skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Is it okay to collect anonymous XYZ data?
Anonymity is not binary.

- What lower level of anonymity is acceptable? Is 1 in 30 acceptable?

- What about edge cases where it becomes much lower? Say only one person in a small county has an account to a web service because it is largely targeted at people elsewhere?

- What about academic improvements that keep decreasing anonymity by improving understanding of collected data? What time limit would NSA get to update its systems in case of such improvements? What happens if the speed of academic improvements is larger than the speed of updates in NSA systems? Is the system scrapped right away?

I agree that formal definitions seem lucrative. But these aren't simplified mathematical static models that we are talking about.
Maybe you could help me out here. I'm split on the whole data science in research vs business. I'm an undergrad Senior majoring in CS (minors in math and Computational Science). All the data science jobs I see for research firms require a PhD. I'd much rather work for a research firm than as an analyst for a business (I think). Any suggestions for someone looking to get some experience before pursuing more schooling? (not like I don't enjoy my classes but I'd rather not drop the dough after undergrad if I can get decent experience and a salary to help pay for a graduate program)
The Machine Zone
A loop? Can you please explain?
This should have been the first release. Unfortunately the media and average citizens have a short attention span for continuing coverage of anything..

He should have led with this leak.
>...the employees in the first floor District Clerk's office (gently) laughed at my attempts to find anything about the Court. They referred to it as the "Room of Requirement", and said they had no idea what floor it was even on.

In a maelstrom of political chaos, it's nice to see at least a bit of humor every now and then. It seems Life Imitates Art. This pleases the Potter fan in me.
My favorite part is that the form assumes you need only a single line for the "Justification" field.
You need to create two gears, a big one and a small one, then place the small one directly in the center of the big one. You can then attach a chain around a gear. Took me forever.
Not sure what other cities are like but in Melbourne I can't justify the price difference. The times I have used Uber I have had a coupon or wanted to take a nice car to get to a specific event.

Our taxi system isn't great but is passable at most times. I would much rather a company similar to Uber that leaveraged technology to drive down Taxi prices rather than compete of service/ luxury.
There is definitely an academic bubble. The infamous ivory tower. But in biology specifically, many of the problems are objectively important (as judged by society). And some people really do love spending all their waking hours working on them, and don't give a crap about the money.

I wouldn't call it virtuous, but it is deeply intellectually satisfying.

Agree about biologists not being ready - computational biology needs more computer scientists, not more biologists.
I'm assuming that's where the NSFW version of this article is. It probably has more risque photographs than one of a cat, keyboard, mouse, and right hand.

Of course, the photo might have some subtle implications. For instance, where's the guys left hand????
Ask HN: Which computer for college?
College season approaches, yet Haswell computers are few and far between. Most incoming freshmen at my college would hope for their computer to last three years at least. For those who don't want Macbook Airs, would you recommend waiting for Haswell or purchasing last year's MBP/Thinkpad?
This approach wasn't quite good enough for me. Even markdown -- for that matter, anything in a text editor -- still feels like "code mode" to me.

My solution was to make an open-source cms with google docs as the editor. I can manage my site from docblogger.org, use the fantastic google docs editor as my wyswig, and can edit the code to do whatever I want, whenever I want.

Code's at https://bitbucket.org/rattray/acvte/ and the interface is at docblogger.org for anyone interested. Very little activity/use so far, though.
> “Research on persuasion shows the more arguments you list in favor of something, regardless of the quality of those arguments, the more that people tend to believe it,”

[1] has some different research which claims that people average the arguments made, rather than summing them up, which most expect. It won't make any difference if you have a whole bunch of low value arguments, but will if there a combination of strong points and weaker ones.

[1] http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/10/the_presentation_mistake_you...
I know this will probably initiate a huge debate but I'm not personally convinced that what Bradley Manning released and what Snowden released is equivalent in scope. In the case of Snowden the documents seem much more targeted to exposing the problem he's trying to bring light on. While Manning made a much broad stroke release of tons of documents probably not even knowing the content of all those documents which totaled almost 500,000.
Brian Krebs Harassed
No. It shows Google Maps in a iframe and was created 13 Jul 2013. https://gist.github.com/VictorBjelkholm/6127343
A $775 phone is so 2012. This year, the big innovation will be Motorola selling a not-bleeding-edge phone that runs Android just fine for a cheap price, as many other 2nd tier OEMs are already doing for the prepaid market.
Snowden's "I had the authorities to wiretap anyone" wasn't a lie
New revelations from Snowden leaks support the claim that anyone can be wiretapped and the NSA is everywhere
It's true, there are circumstances where a person can make a lot more money by doing the morally wrong or criminal thing.
How does that jive with the US citizen / non-citizen split in what the NSA feels entitled to do? Does that not imply all people are granted 4A rights?
What constitutes "establishment" of religion? Does this mean congress can make no law about what a teacher teaches (this will abridge their free speech, at least in a temporal sense)?
I love the idea, but I don't know why your poll didn't include a $0 option. Personally, I would prefer to simply "be interested" in an ad or two on your site every once in a while if I enjoy the service. I think you need to show people that your digested articles are worth >= $3 per month before you start charging. Get some dedicated readers who really value the service by doing it for free/with ads at first, then change to a subscription-based service. Maybe even offer a short "early adopter" program where those who sign up early can read for free after you start charging. Just my opinion.
> But there are many advanced techniques that only experienced developers will be able to grapple with.

At one time iterators were considered a technique and a design pattern. Now, they are a part of most languages. They are transparent. They are taken for granted.

Currently, programming takes place within the domain of software development. It is not surprising then that we value advanced techniques within the industry. Just like there are advanced techniques that are used within the domains of electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and biology (just to name a few).

As we get better at our job as programmers, we further make our "advanced techniques" transparent to those that use our systems. Sure, currently, these systems are usually very domain specific. However, there is nothing to say that we can not build better software development environments which are both non-domain specific and, at the same time, hide the underlying complexities that require experienced developers.

In my opinion, these development environments would use a type of visual language enabling a lot more people to program. I am biased because this is a problem I've been working on for quite a few years now.
Please don't think of diversity as an issue that doesn't affect you, because you are a man. A lack of diversity affects all of us. More diverse groups perform better. If a lack of diversity is a result of artificial barriers being put into place (such as a community not welcoming new members), then that less the effect an individuals right to self-determiniation, and I believe that's an issue that effects all of us.
They're not going to complain if they're afraid of being fired. Restaurant work is some of the hardest work out there, if you put in a full working week that shouldn't leave someone in poverty.
I can't feel sympathetic at all to the idea that this car rental company should somehow avoid these fees.

This is not a story of potentially overbearing or obsolete regulation such as that faced by companies like Uber and Airbnb. This is simply a property owner controlling activity on their own property. The fact that airports are usually owned my governments is completely incidental here. You'd no doubt find the same sort of fees at a privately-owned airport. If you want to do business on somebody else's property, you play by the owner's rules, end of story.
They've been doing exactly that for about 237 years.
Selling with Integrity
I use flashblock instead of adblock. Advertising pays for much of the internet, so I feel it's reasonable to let some of it through. Flashblock kills the worst offenders, and given I also run noscript (which isn't for everyone), the rest of the bad ones are taken care of as well. Simple images are allowed through, and these kinds of ads aren't particularly distracting. In the rare case there is a bad animated .gif, hitting 'esc' stops them cycling.

Adblock just feels like bad faith to me - there is no 'give and take', it's just 'take'.
Yes, I think a podcast would work for commuters who are coders - definitely the right form factor.
What about the The Timex Sinclair 1000 http://www.cracked.com/article/120_the-5-most-ridiculously-a...
soprano last season
> They forego immutability and controllable object lifetimes...

How/where does immutability come into play here? Isn't it orthogonal to GC? Genuine question.
Georgia Tech uncovers iOS security weaknesses
In the end, I don't think it matters much either way.

I think the walkout would have had the benefit of creating a wall of peers waiting outside the conference hall watching their peers who refused to participate. Also, again, good photo op.

It's funny, you and I are on the same page about wanting to disentangle software security (and I guess infosec) people from USG/SIGINT/LEO work, but for I suspect are somewhat different reasons. So many people on HN seem to think the whole industry is in the back pocket of the USG, which just isn't true; I think a lot of people considering careers helping with online privacy think they need to surrender their moral qualms about assisting the USG, which just isn't true.
You could also add in EDGAR data that touches the laws to make estimates on the way the judiciary would interpet a certain action. It could also be used to find loopholes, conviction-free zones near boundaries in the law that could be closed.
Not if it matters much, but I have no problem with the argument that some things should be written in C or on top of the JVM for performance reasons.

My problem is with people claiming that some popular scripting language, say Ruby, is massively faster than all the rest. Which as a general rule is simply not true (although it may be the cases, for some well defined set of problems).
It's actually fairly easy in some cases. If the user is with Virgin mobile, their 6 digit password can be bruteforced in a couple of minutes, and then every text and call they've ever made is public. I've made a fuss to them about this quite a few times, but they've never done anything to fix it.
Depending on where you are in the world, you could consider applying for computational jobs at some of the biotech giants (or startups, depending on your cultural preference). There are plenty on the US west coast and around Boston, Seattle, etc.

An alternative is to get a programming job doing something relevant (e.g. something with applied machine learning) and use those skills to work on open-source bio projects in your spare time. You'd then have some money, relevant experience, and demonstrated interest which could be a good foundation for graduate work if you decided to go that route, or for a career in data science if you don't.
NSA response to today's revelations: http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/press_room/2013/30_July_2013....
I like what I see, why did you stop working on it?
CBM sounds like a bad idea to me. "Get over your anxiety by ignoring pertinent information in your environment!"
"but no one responds. (... Perhaps I didn't write the email very well...) :)"

I think you would have done a lot better asking just 1 specific, targeted question that could be answered in a sentence. Successful people are generally busy and as much as they want to help others, they generally don't have the time to help everyone.

A focused, short question can open a door and possibly get a dialogue going. In addition, trying to phrase such a question will get you concentrating on what is important to you, which can only help.
I have a small app which provides you daily archive of HN
http://ankushhn.herokuapp.com/days?date=20130501
Right, those are exactly the questions that need to be asked, discussed before implementation, and then included in the law if it passes.

What meta-data is truly anonymous and what is not? Is the agency permitted to built a tool to de-anonymize data based on academic research, or is the data in some ways protected against these tools?

They may get to the end of this process and in this instance find that such a government tool, even based on anonymous data is uncontainable, and should not be implemented. If you just grant blanket power and rely upon a courts interpretation of your two paragraph scribble to straighten things out, the intent of the law can be completely lost.
I'm all for giving low-wage workers a larger share of the productivity gains made in the last few decades, but this kind of simplistic thinking doesn't take the immense complexity of the macroeconomy into account. Prices on goods won't simply stay flat. Stock prices will plummet, affecting pension funds and individual investors (i.e. the middle class) disproportionately. Wage disparity is a serious problem, and there's unfortunately no simple solution.
PERL -- Practical Extraction and Report Language
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/htbin/perl-man
Another contributor commented - it looks like it supports more Vim commands and is being actively maintained, unlike Vintage.
Car2Go is way better positioned for taking the self driving short term rental market
Sure, but can the pizza guy come in and sell you pizza in the stadium, then take you off the property to collect?
I've used a pattern such as this in my code [1]:

do := func(n int, err error) {
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
}

do(string.Write(/* 1 */))
do(string.Write(/* 2 */))
// ...
do(string.Write(/* n */))

In fact, the pattern I've found is to declare throw-away lambdas [2] that I then call (few lines later). I haven't looked at all the pros/cons of doing this, but so far I find it's a very versatile way of doing.

[1]: https://github.com/aybabtme/graph/blob/master/digraph.go#L61
[2]: https://github.com/aybabtme/graph/blob/master/digraph.go#L10...
Google Chromecast review: The dongle is ready to take over your TV
The hacker who poked holes in medical devices
> By and large, the best programmers eschew nesting in favor of early returns.

Yup.

> Invariably (in my experience) those who argue against early returns are inferior programmers (and not only by virtue of lacking taste in this particular debate).

Yup.
Coinbase launches redesign
Hospice - helping people navigate their own impending death gave me some perspective. I did it for a few years in my early 30s and had both elderly patients and some younger than I. Pretty intense but the training was great, I was highly valued by the patients and their families, and it really made me think about not wasting the time I have on the planet, however long that should last.

I was a musician at the time and, like you, thought, "I should do something with my days since I have so much free time."
"People do not react to abstractions. They only react to direct experience. Very few people are even interested in abstractions, and even fewer people can become emotionally involved or emotionally react to an abstract thing."

- Stanley Kubrick http://youtu.be/xa-KBqOFgDQ?t=51m30s

It's worth noting that this was in the context of nothing less than the atom bomb.
Hi Alex, I think a free option would be a great idea for a summary service with a larger market, I just don't know if the HN audience could sustain it. If I get a ton of responses who are just curious but not many willing to pay I will come back to that as a concept.

On gauging the quality of the service, I've included a sample digest on the site which I hope helps. However I take your point. People may well want to see that the level of quality is sustained.
Glad to see someone's enjoying it. I think I came out my program more jaded than the average student.

I agree that there are intellectually satisfying problems to solve. However, without getting into the tedious debate on the values of basic science vs translational science, how much of that intellectual satisfaction is mental masturbation?

Are these problems really that important? How much of the cool intellectual questions will directly give you a meaningful biological interpretation? Perhaps this is more of a comment on our field. I found a lot of the intellectual satisfying questions during my phd to involve algorithms/data structures, which mostly are just the tools to get at the biological interpretation.
Indeed, they didn't. And it likely cost the world trillions (I'm being conservative, here). The sour grapes are justified here. To give a few examples:

In the sixties, people were able to build interactive systems with virtually no delay. Nowadays we have computers that are millions times faster, yet still lag. Seriously, more than 30 seconds just to turn on the damn computer? My father's Atari ST wast faster than my brand new computer in this respect.

Right now, we use the wrong programming languages for many projects, often multiplying code size by at least 2 to 5. I know learning a new language takes time, but if you know only 2 languages and one paradigm, either you're pathetic, or your teachers are.

X86 still dominates the desktop.
Maybe a gist would be appropriate?
That does seem most likely, and I would not count it as meaningful. They've also said before that they don't comment on individual pardons, though I can't think of a good reason for that.

In this case, though, the pardon itself would be a substantial piece of policy. I think it would be disingenuous and disrespectful of the administration to refuse comment.

I expect to be disrespected, but hold out some small amount of hope that they will surprise me.
My biochem friend just accepted a post-doc at a respected lab for $39k.
Are these subjects that are already published or are they unique?
Have you already started into your specialty? Maybe you should do econometrics.
America is overloaded on stimulation. For something to get attention, it has to be extraordinarily sensationalistic. These stories are boring government spy stuff to average joe. The NSA would need to be eating babies, assaulting the family dog, promoting / blocking abortions, promoting / taking guns, or the equivalent.

I would argue that half of the country only gets fired up about something when they're told to do so by the party they vote for, the same one that dictates what they believe on any given issue. That's why it hurts that there is a Democrat in the Presidency right now, it has silenced a lot of the supposed civil rights advocates on the left.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl

high-traffic websites that use Perl extensively include Amazon.com, bbc.co.uk, Priceline.com, Craigslist, IMDb, LiveJournal, Slashdot and Ticketmaster.
> It's interesting that someone who professes loving to program in Perl refers to it as "PERL". People who refer to it in all-caps instantly give themselves away as outsiders to the language

Alternatively, they might just be a refugee from FORTRAN, the language which predates the invention of capital letters :)
The key point I think here is the transportation of people from the airport to the car lot. An airport should absolutely be able to put a fee on this. If customers were able to make their own way to an offsite lot I don't see what the grounds for a fee would be though.
I've found that ios is a lot worse regarding fragmentation than Android. While Android requires a bit more legwork at the beginning, once you have written the app it will generally keep working on most devices. There aren't too many changes in new Android versions that break things.

iOS however is a horrendous mess. Every year or two they overhaul their layout system (contentScalingFactor, then auto-layout, and other things). Also, each time a new version of iOS comes out you need to work around various bugs/changes and you end up tweaking/hacking your code to get it working on all devices. I've just spent an entire day getting one of our apps working on the ipad in iOS 7, and another half day getting it working on iphone. It will require another day or two to get everything working perfectly, and then I'll have to recreate all the new icons, launch images, screenshots, etc.
Facebook-style swipe menu with Ember and CSS3
I spent so long at uni they started paying me to stay - not quite got a PhD yet so I'm still kicking around the system, but unless you're very lucky uni is a pretty crappy place to work. A lot of what used to be good about working at uni has been stripped away by increasing class sizes, increasing bureaucracy and decrease in discretionary time.

A couple of years ago I got a long term freelance gig which I was describing to a professor I talk to about once a year the other day. He said:

"Interesting work, good money, and they leave you alone to get on with it. Sounds brilliant".

Although my current work has next to nothing to do with what I did at uni, it was a valuable experience. However I don't think most people are as lucky as me.
Neat.

> Defending Our Nation. Securing Our Future.

...I read that as...

Defending Our Own Money. Securing Our Own Power.
I've always liked Connections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series). What is so great about this show is that James Burke is able to point out how new and amazing ideas come about by connecting a few, seemingly unrelated, concepts to make a new idea.

In my opinion, the ability for someone to take a few observations about the world around them and turn it into something new and amazing is what makes them brilliant.

We are now at a point in history where a lot of people are able to take in a lot of different ideas leading to a lot of new discoveries (one of the reasons why I think new technology is now being created at an almost exponential rate).

You seem to be implying that a particular problem can't be solved because brilliant people in the past have not solved it yet. In my opinion, problems aren't solved yet because someone has not "connected the dots" yet.
nginx is not only good a serving static file but is a (one of the most?) common reverse proxy server.
haha, no. It was meant as a quasi-joke. I'd like to see one though.

Certain laws are very cut-and-dry (speeding for instance) and perhaps laws could be proven on a functional basis.

You could even make it axiomatic from the constitution and declaration of independence.

Of course, you'd need to define the axiomatic meaning of things like 'the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed' - which is hard to do even with such simple language.

And then after loading the axioms, you'd spend a lifetime going through errors in the existing laws.