skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Cheney administration was openly deceitful, as it were, a brazen set of liars fronted by an idiot stooge. This turn of events - particularly given Obama's rhetoric and the expectations of him - seems in many ways much more insidiously dangerous.

That's one way to look at it. Another is that the policies were put in place under Bush/Cheney, and they are being exposed under Obama.

Obama ran on transparency, and things are definitely becoming more transparent, albeit through unconventional means.

Politics is a complicated game and a delicate balancing act, especially when its intertwined with the military, the agencies, and the powers that be. We may be observing a complex line on the grand chessboard, and unless we are able to see the whole board, we won't fully understand the moves or the strategy in play.
Could we try to add some books for each of these topics?
Graham Greene said: "Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil - or else an absolute ignorance."

This world isn't built for maximising happiness of humans, this is true whether you follow scientific rationale or religious faith. When you pursue happiness, you are working against the system. There in nothing wrong with it, however it does tell you why Graham Greene concluded the above.
Looks cool, commenting to come check it out again later. HN doesn't have a "save" feature right?
> Have american racists historically been more individualistic or something?

Not to my knowledge. As far as I can tell they are doing nothing more than using existing strong negative connotations of racism to slander an unrelated ideology. It doesn't make logical sense, but it doesn't have to; they are counting on the strong emotional response it evokes to be sufficiently persuasive.
That's either hilarious (or depressing) that people can't even tell the content of your posts apart (probably because its all so generic.)
Right, but you have to consider the complexity of the iterator implementation as well. Every time I implement iterators for non-trivial data structures in languages without generators I want to hit myself in the face for using that language.
Wikipeida game
Windows has got a Hardware Abstraction Layer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_abstraction#Microsoft_...

Until Windows 4, even the graphic part wasn't in the kernel, eventually they had to compromise for performance reasons.

I don't know Linux well enough to answer your question about Linux, but I'm pretty sure that concerns are well separated, however they are so fundamental to what the OS does that you can't just rely on some "external library".

An Hypervisor doesn't touch any hardware stuff. Basically if you consider kernel mode to run in ring 0 and user mode to run in ring 3, the Hypervisor runs in ring -1 and just deals with privileges to sum up. At to no instance does the hypervisor deal with the hardware such as disks or network cards. That code lies in the ring 0 kernel. All the Hypervisor says is ... "yeah ok, ring -1 kernel, you can play in that sandbox".

For example when you run a VM, the VM emulates hardware but the OS running in the VM stills need drivers...

Now it's not that easy to separate the OS from the drivers, because each OS has got some ideas about how the cache should work and how disks should be managed and what is actually a NIC.

When you write an OS you make your best so that writing a driver can be done to someone else and the code can be reused (e.g. for writing to multiple OS) but you CAN'T expect to use a common framework because well, at some point you will want to do DMA and you don't want to tell your user that their Intel SSD will run at 10 MiB/s.
I vaguely remember some incident back in early '00 when they found some "interesting" patch in FreeS/WAN code added by someone who was either consulting or tied otherwise with NSA. There was a flurry of discussion on a mailing list followed, I think, by the patch reversal.

Does anyone know what I am referring to?
There are always ways to act, you just have to be willing to do them. For example, if 100.000 people constantly barraged the members of congress to outlaw this it would happen, but people aren't sufficiently motivated to turn this into a genuine cause.

I agree with the parent comment, people have too much trust that this all will not affect their lives. The fact that a functioning democracy becomes impossible when political opponents can be retroactively wiretapped for years into the past is something esoteric that simply doesn't strike home.
While he may get criticism from both sides of the political aisle, the criticism has not yet passed over into popular culture. Just as one crude barometer, comedians are not yet making their livings lampooning Obama (well, you see it on the Comedy Central 'satire news' lineup, but not yet the Comedy Central 'standup special' lineup.)

Give it another year or three and we might get there (particularly if this Syria shit goes Obama's way...).
John Gilmore (born 1955)is one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cypherpunks mailing list, and Cygnus Solutions.

I should be such an 'idiot'.
The discoveries of antidepressants and anxiolytics weren't accidental: testing something and seeing what it does, then finding a purpose for it is not accidental, it's basic science. It's how most chemicals were discovered.

And there's no doubt these medications work in a lot of people (but not all), even though we don't understand how they actually work.
Our ancestors did not know what fire was or how it worked, but they did use it because it was useful, the same applies here.

Further development is going to be difficult without a good understanding of how the brain works, though - pharma companies need to focus on finding better ways to probe deeper and more accurately into the brain (and create good simulators for that later on) before developing new drugs.
Yes, you're right - from chiphers(1):

aDH cipher suites effectively using DH authentication, i.e. the certificates carry DH keys. Not implemented.

ADH anonymous DH cipher suites.
It's not that great.
There are plenty of other distros that are just as good.
Could this be explained by a secret deal to support health care prgram in exchange of supportIng a security enforcement program ?
There are a couple of reasons I have some hope for the security of AES:

1. There's this proof that a trapdoored symmetric cipher is equivalent to a public key system (there's a link in the metzdowd thread somewhere). No one seems to have figured out how to build a public key system with anything close to the efficiency of AES.

2. The specification of AES itself isn't that large. It's not minimal, but neither does it seem to have large arbitrary-looking constants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_up_my_sleeve_number

The NIST Dual-EC DRBG fails on both counts: 1. it is based on an obvious public key system, and 2. it recommends the use of large arbitrary constants that could easily be a trapdoor.

Now is it possible that NSA occasionally intentionally fails to backdoor a NIST standard in order to help us underestimate how often they succeed? Can we ever develop a coherent threat model with the possibility of this kind of adversary?
They're funded through our 'representatives'. And (going by Sensenbrenner's statements lately) they'll have something to say about that when Congress rejoins.
Intel Reverts Plans, Will Not Support Ubuntu's XMir
> “These capabilities are among the Sigint community’s most fragile, and the inadvertent disclosure of the simple ‘fact of’ could alert the adversary and result in immediate loss of the capability,”

That's a statement designed to mislead.

"the adversary" certainly assumes that the NSA does what it does and acts accordingly.

Now, if "the adversary" is the general public, then the statement actually makes sense.

EDIT: The consumer is indeed part of "the adversary":

Extract of one of Snowden's documents: "These design changes make the systems in question exploitable through Sigint collection … with foreknowledge of the modification. To the consumer and other adversaries, however, the systems' security remains intact." Taken from http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryp...
> you’re really going to have to pay attention to where you’re sticking the cable in so you don’t do any damage.

Damage? Is there a known failure mode with micro USB 3, or is the author unusually heavy-handed with this stuff?
I believe that's what the parent is talking about. There isn't any reason for Go not to have similar syntactic sugar for something as common as looping through an iterator.

To be honest, every release of Go feels more and more like Java anyway. I won't be surprised when Go eventually ends up being a JVM-less Java in the same way a new OS will end up being unix. After all, "Those who don't understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." – Henry Spencer

Maybe Java is the same way? Not to say unix (plan 9?) or java (scala?) are perfect, but there is a reason they are popular.
Have you seen the debate he had when he was running for Texas Governor, hell if he was honest he may even of gotten my vote, it's sounds like it's from a completely different universe.

http://youtu.be/pw4Bhmm22xo?t=18s
Oh well. Is OpenVPN still considered solid?
To be fair, he is 60. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn't look fantastic without a shirt on these days, and dianabol is a hell of a drug...
How a 1930s theory explains the economics of the internet
What's so good about the Medium editor?
You say the same thing that doctors say about SSRIs: is certainly effective and fairly well understood in its clinical effects.

Yeah, of course we see the effects, but we still don't really know how exactly it works. For example, no one can tell for sure why Dextroamphetamine and levoamphetamine have different effects (the former is a brain stimulant, while the latter affects mostly the body). Adderall is mostly dextroamphetamine, by the way.
"No record of where it came from"

Not quite.
I guess I was thinking of this: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57410234-93/wikipedia-dumps...
which was a year ago April (how time flies...)

IIRC before that time GM were thickly populated with WP icons, and that diminished over time.
Go supports this:

for c := range customers { }
Tips for budding freelancers – Start getting more productive
Discussion continued in other thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6347924
We've already discussed this.
That guy just argues that people should eat less junk food. The basic point is the same: if you want to be thin, excercise and eat properly.
Having read some of the blog, it certainly looks like he's a kid with issues. So I'm not surprised the teacher called the university to warn them.

Not sure he really should have called the police, but it's up to him isn't it. But as I said, there's very likely far more to the story than just a blog.

If for example the story was "teacher calls police after student damages property / makes threats / brings knife to school / etc etc, and also shows police his weird ranty blog", then it wouldn't fit with the 'internet hate mob' agenda.
I get what you're trying to imply, but I believe you're wrong. Most everyone knows by now that all bitcoin transactions must be public, but there is nothing in the bitcoin protocol that identifies who's who. Or even where (geographically speaking) a transaction originated.
Obama ran on transparency, but that turned out to be a total lie. Blaming Bush/Cheney for Obama's failures is just a way for the people who voted for him to assuage their hypocrisy. The reality is that the Obama admin is far more like Bush's admin, and is contiguous with it in terms of policy.
IMO the syntax of Verilog isn't so problematic. Adhering to a simple style guide will avoid most gotchas. The author does make a passing reference to the real problems though:

1. Simulation is many orders of magnitude slower than the same code running in production (and you see code in production only after many months and dollars). You don't face this slowdown when writing software.

2. Compared to software, there is much less code reuse in hardware. With software, it doesn't cost much if your binary is 10% or even 100% bigger, so your class can be written a more general/reusable but less efficient way. But a 10% increase in the size of a chip makes it significantly more expensive, so as a hardware designer you tend to create one-off 'classes' that are as efficient as possible, but less general/reusable.
Well, for example compare:

OSM
http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=10/51.3825/-68.5375
(I don't see anything on the St. Lawrence River either...)

Mapquest
http://mapq.st/18F1XnO

Looking at LARGE bodies of water away from populated regions, I'm seeing very few labels anywhere.
I suddenly realized today how few spam messages I get on Gmail and Hotmail nowadays compared to 5-10 years ago. I googled for "spam email largely solved" and this article popped up.

Think back to all the ideas proposed 10 years ago to deal with spam: electronic postage, positive IDs, catching and prosecuting spammers, challenge/response systems. People said that the growth rate of spam was so large that it would kill off email within a couple years.

It's interesting that it was algorithmic methods (like filtering) that I think largely solved the spam problem -- and not re-training of users, changing workflow, or anything the government did.
A reversible design would have been elegant. Lightning just requires every connector to have a chip which figures out its orientation and which is intended to obstruct third parties from making compatible accessories.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_(connector)#Technolog...

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/10/apple-revising-mfi-prog...
102 years - not bad at all!
If anything, individualism and racism are incompatible since individualism considers people as individuals and not as members of groups such as races or nationalities.
Well, it seems that we humans need to figure out how to do what we do best - Eat a species back down to acceptable numbers.

Last time I tried jellyfish tentacles (American Chinese food restaurant), they were rubbery and very chewy - Maybe flavor them and make a new gummy worm substitution? Lasting longer than a jaw-breaker?
As I understand it one of the infrastructural problems that used to enable spam was botnets blowing out ungodly amounts of mail over port 25. This doesn't happen nearly as often as it did, because most ISP's blocked port 25 by default. (You have to call them up to get it unblocked.) And of course most email services whitelist each other instead of blacklists.

Botnets can still take advantage of webmail through more sophisticated methods. Since spam is just a symptom of large scale botnets. (The majority of the web is currently a zombie in some botnet IIRC.) One way to reduce a lot of bad faith Internet behavior is to kill botnets.
It's already feasible if you've got the time and expertise (or will to learn) to build your own panels (from scratch, soldering solar cells and all) and do the installation yourself. Batteries are the cheapest part of a PV solar installation.
Obama's presidency has been disastrous for the privacy of American citizens:

“The [surveillance] Court documents declassified recently show that in late 2011 the court authorized the NSA to conduct warrantless searches of individual Americans’ communications using an authority intended to target only foreigners,” Wyden said in a statement to The Washington Post. “Our intelligence agencies need the authority to target the communications of foreigners, but for government agencies to deliberately read the e-mails or listen to the phone calls of individual Americans, the Constitution requires a warrant.”

The Obama admin hypocrisy on transparency is astounding. No public debate, no checks by Congress on the authority to wiretap and collect enormous amounts of data on US citizens. Yet the people who voted for him are still making excuses for this admin.
That CL language is only slightly more aggressive in terms of ownership than the Medium terms. All CL did there was add the ability to enforce against competitors scraping CL pages and reposting the content on their own sites to bootstrap content, a problem CL has been plagued with from many would-be usurpers and parasites. The author of the ad still retains general ownership of the content. You can legally post something to CL and then post the exact same text to eBay or wherever else, CL is not taking that right from you under those terms. As long as you are the one doing the reposting (not a parasitic third party scraper).

Language that takes full ownership would be the kind of thing you'd see in a work-for-hire writing contract, which looks something like this:

> The copyright for all Work produced under this agreement shall belong to the Client at all times. Client shall exclusively own in perpetuity all now known or hereafter existing rights of every nature worldwide pertaining to such Work in or as part of any version of the Client’s publications that are published in print or displayed through computer-assisted and other interactive media such as the Internet and World Wide Web (collectively the "Rights").
> So now you wonder about the most-outspoken apologists for the agency, guys like Ruppersberger. You wonder if some blackmailing is going on or whether these folks just hate the country they serve.

There's another possibility:

Getting money or power (and ultimately money) out of this.

It's probably the most widespread motivation of "representatives" in DC nowadays.
awesome list! Thanks!
Hey, thanks for commenting. Lemme try to answer some of your questions.

> 3. Colours is the single most important thing of design

Colors are indeed the important aspect of design, but they're also hard to choose and understand. In general, you have to know some things about colour theory when choosing a palette. I'd recommend to you to choose a popular palette from the sites I referred to in the article. Another option is to find a nice presentation and copy its palette. Speaker Deck is definitely your go-to choice for this.

>Just a tip here: not all palettes work well for a presentation. Firstly, some palettes have too much contrast.

Contrast is (simply put) the difference between two colors. It is often used to create vivid and colorful images, example: http://www.flickr.com/photos/louisgely/4409863711/in/photost.... That might work great for art and photography, but it's not easy for our eyes. In fact, when you're having a too contrasty palette it might look great on your computer but it will be difficult for viewers to read it comfortably. Also, consider that the projectors usually have different color profiles and not having enough contrast could become an even bigger problem. Generally you need a nice balanced palette eg. https://speakerdeck.com/geeforr/whats-new-in-ruby-2-dot-0. Finally, when you're using only black and white in your palette, everything looks plain and emotionless, at least to me.

To conclude, colors are hard but there are ways to find good palettes around.

P.S.: I should edit my original post and clarify these things, add some examples as well.
If history will judge Bush poorly, how will they judge Obama in the context of continuing Bush's policies? Embarrassment? Check. Screw-ups (including Syria)? Check. Pressuring/intimidating foreign governments not to grant Snowden asylum? Check. Drone striking children? Check. Sending admin flacks out to say that Benghazi was caused by a YouTube video? Check.

BTW, the Obama admin has zero evidence in public of scientific samples or intel proving use of sarin gas by the Syrian government: http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE98603A20130907?irpc...

Reality check: Obama and Bush are cut from very similar policy cloth. Both warmongers and NSA expansionists who don't give a damn about the civil liberties of the American public.
Namebox - sell your unwanted or unused domains
If you are interested in seeing them for yourself, it is quite simple given a small amount of luck.

First, collect dry moss. Soak it in warm for 30 minutes. Squeeze out the moss, and examine the collected liquid closely under magnification, searching for localized motion. Even a 10x hand lens or loupe will be fine for identification, although a microscope would of course be better.
Project Management Versus Product Management
Thanks for the course pointer. It seems to me that there is no new offering of this course in near future. Do you have any pointers to similar online courses related to VLSI CAD tools ?
You can always find some excuse or another.

The fact of the matter is, the consumer (we, the general public) IS targeted by the NSA and our privacy is about to be terminated forever.

So yes, we now have the evidence to understand that we are "the adversary".
> The majority of the web is currently a zombie in some botnet IIRC.

I didn't understand this sentence. Can you explain?
Generate statements are your friend.
Also see "who is not an adversary?"

https://soundcloud.com/madiha-1/students-question-the-nsa-at
well to me - if I am CC'ed in conversation it means as FYI or "I'd like to hear your opinion", "I hope you don't mind" or similar, i.e. I am on CC just to stay informed, not to actively be on conversation, also sometimes informs the receiver that this is known to someone else.
Other case when 2+ parties with several participants in each are agreeing on something/negotiating it resembles semantic conversation much better you send email with TO set to other parties (you say them this) and CC your colleagues (they hear this and stay in conversation). Btw, and I don't like when people don't include all recieptients when replying, Gmail somehow promotes this
"Concerned with security and threat" - not really the case in Europe...

As for hospitality, people always seem to enjoy something/someone new in their daily lives - as long as you're friendly and don't overstay your welcome, you'll always find someone to show you the city and give you a place to crash for a few days.

Westerners (esp. Americans) are a curiosity and don't seem threatening at all (what with the smiles and politeness) - no Hungarian, Bulgarian or Turk will ever think you're a threat when you're alone and they've got a whole neighborhood to back them :-D.
I am not what you would call an Obama advocate.

But just like watching what people do can reveal more than listening to what people say, observing the effects in a complex system can reveal more than focusing on the mesmerizing flap of its butterfly wings.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machinery_of_Freedom

Describes a system based purely around free market mechanisms. Free markets are emergent, and they certainly work very well, scaling them up to consume all the functions currently performed by government in the methods described by this book is in my opinion the best method for abolishing the state I've heard of so far.

There are many other ideas however, and I'm open to any of them to the extent that they employ persuasion / markets rather than force.

> Fraud alone can't keep it going in any event, otherwise police wouldn't be needed.

Yes, when the lies stop being believable, then you need the jackboots to come in and crack skulls and assert the true facts of the way those in power see things. This is part of my problem with the system in question.
Analytic Combinatorics
I agree. You can't look at it as a programming language. We also learned it in school and at some point I flipped a switch and it was remarkably easy to use it after a few failures. I thought it was very exciting to build digital circuits using it.
I feel exactly the same way. (US citizen here.)

My country abuses its people and can't be trusted.

At least in the past, people had somewhere to flee to (here). Now, I don't know where to go.

It doesn't seem like it's even worth trying to fight it.
+1 in general except I think you are defining "ownership" a bit too narrowly here. For some authoritative discussion on the nature of "ownership" in copyright, see http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap2.html