skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many, many thousands of pressure cookers are sold every year. Terrorist attacks are extremely rare. Millions and millions of backpacks are sold every year. The intersection of those two products isn't helpful. The base rate theorem dictates that pressure cooker sales will turn out to be a very poor signal for terrorism.

This article posits (or is trying to sell you on the idea) that the FBI watches for pressure cooker sales on the Internet and dispatches teams of extremely expensive FBI agents to investigate them. Stipulate that the FBI has access to that information (I don't think they do, but whatever). What the FBI isn't going to do is compromise sources and methods in a pressure cooker dragnet. They are mathematically assured not to find terrorists that way. But they'd make a huge amount of noise. They don't burn sources for no good reason.

I don't buy this, at all.

Also not helpful, if you're trying to sell a hoax: the too-vivid callbacks to the Boston bombers, and to the FBI's television show image.

Later

Note also that this story wants you to infer that the FBI told her husband that they were following up on Internet search leads. Not only did they roll trucks to a residence to do a search that was almost mathematically guaranteed to come up blank, but when they did that, they hinted around at the secret program that got them to do it.
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So am I, as a citizen, supposed to be content with a 9/11 scale terrorist attack happening "every few years?" If the idea of that frightens me, am I just falling victim to fear mongering? Do I "lack perspective?"
Related is work by T. Kohno, A. Broido, and K. Claffy [2] where, too, small deviations in device hardware is exploited for device identification, in this case clock skew.

[1] http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~yoshi/papers/PDF
My apologies, I didn't realize that a disclaimer meant that everything preceding it could be ignored.

If you truly believe that the proportionality is not debatable, then feel free to cease debating it.

I'm sorry to inform you, but I'll need to see something at least on the level of a 12th grade essay to concisely consider your argument. Simply yelling "It's Too Much!" is not helpful.

DISCLAIMER: I didn't realize that a disclaimer meant that everything preceding it could be ignored.
If you truly believe that the proportionality is not debatable, then feel free to cease debating it.
Simply yelling "It's Too Much!" is not helpful.
Especially given that this is a new account, with only this comment.
Has Snowden given you any reason to think that he'd do that? The guy must be principled as shit to have done what he's done in the first place.
I thought I had! Done now.
Before you happily go to (hypothetically restored) USSR, please read about the fate of Italian aircraft designer Robert Bartini, who moved to USSR in 1923. In 1938 he was imprisoned and spent 14 years working in sharashkas:

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

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

Be careful what you wish for.
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I always enjoy chatting about projects, whether they're in the planning stages or just need a bit of help.

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Is apple.com doing User-Agent based discrimination?
Neat project for sure. I think the powerful idea I like about your approach is more that you are using flow control to add structure at higher levels but still leaning on traditional coding to implement the details. Visualizing communication/interdependencies and have that front and center leads to people keeping it cleaner than usually where it's hard to visualize how complex the communication has become except by imagining it and mentally parsing the code in your head.
... or that they clicked on a link from the search results to a non-https website about backpacks or pressure cookers.

Say, I don't know, Amazon, where even if you try to visit it as https it redirects you to http.

* edit: On second thought, I'm not buying it. The whole thing reads too much like a bad police procedural. Thomas's commentary more or less sums up my thoughts on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6141113
A powerful thought.

We should feel lucky that what we love is such novel and unexplored field.

I'm quite confident that we will eventually move forward from this seemingly stale period of programming paradigms. Because after all, we all know the frustration brought from the initial stages of learning a new thing; and we all know the much greater awe of mastering it.
For decoding types, particularly with function pointers, I recommend learning the right left rule.
http://ieng9.ucsd.edu/~cs30x/rt_lt.rule.html
Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition's Robotics Group in Pensacola, FL, looking for Java developers and robotics people.

We're looking for short term, long term, interns, post-docs, researchers, full-time, basically anything. We do frequently sponsor foreign job applicants with work visas.

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She's not 99% of America, she's a writer who's been published in Forbes and BoingBoing, and has almost a million Twitter followers.
Tubular Labs Launches Audience Analytics Platform For YouTubers
Mr Null is my cousin. He breaks the backend, I break the frontend.
Same here. I'm at a point now where I've basically wholesale adopted the "don't talk to the police" mindset.

A few nights ago, I went through one of those DUI checkpoints. I handed the cop my license, and then he started asking me questions:

Cop: "Where are you headed?"

Me: "That's none of your business."

Him: <surprised look>

Different night, different DUI checkpoint:

Cop: "Where are you coming from?"

Me: "Sorry, I don't answer questions for cops unless I'm under arrest and have an attorney present."

Cop: "That's a pretty intense position, any particular reason for it?"

Me: "It's just a matter of principle. This is a free country and we don't have a Gestapo or a Stasi here that we have to answer to, and somebody needs to remind you guys of that."

Cop: <looking in my window with his flashlight> "You always ride around with all this stuff in your truck?"

Me: <forgetting for a moment that I'm not planning to answer any questions> "Yeah"

Cop: "You moving?"

Me: "I just told you, I don't answer questions unless I'm under arrest and have a lawyer present. If you think you have probable cause to arrest me for a crime, arrest me, I'll call a lawyer and we'll do this right."

Cop: <finally noticing all the anarchist and anti-govt. stickers on my truck> "Oh, I see the stickers now. I guess you think of yourself as sovereign, huh?"

Me: "I guess that's an open question, isn't it?"

Cop: "Good luck with that. Have a good night."

So yeah, technically speaking I did answer a couple of his questions, one out of sheer instinct, and two that were "meta" questions in a sense. But the point is, this is now how I routinely deal with the police. You want to search my car? Get a warrant. You want to play twenty questions? Arrest me and wait until my lawyer is in the room. Etc.
Strange story - why allow anyone into the house???

My understanding is that any sane person would do this only if there was a paper signed by judge ...
I see. Can you explain to me how it fixes the power consumption problem? Yes, I know that it needs to reorder instructions to achieve ILP, but isn't that the entire point of a weak architecture? To reduce the memory barriers and weaken the ordering constraints, making it easier to reorder?

What are false register dependencies? And how does a three-address code help in register renaming?

Some reading references would help. I'm currently reading [1].

[1]: http://www.rdrop.com/users/paulmck/scalability/paper/whymb.2...
The engagement threshold: transforming one-time customers into repeat business
An easier approach to the submodule problem is to use "git subtree" to copy in any dependencies of the project into your tree. Then (1) your project always builds against exactly the version of the dependency you tested against, and (2) if someone else deletes their repo it doesn't affect your project (unlike git submodules).
Seems to have difficulty keeping her word just talking to someone:

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

@jsin you're the only one doubting me, dude.
Michele Catalano @inthefade 17h

To clarify, they turned out to be a terrorist task force, not FBI. I wasn't home, my husband and son were
Michele Catalano @inthefade 16h

Going silent on the issue now.
Michele Catalano @inthefade 16h

@jsin How the hell is it hearsay when it happened to ME? 4h

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

I don't think credibility like this can be meaningfully established by polling someone's twitter followers. How would they know if it were true or not?

I suppose if they've not been caught in a lie before, it's less likely that they're lying this time. But how persistent is their identity, how many do they have running at the same time, is it just a case that all the people who think they're lying have left? And are all the ones that question just banned?

-shrug-

I doubt the story. Whether it's a lie or not -shrug- It's not totally outside the realms of credibility I suppose, but her word alone isn't sufficient evidence.
Are Smart Locks Secure, or Just Dumb?
The ultimate basis of my morality is the idea that maximizing overall human pleasure and minimizing discomfort is good, and the opposite is bad. I don't think this has an objective basis. It appears self-evident to me, and as best I can tell most people agree, but I won't pretend it's any sort of law of the universe.

Once you have that basis, game theory lets you extrapolate. Theft is bad it most cases, for example, because it lowers the overall human good, even if it improves my own particular good.

Governments are useful because they're a way to overcome collective action problems like free riders or tragedies of the commons. Because of this, they can be a force for good.

I have no idea where you got this "turn in police some people, but not your friends and family" from. Please try to limit your commentary to things I have actually said, not things you have imagined.
The leaked papers reveal the UK's biggest fear is that "US perceptions of the … partnership diminish, leading to loss of access, and/or reduction in investment … to the UK".

Talk about being bent over.

Maybe it's time to cut losses now and discuss UK's expulsion from the EU (unless of course the other EU members are able to exert heavy pressure upon the UK, which I honestly doubt).
So if someone demonstrated to you that any government is actually a bigger evil, would you consider changing your mind?
Why would we need to spend hours arguing? Your analogy makes no sense at all there. Nobody is arguing that Americans aren't sufficiently panicky. It's an argument about the resources, powers and attention that should be devoted to fighting terrorism relative to its death count. The Blitz utterly fails as an example of a response proportional to a death count. The ongoing response was massive relative to the "mere" tens of thousands killed.

As to "The Troubles": Are you arguing that the British government gave it proportional attention and resources for number of people killed? I don't believe the death count was ever that high, but it was a hugely important issue for both the Irish and the British, again, for a variety of reasons that go well beyond the death count. Which, of course, is my point.
It's on Internet? Must be legit.
Yes. I need more motivation to organize this 7-figure-sloc behemoth I inherited.
This story reads like fiction to me. but it does inspire me to search using the same phrases.
Er, yes, I was originally replying to someone who said the opposite.
Raspberry-Pi Ghetto Blaster Suitcase[FR]
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I don't think that quote is so un-serious, Zuckerburg is literally and rather specifically offering his friend private information of the users of Facebook, and ending with calling them "dumb fucks".

To the extent that I am learned about Zuckerburg in his earlier days of Facebook by having read various biographical accounts, I can pretty confidently say that the seriousness of his offer and the seriousness in his calling Facebook users "dumb fucks" goes well with the rest of his persona and doings.

But anyway, this is getting pretty off-topic so I'm stopping here.
It doesn't actually make you suspicious, it just indicates that you're an informed citizen. If you paid attention in 8th grade civics class, you'll know that you get to ask if they have a warrant.

Reading the warrant will give you some indication of what they're interested in. If they don't have a warrant, then you can decide if you think you should let them in.

It's up to you; if I'm on a jury, I won't find you more suspicious if you question the police before allowing them into your home. I'd guess that there are other people like me.
I wonder if we should try to put together a programme to try to drain the NSA of technical talent ... offering jobs or other incentives to try to persuade developers currently working for the agencies and their various contractors to resign?
First, a developer can not expect anyone to individually go get 20-plus different packages (Slartibartfast has more than 10 and growing), not to mention whatever 3rd party dependencies the application uses, to work on a single application.

go get fetches dependencies, so this is not an issue with go get, anything imported will be fetched.

There is no place to put such resources in the normal Go Workspace, as anything placed in the src/[package] directory gets compiled into the resulting binary and is not accessible or editable from outside.

It's quite possible to put resources into a go pkg folder without causing problems, and those are go gettable along with the code. I don't see the issue here.

Running go get for a package clones the repository at its current HEAD/master/trunk, with no way of specifying a version or commit you might want.

Go get doesn't (yet) get versions of packages, just fetches the master. This is something that's been discussed to death on the mailing list, there are plenty of threads:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/golang-nuts

Some solutions to that are:

Go get everything once, and then stop using go get (the solution in the article, though he brings workspaces into it too, which is unnecessary) - this is problematic as he points out.

Put all your dependencies into subpackages, frozen at a particular version, I like this solution for now.

Put all your dependencies into your own repo, again frozen at a particular version, and only go get or checkout from there

Use something like gonuts.io to add versioning information (relies on the pkg authors to do this though)

Add versioning to go get to check out versions to a specific path.

It would actually be pretty easy to add version dependencies to Go by adapting the go get source. go get already versions for version of the language by looking for a certain tag, but not versions of the package. You could just check out to a path like src/github.com/jasonroelofs/slartibartfast/1.0/ and use that path for imports. Someone should just go ahead and do it, to see how it works out - if it's popular, people will use it, and eventually it might make its way into the default distribution. The folks at Google just don't seem to see it as a problem so presumably their setup/usage doesn't hit this problem.
If my understanding is correct, they're using the tiny variations in phones' signals to identify them. Could such evidence be used in court? Couldn't they just argue that it was merely a coincidence that the signal fingerprint is the same, since it's just based on randomness in the phone?
Maybe a lawyer can chime in, but if you said 'no' to when the police asked if they could see your residence, would they not be able to come in and then need a warrant?

I remember a friend telling me that when police come to your door and ask if they can come in (say for loud music or such), you can say 'no' and then put the onus on them to actually come in. And a lawyer said if you say 'yes' then you give them access to prowl through your stuff.
I agree that I'd like to see some actual evidence. The author _is_ someone with a degree of credibility, but it is a little hard to believe.

That said, I posted this specifically because I thought the discussion around exactly this would be interesting.
While I agree with you, it's important to note that every government is corrupt to some degree and the US is forced to participate in these wars as, since the end of WWII, it's been looked upon as the de facto police force of the western world. The US can't simply turn a blind eye to the middle east and let oil prices be used to wage an economic war with all western nations(likely a war we'd lose). And I'm sure there are similar concerns with every other conflict in question.

Unfortunately, like all this related to politics, the situation is complicated.
That's an interesting way to look at it, but it doesn't appear apt to me. These actions look to me like an ongoing reaction to attacks, not rational attempts to reduce the overall impact.

In any case, if you can reduce the immune reaction, that's far preferable. I don't see any reason why we can't reduce the overreaction to terrorism.
Maybe a color management issue in IE 10?
requestAnimationFrame for smart animating
What markets and industries could actually be crippled with a simple bomb?
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The troubles escalated until government ministers were being killed, and two different prime ministers narrowly missed being assassinated. Ultimately the UK capitulated and the terrorist leaders ended up as cabinet ministers in the new Irish government.

Are you really suggesting letting the terrorists win?
That's a definite possibility. We went with base-94 because it avoids UTF-8 overhead in situations where the browser will treat your data as a string (e.g. no typed-array support). We also wanted copy/paste to work, and for Flotsam data to be embeddable into JSON with minimal expansion.
> "it explains why I haven't "lost faith in the system" when it comes to the U.S. government. As bad as these programs might be, I think it is important to recognize that there is a lack of tangibly bad consequences to these programs (so far!)"

s/so far/that we know of/

And that's only if you don't consider the rape of the Fourth Amendment a "tangibly bad consequence".

If the US Congress passed a law suspending one's Miranda rights would you have the same attitude if the police didn't report any "tangibly bad consequences" they had observed? How you see these issues is a matter of perspective, and if you adopt the government's perspective you aren't doing your fellow citizens any good. Skepticism should always be the default response to any statements made by those in power concerning the proper limits of their power.
These guys in the story said they do this 100 times+ per week.

That's a good point. If they were doing this even a couple of times a month (or probably per year) you have to expect that it would be getting reported.
How We Created a Fake Vodka Brand to Promote Our Startup
What's the advantage of it being built into the OS versus using chef or puppet? There's going to be some kind of process running to handle configuration no matter what. Docker also has Dockerfiles to handle configuration of containers. After seeing this article I looked into config management in Docker and containers and I'm having a hard time seeing why something like puppet/chef isn't the right solution.
Show HN: Make your iPhone and iPad app beautiful
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> Although the author touches on some real issues with
> writing applications in Go, I do not recommend this
> article. The author does not follow the recommended
> practice for writing Go applications and the author has
> misconceptions about the Go tools.

Strongly agree. The author's workflow is full of antipatterns.
don't forget the + الله أكبر search function
So am I, as a citizen, supposed to be content with a 9/11 scale terrorist attack happening "every few years?"

We spend $0 a year on defense against alien invasions. Should I, as a citizen, be content with alien invasions happening every few years?
Yes, in fact they seem to make so much money that he's able to increase his consulting rates after almost every engagement!
Wouldn't have heard about it except for this article :) Could I get some feedback on this app I'm about to submit to the SSAC?
The linked article only provides the highlights. A more in-depth article is here:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/aug/01/gch...

As well as discussing the funding and various projects in more detail, it also sheds some light on what life is like for the rank-and-file.

It is a world of decoding and cake sales, programming and pub quizzes.

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.

There are protocols on the clearing of desks at the end of the day, with particularly sensitive documents being locked in special cupboards, the keys to which are then stored in other reinforced –lockers which can only be opened by following a set of complex instructions.
Errors found while checking this document as HTML 4.01 Transitional!

Result: 3618 Errors, 3360 warning(s)
I blame c. Those mothers should learn how to implement their programmers.