skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Last night Thom Hartmann interviewed Ron Paul in his Conversations with Great Minds segment. Paul's take on all of this is that what's happening is already illegal according to the constitution, but that we aren't able to enforce the law because corporations, special interests and political lapdogs write their own laws. I'm still not sure what my stance on Paul is but I like his core political belief of nonintervention. It's similar to the golden rule but for politics, so for example if you spy on americans, you infringe their property right, in this case by stealing their privacy. An individual should be able to sue the NSA for that and win, setting a precedent for the rest of the population. The fact that they can't shows just how corrupt the system truly is. I'm not a libertarian but he made me stop and think:

http://www.thomhartmann.com/bigpicture/full-show-81913-ron-p...
While the parent post is the #1 comment right now on this article, it is clearly hyperbole.

Blatant Intimidation and Control is not what the US Government does. If you want proof, compare the US handling of the Washington Post to the British handling of The Guardian. The Washington Post and New York times have been free to publish everything. The Guardian however, just had spooks smash their computers this past weekend.

The US affords the press freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of debate. There are no spooks here that are trying to shut anything down, anywhere. At worst, we have some secret conversation that happened between Lavabit's owners and the FBI. No one forced anyone to shut anything down however, most certainly not in this Groklaw case.

Abuses that have come to light are all under-the-table sort of affairs. Metadata collection is not technically data, and therefore isn't afforded 4th amendment protections. (See Smith v Maryland). Information gathered from the NSA technically can't be used in a prosecution case, so the DEA unofficially changes the story before it gets told to a judge (see Parallel Construction).

Some laws are working, but there are cracks in the foundation which is leading to an overall breakdown in trust. If anything, viewing the news recently has shown me that these agencies are very interested in following the _letter_ of the law, although not necessarily the spirit of the law.

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

History of the US is a sobering example, of the Government constantly giving up powers in favor of its citizens. Need I remind people of the Office of Censorship in 1940s, where Government agents read every single mail that was going across the mail system? Need I remind people of COINTELPRO in 1960s, the program the FBI used to spy on Malcom X and Martin Luther King Jr ?

The US Government has historically listened to the pressures of its citizenry, and changed. It is not the time to lose hope, but the time to make your voice heard. FBI and NSA, as intimidating as they are, are run by US Citizens first and foremost.
Twitter user database is hacked
Cts: command-line manipulation of ctags for speed and profit
template <typename T>
void remove(std::vector<T>& v, std::size_t i)
{
std::swap(v[i], v.back());
v.resize(v.size() - 1);
}
Misquoting William Gibson:

"The fascism is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed."
Ah the "I'm right and will not listen to anything that contradicts my view!" type. How the hell do such people get anything other then heaping helpings of scorn?
I find it interesting that Greece and Italy, both of whom are in a financial crisis have some of the lowest internet uses rates it the EU. I wonder what the correlation between the economic crisis and this is.
The author of boost.context did some benchmarking[1] and found that get/setcontext was an order of magnitude slower than a custom solution. Whether this matters is an entirely different question, but it's clear that get/setcontext has some overhead.

[1] http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_54_0/libs/context/doc/html/c...
Hg's command-line tools are pretty awkward.

TortoiseHg, in especially the latter versions where the interface is unified into one big dialog, the workflow is exceptional. Everything I needed was at my fingertips at all times.

I've since drank the git koolaid after being forced to at work but after the introduction of git-flow I'll find it very hard to switch again. I know hg-flow exists but again due to Hg's awkward command-line or specifically how it is in the TortoiseHg window I would likely need a significant workflow boost to switch. Though it would be a good exercise to try to take a lot of how I work now and see how much I can bend TortoiseHg to that.

TortoiseGit specifically has a few holes where no UI exists and you have to use the command line but those are very infrequent. TortoiseHg and Hg in general seems way more user friendly to me but Git is definitely more powerful as you have access to all the knobs to completely trash a repository easily.
As a baseline it's limited to 100mA @ ~5V (150mA for 3.0). Devices can request additional power from the host, 500mA max for 1.X/2.X or 900mA max for 3.0. The host isn't required to be able to supply this much current, it can say 'no'. There are also some quasi standards and I believe now a real standard now for 'USB charging' which allows higher current (and voltage I believe).
Money can't buy you class. See: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, etc.
After some googling and stackoverflowing and msdning, I think any version of SQL on azure does _not_ support "select into".
I also found a request to have that added, and in January of 2013, it was closed as "won't do". ( see https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/776... )
Google Maps and Waze: A perfect match
depends what you mean by elegance. an "elegant solution" in engineering has very little to do with fashion, it's about solving a problem in a non-obvious but very clean and efficient way.
Groklaw isn't an organization, its a personal project, and its not shutting down because of the impact of the NSA revelations on Groklaw's mission, but because of the personal impact on the site operator.

Groklaw is shutting down because Pamela Jones, in the wake of the NSA revelations, has made a "personal decision [...] to get off of the Internet to the degree it's possible".
I remember my high school teacher's first introduction to an online encyclopedia article - we were tasked with some writing, and one of my friends had this new "Encarta" software (that was 1994 or so).

We made our homework in 15 minutes, proceeded to goof off all the afternoon, and blew away the teacher (we were intelligent enough to slightly modify it).
I believe he answered the question in the original comment.
I cannot comprehend this comment. I'v never seen a ticket for less on delta and the efficiency of boarding a SW flight blows anything away that I've seen on other carriers. Maybe this is a cross country issue. I usually fly shorter routes...I don't even know if southwest has flights that go cross country that don't have 3 or 4 stops....that might account for the higher price. For getting from Houston to New Orleans, there is no other way to go than LUV.
Chevy Volt?
>HN seems happy to point out that more people die from furniture than terrorism, but yet unwilling to correct people with similarly misguided opinions when it comes to this.

This logic is broken.

While more people may die from furniture than terrorism, what the NSA is doing is ensure that ZERO people are free. Period. You are not free when you simpl cannot communicate with another human being via electronic means without the government's ability to actually be party to that comm.

While I cannot comment on any of these decisions to shut down their businesses - the fact that they are doing so shows that we are in a really really REALLY bad place with respect to any level of trust in the government.

America is dead.

So where do we live? Every single thing that the US stood for has literally been murdered in the last 13 years.

We are not the land of the free. We are not a home for the brave. We have zero moral standing on any issue. We are 100% completely corrupt and destroyed as any nation we were raised to believe in.

I believe this all leads to one place. A world war - but not between nations. Between humans and their governments.

The systems of control will be stamping out any resistance to their control in the next few years. It doesnt get better from here.
Forbes is republishing experts-exchange now?
Brainwashed: Neuroscience and Its Perversions
The obvious reason for this approach to me is that Google is leveraging their reputation in order to solve difficult problems rather than actually looking to hire anyone. The answers this particular interviewer appeared to answer seem to be the kinds of things that a developer would want to know but might not be able to see the answer to.

The idea here that Google might be leveraging knowledge from a hopeful dupe, is echoed by their annual code challenges. The company wants to know things. It's hungry for knowledge.

My feeling that leading on applicants is the best way to be ignored when you need one because when you cry wolf, only the wolves answer the call eventually.
You will make more money if you have an active github account. For most people this means side projects/work.

You will be a better developer if you code more. You will be exposed to more languages, tools, people, and ideas.

If you don't code in your spare time, but you are happy where you are, don't feel like you are a bad developer, you just will not be as good at development as you could be. It is your life, why does it matter if you prefer to paint paintings at night instead of code? If you don't need to maximize your future revenue, don't feel bad.

If you want to be a better developer more than anything, then you should code. If something is stopping you from doing that, remove the blocker.

Personally, I don't hire anyone if I can't see code samples. 95% of the people I hire have their code samples on Github (not in a .zip file). So make sure you have some code samples available, but it doesn't have to be a side project or open source work.
Curious about the 'official' answer to the counter question. I'd have thought just having something triggered daily to clear out increments older than a day would be enough.
Is Forbes really scraping content from Quora and presenting it as an article?
I seem to recall Canada either is debating or already has similar legislation in place (memory fails me sadly). Although we do definitely have lots of wide open space, mainly because it's either arctic desert, bare rock, or is below freezing for six months of the year (or more)
Why don't more people walk out of interviews? Especially if someone set you up to fail, quite literally: interviewing for the wrong job. It's a waste of my time, it's a waste of your time as a company.

On top of that, if you're going to throw out dickish comments like the article states (paraphrase: "ask your friend, he'll know the answer"), I wouldn't stick around. Is that the atmosphere at the company? Agree or disagree with the interview style, comments like that would piss me off to no end. Start a game of needling and insults? You know what, I've had enough.
Making unSEXY soSEXY (Andrew Watterson from Asana on 9Slides)
Rubbish. Make good content, and make sure to share it to everyone that will find it good -- those following you on social networks.
Vibe or culture fit, whatever you call it, simply being extremely smart is not sufficient and far too many people think it is. :)
A patent is, ultimately, a negative entity. Before a patent is granted, anybody can make certain objects or perform certain techniques. After it's filed, the patent owner's rights remain unchanged, but everybody else is restricted from doing those things.

Humans have an intrinsic idea of "property" that the legal idea is built upon. A two-year-old child understands the idea of "mine". People still own things when government is not present, they just have a harder time enforcing that ownership.

Patents, on the other hand, are an entirely governmental construct.
How much of this is "News" in general, and how much is the Guardian in particular? They seem to be way further out on this than any other publication. The fact that their corporate structure is so unusual is part of why their role is so fascinating. I wonder how relevant the latter is to how they practice journalism—it must be, but to what extent?
Clearly, the answer is no.

BUT, and this is a big BUT, having multiple personal projects does make you much more marketable to potential employers.

If you don't have a well known University or a well known company on your resume, having a stack of personal projects that show you're constantly learning, that you're passionate about the programming and that you love what you do can mean the difference between getting a request to interview at a start-up vs. getting put in the "pass" pile of resumes/profiles that internal recruiters have to look at.

This especially holds true if you work at a large, enterpris-ey company (IBM, VMWare, Goldman, Delloite, etc.) and want to attract the attention of, and get a job at, a venture funded start-up based on our experience at DeveloperAuction.
A little over my head at points but the concept is intriguing to say the least..

Great to watch.
I wouldn't know about that; I've never built a single page app.
Cash is at least a concrete thing you possess, rather than an abstract idea whose sole purpose is to prevent other people from doing certain things.

Edit: additionally, cash doesn't expire, while patents only last two decades.
even if that is physically the same 30 pin connector, that isn't even remotely close to being electrically the same.

PDMI has USB 3.0, displayport and high current power.

the ipod dock connector has firewire and composite video.
Since I spend so much time in deeply nested source trees (shakes fits at Maven) with multiple different languages at play, I was finding it tedious to jump around to different files, or discover where a method/class was defined. I wrote this tool to let me jump around easily using the index file generated by ctags.

I've found it to be a real productivity booster and figured it to be worth sharing considering previous discussions of hacking directory traversal.
I encounter a massive ad every time I read a forbes article. At this point, I'm convinced forbes.com is blogspam
> I think the problem is that, by the time the NSA ask, it's too late. That's why these companies are prematurely shutting down, they realise this.

But wouldn't these circumstances ultimately mean that every service that holds information that could somehow be interesting to the NSA would have to shut down pretty much now to avoid exposing customers/users?

I mean, the NSA is allowed to come to your office unannounced and force you to give them access right away, right?
Graph Based Routing
Don’t Get Bored at Demo Day: Demo Day Bingo S13
One side effect of this is people feeling like the have to work on a side project. People who otherwise would be happy working for their company find themselves spending hours and hours on something on the side.

This cuts into hours that could be used for work or family or fun, and probably won't succeed because their heart isn't actually in it.
Maybe this is a sign that we need continuing education / professional development rules, like real professions have?
Google "pale skin vitamin d wheat northern europe" and you'll have it explained in full.
I would say that the reason people tend to look for developers who work on side projects etc. tend to generally be good developers, while those who don't can go either way.

It's hard to know whether a developer is good or bad with only a resume/interview. If you're looking for smart motivated people, the ones who tend to work on side projects etc. can actually show you stuff they've built, and generally you can get a good idea as to how/if they'd fit in with your company/start-up.

While this doesn't mean developers who don't take on side projects are bad, it's just hard to identify whether they are in fact good or bad.
Northern Irish here. We have a cultural division that aligns roughly with a religious division. The political leanings of Unionism and Nationalism stem from that cultural division - the historical inequalities and injustices. Religion is not the source of the division.

Sometimes it has been part of the problem. It has encouraged the establishment of separate school systems for Catholics and Protestants and it has been used a tool by the extremists to give legitimacy to their violence.

Sometimes it has been part of the solution. It has given emotional healing to victims, and it has motivated community leaders on both sides to push for peace.

I'd suggest that the same is true of most conflicts that you think of as stemming from Islam.
So cool to see those kids doing something with their talent
What's changed is that now more and more people realize the futility of crypto when the government can force you to decrypt or treat you as a criminal just for using crypto.
This struck me also. I initially thought "blimey, does HN provide them so much traffic that they're linkbaiting them now", but taking Quora content and repackaging it is just even lower.

It particularly struck me that HN very recently had an article that kicked off this exact debate.

What a sad state of affairs, although the full advert splash and the junky "similar" articles give that impression too.
From the Quora answer [1]:

> I do attend (and give) technical talks; and perhaps most
> importantly, I pick my day job based on learning and
> growth opportunities: which company I’m working at, which
> team I’m on, and which projects I take on. I stumbled
> onto this a little bit by accident, but I discovered that
> responsibilities in your day job that require you to
> learn are a great forcing function for learning.

I think that this is the nuance of the article that the headline simplifies away. I think we often look for side-projects because they are an indicator of ongoing learning and they demonstrate expertise. They are by no means the only way to show these things to a prospective employer. Giving presentations, writing articles, being able to discuss industry trends intelligently... All of these things count too.

[1] https://www.quora.com/Software-Engineering/Are-you-a-bad-dev...
GnuPG is not a solution for this. The problem is not just about the contents of the message, but knowing your communication habits. GnuPG can't encrypt who your message is going to, being replied to, when, or even the subject.

The NSA probably isn't storing all the contents of voice calls either, but it really doesn't matter all that much. They can still tell who you communicate with when and how often. That's not conducive to democracy or free speech.

Furthermore, because of how few people use GnuPG or other such tools, I would expect you'd only be targeted harder for using them.
"but it doesn't have to be ... open source work"

Would you be comfortable with the candidate that would put a brief description on CV and bring a laptop to the interview to show it?
The standard is for the specification of the pin layout not the plug. As all the links on the wikipedia page are broken and I can't remember the name of the plug itself, we're at a loss here.
> Blatant Intimidation and Control is not what the US Government does. If you want proof, compare the US handling of the Washington Post to the British handling of The Guardian. The Washington Post and New York times have been free to publish everything.

Ahem... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair
> Side projects are not necessarily a great way to get better at engineering, and by no means the only way to get better. If you take on a side project, you do go through the process of defining a product and coding it up, most likely full-stack and hopefully with some interesting technologies, but you’re probably not going to be working with a lot of teammates on a large, complicated codebase with evolving and expanding product requirements and scaling it up and maintaining it over time, which ends up being a lot of what software engineering actually is.

Notwithstanding the fact that working "with a lot of teammates on a large, complicated codebase with evolving and expanding product requirements and scaling it up and maintaining it over time" is not necessarily what "software engineering" entails (or should entail) at every company, I actually think this is why a lot of developers take on side projects: being able to design and build something of one's own using the technologies of one's own choosing can be a lot more satisfying than refactoring code and putting out fires for 8+ hours every day.

Obviously, developers who are adequately stimulated and satisfied by their day jobs probably have less incentive to indulge in side projects, and there's nothing wrong with that, but most people in the industry know that engineering jobs, even at the hottest or most prestigious companies, often leave something to be desired.
Does anyone know a good answer for the RealTimeCounter question?
How Body Language Can Hack Your Ads
How to use nonverbal tricks to increase your ad or landing page effectiveness.
I'm curious, what makes a program 'real' and what about Python and Scheme got in the way?
Well it completely ignores formatting (lists, tables, headings etc.) and images, so if you were to account for those it would inflate a fair bit I would imagine.
I don't think the tools available really limit a beginning programmer. They'll hack away in Visual Basic or using a hexeditor on their favorite programs.

What they really need is a mentor, learning materials, and the drive to create something. The smartest kid in the world isn't going to build anything useful or interesting if he doesn't care about it. He'll be assisted big time if he has someone to give him a sense of direction. It's amazing how much a 'dumb' but determined kid can get done, even if underneath it's a horrible jumble of spaghetti code.
An acquaintance of mine applied for a product management job, did two interviews in NY that went fine, then was flown out to MTV for a series of interviews.

When this person got there, two of the people they were supposed to meet with were traveling on business and hadn't notified the recruiter. A third was out sick. The supposed-to-be fourth, now first interview walked into the room and said, "Look, I don't have any idea how to interview product managers, so I'm going to ask you calculus questions", and proceeded to start to write equations on the board. The fifth interview was the first and only that happened AND dealt with product management.

When they got back to NY, this person was notified that they'd been rejected, then notified this was a mistake and they'd have to come back to MTV to redo all of the interviews, including the two that had happened.

Obviously, at this point they told Google to go scratch and went on to do really good work elsewhere.

I've interviewed at and worked for a number very very large companies before, and none of them have been as disrespectful at interviewing and hiring as Google sounds from these stories.
> set up some slick distribution mechanism that updates the logic when needed without bothering non-technical users with it.

You'll need to make sure that those responsible to signing the updates are resistant to coercion. The best bet there is probably a moderately large number of somewhat anonymous signers. Have a large and diverse pool of signers and require every update to have some portion of the signers sign off on it before the releases are accepted. With any luck if doors start getting kicked in and signers start getting hit with wrenches, at least one of them will be able to warn the public.
The problem with filesystem-level encryption is that it allows the mail server to decrypt the messages. With PGP, the server is only able to encrypt messages; messages can be decrypted only by clients which have the private key.
What does the NSA have to do with Groklaw? They don't get anonymous tips from whistleblowers do they? This is weird. Someone please explain.