skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're talking about long-run equilibrium which isn't totally relevant here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_power). In a perfectly competitive equilibrium market, you're right, producers are price takers. But we're not talking about wheat farming. When we're talking about the introduction of new products, etc, we're necessarily talking about markets that aren't in their long-term equilibrium. Such markets are where all the money is made. E.g. today, the CD drive market is probably in its long-run equilibrium and highly competitive, and there is no profit to be made producing CD drives. But it was a highly lucrative product for Sony when the technology was first introduced. In these contexts, producers do have a certain amount of pricing power, and can extract positive profits as a result. Moreover, even in perfectly competitive markets, where costs are irrelevant to prices, costs are relevant to companies' decisions about whether to engage in R&D. If the market dynamics are such that prices approach marginal cost, there is very little incentive to engage in R&D, because it won't be profitable.

As a concrete example, say you're ARM and contemplating investing $1 billion to put a new quad-core 3 GHz 1W CPU on the market. Because this a new product, you have a certain amount of pricing power to begin with. That pricing power allows you to extract positive economic profits, at least until your design is copied and the market becomes highly competitive. For the whole exercise to be worth while, you have to recoup that $1 billion in R&D before the market becomes competitive and prices approach marginal costs of production. If your Chinese competitor can copy your design for $100 million in 6 months, they have a huge advantage. At that point both companies will together likely still have a lot of pricing power, but because your competitor had much lower R&D costs to get the same product, he can undercut you o price and still recoup his lower R&D expense. In that sort of market, the profitable strategy is to copy, not to do original R&D.
This is a good time to remind everyone of a decent eBook PDF version of SICP: http://sicpebook.wordpress.com/
I don't know about TAoCP but SICP has been available in electronic format for some time. They released the full book as HTML [1] but others have taken to formatting it in Mobi [2], PDF [3] and even a "Pocket" edition [4] formatted for small devices.

[1] http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html

[2] https://github.com/twcamper/sicp-kindle

[3] https://github.com/sarabander/sicp-pdf

[4] https://github.com/sarabander/sicp-pocket
Seems significantly more likely than what was claimed in the original story:

1. The NSA using monitoring technology against civilians in the country, against their charter.
2. County sheriffs deputies who are members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force obtaining this classified information from the NSA
3. Aforementioned county sheriffs accidentally divulging said classified data

I'd listen to an argument that points 1 or 3 occurred. Point 2? Way more likely that somebody read facebook than interagency communication of classified data from a classified program to a local law enforcement officer with no security clearance.
In Finnish driving schools we are taught to try to put our feet on the car ceiling in a situation like that. It seems pretty difficult, but gravity helps when you're upside down and actually in a need for that trick. That way one can avoid falling on their face after unbuckling.
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Hope they get good liability insurance.
Resisting a law is non-violent, but often gets a violent response from authorities, with guns. Most existing approved methods to change law simply dont work for most normal people.

Its not as black and white as you think. If a minority is oppressed by a majority, then yes, the democracy is broken. The point of democracy is not legalized mob rule, it MUST protect minorities.

The last bit you just made up.
Thanks Kirill, but I am cheered up. :) When I was first told, it took me by surprise and I've since thought a lot about it. Once I spent some time really processing it, I had to write down what I realized.
Seems reasonable, assuming you asked about Java experience and they say they're familiar with the language.
We don't even know that the police looked at the page; for all we know, someone called this in to the police.
It's on page 260 for anyone going through it.

But you should also context that the studies are based on Norway and Sweden, and the latest reference in it is from 2003 whereas public acceptance has changed quite a bit in ten years, especially in the U.S. where it seems every three months gay marriage is legal in another state.
You'd think so but when the use case involves dynamically retrieving fresh data it becomes one of the last things to work on. Lots of people have CSV data and it makes sense to support it but since it's generally a manual process it doesn't deliver a good "flow" for the customer. If they have to repeatedly export/import their data manually to have the chart data update it'll seem like a chore.

Compare this to connecting to a customer's database directly. You can refresh your (cached) chart data on your own schedule and the customer doesn't need to be involved at all.

Oh and if anyone is thinking, "Yeah but I can schedule a cron job to extract the CSV file and publish it every X minutes", yes you could do that but again that's work for the customer. If the pitch is "sign up, plug in to your database, and boom charts!" there really should be a "schedule automated cron job" component.

All that aside, it is useful to be able to manually add data like this. Particularly for static data where the manual work is infrequent.
I wrote a column for many years called "Police Blotter" and have some familiarity with law enforcement investigative techniques. This is what happens in real life, not on HN.
Cool! 2 thoughts:

1) Would be cool if it were a dry erase surface, both for writing the month on it and circling important dates, etc.
2) Many have mentioned the 31 days problem, but that's solved with a magnet of some kind to cover the 31 on months where that day doesn't exist.
If this was the cause, why were they questioned about pressure cookers and not fireworks?

There's now a guardian article up about this with contradictory responses from the FBI and local police.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/01/new-york-police...

I find it unlikely that the JTTF don't have access to prism and other tools, so that seems a more likely avenue to me; searching for pressure cookers could lead to all sorts of non-https pages on amazon for example. After all that's exactly what these tools are designed to do - dig whatever the operators consider flags for terrorism this week out of the haystack of Internet traffic.
I own a pressure cooker. I used it for cooking. Not only is it legal to own a pressure cooker, hundreds of thousands of americans, and tens of millions of people world wide, own and use these devices. They are particularly useful for reducing the cook time of long cooking dishes like stews, and are also necessary for proper sterilization of canned foods which are not acidic enough to be safe from normal immersion bath sealing. No license or ID or special training is needed to purchase or operate a pressure cooker.

I also have a fairly good sized box of leftover fireworks and firecrackers. These are also legal and normal to own, and many millions of americans have purchased said items. There are fireworks stands in parking lots and gas stations during the summer, and there are fireworks warehouses that sell items in bulk. No license, ID or special training is generally required to purchase or operate fireworks in the states where they are legal. Some areas they are banned because of the fire hazard, some areas have age purchase restrictions that require ID.

If I did put a photo of my pressure cooker, and my fireworks, on a facebook feed, I do not agree that that would be probable cause to search my house, or even to ask to do so (which is absolutely not a normal and routine interaction with law enforcement), nor would it be a reasonable use of taxpayer money to send a team out to investigate.
The article is a little disingenuous.

There aren't two options for a patent like this (horde it or give it away freely).

The other option is to out-license the patent to your competitors for a fee, say $5. The other car manufacturers can speak to the additional safety offered, customers can seek those types of cars out (and are likely to pay for the privilege).

Volvo makes money on their invention and customers get the safety they desire.

Everybody wins.
Ah, pg, assigning homework to… everyone.
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The distinction between public and private in this scenario is the difference between pictures posted so that everyone can see versus a string that only two parties can read directly or others might sniff indirectly.
as was proved recently, it basically boils down to be hit in the right spot the cars are hardened to pass the safety ratings tests. Maybe not on malice but because the emphasis on those tests, the car engineers focus a lot on those, while ignoring (or saving costs/weight) others.

There's a new batch of safety rating tests that i can't find the link to, that changed the frontal non-centered crash from the original position to some degrees off, and most cars jumped from 5 to 3 stars.
It's also true. Check out news.com tomorrow morning.
That is a known procedure when buying something online and picking it up in person. And it is somewhat burdensome for people without credit cards. But then those people wouldn't be buying stuff on line anyway. But the Genius Bar is a service that doesn't cost anything and might not even end with you paying anything. And even if you do end up paying/buying... Apple stores still take cash right? Requiring that you give them a credit card just to talk with someone does not sound like the Apple way.

EDIT (to answer the above EDIT 2): Both would be effective and easy for Apple to do if they cared. Although, requiring an Apple ID could be problematic for a person who doesn't have one, right? Admittedly, I'm not an Apple consumer myself so I don't really know what is involved in getting an Apple ID or why a non-user would need a Genius Bar appointment.
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http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110719/ has a scene right about people like you.
I fear the Brits are more pessimistic about their government than US citizens.

Which I've always felt dangerous - on a personal, social and democratic level - if combined with isolation from the country's political system.
Asking about pressure cookers is probably a standard question these days, for obvious reasons. It doesn't mean they were monitoring Google searches.
Software patents are not "so clearly harmful" just because you say so.

The reason many patents, not all and not necessarily the majority, are harmful is because there is no clear definition of what a patent is allowed to be. The definition of hardware patents that was intuitively accepted by patent clerics did not evolve properly to accommodate software. This is by no means a limitation on patents but by the bodies that grant them.

It also isn't a matter of the bar being low for patents applicants. The weakness in the system is that until a clearly worded definition of what a software patent constitutes, we can't pass a judgement on whether patents are useful or harmful.
"Now, when will it and The Art of Computer Programming be available in an electronic format?"
How ironic.

I would say that labeling someone who posted factual evidence that M-66 explosives are in fact legal and relatively ordinary recreational fireworks as an "outrage tourist" is a beautiful example of character assassination. Far more so than merely alluding to the title of a self-identified media correspondent who goes on to make a defense that the photos are public and that law enforcement can access them, while de-emphasizing/distracting from the fact that neither google searches for pressure cookers nor facebook photos of fireworks merit a law enforcement visit. Verbatim from declan's G+ post "Having curious local cops ask you questions about your public photos of explosives is not [a big story]."

If one or the other is potentially happening, then there is a cause for concern that at least justifies a personal article on medium by Catalano. Had law enforcement actually revealed to Catalano, that hey, we're visiting you because you posted fireworks on your facebook, then she probably wouldn't have written that article. However, being investigated in a Kafkaesque manner, where you have little idea what your original crime could have been since you are a law-abiding citizen (searching for pressure cookers or posting fireworks photos on facebook is pretty innocuous behavior) might lead to legitimate speculation on the methods of law enforcement.

EDIT: None of this is to say that mass media isn't overly eager to report stories without enough support, and kudos to declan's investigative skills and intent, but I do think that drawing conclusions based on contrarianism and real character assassination of someone who added legitimate facts to the discussion isn't very productive.
> purely based on search terms.

I got the impression from the blog post that a son may have clicked on links possibly relating to how bombs are made. Perhaps the FBI were monitoring who clicks on those links, and then checked for further search activity etc.

I'm not suggesting any of this is warranted obviously (Terrorism isn't a real threat at all), but it does look like it was more than 'just' search terms.
What exactly is your point?

Well in any case, at least we're back to the original claims so let's try and get to the bottom of it:

The police do what 100 time a week? Go to random houses and ask odd pressure cooker bomb related questions?

Again how is this statement supposed to do to dispel the original Google search = police visit suspicion. The cop probably doesn't want the suspected terrorist to get too jumpy. In any case.. who cares how the cop is trying to justify his strange visit to this particular household. He's certainly not going to explicitly say "Well we know you searched for pressure cookers so we wanted to see what that's all about". Or is that the kind of "proof" you're hoping to see here.

The goal here should be to try and verify the woman's claims. Not try and find 100 reasons to dismiss it in the fastest manner possible.
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Link this to PTC scheme and you are doing well better than in the article; for 10 second display time, you will get 1000 guaranteed visits to your website, for whopping $1,5.
A great viewpoint for the choosing vs lifestyle argument.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJtjqLUHYoY
Especially in languages where whitespace matters, I think it's the wrapping of the lines itself that is problematic
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I'm not sure what you mean by this exactly. What does "federal credentials" mean?

JTTFs are manned by both federal and local LEOs. The Chicago JTTF, for example, absolutely includes detectives from both Chicago Police Department and Cook County Sheriff's Police.
Here is a more readable diff: https://www.draftable.com/compare/9spTfcM
Sheesh, this is one of the most inane comments I've ever read on HN (which says something). My post wasn't a defense of the cops. I never said the visit was justified.

If anything, as I wrote, it makes the cops look even more dumb. And if I'm a cop who's told by my supervisor to ask some guy about a bomb, and we have a 45-minute discussion, in the wake of the Boston bombing I definitely will ask about pressure cookers. This is how the real world works outside of HN, folks.
> An optimistic professor somewhere has been feeding SICP to undergrads who are not ready for it.

In my very fist undergrad class, this was the course textbook. I generally think that I and some others taking the class at that time didnt value it so much, but going forward (especially after the class) I feel like what it talked about is a lot more important than I initially thought. I think that the professors made the right decision, though, giving us the book that early because even though I didnt appreciate the book so much then, I think that I absorbed a lot of its ideas into the way that I code.
That doesn't work if I'm editing a TABs-Are-8 file and still want to be able to indent by 4.
I frequently have to enter my first initial and middle name as my "first name". Why? Because that is how it appears in numerous official places, such as my credit card.

The users aren't broken, your database (and your assumptions about names) is.
I suggest you do what I did and redefine your birthday the way they do Federal Holidays. It's not "September 22nd" for me anymore, it's "The 4th Saturday in September".
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Alas, this only shows you don't understand what PRISM is. (Hint: it's not used by local cops! Sigh.)
> 6. Who is al? Why is his name in lowercase?

Anybody?
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Do you realize police look for people changing their behavior or "acting strange"? That is what you were doing.. inviting more scrutiny.
Interesting the me as a Swede, I read about this "problem" at HN first. Never read/heard anything about this in mainstream swedish media.
I might if course have missed it, but if its such a big problem as the article like to state, I like to think I should have heard of it, otherwise it would be fair to question the sources of this.
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Why did you link to some random Facebook post instead of the source (Jezebel - yuck)?
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Thanks, tptacek, for posting this. Though now I'm participating here and it's taking time away from my surveillance article for tomorrow! :(
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Far better in my book. It means what likely happened is any one of her FB friends, or since the firecrackers were public, anyone else saw the image of fireworks and possibly other comments, became concerned, and reported it to law enforcement. Even if this was found via some source of open source intelligence gathering operation that ended up in a visit, that is leagues away from private google searches leading to a visit.
The Art of Computer Programming in PDF form can be found on The Pirate Bay, and I encourage anyone who can't afford it (students, programmers between jobs, etc) to download it. But if you feel you learn anything from it, then you must buy it later once you have the income.

Also, it's probably ethical that if you've bought TAoCP, then it's ok to download it in PDF form. Some people like PDFs instead of hardcopy.
Are you implying that two people (you and your father) can't have identical names in the US?
"The NSA does the routine profile on everyone within three steps of the-guy-on-the-list, some key words generate hits, salaried agents get another address to visit."

By routine profile, I meant "of the data we all already know the NSA has access to, such as google search history/mail content/etc".

e.g. they may have been on an 'automated search' list for being at three-degrees-of-'terrorist'-kevin-bacon and then got on a 'physical visit' list for trips to china + a few keyword hits in the web activity logs. at which point it seems obvious they would ask about pressure cooker bombs, even though they weren't there just because someone had searched online for pressure cooker bombs.

Now, I'm certainly not defending the NSAs list-making justifications nor accuracy. The whole thing is bullshit.

But this story looks like a textbook use of the bullshit programs we (now/all) know about. And it gives us no reason to theorize the existence of some new (trivially unsustainable, useless) program.
Also if you use emacs and el-get, there is a sicp package.
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In some industries this is unfeasable, the cost of signing the contracts with a million little players would be too dificult. However, the auto industry is not one of those industries and Volvo definitely could of gone this way. But how many years would it be until someone decided they should squeeze a couple extra hundred million out of their seatbelt patent? I'm glad we'll never have to find out
I will say I used to work for a private sector defence company. It wasn't a great problem as I could demonstrate my skills.

Not that I did anything interesting unfortunately :(
A backpack is possible, but a messenger bag swings around too much.

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Did neither Declan nor tptacek read the original article? This post doesn't explain anything.
Exactly, the new cars fail gracefully- for the old cars things are much more all, or nothing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crumple_zone
This is why I support exposing new programmers to Basic: unlearning bad ideas is a core skill we should start developing early.