skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, I think part of it can be a question of whether you think that the government is evil or stupid. A simple way of thinking about it is asking whether the government uses information to make decisions or just to justify them.

Goverment == Evil
------------------

Before PRISM:

Bob: "Hey, Bill, I'm feeling bored tonight. Want to go hit Paul Graham with a crowbar until he confesses to terrorism?"

Bill: "Sounds fun, Bob, but we don't have anything on him. Let's just sit on our butts and collect a paycheck for doing nothing."

After PRISM:

Bob: "Hey, Bill, I'm feeling bored tonight. Want to go hit Paul Graham with a crowbar?"

Bill: "Sounds fun, Bob. Hey, it looks like he ate at a restaurant whose owner gave to an animal rights group whose mailing list sent an update message to a teenager who might be connected to ALF. I'll go get the crowbar."

Goverment == Stupid
-------------------

Before PRISM:

Bob: "Hey, Bill, I'm feeling bored tonight. Want to go hit Paul Graham with a crowbar until she confesses to terrorism?"

Bill: "Good thinking, Bob. Paul Graham is a woman programmer."

Bob: "And all women programmers are terrorists."

Bill: "So Paul Graham is a terrorist. I'll go get the crowbar"

After PRISM:

Bob: "Hey, Bill, I'm feeling bored tonight. Want to go hit Paul Graham with a crowbar until she confesses to terrorism?"

Bill: "Good thinking, Bob. Except PRISM is saying that female programmers have a 95% chance of not being terrorists. Also, there's a 65% chance that Paul Graham is male. Paul Graham might not actually be a terrorist"

Bob: "No shit? Well, that would have been embarrassing. Let's just sit on our butts and collect a paycheck for doing nothing."

-------------------

Clearly this is all a terrible caricature and the government contains a mix of stupid and evil. However, if you believe that the government is mostly stupid, then programs like this will increase the government's intelligence and decrease atrocities. On the other hand, if the government is more evil than stupid, keeping information out of the government's hands is the best course of action. Well, the best course of action in either case is to just take away Bill's crowbar, but that discussion sidesteps the entire privacy debate.
What goods or services could be boycotted, to protest these actions by the British Gestapo?

Largest UK companies (that seemed recognizable):
HSBC,
Shell,
BP,
Royal Bank of Scotland,
Barclays,
GlaxoSmithKline,
Unilever,
Vodafone,
Anglo American (thought the name was funny for a huge British company),
Prudential,
Coldplay

Edit: Added services

Edit 2: Added list of largest UK companies

Edit 3: Added Coldplay
I think this comes from boats used for free time. They cost a lot and you spend relativly little time on it.

Now if you live on the boat you are using it which would make it more economical however I'm sure the upkeep and fuel costs more than a house would.
I'm getting flashbacks to the VerizonMath Fiasco.

http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2007/08/original-recording-o...
The thing I like about bitcoin is that it's just the first of many. It's not perfect, but the fact that there's a decentralized cryptocurrency with major traction out there makes me giddy for what the future holds. We're living in a cyberpunk world.
Printer and Ink Cartridge API - An Evening Hack
None of these future/aync systems are very novel, but there is demand for them. Eventually most of them will fail and a few of the good ones will survive. And ya, they will resemble functional programming language X and Y in some of their features, because they aren't meant to be novel.
Not for "the team", but for individual persons like the OP. The post in fact makes that distinction.
It simply depends on who is in your threat model.
If you ignore various entertainment traffic (HD video etc) - which is the biggest component of the multi-petabyte "information exchanged on the Internet" - one could be monitoring/capturing 100% of the information that matters (emails and social media postings), and still technically be within that fraction of a percentage point.
Yes, that is correct. My apologies - I am not originally from the US either but I've heard it on a lot of police-themed movies, shows and games, and I assumed it was more widely understood.
Was the nine-hour detention of David Miranda lawful?
Does the UK actually make anything anymore? I thought they were like the US and had become a "service-based" economy. I guess you could boycott visiting.
Why bother to read to 1984 or Animal Farm anymore. We see in every bloody story these days. This story is perfectly 1984 in a nutshell.
Nope -- you always make the boss richer.
oh yes absolutely. just like the Gestapo. and the NKWD. i mean this is like a photocopy. sending people to concentration camps/gulags, murdering families. it is so 1:1 it is downright scary. you're so brave. so brave.
In this context, I believe he's using liberalism to mean 'idealism', 'progressive views', optimism and faith in humanity and human progress.
I've only looked at Twisted briefly before but I feel like I learnt a lot from this run-through.

Guido writes so well; he is able to thoughtfully deconstruct ideas with a critical eye while still praising the bits he likes. I think we could all learn something from the way he has approached this. It's definitely a model I will aspire to follow while appraising unfamiliar code.
We can hope they make it impossible to get any work done. I say eliminate 100%.
I'm curious about your comment "but I'm sure we could get sued if the strangeness was due to a disability." If the possibility that the candidate's "strangeness" was due to some sort of disability crossed your mind, how did you justify putting your employer at risk of a lawsuit by communicating with the candidate, particularly when your superior had directed you to ignore his submission?
Who cares what percentage of the total internet traffic is monitored? This is a totally disingenuous metric to put forward. Most of the traffic on the internet is not meant to be private. Most of the traffic probably even isn't created by humans.

Interesting metrics to debate:

What percentage of American emails are recorded by the NSA? 0.0004% or 100%?
What percentage of American phone calls are recorded by the NSA? 0.0004% or 100%?
What percentage of American text messages are recorded by the NSA? 0.0004% or 100%?
Thanks! :) Glad you like it.
Something tells me he won't be working in an Internet-related field in the future, at least as long as this story sits around the top of a Google search for his name.
My brother-in-law is an accountant who specialises in insolvency. He doesn't touch tech company failures, because there are usually no assets they can sell to pay creditors. Believe it or not computers are actually very hard to sell unless you outsource it to one of the big auction places. I've picked up a number of computers from them for nothing, because it's all rotting in their office basement, jobs wrapped up, "assets" unable to be sold for small change.

So companies will try and package up your severance to include things like your work laptop (which you've maybe become attached to), they can put a $ value on it, and mark it off what you're owed, but in reality you're losing out. Better to take cash rather than hardware, unless there is no cash.
That's great, I loved doing that too. Literally anything was a possible scenario for the stick figures, when all you had was a pencil and blank paper.
Indirect control of the form "you broke this law and go to jail" is perfectly sufficient. And it is in fact attempts to disassociate addresses and real world identities that are easily circumvented when you have the resources of a government.
That's an interesting view. Not to challenge you, but for my own edification, do you have sources for that?
The bit with passing the result along in the chain of deferrals reminds me a bit of some of the fun stuff you can do with Events in C#.
The Problem with iOS
Easy, they'll order people to smash the Google instead of just hard drives. Problem solved.
I've been using appharbor for a long time and I've been very happy. The recent additions of spdy and web sockets is really great....they've been very active in integrating with other providers. It is pretty shocking how easy it is to spin up a $10/month 10GB sql server instance. And in general, it 'just works'.
Money. The less government money you use, the less they can tax. Cash or Bitcoin. Don't give them a cut. I wouldn't advocate tax evasion, although the truth is, if you pay taxes, you finance this bullshit.
In theory, the third party doctrine can be worked around with a contract that says that the data is owned by the customer; that won't help with NSLs, though.

Also in theory, trusted computing can be used to prove to the customer that the provider is using a secure hypervisor. There are a lot of technical and business issues making that actually work.
The choice of Rail Neutral Temperature depends on the region. In the US Midwest and plains it's typically around 95 to 100 degrees. In the UK it's stressed to 27°C (81°F), which is the mean summer rail temperature. In neither case is it the maximum possible temperature.

You don't want it to be the maximum possible temperature for the area, because a well-laid track can be in temperatures 40 to 50 degrees above the RNT before it starts to buckle, and a higher RNT is harder to achieve.

Nor do they lay the track or heat it at the hottest possible temperature. They achieve the RNT by stressing the rail. The RNT can also change over time, for example, if winter causes a curved track to become a bit more shallow.

I agree with you and with the linked-to author: I don't see how the proposed hyperloop system can ever economically handle temperature expansion, and the lack of a good explanation or discussion makes it easy to dismiss the seriousness of the proposal.
What's inside my Blu-Ray player?
It's been my point of view since the first dot-com crash that my employer and I are "even" every payday. I've done my work, and been compensated for it. I'm not sure what else one can reasonably expect.
Exactly. I have a little bandwidth counter in my rainmeter and it tells me that so far this month I've used about 50 gigs download and 20 gigs upload. So incredibly little of that is content that is sensitive or really even meaningful. If I send one email to a terrorist, then download one movie, then only like a couple kilobytes out of several gigs is actually "interesting" data.
I don't understand any of the ideas alluded to therein, but the tone of the discourse in there and the thread that led to this (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/python-tulip/EgpBV5-sI...) is very respectful, and people apologize if their tone was too snarky or contemptuous.

I like this a lot about python, and it makes me excited and eager to perhaps contribute a little to its development some day (I'm currently at the level where I have a decent idea about the OOP aspects of python, and know some tricks that I think are nifty, such as overloading __setattr__ and the like. So quite a long way to go, but hopefully I will get there some day).
Clicky link thingy:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/W7VLPXN
GoDaddy Acquires Local Business Data Provider Locu
5) Now if the Guardian is seen in possession of this material, would that constitute lying to the authorities?
Double quotes imply a direct quote, not paraphrasing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark.
is there any way to secure a virtual box such that a service provider could not achieve or grant others access to it?

No.
A shiite ton of military equipment - Britain is a big arms exporter.

Here is a story about exports to repressive regimes, this bit alone is troubling, and a believe it's just a fraction of exports. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/blood-money-uk...
If you happen to not make it through the thread to the following link or would prefer to join Guido and others discuss further edits to the post, before he makes it into a blog or a contribution to Twisted docs, the following is a Google Doc with several comment threads about quotes throughout the article: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10WOZgLQaYNpOrag-eTbUm-JU...
Until we get someone to risk going open with this we won't ever know. You can't fight a secret law in secret very well. But only people served with a secret demand has standing to challenge it. The barriers are too high as long as the Government can keep the secret. Once it's out of the bag you have more options in court. But you also risk everything they can do to you in secret.

Secrets have no place in a "democracy".
As far as I know, there are no documentaries made about how it sucks to be a gas attendant.
I've gone through a number of these company bust-ups. The first one was fairly traumatic for a lot of people, but I'd only been there 3 months. 2001, In my interview, when I was asked "Is there anything you'd like to ask us" I said, "look this is awkward, but I've seen the company mentioned on fuckedcompany.com a number of times, and it's all bad news, is there any concern?" and I received the answer "Oh that's our American parent company, we'll be unaffected". 3 months later, gone gone gone. I watched people who'd worked there/started the company get turfed out, and crying. I had barely been in the office (working offsite) so I didn't even really feel any attachment at all, so it was all quite surreal.

Next job I worked for a small company where the two directors ended up being unable to pay staff, so they put everything on their credit cards, and convinced everyone to resign and sign up as contractors. It was only years later that it dawned on me, that by resigning they didn't have to pay severance packages. We were young and trusting.
It seems to me that some people read those books and didn't understand them to be cautionary.
I made a feed reader called Bulletin that has infinite scroll that works just fine. Can't see why others couldn't do it as well. We also went for minimal on the UI.

bulletin.io
Coming from the NR, this represents a real (albeit small) addition to the growing chorus of concerned voices.

And it only increases my respect for the leakers' strategy of releasing new information bit-by-bit: it allows a parade of NSA apologists to concoct a fresh new excuse for each revelation, then look like the untrustworthy puppets they are once the next abuse blows their ad hoc rationale out of the water.
3D Robotics launches $729 fully assembled, drone
You can look for collaborators/co-founders who may able to help you http://sideprojectors.com
I think it's more telling that the lack of professionalism displayed by an unemployed developer is the focus, and not the fact that an unemployed developer with a lack or professionalism discovered this hack. This could have been exploited so much worse than it was. Just because he didn't follow unwritten rules of disclosure, doesn't mean that Facebook didn't majorly mess up here. The details of the dev and his behavior are quite trivial, in this case.
I grok a different subtext:

It's a journalist's job to know where the skeletons are buried, and where the escorts keep their address books. Journalists also have ready access to dictionaries, with which to clarify the meanings of words. Such words include "mutually", "assured" and "destruction".
tl;dr: bolting on a dynamic-typed imitation of static-typing is slow.
That's actually a very fair point - when it comes to usability with respect to the functional style, sometimes less is more. I think C# is actually a pretty good example of a pragmatic language that offers FP to make your life easier, but doesn't beat you over the head with it. If I could choose between Java and C# purely on the basis of the language, there is no question that I'd choose C#.
It should probably be noted that:
a) you don't have use node's built in HTTP server (yeah, I know, nearly everyone will), you are more thn free to write your own or use one from it's module repository (npm)
b) The entire HTTP module is currently being over-hauled in the 0.11.X development branch and the changes should appear in the stable 0.12.x releases.

Out of interest has anyone seen what other web servers support for these more 'esoteric' verbs is like?
So:

1. What do we know about the Boss? Nothing. Does he have a family? We don't know.

2. Is the Boss meant to quit simultaneously? Why? It's not clear that this would've stopped OP being fired.

If he's such a good boss, quitting makes the situation worse for everyone left behind.
Why boycott companies? It's not companies who did this.
Just read the original:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/19/david-m...

He had the drives destroyed after noting to the Whitehall guys that it would do nothing: "a peculiarly pointless piece of symbolism that understood nothing about the digital age."
I'm actually an American. It looks like Unilever, Shell, BP, and HSBC are all based in Britain. Those brands are pretty popular in the USA, so that was an interesting find.
Wouldn't mind an Aeron chair though! Definitely pick one of those up for yourself in a sell-off ;)
Yeah they think the are a roadmap.
Apparently you have no idea what a speculative bubble is.
A definite +1 for writing down the question.

Regardless of your confidence in yourself, it just takes one inarticulate interviewer sending you off in the wrong direction and then marking you down as "couldn't solve the problem and then claimed to have misheard me" to ruin your review, especially since many companies nowadays require a unanimous "yes" before making an offer.
Companies based in Britain bring in tax revenue, which then funds the British authorities, who look to be rather corrupt.
Well, in the strictest sense, I'm getting richer by being employed. Of course, good money handling and living below my means are required for me to make progress.

I think you mean to say that "my boss" is capturing more value from my work than I am, which is probably true, but that doesn't mean that we're not both benefiting. I look at it as a simple transaction; I give my time, he gives me money. I don't plan to keep this arrangement forever, but it's certainly making me richer right now.
It depends on the bug, automate account creation and spam some links could add a few million bots to a bot net.
I'd be cautious about deploying a high traffic app to Mono as well. This is more for experiments and personal apps.
Sorry, If you had a bad experience in our country.

Most people stare basically out of uncontrolled curiosity. In fact you get similar stares if you were to look differently than we do like for example say Chinese, African etc. This isn't just limited to white individuals but anybody in general.

Situation in many parts of Bangalore is better. The solution to this problem is to let both our cultures mingle more, than just stay in isolation.
Hacker Scouts is served Cease and Desist letter from Boy Scouts of America
I Don’t Want to Meet Your Company at Demo Day | Hunter Walk
Boulder-Longmont Maglev Monorail
Can we all agree now that the slippery slope is real and had been slid down?
"If we have to. That's what makes us special. No more red tape. No more getting the bad guys caught in our sights then watching them escape while we wait for someone in Washington to issue the order. Oh, come on. You've seen the raw intel, Pam. You know how real the danger is. We need these programs now."
The low-contrast trend is really being shown here. I don't get why it's so popular. We've got left navigation with grey text on a grey background, no borders, no underlines indicating that they are link. The top bar is purple, with a purple hero board just below it. It's low-contrast city... and I have no idea where my eye should go.

Bootstrap 3 looks old and Bootstrap 2 looks new.
The original title was: "You've had your debate. There's no need to write anymore." (theguardian.com)

The new title is: David Miranda, schedule 7 and the danger that all reporters now face (theguardian.com)

I prefer the first one.
I am not a native English speaker. Although I study in England (University of Manchester), I believe half of my course mates are not native speakers either. At least the ones who turn up to lectures. People try to explain their algorithms, ideas in broken English with damn thick accents but they DO explain. They put effort.

From what he managed to write in the blog post, he CAN write English which is not THAT bad.

But this dude doesn't really bother. Hey Facebook, there's a bug. Wanna know it? How about you... beg me to tell you?

I am quoting him: whatever , i dont care for miss spelling , just the idea , i never correct an underline red word ;)

Did FB treat it properly? No. Did he act properly? Not either. But since it's FB... THEY ARE EVIL!!!!111!
Startup Bro Apologizes For San Francisco Rant
That might be true, but if it has gotten to this point, I'm more inclined to think that we really haven't see anything yet… after all do people think that these capabilities, that they have worked so hard on in secret and outsourced to companies owned by some of the largest/most influential private equity groups in the world, will just be given up easily?
I have been really disappointed with MSBuild in general. I kept looking at steps in the build process and finding documents that said "you need to install Visual Studio and package XYZ onto your build server to get support for this feature".

MS does a lot of things right - C# is a fantastic language. Imho, the biggest problem with MS is the lack of the normal darwinean processes that you see out in the bazaar of open-source. MS products survive because they're tied to other MS products, so complete turds live on in spite of constant user frustration because the entire MS universe, as a whole, is good enough to keep using. But the pain points never go away, or get completely re-written by the same people with the same flaws but a whole new two-day process of learning how this new version works.
I can't see all of them on a 1080p screen at 125% zoom, either.
If you want to use native JSON, store it as an object with a string.

{
"small": 2,
"large": { "bignum": "-9223372036854775807.4237482374983253298159" }
}

Then make sure to replace or treat the object as a big number. Granted, it is more busywork.
While twirling his nefarious mustache, no doubt.

EDIT: If you must downvote me, go ahead, but I'm not making a statement here. I'm joking. I think HN could use it these days.
"...I additionally believed that one of our best defenses against the national security state was the perennial proclivity of clandestine organizations to piss off their own employees."

-J. Orlin Grabbe, 1995

http://peculium.net/2013/04/03/the-end-of-ordinary-money-by-...
The article misses the progress made by Microsoft Azure.

http://fakevalley.com/microsoft-celebrates-100th-windows-azu...
Hmm. The 3 jobs I've gone through were all very different. One was a very small software development company, they decided after three weeks that they wanted someone with a lot more experience. I went from there to a huge corporation, where I was unhappy so I found another job. This one I'm at now is a largish "small business", like 300 employees.

I'd be confident in my ability to find another should these guys suddenly not want me. But they told me when they hired me that it wasn't even a competition, I was that much better than their other candidates. It was like that at BigCorp too.

Another thing is that all three were contract-to-hire, except for BigCorp, which omitted the hire part. I had significant accomplishments at each of them, making and delivering entire apps. This is reflected in the resume.

It's a different world out there. You really have to try people out before you can commit to them. Many times it just doesn't make sense to continue.
The NSA? Caught lying? I am shocked. SHOCKED.
> the 'majority' who support the drone strikes understand what is going on and are ok with it.

I agree some do, but it's wrong to suggest all do. I think mostly people are uninformed (certainly in the US). Actually I'm headed to Portugal in a week or so, if you're in Lisbon or north do send me an email and we can have a drink :)