skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Elect politicians who will do better

How?

The 2-party system will simply not allow it. They have the monopoly over the 2 "choices" we're given each time. They will continue to give us "choices" that they can control. Remember how one of the earlier whistle blowers revealed that Obama had been under surveillance earlier? People who are under surveillance are controllable. If they are allowed to access power, it's really not a stretch to think that they just have the function of a puppet. The 2 parties are controlled by the campaign money donors, which are mostly corporate interests. Do you remember how the Republicans ejected Ron Paul from the debates by quickly changing the rules when he got traction? (Not that I would really want Ron Paul for President.) The media are controlled by the same interests, just look at how little coverage you find about the new slides in the mainstream media, today.
This is something I would really love to do. Where do you work (in academia, I presume)?

I have the programming background, and a bit of the bio background... but I am weak on statistics. How much of statistics and probability theory would I need (beyond a basic 1st-year college level)?
I work with a dozen or so people who are involved in this sort of work. I think it is very interesting to see how they rationalize and deal with their moral compass internally.

One of the guys is the most caring, liberal, loving person you'd ever meet; he justifies being involved in this sort of skeezy marketing work as "I can take a small amount from a lot of people and amplify the result to do good with a lot of money."

He genuinely believes this. A lot of the other guys simply try not to see the "punters" (potential customers [1]) as real people, they are disconnected through the impersonal nature of the internet.

[1] http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/punter_2
You can do that in Intellij Idea and related tools.
Forgive us for not trusting you when a few weeks ago you denied under oath that this capability even existed. We may have a short memory as a country, but not that short!
You answered your own question.

The visit toll could be collected electronically, via transponder or a bill mailed to the car's registered owner, to require no slowing or stopping of traffic.

They could also allow free or cheaper visits at the far end of the SFO 'airtram' (where the existing rental car center is located).... the differential could even vary with congestion.

If they want to throw a bone to occasional, casual flyers and friends on pickup/dropoff duty, let each license plate have 1 free visit each N days. (Though, the logic and fairness of charging every visit equally based on its congestion impact is strong.)

There are better ways to meet any legitimate concerns of SFO than to force new services into the old rental-agency cookie-mold.
What if laws are considered whitelists? If it's a whitelist then if not directly stated it's thrown out. This may slow the legislative process, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, it was actually the founders primary goal.

Agreed that it's not a fully baked idea by any means, humans will always attempt to circumvent any system. With that in mind, you may say that rather than designing a better system, we stick to the safe that was first cracked 200 years ago.
The paper is truly awesome and fractally hilarious. Thanks for the link.
NIH trainee pay scale: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-12-03...

Depending on the institution, you may make slightly more than the minimum (starting at $39K), but postdocs in the sciences do not 'typically' make $50-$60K. As a monetary investment, academia is about as poor a bet as you can make: spend 5-6 years making ~$25K then another 3-5 years below $50K. Then you might be able to start making professor money if you're in hot field and willing to sell your soul to your work.
I think you misread. They stated specifically that every search is fully auditable. In NSA speech, that means that no audits of any sort are ever performed; searches are only auditable, never audited. This works similar to the collection of domestic data, which is siphoned off, stored, replicated and indexed, but never actually accessed by anyone.

(Some of the screenshots suggest that the legitimation for every search is entered into a free text field, making any kind of automated analysis extremely difficult. This already suggests that no such statistics are collected.)
I mean, developing a new algorithm for data analysis could be just as important to the OP as analyzing bio data to forecast some sort of disease is to someone else.
IIS 7.5 and 8 are actually really good, and among the best to interact with programmatically. You can write the equivalent of nginx modules in C#, and even implement custom framing and protocols.
NSA Responds To New Reports On Top-Secret Spying Program, XKeyscore
| What does it take to get American's outraged about something?

Americans can get outraged just fine. The problem is that many people just don't understand exactly what's going on. They're either not very technical, and/or don't understand through the context of history, the ramifications of mass state surveillance.

This highlights the problem with our news-as-entertainment media model. It gives us what the country wants (sensationalism, excitement), not what the country needs (facts, context). Until not-for-profit media organizations can give the private news industry (in particular: CNN, Fox, NBC, ABC, CBS) some legitimate competition, we'll be stuck in this cycle.
The examples you gave are of eloquent if harsh statesmanship from a sitting Senator, and I absolutely agree that is exactly what needs to be happening now. Ed Snowden is actually doing a really good job of it with his press releases, in fact.

But that's a far cry from yelling "bullshit" at the back of a conference room.
what ransom? he did not threaten them with anything; he's just annoyed now because he feels they didn't reward him sufficiently. not the same thing as trying to extort money out of them to reveal the vulnerability.
"Moxie Marlinspike ‏@moxie 8h

Gen Alexander says that we shouldn't worry about NSA collection because analysts have taken a pledge. Also, they took a class."
Hacker Dies Days Before he Was to Reveal How to Remotely Kill Pacemaker Patients
MIT: Not Neutral, Not Leading, Not Standing Up for Technologists
Show HN: Bitcoin Roulette
We have a Bitcoin Casino called SatoshiBet.com and launched our newest game today: Bitcoin Roulette.

It's completely made in Node.
Let me know what you guys think :)
The culmination of this article was just as obvious and unsurprising as the very ads it describes.
other Montrealer here - I also wondered why that is. Especially considering the amount of gaming companies around here, you'd think a lot of C++ would be in order. I have met quite a few rubyists, but python seems rarely used. PHP coders were always available, wherever I lived though :)
My family is from Hargeisa, but I haven never set foot in it.
I could not agree more. This terrorism talk is complete bullshit. Our lives are in danger in so many ways and terrorism is far down the list.
New software obfuscation throws wrench into reverse engineering
> Teachers' unions are right now fighting the introduction of actual metrics

We would unionize and be fighting metrics too, if they tried to measure how good a programmer you were with the number of goto's you use.
It is. But only if the wallet contains >50€ or so.
You can be empathetic to someone without being partial to them.

But your point still stands. The reasoning and specificity of cases are what define common law precedent.
Stop Worrying, and Learn to Love Free WiFi
This response tells me you've never been in the science trenches. I've never heard of a postdoc making anywhere close to 60k, even at elite schools in high COL areas. The financial opportunity cost is staggering.
>but I know that nothing will change (even though the last CEO is long gone).

Why, BTW?
There is a such thing as Administrative courts. IRS has them. Department of Justice has them for immigration. So, as long as this court was authorized by Congress the Executive can implement it.
What you've described is a trait of human beings, not politicians and lawyers.
Malaysia actually returned Hamza Kashgari to face trial in Saudi Arabia for "speech crimes" against Islam.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamza_Kashgari
Oh, I agree. But they do successfully maintain the veneer. Regardless of how, the Supreme Court is complicit, and they engage in some tortured linguistic judo in the process.
Found a typo:

"You do not want to be pursuing some Ph.D. when all
your friends are pouring crystal all over benjamins in
the Cayman islands."

"crystal" should by "Cristal", the much hyped bubbly in hip-hop lyrics.
If the T440s comes out soon enough, the Thinkpad T440s with FHD IPS screen.

Otherwise... personally I'd go for the T431s. Macbook Airs don't have enough key travel.
Maybe I'm just jaded, but none of that sounds particularly sinister compared to what a few hours' work could net you via Tor or other deep web portals.
Black Hat USA 2013: General Keith Alexander Keynote
By submitting this information to BT, he indeed closed a access point to all this data, thus reducing the likelyhood of it being badly used. Isn't this exactly why bounties were created? Because its better to give a few bucks and increase the system's security than to have it compromised for worse costs.
It isn't the article that I usually spend the most time reading. It's in the comments where most of HN's learning value lies, and thus where most of my time is spent. If the summaries included an outline of the opinions/takeaways/great resources mentioned in the comments, that would make the product that much more worthwhile.

I also tend to hoard links. If there's a great thread on Haskell, for example, I'll bookmark it (save it to Pocket), with the intention of going back to the thread if/when in the future I decide to learn Haskell.

Ultimately, though, the problem is that whether or not I pay for this depends on whether this tool actually weans me off HN. If the summaries are so high quality as to get me off HN (except to post comments myself), I would pay $50 a month for this. If I still find myself reading threads by myself on HN, I wouldn't pay anything.
Interesting, that's lower than the people I know. They lean more towards the machine-learning side of bioinformatics (plus people in straight AI, not bio-related), and generally make around $50k, some $55k, at research institutions in the US.

Sounds like recent American graduates may want to start reading the job listings in Europe, though. A postdoc where I teach in Denmark has a minimum civil-service salary of ~$55k, and in Switzerland the going rate is well above that: a friend works in Lugano, fresh out of grad school, for somewhere in the neighborhood of $80k, although that's a bit above the norm. Postdoc candidates with strong tech skills have good demand at institutions with large EU projects, so they're not lottery-win positions either.
Really amazed at the number of commenters who didn't pick up on the sarcasm.

But, honestly, how many developers are there making five figures a month in profit passively (more or less)? That is an extreme amount of success, far beyond what most people will ever enjoy in their life.
I think the lack of faith in public officers to follow the law can be disconcerting. I don't think everyone will follow all the laws all the time, but if you just assume that laws will be broken consistently, then you enter into a loop of cynicism to where you basically cannot have any form of public structure.

Assuming that agencies will at least try to follow the law is rule of law 101. Passing new legislation concerning the audit procedure, for example, could solve a problem you mention.
Hi. Some excellent suggestions in this thread already. Here are a few more.

1. Read great writing. If you want to write better nonfiction, read the masters of nonfiction. Michael Lewis. Tracy Kidder. Atul Gawande. Joseph Mitchell. Jon Krakauer. Christopher Hitchens. Tom Junod. If you want to write great fiction, read Murakami, Marquez, Palahniuk, Eggers, Hosseni, Oates, Atwood. (Shameless plug here, you can find stories by these folk at Byliner: http://www.byliner.com )

2. Read about writing. Some worthy books on this:

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King (really!)

The Practice of Writing, by David Lodge

The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott

Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd

To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction, by Phillip Lopate

3. As already mentioned upthread, practice. Write something every day.

4. If you're not confident in your writing, apply your MVP lessons. Write short sentences. Use as few words as possible. Rid your sentences of adjectives and adverbs. Study your verb choices. Ditch the complex punctuation and dependent clauses. Ask yourself, What's the least amount of "writing" necessary to convey this idea or image?

5. Have fun.
You write well enough. What's missing is maybe a punch in the guts. I mean in yours. Writers must have wounds to heal, must have a very strong agenda. You must want to kill someone, you must have your heart rotting in some hatred, or you must have this kind of faith only accessible to the mentally ill.

Writing shouldn't be a choice: it's write or die from your wounds.

Right now you're training in the gym, you need a beast on your neck to start running for real.

[edited slightly]
Oh the efficiencies to be had when everything is passed through lattice-based cryptography.

Definitely worth it.
Well, you'd be incorrect, since I'm currently a science academic. Have you checked what Stanford, or Georgia Tech, or UT-Austin pay postdocs with machine-learning or data-mining experience, in the past 5 years? There are definitely areas that pay less, but bioinformatics, if by that you mean people with serious computational skills, pays above the norm.
Dating Lessons from the Man Cave
GUI Kits for Building Websites and Mobile Apps
All those StackOverflow posts.
It wasn't about flooding the market, it was about pricing in Euros, thus taking aim at the dollar as the sole reserve currency. (Among other things.)

Example: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,998512,00.h...
Another FirstGroup

https://www.google.com/finance?q=LON:FGP

Give the Uber guys credit.

They have convinced baby boomers with money (TPG, and the other VC/PE firms), that "this time is different". Let the Uber founders take some money off the table.

I saw this with social media a few years ago, when RenRen and Groupon and Zynga IPO'd. It was remarkable.
Who should do this kind of audit? The GAO is part of the legislative branch, not the executive branch, but presumably they wouldn't have enough "clearance".
IANAL but I think the constitution only applies to people under the jurisdiction of the US, i.e. in US sovereign territory.
As a reader, my main complaint with medium is space bar scroll not working. I never realised how big of a part of my workflow it was until it stopped.
I hate how they default to a completely out of scope argument: but we're providing a valuable service by putting unused cars to work. No, you're providing yourself with paychecks. The operations of your business are only a subset of that.

It's the same kind of un-scoped reason that leads to conclusions like trickle down theory. They think because they're proving a service that someone can presumably benefit from, that gives them a blank check to consume as much as they can to provide that service, thus completely negating the positive impact of their business through crock-pot philosophy. Obviously, there is no sound logic in this line of reasoning. Obviously, they're not going to argue that they should pay more since they don't have a fleet to maintain. "Invisible" hand?

The solution is quite simple really: there is no simple solution. If you're going to displace a business you can't replace them with something less then what they were and expect to make more money than they did, at least not in a sustainable way. It's simple thermal dynamics.

This is all a subset of issues born of cargo-cult thinking, techy buzz words and such that give businesses respect they simply co-opted by using the word/technology in marketing materials. More bubbles, more start up trends, more 'combinators separating uninformed people and their money without providing real value and expecting to get their @#$% &*!! for doing us the favor.
No, no, no. That's what college professors with no real world experience tell you. In the real world, professionals use guard clauses to exit early all the time.
And even better, they make really sure that they will stay locked away: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23493323

On one hand, they tell us that they need to monitor everything to catch terrorists, and on the other hand, they don't seem to care that they can walk away once they're caught.

I find that really strange.
I used to skip adblock for the same reason. Using Flashblock used to be good enough. I just wanted to avoid animated crud and auto-play audio, and it worked great.

Two years ago (or so) I installed adblock and set it to only block those annoying little social share buttons which started infecting everything. Eventually I had to turn the main rules on. As more sites started to put more and more obnoxious "Take our survey!" and "Hey, why not sign up before you view the site!" pop-ups and JS-hover-ads and such, I couldn't stand it any more.

I make an effort to support the sites I like. I have subscriptions to Ars, Reddit, LWN, and a few other sites. I turn the ad-blocking off on sites that act reasonably (Reddit and LWN are two examples).

It amazes me to use other people's computers (or my own iPad) sometimes. I'll go to a site I see links from now-and-then and realize just how much ridiculous crud is getting filtered out by AdBlock.

I understand your point of view, I still largely feel that way. But things were getting so intrusive I finally gave in. I like that AdBlock has a "good ads" program, I hope it succeeds.
The "Next 10 Suggestions" button shows up all the time, regardless of if there are suggestions or not. Also pretty fast for something that is returning an entire table to be injected into the DOM
This is fantastic - I am completely in support of this. Remembering how much money the few people who still remembered COBOL made in the 1990s, I can't wait to clean up after the "normal people" get their "shit done".
What is the "entire US Code"?
HTML5 Typographic Metrics
Getting a postdoc at Stanford has the same probability as playing in the NBA. Only you get paid $60K instead of $60M.
Are all these summaries going to be hand-written?
Who will be writing them, how many people would you have on backup in case you can't write the summaries for that day? -- Since, you know, people would be paying for the service.

With the Hacker Newsletter, if I don't get it sometimes, I don't really care, since it's free. However, if I were paying for a service I might feel different about it.

I wouldn't mind trying it, but I don't think I'd pay for it. But, who knows, others might! Good luck to you.
That's a good thing. But still, they let the other ones go: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23493323

Is that part of the old "keeping the threat alive" strategy?

(Considering the eternity it took them to find OBL. And the one hiccup during the hunt when Bush called the team back, when in reality they were pretty close, as I remember reading.)
The parties have a monopoly over the choices, but the parties aren't the NSA. They have much more of an interest in getting our votes and our donations than they have in letting other people spy. Unseating the current party machines enough to make a meaningful difference on this issue is likely to be hard, but I maintain that it's most likely more doable than violent revolution (and significantly less bloody, if we start soon).

I certainly don't pretend it's easy - but convincing people is the way it will happen.
This is silly, and it won't help poor people. at least not for very long.

While McDonalds as a whole could afford the pay hike, some portion of it's stores (10%? 20%? maybe 50%?) would become unprofitable overnight. Then what? Shutter the stores? Lay off half the employees? Either way it's defeating the purpose.

Also, new employees would be hired at the new wages (presumably) which means McDonalds wouldn't be hiring poor people anymore. In 5 years or so, we'd have people with associates degrees flipping burgers for $14 an hour, their shift managers would have Bachelor's and make $18-20/hour. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it won't help anyone out of poverty.
Chrome contains millions of lines of code, not counting WebKit. Almost all of that is C++ and was started 6-7 years ago.
This plugin infrastructure uses Perl, so they definitely haven't moved away from it entirely http://duckduckhack.com/
As a web hoster supporting both Apache and IIS I used to long for the configuration flexibility of Apache in IIS <=6. IIS7+ was rewritten from the ground up and is a serious a game changer for MS, it's a bloody nice web server.
Middle click does not work for Chromium 28.0.1500.71 :(
No it doesn't. This issue was raised and thought out long before JSMin, for example in the case of the license that forbade use by the South African military. It's a bad idea.
Incredible; love the coupon at the end "Yes, I want stress-free personal financial freedom via Algebraic Geometry!!!"
It's less of an issue since many communication and internet services are located in the US.
Because the NSA doesn't prosecute Americans. They don't have lawyers, they don't bring forth evidence in front of a judge. They don't investigate Americans either, so they cannot in fact be affected by this decision. Its impossible to prove a negation btw, so if you wish to "disprove" my statement, bring me a single court case where the NSA prosecuted someone during a public trial.

It just doesn't happen.

DOJ on the other hand, controls the FBI, ATF, and other federal police forces. It is the _job_ of a police force to bring you before a judge. This article states that when this happens, the DoJ is now forced to tell the judge (and the public, in the public trial) whether or not they used FISA powers.

NSA is different. Its a military agency run by a 4 star general of the army. They are military, and as a military-run (civilian) organization, they are subject to different rules and regulations that the DoJ follows. In particular, they aren't supposed to be investigating Americans in the first place.

And the people the NSA does investigate (ie: Bin Laden), they are allowed to do in secret... by nature of being a branch of the military. Military targets do not have rights, they don't receive warrants, they don't check with judges. At best, they check with the FISA court to prove that their target is a legal target of the NSA, but beyond that, they are free to do whatever they want.

Its the difference between a Police and the Military. The military cannot and do not afford their targets any rights. (and as a result, in theory, military run organizations are not allowed to control the US Homeland. Military powers are supposed to be used strictly only on America's enemies).

For this particular story... what we have here is the Federal Police Force (IE: Department of Justice) declaring that they'll follow a particular regulation from now on. It says nothing about the NSA however.

To tie this story into the NSA indicates a misunderstanding on how the US Federal Government works.
I don't give a shit how much training these people get, the very fact that a gigantic database of potentially all Internet traffic exists is itself a threat to freedom, open society, and the rule of law.