from_the_RISKS_...)
Obfuscation and Functional Encryption for all circuits
Medium is both a promotion brand and a platform; Wordpress is mostly just a platform.

The better analogy would be http://tryghost.org and Wordpress.
Don't forget the lawyers. They benefit quite a bit as well.
Starbucks Partners With Google to Speed Up Wi-Fi in Stores
LE TOTE Funding News
Chrome's codebase also got more complex so now every new process consumes a lot more memory. It's a way of achieving concurrency, but it's not necessarily the best way in terms of memory footprint.
Just FYI: the Rust team is in the process of moving Garbage Collection out of the core language and into the standard library.
http://bit.ly/14DVOEC

EDIT: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Why+cameras+are+banned+on+courtrooms%3F...
http://www.ohloh.net/p/chrome

The metric is probably off from the automated calculator.http://www.ohloh.net/p/chrome It's likely counting the .h files as C
This isn't strictly true, which is why I made the differentiation above between 1st and 3rd party cookies. With the 1st party cookie you'd get a new GA cookie on each site (e.g. mozilla-GA, ycombinator-GA, etc), making those correlations impossible. In the case of 3rd party cookies, yeah, I totally get that they can be used for some seriously evil things.

It's possible GA could try to correlate IPs or browser fingerprints between 1st party cookies over multiple sites, but proxies and mobile devices would make that difficult. The fact that all the data is together in GA's warehouse doesn't change the fact that the data isn't there to be correlated.

As for JS being able to be more intrusive, sure, I get that. At that point, I suppose you have to trust the site you're on that they wouldn't use a service that was intrusive. Perhaps this is a bridge too far for some, which is reasonable.

I guess I just don't get wanting to ban the tool entirely when it could but is not currently be used nefariously. (working on the assumption that if GA started fingerprinting browsers someone would've seen the traffic by now. it's not easy to hide.)
Formerly classified briefing papers to Congress from 2011
Manning verdict's lesson in a digital age
The value of attention
How does a guy that makes excuses to spy on us all and lies to Congress deserve any courtesy?
No, I think the fact that it's tax paid is exactly his point.
Avoiding premature free()s is precisely what garbage collection accomplishes in this context, because you will never have to call free() to avoid running out of memory.
I think the processes are not the main culprit. We are using way more massive DOMs and a lot of js these days. And there hasn't been solid memory optimization efforts for js VMsas far as I know. The focus was purely on speed the last few years.
If you're having difficulty assessing the feasibility of something like this, you're going to have all kinds of trouble actually implementing your "diabolical" scheme.
That's fascinating. I googled a little and found [1], which speaks highly of Trapeze. It even says that modern spreadsheets still haven't caught up to it.

I'd heard of Improv, but not Trapeze. It sounds like you were earlier. Did you see a lot of similarity when Improv (and later Quantrix) came out?

Also, why do you think that Excel users, even sophisticated ones, tend to stick to Excel instead of using higher-level modeling tools? Is it simply that Excel is entrenched, or are there conceptual reasons?

[1] http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...
Is there a way to automate your own personal site to update a medium post? I've looked at Medium and while it is visually nice and laid out well, it seems very "cs student who just graduated college and wanted to make a start-up".
BlackHat is a more "professional" event for the security industry. People that ostensibly work in the security industry go there just like people go to o'reilly conferences for various technical areas.

DEFCON is a community event for anybody and is totally anonymous (entry fee is only payable by cash in person) and has a more freewheeling, community feel.
no because speed is nothing without torque.

The right wheel would spin fast, but anything put there to leverage that momentum into energy, be it simple magnetic generator, would be enough to halt the whole system by equalizing the opposing forces, since whatever minimal force it has, will go trhu the same powers that create the initial speed.
I think what it comes down to is that people are scared that Medium is going to use their license to steal all your content. Their license is weird: It says it allows them to make derivative works with your content, but at the same time it says it allows you to retain ownership of your content. What does that mean? Nobody knows.

I think if Medium just clarified that one line in their license it would make everyone's fears go away.
Ember Data Visualization on iOS
Do it. Unit test the code. You might even be able to get law students to do it for free as a study aid.
It would be good if people realized how snooping is connected to poverty. In my scenario, snooping is used to gain business secrets. These are used to undercut businesses, resulting in lower wages and poverty.

E.g. Chinese hackers steal plans for American-designed products. Instead of Americans working, building and selling the things we consume, inexpensive imported versions are available b/c those companies didn't pay for the overhead of design and didn't take any risk. We need to protect ourselves from this.
So far, no, mostly due to 3rd party issues.
Once the rest of the library sets I use port over, maybe.
Secretly keep tabs on Twitter accounts
You have some really BAD quality videos on there. Please fix.
A "let me Google that for you" response is rude, and using a link shortener to hide a URL is poor form. For the curious it goes to http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Why+cameras+are+banned+on+courtrooms%3F...
I think the logical way to look at algorithmic efficiency starts by picking a reasonable N. "Number of bits in a byte" is something that very rarely changes, and never reaches high values, so it makes a bad N. The flip side of this is that something like "number of bits in main memory" is very flexible and reaches extremely large numbers, so it shouldn't be a constant.

If I wasn't making a point about different methods to flip bits, and I was just naively classifying these byte flippers, I would probably call all of these O(1). Or perhaps O(N) where N is the size of input in bytes.
This is surely an artifact of the conversion process.
They are not storing the documents internally like this :)
The hardware features required for hardware-assisted GC are actually pretty simple. See https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/vee05/full_papers/p46-c... for a description. Other features like hardware-assisted write barriers (simple) and transactional memory (much more complex) can be used to increase performance.
"...shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony, and Breach of the Peace,..."

Leaking classified documents is a felony, and potentially could be construed as treason. Since the executive decides what is or isn't classified, it looks to me like they clearly can restrict the speech of legislators, regardless of time or place.

Unless, as was alluded to elsewhere, the Senate Intelligence Committee votes to declassify those specific topics first.
> I wonder how they store all that.

Well, now they have a massive data center in Utah. That's most likely where it's all going today. Standard open source tools are all you really need.

> Wouldn't they show up on, say, Sandvine's Internet traffic reports?

No. If some script kiddie/hacker type installs a packet sniffer and logs all your traffic to your ISP, that won't show up anywhere. Traffic goes somewhere. You're sending packets out. Merely logging packets is entirely passive and undetectable.
To give the GP the benefit of the doubt, there are plenty of low-power FM transmitter dongles that people use legitimately to play audio over low-cost FM radios.
Showing a Turtle In Tmux When CPU Usage Is High