skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Poor word choice on my part. The intention was that machines don't need to jump through any hoops to be able to figure out what code means - it's a language designed such that it can be parsed mechanically without ambiguity. Compare this to a machine interpreting English.

I was not intending to downplay the significance of code being intended for human consumption.
Upgrading CyanogenMod and other ROMs on an encrypted Nexus 4 device
> "having non ASCII characters"

Accented vowels are ASCII characters but in the extended set which people sometimes don't take account.
IFTTT - https://ifttt.com/jobs - San Francisco, CA

==================================

IFTTT is looking for engineers to help build the next generation of its platform. This is a unique opportunity to contribute to the core architecture of one of the web’s most innovative and exciting services. You’ll get to work on challenging technical problems alongside a small but driven group of developers, and play a key role in shaping both the product and team culture.

IFTTT’s mission is to help people to create connections between the services and devices they use every day. We’ve built a system that enables users to set up simple “if this, then that”-style recipes, which allow activity from one web service to trigger activity in another. The current system supports over 60 unique services and runs nearly a hundred million recipe-handling tasks per day, and we plan to dramatically expand on our flexibility and scalability. Under the hood, this translates to building a platform that can talk to and move data between virtually any API you can think of, all in realtime and at massive scale.

We're well funded, and we work hard to do right by our employees. New hires at IFTTT enjoy competitive salary and equity, full benefits, sane work schedules, and a flexible vacation policy. Much more than that, we offer interesting, deep projects and an amazing team experience. We operate on the philosophy that the best job perk is fantastic teammates, and to this end we’ve assembled a staff of intensely curious, well-rounded, talented people who happen to be great engineers. We’re hoping you can be the next one.

==================================

Mobile Engineer

Earlier this month we released our first mobile app, IFTTT for iPhone (https://ifttt.com/mobile). The response has been overwhelmingly positive (Editor's Choice, #1 Productivity). We're looking for talented mobile developers who can help us continue to innovate on iPhone, as well as bringing IFTTT to new platforms (Android, wearable computing, embedded systems, etc).

==================================

Platform Engineer

We’re hoping to find candidates who speak fluently about distributed architectures, databases, and ops, who enjoy rolling up their sleeves and writing code at all levels of the stack, and who have the confidence and depth of knowledge to take ownership of long-term projects. IFTTT currently runs on a polyglot mix of technologies, including EC2, Rails, Node.js, MySQL, Redis, Memcached, and Chef. Experience with these is a big plus, but we’re constantly evolving, and we value creative problem-solving and desire to learn over domain knowledge.
What a bucket head!
Compared to the US defense budgets and what the US spends on counter-terrorism, I think all of these are effectively zero. Yes, there might be programs in the million USD range, but certainly not in the hundreds of billions.
I routinely buy quinoa, as well as somewhat more obscure things, such as mayocoba beans and Salsa Lizano. I own two pressure cookers - a search of my e-mail history will show me asking my sister for a recommendation, followed by a purchase from Amazon. When my decade+-old computer backpack gave out, I asked my friends for recommendations.

No FBI yet.
Qualys SSL Labs - test your SSL setup
A Japanese company once made the decision that they needed "virtual" employees in a particular system, for example to support e.g. adding a job to the org chart before that position had been filled (and another dozen use cases), so they had the clever idea "Hey, if we need to do this, we'll just input their 'name in Japanese' as one of a dozen status flags, like XX_JOB_REQUEST or XX_INCOMING_TRANSFER."

One developer at this company, who was annoyed with having to tweak a particular system every time they added a new possible status flag, wrote code which was, essentially:

if (InternalStringUtils.isAllLatinCharacters(employee.getJapaneseName()) {
/* no need to pay this 'employee' so remove them from batch
before we retrieve bank details for salary transfers */
...
}

Do I have to explain why I'm aware of this curious implementation choice?
The recent Adami/Hintze paper that is topic of this article is itself the paper that shows that the ZD strategy is not evolutionarily stable. The May 2012 Press/Dyson paper was what caused people to question what had been thought settled for 30 years, and Adami/Hintze paper pointed out mistakes/limitations of Press/Dyson's conclusion. Before Adami/Hintze paper is was not clear that ZD strategy "did not work out so well". You can download the Adami/Hintze paper here:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.2666
By the same logic, ff terrorism under the flag of a cause is seen as an effective disincentive for policy change in a particular direction, then we would just have an escalation of false-flag terrorism sponsored by anyone who wants to avoid particular policy changes (whatever the merits) as they adopted the now-proven strategy.

Your position is no less "advocating terrorism" than the one you responded to. The only way not to encourage terrorism is to evaluate policy changes on their own merits, and not be swayed from acting on the merits of the policy changes themselves by the fact that terrorists have stated goals related to those policy changes, either as a positive or negative factor.
I'm just going based off US law and not Chinese law (since I don't know Chinese law), but I don't see why it should be illegal. It might be against Apple's TOS, but take ticket scalping for example. In the US, there's no federal law against it, and it's only against the law in a handful of states.

Even if the TOS said you couldn't do this, it wouldn't make it illegal (in the US). The TOS is not law, and the only repercussions would be civil.
> ethnically caucasian

Actually, that matters in Russia a lot, too. Although, their meaning of the word is different (Russian Caucasians are people originated from around the Caucasian Mountains; that's where all the guerilla fighting is currently going on).
I highly encourage you to go read Manning's statement that he gave as part of his guilty pleas before the trial, where he talks about the 'relationship' he thought he had with Assange, and the relationship he actually had with Assange.
13 Graphs That Suggest The Planet Might Be Totally Screwed
In our app we neither validate nor escape user strings for any free form text (eg. "names" and descriptions)[1]. We only validate the max length.

If text is truly free form then you don't need to validate or white list anything. Just make sure it's valid UTF-8 (or whatever encoding you're using) and escape it when you display it. That combined with using prepared statements with bind variables (aka named parameters) and you don't have any issues with user inputs.

One other benefit of this approach is that you end up with proper i18n support without doing anything special. From your apps perspective all text is the same. If user's want to use unicode characters or put html tags in their descriptions then let them. If you escape it then there's no XSS issue. Plus it's WYSIWYG[2] from a user's perspective.

Who am I to judge that a user putting "<script>alert('Haxors!');</script>" as the name of an object is a bad idea?

[1]: "Names" don't include usernames which generally should have a whitelisted character set (ex: ASCII [a-z][a-z0-9+]) or email addresses (use a a real validator ... not a regex!).

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wysiwyg
Why are you so surprised? Mass surveillance isn't happening for no reason.
I asked you explicitly in Twitter "@mikeash two questions: 1) will you give your friends/family to the police if they don't file taxes? 2) did I threaten you for your beliefs?"
https://twitter.com/oleganza/status/362954987661295616

You answered: "No, I wouldn't turn them in, but I believe such enforcement is necessary and overall good."

Before, in this thread I asked if you will turn me in, you answered:

"Yes, I would justify someone forcing you to pay taxes to fund the NSA in that case."

So my question was (quoting from above):

"why would you turn in police some people, but not your friends and family? It sounds to me that your morality is not universal at all, but just a whim."

How am I being dishonest here? Please answer what's the moral difference between turning me into police and not your family?
They should be able to declare an in-kind contribution at some reasonable hourly rate for the engineers' time.
Nobody at Cheltenham is particularly well paid, compared to the private sector at least – a junior analyst might earn £25,000. "We can offer a fantastic mission but we can’t compete with [private sector] salaries," one briefing note lamented.

Yep. That was a big part of why when I talked to a GCHQ recruiter when I was finishing my doctorate that I didn't bother going any further.
As pointed out elsewhere in the comments, this is different.
I have no trouble believing that the FBI would do things that would compromise the fact that they collect information about searches for targets of investigations. That's a very different compromise than the one that reveals they dragnet all Google searches for lead generation.
Cute attack -- takes advantage of the deflate compression shrinking the size of repetitive strings as a way to test if a given set of bytes is in the encrypted data.

Has nothing to do with email addresses. That was just an illustration.
That's a good point. I would hope that if tax revenue declines, the NSA, at the very least, would cease growing. It is possible that more justified programs would take a hit, such as food stamps, but in the end I'm far more concerned about being spied on. But honestly, I think it's more about the principle: I'm not going to finance a government that so blatantly ignores its own Constitution.
And, in my case, it did actually replaced my USB drive 99% of its uses. The only time in the last 2 years that I used it was to go to print some PPT on a printing shop, as I don't have a printer at home. And I had to search the whole house to find my USB driver (which was lost on an old backpack).
I think it is actually.

People spend a lot of time not letting HN devolve into what reddit is now. Joke handles are a part of that. Downvoting "jokes" and jokes period is part of that.
These allegations have been widely reported since the start of the Snowden leaks two months ago and both General Alexander and DNI Clapper have both claimed that they don't "run around" the Fourth Amendment in this fashion.

It's interesting to see the USG contradictions and hypocrisy coming to light in this fashion, especially since their lies are increasingly egregious and continuous.

There is an image[1] of their operations that is especially interesting, and one can interpret it in multiple ways. For example the colors likely represent intelligence reciprocity, but it could also be construed to identify allies and enemies. Since America is yellow then it could represent weak intelligence gathering effectiveness, and it stands to reason that allies likely spy on Americans for us. I wonder how much legal liability that opens up for them? Perhaps they're leery of spying on Americans.

[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/Boundless...
A tricky bit, often overlooked, is that the line between hardware and software is fuzzy and moves constantly. What's hardware today is virtualized or emulated or decomposed into a general instruction set tomorrow.

Is infringement contingent upon hardware implementation? Partial hardware implementation? Substantial hardware implementation? If you have an awesome DSP and I virtualize it and then use hardware acceleration to speed up that virtualization, is that a hardware implementation, or software?

Saying "no software patents" as a practical matter is hard to nail down objectively, without just generalizing it to "no patents on digital anything". Which becomes a larger upheaval than people tend to consider.
Smarkets, London, VP of Engineering and Software Engineer, Python, Erlang & Mobile

Smarkets is disrupting the global betting industry by offering a modern betting exchange with significantly lower transaction fees than the competition. We're a well-funded company with a small, agile development team, and our platform has handled over £350 million of bets since launching in 2010. Smarkets has been featured in publications such as Wired, The Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch and was recently selected as part of the Startups 100.

We're building a reliable, low-latency exchange system to facilitate automated traded strategies, as well as a fast, modern web interface. Our team constantly works on significant, challenging software engineering problems; if you're fed up of writing yet another boring CMS, we might be able to help.

The Smarkets platform is written predominantly in Python and Erlang, and relies heavily on asynchronous programming techniques and REST. We make extensive use of version control, configuration management and automated testing, which allows us to reliably deploy code to production several times a day.

Our team builds on a modern, open-source software stack which includes Linux, Vagrant, Flask, Eventlet, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, ElasticSearch, Graphite, Chef and Git.

For more info: http://info.smarkets.com/about/jobs/
> You're vastly underestimating how many people are interconnected in this hodgepodge of gray matter we call HN.

And you're vastly underestimating how easy astroturfing is to do, and how cheap/effective it is to implement with a captive audience (i.e. HN).
Isn't this a federal felony? I am not positive, but as a former bar owner, it is for sure a federal felony to mislabel booze; I am not sure about how things play out, if you are not selling it.

Edit: Not to pile on, but as someone who has poured a shit load of money, sweat and blood into a bar in the past, if I read something like this, I would stay as far away from you as possible as I wouldn't want to open myself up to the liabilities your company is sure to cause an establishment.
The general geopolitical trend seems to be that the US is about to take control over Europe. Slowly, but under the radar of the People.

Maybe we really could all agree on having 1 big merger.

But the idea that "Americope" would then be controlled mainly out of North America is pretty unhealthy/insane.
I remember reading the Larrabee white papers, press material, etc. for an article[1] I wrote some five years ago. I think the reason that Larrabee was pitched for graphics initially was just to limit the domain of "things" (tessellation, texture sampling, etc.) that had to be catered to in silicon. I've no doubt that had it come to market, and had it worked well, we would be looking at a radically different CPU architecture than Haswell on the market today.

Of course, there's always the outside chance that the experiment worked so well that Intel is keeping an architecture inspired by the Larrabee research project it in reserves for after it's gone as far as it can shrinking transistors and needs something new to sell.

[1] http://www.trustedreviews.com/opinions/intel-larrabee-an-int...
Cool branding and way to hustle. Reminds me of PG essay Do Things That Don't Scale - http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
Oh so it was just a real-estate transaction :)
It's an excellent book. Even better is the Illustrated version, which adds a lot of beautiful photographs. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4805.The_Illustrated_Long...

Longitude particularly made me appreciate the craftsmanship that these inventors applied. Could you imagine spending 20 years building a single machine, not sure if it was going to work, then sending it off on a boat for 2 years and only when it comes back do you know if it worked? Makes me a bit more patient to wait 2 minutes for the test suite to run...
SEEKING FREELANCER – remote

I need assistance in creating a database / statistical analysis of Lego pieces. You are free to use the tool(s) of your choice.

Here’s a brief description of the project:

1. For each Lego piece, find the minimum dimensions (x,y,z) of a cube that it would fit into. Round up to the nearest millimeter.

2. Analyze the distribution of the cubes, for example: “there are # pieces that fit into a cube of 10mm x 10mm x 10mm,” “there are # pieces that fit into a cube of 11mm x 10mm x 10mm,” etc.

3. The above analysis should be performed on the entire universe of Lego “official parts” that can be obtained from this site: http://www.ldraw.org/article/13.html (--> “Get All Official Parts”). There are thousands of parts.

4. Deliverables include the analysis above and the code and/or files that you use to complete it.

This is for a personal project. Ideally the analysis above would be completed in the next few weeks.

If interested, please send me an email at gthomps at gmail.com. Thanks!
Opentable Acquires Urbanspoon's Rezbook
That was my thought too. Simply exploiting a loophole of sorts. It sounds like once a booking is made, there is a way to go in and edit your info. Still curious if this a TOS violation or not.
Help inspire the next generation of technology creators: Apply for RISE Award
Interesting idea, great hustle, scary to repackage food in non-food facilities. You check the laws for repackaging alcohol? I'm wondering if your friendly local ATF agents will be paying a visit soon. Something to keep in mind...
Pretty sure we're talking past each other, but I'll give it a shot anyway.

>Even if I grant your premise (which I don't), just because a breakthrough is likely to be written in crazy-talk

Who said anything about "crazy talk"?. My point is simply that your signal/noise filter is by necessity driven by information derived from the status quo. The status quo part being a really big problem if you're hunting for something new.
"No, you may not enter my house without a warrant. Good day."
Ordering Pizza
The KKK wasn't just one peculiar agent of white supremacy: it was the keystone that made it so effective.

If you were a black man engaged in any kind of political, economic, or social organizing, you stood a decent chance of being murdered by the KKK, which was implicitly supported by the white-dominated State. This created a system where people were too scared to even begin organizing, leading to all kinds of disempowerment and social malaise.

Those inner city gun deaths have the KKK in their genealogy.
Most people seem to focus on the visual programming model which is just one aspect of NoFlo. I think its real power comes from the Flow Based Programming model. Functional programming is the trendy solution to the problem of concurrency these days. But I think FBP could offer some solutions in this domain too.

In my experience with LabVIEW, I found that the FBP paradigm greatly simplified process of writing highly parallel code. Whether you use the text or visual UI, I’m excited that NoFlo will bring this concept to JS development.
Definitely! Similarly, I threw out all the advice I got from my father the day I found out he was wrong about who was going to win the world series that year. I mean, if you can't trust someone to be right about everything, why even listen?
San Francisco - Software Engineer

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Thumbtack's people are down-to-earth, practical, and intelligent. Everyday for lunch we all sit down to a meal cooked by our in-house chef. On Wednesday nights, we stay late for a hot dinner, some wine, guests, and great conversation. Sometimes we drink beer that we've been brewing in the back closet.

Ping me (chris @) if you want to chat. Happy to meet up for coffee if you're in SF.

http://www.thumbtack.com/jobs

(H1B welcome)
Sweet, so just hang around pubs in Cheltenham till you find the spook pub, then pal up with them, find out who would most likely take a bribe (I don't know, maybe one who plays the puggies[0] a lot would be a good place to start) offer a big wad of cash and boom! you can find out about anything or anyone... Shit, that's probably how the tabloids know who to send PI's after, there must be stuff leaking out of that place :-(

Edit: [0] Slot machines for gambling.
What scares me further is that The Guardian seem to be the only publication that are reporting on this. I'm a frequent BBC News reader and generally trust in there neutrality. I would not have heard about any of the recent revelations if not for The Guardian. I didn't even know about Tempora until I saw it on a HN comment and looked it up on Wikipedia. Apparently there has been a "D-Notice" to prevent reporting on the matter [1].

[1]http://order-order.com/2013/06/08/d-notice-june-7-2013/
Or they account wrongly ;) (ie: from the wrong set)

I love how sometimes even on the same company, each place account ASCII differently.

I remember registering for a IM, and in one info screen my name was Maur&cio and in the site info screen Maur€cio and in the search screen was Maur£cio and so on...
Form Validation with JQuery
And that's if you think this mass spying it's actually working. But so far we haven't seen any evidence that it does. In the vast majority of terrorist "events" they say they've stopped, the mass spying wasn't even essential in learning about them or stopping them. It may have no helped at all.

And for so little benefit, they spend hundreds of billions every year, and get the ability to blackmail or threaten anyone in the world.

So not only is not "not worth it". It's an extremely dangerous monster that should be slain as soon as possible, before it gets to do much more damage than any terrorist could ever do.
The problem when you measure one thing and optimize it the things you don't measure often get worse. That's an important thing to keep in mind when optimizing.
I've got a friend whose last name is Null, and he used to have all kinds of issues with the phone company...

Obviously if your lookup app is having a problem with using "Null" as a string then you have data type issues.

It's not rocket science.
Americans making "informed tradeoffs" about privacy defeats the purpose, from a SIGINT perspective. If everyone knows Skype is bugged, the bad guys who aren't idiots don't use Skype. The only way for a crime prevention dragnet to work is if nobody knows about it, and even then the nastiest bad guys will still probably take heavy precautions just in case.

Surveillance is about control; more nines of safety may or may not be a beneficial side product. There is no reason why mass surveillance would not expand to encompass other crimes: first murders and rapes, then tax evasion, then drugs and torrents, then joining "subversive" protest groups, etc.

I'm not sure there is any person or group trustworthy enough to own a unilateral monopoly on all knowledge.
I agree. I'm saying this is a bug. The fact that we need to care about this is a bug.

If I'm working with code on my phone, I'm going to have different preferences than on my tablet, or my laptop, or doing side-by-side comparisons, or my 30" display, or a projector.

Probably the best current examples of what can be done with this are docco and it's friends. iPython notebook is another example of what we can do when we decide that hardware improvements in the past couple decades may be taken advantage of to improve production and consumption of code, rather than declaring that no progress shall be made after 1976.
Comedy Central Debuts Stand-Up App for Xbox 360