skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With regards to the data collection, the thing to realize (which I did so myself) is that email truly is the glue that ties together most internet services.

Take facebook for example. By default, almost any and all activity on the site is catalogued for you by email -- for your convenience. Someone mentioned you in an update, you get a notification. A friend sent you a private FB message, you can an email notification with the content in line (even with the support of replying to message via email as well).

Now, because email traffic on the internet is not encrypted by default, one is able to piece together the contents of communications just by looking at the email.

Essentially anything that you receive via email (e.g. password reset links; credit card statement summaries etc) is subject to capture and analysis. Given this, it may make sense to perhaps disable (potentially sensitive) email notifications as a workaround around this particular collection method.
I'm not larrys. All I'm saying is that he clearly had his own demons, and his own problems. He decided to break the law, knowing what the result would be. Then he decided to end his own life. A sad tale, but the law is the law.
If using something like shared_ptr in C++0x, it does come with some drawbacks (due to not having a strict ownership) as mentioned by Bjarne Stroustrup[1]:

Please don't thoughtlessly replace pointers with shared_ptrs in an attempt to prevent memory leaks; shared_ptrs are not a panacea nor are they without costs:

-a circular linked structure of shared_ptrs will cause a memory leak (you'll need some logical complication to break the circle, e.g. using a weak_ptr)

-"shared ownership objects" tend to stay "live" for longer than scoped objects (thus causing higher average resource usage)

-shared pointers in a multi-threaded environment can be expensive (because of the need to avoid data races on the use count)

-a destructor for a shared object does not execute at a predictable time, and the algorithms/logic for the update of any shared object is easier to get wrong than for an object that's not shared

[1] http://www.stroustrup.com/C++11FAQ.html#std-shared_ptr
You Will Want a New Mac Pro, but Here's Why You'll NEED it
I rewrote quite a bit of the Chromium browser in Go, achieving a 10x reduction in lines of code (I stopped this project before I could reliably evaluate performance). Since Chromium uses a multi-process model, this was pretty easy: I implemented the Chromium IPC protocol in Go (I wrote a Chromium utility to emit a JSON description of the IPC protocol), and then told the privileged and unprivileged Chromium processes to use my Go subprocess rather than the original logic. My Go logic ran on both Windows and Mac OS X.
"A mistake, perfected:" Upcoming documentary on APL
If you're looking to integrate a card reader and a Stripe account, you might want to check out CardFlight: https://getcardflight.com/connect-with-stripe
Good luck, just remember when you were a kid learning how to code.
Does anyone know what software is used by the hill staffers when drafting new bills? How do they make sure that the laws do not contradict each other?
Will probably send a pull request just to be able to draw gears by the diameter or radius instead of the perimeter.

can't even draw a square with the clitmouse...
Governments, Led by U.S., Seek More Data About Twitter Users
At least for me, accustomed to logic, determinism and mathematical models for laws of nature, this was actually a surprise. Instinctively I still find it distasteful, though I can't say I have anything better to offer other than the unrealistic ideal that all judges would be guaranteed to be truly impartial. I have never directly benefited nor been harmed by the nature of this 'code' either, unless you count getting out of traffic tickets by switching on a learned persona that has people skills.
UEFI? Closed the fucking tab, we're done here.
Perhaps. But that's speculation about the future, which needs to be separated from the current facts. Don't blame people for things they haven't done yet.
For the answer, see my future law review paper "A complete multi dimensional polytope model of US law"
Indeed. I just finished my undergrad degree in CS, so going 'in depth' into either field is still on the horizon for myself personally, but I am admittedly a bit more acquainted with the neurological/psychological side of things. Thanks for the link, certainly seems to touch on a lot of familiar subjects so I'll be sure to go through it.

Continuing on the 'philosophical challenge' tangent, this talk recently came to my attention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnA8GUtXpXY

I haven't delved into the matter much beyond what's presented there, but it seems plausible enough (given the evidence) to be another thorny aspect relating to 'consciousness'. Just thought I'd share.
I'll say here what I said in the other reply, but briefly.

There's a difference between a 3rd party doing the analytics and a 3rd party cookie. GA can (and should) use a 1st party cookie for this, which would make it impossible for them to correlate between sites. As a bonus, turning off 3rd party cookies also breaks ad retargeting, which makes everything better.

At that point, it's the same as Mozilla doing it themselves, but your concerns about JS being more potentially intrusive is valid.

note: i may be wrong about GA using 1st party cookies. if so, that's really not cool.
I'll happily explain, thanks for asking.

First off, in Perl the parens for a function call are not mandatory.

As such it is very useful for functions and variables to be visually difference, especially when you're using functions to generate parameters for other functions without any temp variables inbetween.

my W = qq_mult ConjugateQ, qv_mult RotationQ, Vector;

You can't tell at a glance what's going on and will need to look carefully. Adding sigils makes it quite clear:

my $W = qq_mult $ConjugateQ, qv_mult $RotationQ, $Vector;

Further, most languages have only one type of variable, a name for a single thing. Perl has multiple types of variables that behave differently. For example:

my $res = munge $one;

I see this and know that the function munge is passed one single variable. However, consider this:

my $res = munge @two;

If there wasn't the @ there, it would be easy to assume that munge gets exactly one argument. However the @ there alerts us to the fact that @two is an auto-flattening array, and munge will end up with anywhere between 0 and MAX_INT arguments passed to it.

Similarly with hashes:

my $res = munge @two;

They also auto-flatten, so they need to be marked as being different from scalars, but they also flatten in a very different way from array, in that they flatten into a list that alternates the keys and values. So they need to be marked differently from arrays.

Lastly, due to functions, variables, array and hashes having explicit sigils, they can be recognized by editors without any heavy analysis, enabling editors to mark these four types with different colors, which is extremely useful. Personally i don't see the sigils anymore, and instead just see the colors with which the types are highlighted.

(Bonus set: Actually C is often written with sigils too. I've often seen code where variables are prefixes with p_, s_, a_, i_, etc. They are not enforced by the language, but people often force themselves to use them. The downside: They are inconsistent from project to project and have to be relearned every time.)
The type cast as part of the switch is really cool, I hadn't seen that before.

switch v := v.(type) {
case string:
w.Write(int32(len(v)))
w.Write([]byte(v))
default:
w.err = binary.Write(w.w, binary.LittleEndian, v)
}

Great way to alter control flow based on the type, without a ton of ugly casts cluttering things up.
XKeyscore job listing post from 2010?
> “I haven’t lied to Congress,” Alexander responded

And WTF was that, now?

EDIT: I guess this is true because actually, he lied to the chairs in the room. Or some coffee mugs that were also present.

Is that how one evades a lie detector, btw?

It really can't get any sicker. We have now reached the bottom.
> too burdensome for individuals to make sure their works stay registered.

Four people in the world are currently verified to be 114 years old are older. An eighteen-year-old taking a photograph in 1923 would be 114 in 2019 when their 1923 photograph might accidentally go out of copyright if they don't re-register it.

You use the language and arguments I am talking about. You say "individuals" re-registering "their" 1923 photos might have the position that it is "too burdensome for individuals to make sure their works stay registered." The reality is that no individuals are making sure their works stay registered. These people will all be dead - no one is going to see their works become public domain in the moments before they die at the age of 114. You're presenting a scenario which will not happen. No individuals protecting their own works are involved.

What exists are Getty Images and other corporations which can re-register their 1923 works if they had to. These companies will certainly re-register their most valuable works.

"Too easy for works to accidentally fall out of copyright" - does anyone really think Disney is going to let Mickey Mouse fall out of copyright? Anything of value is going to be re-registered. Only things which have so little value that corporations don't bother to re-register them will become public domain. Particularly orphaned works.
I thought HN decided couple of months ago with the whole posterous thing to never, ever, trust a third part to host you blog for free.

How long until twitter buys Medium and decides to shut everything down?
The question of receiving signals is more a philosophical one of ethics. The question of broadcasting signals is one governed by law. In North America, you can't broadcast on a part of the spectrum that you don't have a licence for. Wifi devices, 900MHz phones and CB radios and such operate in a frequency band which has special provisions for such use.

I looked at their product specification and there isn't any mention of phase noise of the local oscillator. It turns out that a critical requirement for tuning into GSM signals is the phase noise or jitter of the local oscillator. Chances are, they are using a pretty good cystal, but probably not good enough for a GSM base station.

There is a good reason why GSM base stations all run off rubidium standards. In fact, you can grab 10MHz rubidium standards for a very (relatively) cheap price off eBay. They are all from decommissioned cell towers.

There is a possibility that you can still tune into a GSM signal with a substandard local oscillator. However, this behaviour would be intermittent.
>As is only using the FSF's definition of free software (where it matters less that the software itself is free, but that the software doesn't point out to you any nonfree addons.

You're conflating the FSF's definition of free software, and the FSF's criteria for recommending software to users.

The FSF sees Firefox as free software (now that the proprietary error-reporting system they used is removed); they won't recommend Firefox, because it recommends non-free software. Fedora is a distribution, not a specific program, and they won't recommend it because it recommends non-free software.

By the FSF definition, a license is free if it protects the Four Freedoms; but software licensed under that could be something the FSF doesn't wish to endorse.
The Disposable Man: A Western History of Sherpas on Everest
LightArrow Releases LifeTopix 7.0 and New App My.Shopping
Uh, I suspect something is already wrong when the yes command can cause high cpu usage on your system...

That said, I didn't know tmux could do that, and I'll be reimplimenting this in a shellscript :)

Very neat!
Is RethinkDB now "production-ready"? I recall some people using it production, however I think the devs still don't call it production ready.
The issue is that we need to demonize the people who are in fact evil and deliberately built this out and got it going. That list is surprisingly short:

GHW Bush

GW Bush

D Cheney

D Rumsfeld

C Rice

G Clapper

G Alexander

P Wolfowitz

These are the guys that created the orders that the soldiers are following, and the war they are dying in for these criminal's profits.
I wondered if this was legit, but Google's cached version from 2 weeks ago also mentions the programs, and I'm not sure if the name "XKeyscore" was publicly known back then. If so, kinda nuts that a handfull of top secret codenames made their way to a Blogger job posting website.

It's interesting to see what kinds of skills they were looking for.
whoa, this is exactly the motivation behind a current project (just posted a ShowHN thread actually!), centered around collaborative time capsules. One criticism we've come up against when we tell people we're interested in building an experience around social time capsules is that it's not consuming or addictive.

I'm optimistic in thinking that social services make it easier to connect, but I'm not sure many are designed primarily for true, intimate connections. A saying I do like though is that "Facebook is only as good as your friends list," so maybe at the end of the day it's still up to us as individuals to put forth the effort in creating meaning.
Doesn't Dwolla hate Bitcoin?
The exchange in question starts around 33:40
http://myweb.wvnet.edu/~jelkins/lawyerslit/exercises/kafka.h...
I've discovered there are some things I'm not willing to put up with in games
It's weird to me that people need all these amazing tools to just write stuff. I typically write things in emacs text mode buffers because I'm writing words and don't need any bells and whistles.

Almost all of The Geek Atlas was written like that and then pasted into whatever thing O'Reilly wanted me to create XML with.
I just censored an email I was about to write in case it is used to discredit me in the future. Jesus. The thought police are here :-(
This entire event was a staged press op. Keith Alexander is a ~30 year veteran of SIGINT, electronic warfare, and intelligence, and a Four-Star US Army General --- which is a bigger deal than you probably think it is. He's a spy chief in the truest sense and a master politician. Anyone who thinks he walked into that conference hall in Caesars without a near perfect forecast of the outcome of the speech is kidding themselves.

Heckling Alexander played right into the strategy. It gave him an opportunity to look reasonable compared to his detractors, and, more generally (and alarmingly), to have the NSA look more reasonable compared to opponents of NSA surveillance. It allowed him to "split the vote" with audience reactions, getting people who probably have serious misgivings about NSA programs to applaud his calm and graceful handling of shouted insults; many of those people probably applauded simply to protest the hecklers, who after all were making it harder for them to follow what Alexander was trying to say.

There was no serious Q&A on offer at the keynote. The questions were pre-screened; all attendees could do was vote on them. There was no possibility that anything would come of this speech other than an effectively unchallenged full-throated defense of the NSA's programs.

Even the premise of the keynote was calculated to wrong-foot NSA opponents. However much you might want to hear Alexander account for the activities of the NSA, the NSA itself is not the real oversight mechanism for the NSA! My guess is that no pol with meaningful oversight over NSA would have consented to address a room full of technology professionals about NSA's programs; they were happy to send NSA's own supremely well-trained figurehead to do that for them.

I think a walkout might have been effective, had it been organized well enough in advance (perhaps with some of the same aplomb as the [I think misguided] opposition to CISPA); at least you'd get some stinging photos.
Api, please make a post expanding on these ideas.
Then post it here and send some copies to international news sites, like the guardian.

We need to wake up, your post would help a lot.
>and at the same time justifying their complacency about the issue.

A good theory, as I have an extremely difficult time imagining anyone in an activist (non-complacent) stance on this issue ever reacting like that to these revelations.
It's up to the court (and maybe to the judge?). There's a pilot program that the District Court for Massachusetts is doing to allow them:

http://www.mad.uscourts.gov/general/Cameras.html
Thank you for sharing. I'll be sure to listen in later.

While everyone else on this subject is going to be armchair-debating whether or not the article is a fair representation of what happened... I'm going to just listen into the audio myself and make my own opinion.
How can anyone really be behind something they barely know anything about? When a bill like that comes around, the general reactions usually run from If You Say So to They'd Better Not Screw This Up. Some are completely deferential, some are completely skeptical. Nobody knew the details of what the law entailed for certain, so argument over it is like kickboxing on a waterbed: pointless, but vaguely resembling real fighting/debate. EDIT: to be clear, the general assumption is that Congressman know enough about the law to understand it (some things can be withheld from the public).

> incredibly afraid of the political suicide

Afraid is not the right word. Aware. When all (public) evidence concerning a law says "fight the terror!" and buildings are still blowing up, you'd have to represent a very interesting district to be "soft on terror".
Remember that diff is an algorithm to generate the smallest set of operations to produce version B from version A, not an accurate reconstruction of what happened.
Diff algorithms are also often tuned not try as hard to find the smallest set of changes for larger documents, due to speed concerns.
What we need now is software that reads bills ("in section 123.abc the text 'blah blah' is replaced by 'bleh bleh') and compiles it into before/after views of what the resulting code would be.
I don't care whether the director of the NSA is a bad guy, it just makes you look bad if you heckle someone on stage. There are probably few more scrutinizing audiences for the director of the NSA than a professional security conference. I would rather have him say what he has to say and be analysed by the many bright minds at the conference than for him to be childishly interrupted and waste time that could be spent talking about the actual role of the NSA in the security of the nation.
NSA General Alexander Shouts Back at Black Hat Heckler
In wake of leaks, US intelligence pulls back the curtain on metadata collection
Well, maybe he doesn't, but you're the bigger man so you do it anyway. Turning the other cheek and all.

Also, the organisers invited him because they thought you might want to hear what he has to say, so you do it out of respect for them.
The clause in question:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_or_Debate_Clause

"...shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony, and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their attendance at the Session of their Respective Houses, and in going to and from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place."

Leaking classified information is a felony, and may also be construed as treason. Sounds to me like he has no immunity at all. I'm not a lawyer or Supreme Court justice, however.
is there a blog framework/platform specifically for developers? I want to show code samples with syntax highlighting (and possibly the ability to actually run the sample code)? is there something which lets me embed d3.js charts? i've looked at pelican, jekyll, etc. but i want something simpler.
I'm very suspicious of Google's role in all this, but there's not much overlap in the list above and the map you refer to, outside of the normal population and business centers in Europe and the US. I didn't see any in Google data centers in Libya, Burma, Nigeria, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, Iran, or even Venezuela (the only one in S. American looks like it's in Brazil). Based on a quick glance, the only overlap between the list above and Google's server looks like Moscow, a major global business center.

Were we looking at the same map?
Would you mind forking my script and adding your shell script there? I was too lazy at the time to use bash.
There isn't an official add-on yet, but as mfenniak pointed out, RethinkDB Cloud has an add-on in beta: https://addons.heroku.com/rethinkdb-cloud
No it would not... At this point, it seems quite feasible that Facebook, Google, et al., are telling the truth at least in some respect. The point is that there are TWO different forms of data collection: PRISM and XKeyscore. PRISM happens via court order and is what we've heard about primarily up until today. XKeyscore is a separate program and does not require the compliance of Google, Facebook, et al. In fact, it doesn't even require their knowledge.

The key now is to see who exactly is letting the NSA tap their network hubs to sniff the entire Internet. These will be your Internet Service Providers...
High-level overview: You get an image (an actual filesystem image). You "docker run" some command, which creates a container (container is to image what VM is to, well, disk image, the container is what runs). Any change to this container doesn't change the base image, but it's done on a separate one. You can commit at any point and "freeze" the container's image and get back to it. You can start and stop the container at any time, but you can only run one starting process in it (so you might want to run sshd or supervisord).

That's pretty much the gist. It's a VM where snapshots are free, you can clone it at any point and branch off, and it's really lightweight to run. Basically, think of it as the child of VirtualBox and git.
As a Russian Jew who immigrated for the United States, hearing your story upset me a lot: there are many parallels between how Russia/USSR (both under tzar and communists, fortunately less so after fall of USSR) has treated Jews and how Malaysia and Indonesia treat their Chinese minority.

It is sad that I am powerless to do to help you and that our immigration laws will probably hold what your government has done to you _against you_, e.g., if you were in the process of getting a college degree but were kicked out by your government, you will not be eligible for an H1B visa. Fellow Americans: this is why immigration policy is not about economics or politics, but a moral issue. Perhaps it's true that immigration leads to lower salaries or to more democrats instead of republicans being elected (but I have my doubts), but isn't it a _far greater_ injustice to prohibit people like OP[1]) from wanting to have basic liberties we take for granted?

[1] ... or myself from 17 years ago: we had to jump through many hoops for my dad to get an H1B visa, for my mum and I to get an H4 visa, and later for all of us to get green cards. We were racked by uncertainty and anxiety over many years: I thought a lot about how we might not get a green card and how upon return I'll likely be inducted into the military where I'll be periodically bullied or even tortured ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedovshchina ) for edification of others.
They track "production ready" with the following item in their tracker:

https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/1174
this 40% metric could only be true of they are counting the third-party (with ffmpeg, webkit, etc) but then we cannot say this is chrome..

also there are a lot of tools written in python(gyp, grit, ninja etc).. but this dont get into the executable or libraries.. so i would not count (at least in the perspective of this thread) as the chrome itself. since those tools are used in other projects as well and come only with the source code to build things (it would be like to count the gcc compiler as part of the source)
I'm glad to hear I was reading too much into the summary.
So you plan to use docker as a replacement for tools like pbuilder?