skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think there's any indication that they actually thought destroying the hard drives would stop anything; seems more likely that:

1) They didn't want anyone else to get access to the material that the Guardian had but would not end up publishing;

2) The rules said that that's what they had to do, so they did it;

3) That's all they could do on "their patch", so CYA;

4) A little intimidation would never go amiss, surely...
I don't believe what the NSA says publicly.
It's not a matter of legality, it's a matter of keeping your word. He says as much in a comment.

http://discussion.theguardian.com/comment-permalink/26170409
> Miranda Rights have definitely entered US popular culture

It came full circle. As part of a refusal[1] to overrule Miranda back in 2000, the Supreme Court noted "Miranda has become embedded in routine police practice to the point where the warnings have become part of our national culture.". Rehnquist even opened his oral announcement by reciting the warnings.

America without Miranda is virtually unthinkable. Tragically, there's no equivalent cultural reminder of the 4th Amendment.

[1] http://www.oyez.org/cases/1990-1999/1999/1999_99_5525
I think it's more aggressive and invasive than that. Maybe if the pictures were of the superintendent and their paramour. Maybe.
Whiteboard Coding Tips for Interviews
makes you wonder if it was a honeypot
I feel like this is a cop-out. Indian culture is objectively worse than American culture, and this article is pretty solid evidence of this.

"Traditional values" are no excuse for misogyny and barbarism. Tradition is close to the literal opposite of social progress and I don't understand why it is glorified. I'm pretty proud that I have no "solid foundation of traditional values," and that I've incidentally raped a grand total of 0 people.

Edit: I read your clarifying comments on the other sub-threads. What's the difference in this context between a social issue and a cultural one?
And errbacks are really just the Maybe monad.
Great point, if not a little acrimonious, about the role of a CEO in a corporation. Even though the CEO (or anyone over your head for that matter) may enjoy you as a person, or even find you to be the perfect guy for the job, the bottom line still means a lot more than your life. I think it's important to remember that it's okay to love your job and the company you work for, as well as be loyal to them, but that loyalty goes both ways. I'm loyal to my employer as long as they loyally pay me and don't treat me like a piece of shit. But there's no love. My teammates are awesome but if, say, Github gave me a call and wanted to hire me, I'd be giving my two weeks tomorrow. And if Github ended up being a bad fit, I can always keep looking. As a Ruby developer in Philadelphia, I'm always being courted by recruiters and job offers, because there are so few of us here.
When he said the first story happened in 2002, I was expecting to hear a story about getting your workstation as a severence package.

I knew so many people during the crash who had the most random computer and office equipment. All 'acquired' when their company went out of business.

Aeron chair. Anthro cart. Sun Ultra 10, loaded. $4,000 Toshiba laptop. Occaisonaly some Cisco kit or a fairly beefy server. "This used to run <insert failed site> dot com."

How'd that work? Didn't the creditors or management care?
She fought for her team, not herself.
No issues here both on stock browser and Chrome Beta (Nexus 4). Do you mean the initial delay or rendering jitter?
google cached his linkedin profile.

sigh.

i feel bad for the guy, you just can't escape a bad move made in a consumer-facing market like this.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:X821DtR...

i challenge the comment above - that this reflects groupon hiring people who are "lucky to work in a mailroom or as a waiter".

if anything, they are over-hiring for their roles - this guy is a UC Berkeley grad, which implies a certain level of intelligence. making sales like this could easily be done by a boiler room in manilla.
"Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead."
I'd say in a healthy employee/employer relationship, you're both making each other richer.
At this point on HN, I was expecting a page that just said "I rewrote it in Go"
Please stop using Twitter Bootstrap
I am building a project based on it but I felt needed the contrarian view just to give me a shake.
How High Debt is Bad for your Health
> Obviously, a lot if not most people are inured to those cultures and don't like the Euro/American level of cultural freedom.

Nope, still ethnocentrism.
Bootswatch is in the process of updating its themes to Bootstrap 3 too:

http://bootswatch.com/
> These legislators and business leaders are dinosaurs.

This would more accurately portray the threat that they pose -- they're people in charge of running the world, and their backwards notions of how the world should operate will lead us down a very dark hole of no return. They need to be stopped quickly.
Feds seized $2.9M from Mt. Gox, court docs show
I really hope that someone in Hollywood (or a Fiction author) sees the potential here. What would an anti-Snowden have done in his place? Monitor his girlfriend? Dig up dirt on a romantic rival? Blackmail a senator?

Or for that matter, now that politicians know this power is out there, how about a Senator finding an anti-Snowden to get dirt on a political rival?

You basically take "The Lives of Others" and have a modern-day script with a few search-and-replaces.
This has nothing to do with Crockford. This all boils down to Debian deciding what good and evil means. Debian see those words exist, so they must mean something or some other idiocy.
>Our figure is valid; the classified information that goes into the number is more complicated than what’s in your calculation.

>Our overall number is valid. I’m not sure why you’re calling this a “discrepancy” when the number in the white paper is valid.

I wonder if they expect anyone to believe them.
HN, and many of the technical writers covering this story, are missing out on a major subtext of this story. I'm on my phone, so I can't cite my source, but look at the actual quotes from NSA staff.

They're not laying off 90% of the people that performed system administration tasks, they're revoking the administration rights of 90% of the people that have them.

That means that their Windows domain was so badly administered that only 10% of the people who have Administrator roles were performing administration tasks.

I doubt anyone is actually losing their job nor do I think they're adding significant automation.
A journalist who violates conditions of 'off-the-record' is not going to be a journalist for much longer, because nobody will tell him anything. The 'bastards' who made the rules, in this case, are the journalists themselves.
There's some research that, that people like content paged.

Here's one such paper http://hfs.sagepub.com/content/25/3/279.short
> When I was a kid my parents didn't have a lot of money, so instead of playing video games, I would design entire worlds on paper that looked very similar.

This makes me smile. I actually did this as well in the 80s. I was inspired by games I saw on my friend's computer, so I'd fold a piece of notebook paper into 8 pieces (or 16 if you use both sides) and draw "screens" that you could move between. I'd tear off a small piece of paper and draw the player's character on it. I'd design the game during class-time, then I'd have my friend play it at recess. He'd move the character around and I'd change things around to the correct screens when he moved from screen to screen.
Though I am disgusted by the descriptions in the article, I find your comment equally offensive.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on an encrypted, backed-up, redundantly distributed hard drive — forever.
I worked with Scala at EPFL during my 2 year post doc (in Martin's group). I later started working for Microsoft, and found the transition to C# to be initially painful but not incredibly so. I'm now a happy C# programmer, though I take a lot of liberties [1] with the system, and I also use C# mostly to build programming systems of my own [2] (though Scala has had an everlasting influence on my own work).

C# is a bit more advanced in Java (they have lambdas), and in someways better than Scala (reified generics). But the best thing about C# is that...it forces you to to settle on less elegant but functional designs in a "worse is better" style. I found myself obsessing over my Scala code to come up with perfect solutions because...I could...while in C# perfect solutions obviously don't exist. C# relieves the burden of choice, which is an interesting trade off to keep in mind when designing PLs.

[1] http://bling.codeplex.com/

[2] http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1898...
Wow... i didn't mean to start waves, which was why i unsubbed from the list within moments :/. i _really_ appreciate all of your support AND critiques (they are not unfair). Now i can't sleep. On a tablet, so won't say much more...

Happy Hacking!
Some people just don't want to deal with colo. I know I'm sick of it. I enjoy mucking around with the stuff and spending the company money of course but when shit hits the fan it's pretty annoying. Same could be said for cloud of course. Currently dealing with a random NIC lockup on a VCloud hosted SQL Server for a client. I feel hosting issues are inescapable regardless of where you go.
The problem in practical terms is a semi-slavery view of women in public. Men and women in porn movies are objectified but not coerced into it, whereas assault is coercion.
I'm going to assume that you are male. I can assure you China is pretty damn dangerous for women who go drinking and rape is also common. There is a lot of sexual harassment in the workplace which is typified by power imbalances (you need a job and your boss is a sleazebag). Just because you haven't personally seen it doesn't mean it isn't there.
This story makes me sad. It is egregious to use an anti-terrorism statute against an innocent and obviously non-terrorist citizen in this manner. Saying I expected better from the UK would be an understatement.
I generally hear the advice write everything you can as functions, then use macros for making things easier to express. Locking functionality up in macros is probably bad, making things convenient with them is fine.
Slowly but surely HTML5 and JavaScript are turning into Flash.
Or Erlang/Elixir.
VS a prerequisite? In the .NET world I guess you can use TFS Server CI. You can use msbuild to take care of building websites can't you? There's always the self building IIS option but that's less rigorous of course.
> It also gives me access to talent at a multiple of talent to dollars that you cannot even dream of.

You not knowing the C-levels does this?

> Meanwhile the rest of you feel free to continue warming chairs with them.

Who's warming chairs?
You can find investors even out there (and others) - who at different points slip up and say they're just fishing for data (whether it is ideas or information relating to success of certain ideas).

And do you really think every idea that people have is published and talked about immediately upon them having it? Many don't so they can line things up and have a competitive advantage. Like you said, execution is the most important part - though the idea still is valuable - and if someone else executes first on an idea then they can beat out the originator of the idea. An easy example: Facebook, Mark Z. who was hired by the brothers, who had the idea to be exclusive to only people with a Harvard email address - which in evidence / documentation he even stated he wanted to beat them to the punch (because "people don't need two of these platforms" - rough quote, I don't remember the exact words).
Even with what they admitted I think it was said they search more than Google. If this 10x story is true, then it makes it all the more true.
Did you just compare the Chinese to ants?
The establishment is veering completely off the rails:

Former NSA director Mike Hayden, in a speech to the Bipartisan Policy Center last week, dismissed the nation’s most outspoken transparency groups and privacy advocates as “nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous twentysomethings who haven’t talked to the opposite sex in five or six years.”
A lot of comments or post-content links/ads disrupts the usefulness of the OS scroll-bar.
Can you share anything about that one click (nothing to do with one-click™ I'm sure) deployment?
I think we all know the signal-to-noise-ratio on the internet is a bit whack. So it seems entirely plausible that this was all due to an improperly formed submission.

That being said I think Facebook could have given the reward and a slap on the wrist at the same time considering the language barrier.
Pretty spot on from my perspective.
Can you share more details of the story? I've been assuming this rule exists mostly to avoid the danger that you might accidentally phrase the reason for termination such that it could be treated as discriminatory... but this really sounds like the problem is deeper than that.
How much money have you spent then so far? And thanks for answering.
Technically it doesn't mean "No-one should learn to code", it means "No-one needs to learn to code."
The Selfies are Coming. The Selfies are Here.
Also, there was always a possibility that the guys in the guardian slipped somewhere. Didn't have a copy of all the files, some password/key was stored only on that drive, note/edited information that's easy to forget was only on that drive, etc.

Backups are hard - if there was even a slight chance that they destroyed the only copy of something, why not go ahead with it? They're not that stupid.
I haven't tried MVC4 yet, I was waiting for async support in Mono.

Personally I run everything on a VPS, because I'm not worried about scale. If I was running something larger I'd probably go with Azure.
Wow, a Guardian article that had something positive to say about the U.S. My jaw has also hit the floor!

FWIW, I also agree that shredding hard disks is far overstepping the bounds of what is proper.
Thank you for the info, I hadn't come across that term before. There's still a difference in how we talk about men and women, which I find odd to engage in when trying to combat sexism, but I was unaware it was grammatically correct (and 'men [pastime]' just sounds wrong).
I had a similar thought, in 2003, when the US invaded Iraq. At the time, I was a bit of a UN nerd, and I had been following the weapons inspector reports and the Security Council debates. I was angry at how belligerent the Bush administration was getting, given that the publicly available evidence did not corroborate their claims that we might wake up to a "mushroom cloud". Iraq was maybe dragging its feet, but the weapons inspectors all agreed that inspections were working and should continue.

When the the US invaded Iraq, I started to doubt my own firmly held beliefs. Did they possess some classified evidence that I did not? Going to war without the authorization of the Security Council was such a grave breach of precedent and international law that I didn't believe the Bush administration would take such a drastic action if they didn't fully expect to find WMDs.

It turns out they didn't secretly have reliable information the rest of us didn't. They were blinded by conviction and ideology.

I'm sure these people in government and at the intelligence agencies truly believe these programs are vital to protect the US from terrorism. They know spying can be abused, but in their minds any abuse is unintentional and minor relative to the purported benefits of spying on terrorists.
At some point in the last 5 years, sitting in my pen--ahem, I mean cubicle--I came to the realization that the the subject noun of the term "Human Resources" is "Resources" not "Humans". If you think your boss is your friend, he's either a shitty boss or a shitty friend.
So private property is down too.
Do these guys keep a todo-list?
I speak to my wife on a daily basis (too much, she says, especially at parties -- yes, we go to parties, and we get invited back too!), and I deeply care about privacy, so Mike Hayden is slightly wrong. Oh, and I haven't been a twentysomething since the Clinton administration.
Vote.

In aggregate, it has infinite power over an incumbent politician's future office. It's hard to know what you're getting when you vote for someone new, but it's easy to vote for or against an incumbent based upon past performance.
Here are some more suitable (reliable and inexpensive) options (based on first-hand experience and research/testimonials):

VPS: AppliedI (http://www.appliedi.net) or UltimaSystems (http://www.ultimasystems.net)

Cloud: Azure or AWS (or even DigitalOcean or Linode if possible to run under Mono)

Dedicated: ReliableSite (http://www.reliablesite.net) or OVH Canada (http://www.ovh.com/us/) or Hivelocity (https://hivelocity.net)
Version 1.0 can be out in an hour and requires one page to register webhooks, one place to store outgoing event data (which can be in anything -- a SQL database with a column representing a JSON bag-of-serialized-attributes will work fine), and a cron job. The minimum implementation is not difficult engineering.

A lot about what Stripe does right is in the ancillary bits about consuming their webhooks:

1) Spend a lot of time thinking about what your retry policy is. Some service providers (including ones which I like) will do one callback and then not retry. This is often suboptimal for consumers. I personally like "retrying with expotential decay", which is a nice balance between "You get your webhook really, really quickly if a gremlin just happened to eat the first one" and "If your servers are experiencing hard downtime, we won't add to the problem by pinging the heck out of you."

2) There is no SaaS or open source option for "Have great documentation, at once both comprehensive and easy to consume for the goal-oriented developer."

3) There are a lot of failure modes for webhook systems, some of which you'll only discover when operating them. Transient network problems between your application and the consumer's. "Failure to agree on reality" between different moving parts of your application. Adding webhooks to the outgoing queue in a non-idempotent fashion, which seems to be one of the great Let Me Tell You About This One Timee stories in systems engineering. Timing issues with consumers receiving webhooks in an order other than that which they would logically expect, which might not be your problem but good luck convincing a customer of that.

You'll want to have instrumentation and monitoring up that wazoo, so you can resolve these little usage niggles. This boring, iterative execution on the base feature is approximately 99% of why really well-executed APIs (like Stripe or Twilio or whomever) are really fun to work with and, well, why there exist some APIs which are less fun to work with.
Ask HN: How to secure a server without physical control of the hardware?
I've seen a lot of DIY alternatives to GMail, Dropbox, etc. lately (most recently: https://github.com/al3x/sovereign), all focused on the software aspect of replicating those services. However, the most practical way to do this is to spin up a cloud box on EC2 or Rackspace, or a VPS on Linode or Media Temple and install it there.

The problem I have is that for all the effort, you're still keeping your data at a third party, who 1) can be ordered to provide a backdoor to your data, and 2) would invalidate your expectation of privacy by the Third Party Doctrine (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act).

Short of owning every bit of hardware up to the fiber, is there any way to secure a virtual box such that a service provider could not achieve or grant others access to it?
You can get quite a bit done on Mono these days.

My main job is at a MS/.NET shop, so for my personal projects I'm mostly using MVC 3 and PostgreSQL deploying to Mono.

Probably not good for large installations who want vendor support, but it works.
I'm working at a big company where most employees have worked for a very long time. On my team, besides me, the person who has worked the shortest time is 9 years. The next one after that: 15 years. Most managers and senior engineers have worked here for 20 years or more. They've constructed their whole life around this job, it's almost sad. If in their 20 years have switched jobs, it was within the company. I'm not trying to be patronizing, it's just that The Company is not doing well, and I think there will be very tough times ahead for many these people, and most of them seem to think The Company will always be there to pay the bills. There's this group think going on that "we've had similar crises before, but we always get through it". This time is different, but they won't realize it. The world is moving a lot quicker today.

I think our younger generation is much more weary of being loyal to corporations. We've seen what happens in economic crises, and most of our lives have been just that: one big economic crisis after another.
seriously, are you high?
can't do Select Into in Azure.
The concept of a gag order is orthogonal to specific laws. But I believe it was the Patriot Act that gave the Executive the power to make NSLs with a similar effect.
Well there is one quite obvious way to avoid this, but it has a serious downside.

I did not take that route, thus I am now over 50 :) My advice is to live on way less than your means while you are younger, and then you can have an air of nonchalance as you age, giving the impression of great wisdom ( hopefully somewhat backed up by reality)
I'd be willing to bet even 10% of people within NSA are against the current scale and scope of domestic operations of NSA. Certainly >30% of the rest of the IC, and probably >50% of DOD and non-security parts of government (random NASA guys, etc.)

To the extent that federal government employees tend to be more educated and informed (since they're professionals) than the public as a whole, employees of the federal government are quite possibly more against these programs, at least at their current scale and scope, than the general public (and certainly the voting population, who skew old and paranoid and white and rich).
Static analysis is really hard in general though, and in complex and highly dynamic languages like Ruby its even harder. Some things you really are better off using runtime checks for...

And in the end, smaller overhead on the contract checker means that the programmer has more room to add extra tests and less reason to turn off the checks in production.
I think hanging around at a single place is all right, but you have to be really focused on staying current. I've seen people who didn't and the result was not pretty.
>Never do that. When firing someone in an at-will state, just do it and explain nothing.

That's what you got from this article? Yay for hypocrisy!
How does Instapaper parse just the main body text of a web page?
While Mono is largely compatible with .NET, I'm still not convinced about its performance and scalability compared to .NET. I haven't come across any case-study or even an example of a high-traffic public Web app using Mono.
I'm pretty sure it is a direct quote. He didn't say, 'he said something to the effect of' or something else. He just quoted the official directly, and in the same vein as what the previous commenter pointed out, you wouldn't expect the editor of one of most important newspapers in the world to not know how to use quotes.
A lot of waivers and disclaimers have no legal effect, but they deter people who don't know that.

Bluffing is part of legal risk management.
Video: Industrial Food Production "La surconsommation"