skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The documentation for each search must be given to the FISC. The FISC is explicitly granted the ability to terminate any collection if it finds that the search was unlawful.

I thought they were already supposed to do that, and the reason they had a "Court" of judges in the first place. Why would I believe anything will change with regarding that Court, once this bill is passed?

Also, as Bruce Schneier says, "metadata is surveillance":

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/metadata_equa...

They assassinate people with signature strikes based on metadata, so don't say "metadata isn't important". It's deadly so.

The solution isn't to allow them to only collect metadata (only in US, seems they will keep collecting everything on "foreigners"), it's to end "mass surveillance", whichever way it's done. Surveillance should only ever be targeted. As whistleblower and former NSA William Binney said recently, NSA used to do that - they didn't always do mass surveillance on every country's individuals.

And finally, Feinstein just can't be trusted. For all we know that bill was written by NSA itself, knowing full well how they could "interpret" some of the stuff in the bill.
I am glad there is a clarifcation from Mark - http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1299.

>Last week, the less-than-a-month-at-Canonical new guy sent out the toughest template letter to the folks behind a “sucks” site. Now, that was not a decision based on policy or guidance; as I said, Canonical’s trademark policy is unusually generous relative to corporate norms in explicitly allowing for this sort of usage. It was a mistake, and there is no question that the various people in the line of responsibility know and agree that it was a mistake.

But if the person who sent the template letter was new, then surely this becomes a training issue?

Trademark violations can soon become PR disasters just like this has become. So perhaps companies and start up's may wish to learn from Canonical's mistake as it can easily happen to them.

No one is perfect. Mistakes happen...
For those who don't know the context of the reference to the poppy, it's from the poem "In Flanders Fields"

>In Flanders fields the poppies blow

> Between the crosses, row on row,

> That mark our place; and in the sky

> The larks, still bravely singing, fly

> Scarce heard amid the guns below.

> We are the Dead. Short days ago

> We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

> Loved and were loved, and now we lie

> In Flanders fields.

> Take up our quarrel with the foe:

> To you from failing hands we throw

> The torch; be yours to hold it high.

> If ye break faith with us who die

> We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

> In Flanders fields.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Flanders_Fields
unless there is something new in the latest release of osx 10.9, what on earth are you talking about?

Also, apple sells google the right to be the default search engine on ios (see eg [1]); this is very different than selling your search queries or results. For instance, when you get a google results page, only the very stupidest could be unaware that, well, google knows what you searched for.

[1] http://bgr.com/2013/02/11/google-apple-ios-default-search-1-...
Please read my separate post about a very similar accident a decade ago that killed 6 children. I don't think anyone can make blanket statements about what is and isn't a serious accident.
Notice that she said "our American dream," not "the American dream." She's not talking about a picket fence and a dog, she's talking about writing her own life's story.
Faster InnoDB Imports
Executive branch oversight of government programs has never been effective in protecting the citizenry from harm in the past, and there is no reason to believe this 'effort' would be any different.
ZFS - the future of file systems?
Been a longtime Ubuntu fan but Canonical's newfound disrespect for users privacy and ham fisted response means I'm looking for another distro now. Nice try by Mark Shuttleworth to explain the whole thing away (plays the "blame it all on the new guy" card) but once you've turned to into a datapimp it's hard to regain trust.
There are a few comments in here that demean the supposedly greedy MBAs who come in with no technical enthusiasm or know-how just because the salaries are high. However, I think it's quite possible that this trend is very positive for the industry, and for the world. The financial and social importance of internet companies is becoming more apparent to the mainstream citizen, and as a result, clever people are thinking more and more about how to manage and strategize in this space.
Samsung tried to profit from confidential Apple patent case discovery docs
I don't think Michel Lewis ever said that. See my earlier comment below.
Dude, where is my memory?
I find it extremely unlikely that a new user would sign up simply to ask a question about a new domain reseller. I find it even more unlikely that such a user would be named "Stargo" when "stargo.com" is one of the example sites used by that reseller. Please go shill somewhere else.
yup. science gets the software they deserve: industry not only (ime) pays somewhere between 2-3x as well, but companies like engineers and view it as prestigious instead of labs where you are viewed as the help. Even if the results coming out of the lab are completely dependent on very sophisticated computer programs to produce.
Is this a mistake that was addressed or was this a tell of the policies of Ubuntu? I really doubt that Shuttleworth is going to destroy the trove of commercially-valuable personal information that is Unity and Zeitgeist.

Clearly, he didn't address anything. He just backtracked. This isn't about the Ubuntu logo, as much as Shuttleworth wishes it to be.
If somebody harms people's self esteem to get something out of them, that person is an asshole. If that person is a boss, they are an asshole boss. If they are carefully studying how to be an asshole to women, I'm ok calling them misogynist.

I accept their rationalization might be different. But it always is. Everybody thinks they wear a white hat.
>Each level seems as apathetic to reigning in the NSA's power than the next (including the president).

They are not just apathetic with respect to mass surveillance, they are its main proponents. They have good reason to champion the NSA's programs, as they are some of the most likely targets of any potential plot, and even if they were not physically endangered by a terrorist attack, they would be blamed for it.
"PC" is mostly an artificial construct by which conservatives attempt to construct a persecution narrative by falsely portraying individual expressions of offense by different people in different contexts about different things as if there was a unified group of people who shared all those instances of offense and had a coherent program behind it.
The problem with 'the lane to the left' is that there are frequently two lane roads where doing so is illegal because of the double yellow line. I used to see that frequently on some country roads that people would bicycle on, and going into the other lane is really not an option (saw several accidents where two cars hit each other because there was a cyclist). In those cases the cyclist is also blatantly disregarding others and their own safety, which is why every single one of those accidents the cyclist was getting a ticket because it was also illegal to cycle on the roads (they had a speed limit >35mph).

Things are definitely far more difficult to balance, simply because there are also many places where the road conditions don't allow a cyclist to exist safely (no shoulder, high speed limit, and less than 300ft visibility).
2D Transformations
Wow, 90 years old and sharp as a tack! It is remarkable what past lessons we can learn from our elders. Hopefully the younger generations can avoid making the same mistakes.
You understood me in reverse.

In the body the glutamate (acid or not) is bound up with other things, i.e. not free.

I said acid because my understanding was the MSG disassociates from the sodium once ingested.
Create A 2D Room Design With Neybers App
MSG isn't manufactured using "chemical processes"; Ajinomoto manufactures it through bacterial fermentation.
For me it's 1 warning that future spam will result in a domain block.

Then the domain block goes into place. /dev/null, auto-trash, or whatever the local filter rules support.
The privacy issues were discussed in Sept. 2012, a month before Quantal was released.

22-Sept: Slashdot thread

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/09/22/1319216/ubuntu-will-n...

23-Sept: HN thread

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4558049

23-Sept: Shuttleworth blog post

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1182
OK, great. So Ubuntu only accidentally sent the nasty letter, and didn't mean to offend a lot of people who got offended with the tea party remark.

But no addressing of the privacy complaints the fixubuntu site had.

And explicitly only apologizing to non-technical critics just reinforces the validity of the complaints that http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/10/thoughts-about... had.
> - Specifies that any queries against this data must have documentation showing "reasonable articulable suspicion that the selector is associated with international terrorism or activities in preparation thereof" (note that military/political/counter-espionage/etc. is not listed)

This language only modifies FISA section 501, which pertains to bulk collection of business records (i.e. Verizon phone call data), and not 702 [1].

The amendment adds language explicitly allowing searching of US communications under 702, despite the section being titled "[p]rocedures for targeting certain persons outside the United States other than United States persons" and starting with "limitations: may not intentionally target a United States person".

Although 702 has been used to target US citizens [2], the law doesn't reflect this usage -- yet.

Here is the addition [3]:

> A query of the contents of communications acquired under this section with a selector known to be used by a United States person may be conducted by ... the Intelligence Community only if the purpose of the query is to obtain foreign intelligence information or information necessary to understand foreign intelligence information or to assess its importance.

And the loophole (a 2nd one is omitted here):

> Nothing in this subsection may be construed to limit the authority of a law enforcement agency to conduct a query for law enforcement purposes of the contents of communications acquired under this section.

This is the only part of the amendment that I read, and it looks a lot like swiss cheese already.

1. Section 702: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1881a

2. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/09/nsa-loophole-wa...

3. Section 6 of the amendment.
This is pretty crappy - if I encountered that, I would seriously think about walking out on that company and let everyone know exactly why. My brother is experiencing something similar with regards to getting screwed out of his rightful market value (although different circumstances), but at a major corporation which I'll refrain from naming. The company pays him well, but he got stiffed pretty hardcore compared to some of the others, to the tune of $30k+/year less & no signing bonus, so my brother has let everyone know how discontent he is with HR, even to the degree of enlisting the director of HR for his company to look into his case (via our uncle, who was a former VP for this company in their top division - my brother got his job by 100% merit though, without letting anyone know about this relation).

My brother's contract ends in about an year - due to this screwjob, he is requiring a massive salary increase + rectification of the missing signing bonus + extra vacation benefits or he walks. He said if the company did right by him in the beginning, he would have accepted much more modest increases, but he is furious over HR & HR's refusal to fix their mistake once he found out that other nearly identical hires got paid significantly more than him (with the only real difference being that he was the younger hotshot hire than the others).

It's pretty sad that some of these supposed top class companies are making what I would term as rookie mistakes. If they want to attract & retain top talent, they need to be treating them like top talent because the top talent don't want to stay at a company that doesn't treat its employees right.
Couples.io
No time like the present to present the present English that people speak :).
Samepage.io
It's harder than it looks. To make an average CRUD app the current state of the art, you need to know a very large number of tools, each of which has its own ecosystem of alternatives, each of which has a different philosophy. This makes it all but impossible to offer a course on the subject that meets any standard of exhaustiveness. So the would-be web developer has to wade through a morass of conflicting ideas on best-practices and will inevitably screw something important up, like authorization.

Then you have the constantly-shifting nature of the field, forcing you to continuously study to stay on top. It's much more difficult than it looks to an insider who already put in the hours learning.
I'm not thinking about special favors for cyclists, roundabouts allow everyone not to stop if there's no cross traffic.
Also there is this blog interviewing people/companies using Ember http://emberenos.com/
Obvious disclaimer: not all MBA's ...

I graduated with a BS in Business (Supply Chain) because I knew I wanted to be involved in startups someday, but I've had nothing but big corporate jobs since then. For the longest time, I've held this idea that because all of the bigwigs got their MBAs, and they got them from top schools, that that was what I needed to do. In other words, to become the person I wanted to be, I had to go get an MBA.

My thoughts have tempered as I moved progressively towards more technical roles: Business Intelligence, Ops Research, Systems Architecture, etc. In fact, I've started to grow a disdain for the average MBA, not unlike the disdain you hear from a lot of people with backgrounds in CS. The thing is, I've never been anything but a business-end guy...I shouldn't feel that way about business-guys.

My own observation on the cause has to do with the toolsets that are given to your typical MBA. Their Root Cause Analysis tools assume that everything has a singular root cause, but those analyses fail when the problem is of combinatorial complexity, where you often have multiple root causes for a problem. Business optimization tends to fall solely on LP models, which again, fail under combinatorial complexity scenarios. Pareto analysis is fine until you have pareto'd your entire business and all that you have left are a bunch of bugs and quality flaws that only affect a tiny minority of orders by themselves, but 100% of orders in aggregate. The entire MBA toolset itself seems to be a result of pareto optimization (a set of tools to use for 80% of the scenarios you will come across as a business leader).

Furthermore, I now feel as though the wisdom of any singular person can very easily become overrated, and in the case of top level execs, is almost invariably overrated. As I became involved with Business Intelligence at my last job, I kept running into execs who always had the same mindset: just give me the data, and I will make the decision that will save the day. The problem is, the skillset to extract, transform, prettify, and graph out data is very often the same skillset that can make provably optimal decisions, or at least better-than-human decisions. Why should they spend so much of their time satisfying executive egos by giving them a precious jewel of data that they will just blow with a swagged decision, when they could be applying Machine Learning or Mathematical Optimization instead?

Your average smart guy with an MBA will continue to provide value in specific scenarios. The Technology industry (as long as "Technology" implies working with intractably difficult problems) will rarely be one of them. And just for good measure, I'll caveat that one more time, especially since my current employer has a ton of exceptions: not all MBAs ...
The most reliable indication of a bubble is when 30% of Harvard grads head into an industry. Top university networks are the first to sniff out unfairly strong financial returns and to take advantage.
At a high level, I accept Shuttleworth's apology. I do not believe that it is a company policy to use trademark law to silence complaints.

Some nuances:
> Judge the policy. In this case Canonical has a trademark
> policy that enables community members to use the marks
> (good) and allows for satire and sucks sites even in
> jurisdictions where the local law does not (great!).
> Failing to have a policy would not be a bonus point in this review :)

In the US, anybody (not just community members) has a clear right to use the mark for satire and criticism. However, I'm sure there is some jurisdiction where this is not the case. Shuttleworth is not claiming that the license is needed in the US.

I was not aware of Shuttleworth's "tea party" comment; he was right to apologize for making it. Based on his post, he was making an analogy between certain types of unconstructive criticism of Ubuntu -- ad hominems, conspiracy theories, and racism -- and behavior he associated with the tea party. That behavior is, of course, not limited to just the tea party, nor is it true for everyone associated with the tea party.
The Pop-Up Activist of the Lower East Side
This might even make sense for me, if:

- the display is as bright as the good old toughbooks, means it must be readable in bright sunshine

- the system is able to boot Linux

- it runs on 12V
The brief life of polywater, the water that 'doesn't freeze'
A lot of people are very uncomfortable with the notion that not every product is targeted at them. It's an ego thing. If I was Freud I'm sure I could explain it better.
Ah I see. This is the old issue. Why wrapper layers have to be later than its source…
Another side effect of such requirements: it means that even white-hat ops at the service itself cannot address the issue sanely.

At multiple gigs, at multiple sites, a significant amount of bounced mail consists of messages sent to long-term undeliverable addresses (in many cases: to domains which no longer exist, and/or have been tranferred, and/or the owning company has gone out of business: think Enron, AT&T's discontinued ISP network, Lehmann Brothers, etc.).

Even if I'd _wanted_ to create rules or write scripts to automatically process the messages, the login requirements generally meant that wasn't possible. Instead, these comprised both a significant amount of outbound mail queues and nondelivery notifications, potentially masking more serious issues (you've got to come to understand what notifications are effectively part of background noise vs. not).

Oh, and some of those domains still exist in some regards (e.g., there's a skeleton crew at Lehman winding down the firm), so you can't just blindly select entire domains.

File under continuing hassles of a conscientious admin's job.
PC doesn't stop at "inclusivity" or "empathy". By threatening the livelihood of any person who says something that offends a progressive who thinks the statement might offend someone of a protected class, PC has a chilling effect on the college classroom. See "The Hidden Impact of Political Correctness"[1]

"What can be done? One option to embrace the PC party line at every opportunity since those who object (i.e., conservatives, Christian fundamentalists) stoically forbear this nonsense and lack the supporting indignation infrastructure. But, for those disinclined to fake it, the only viable option is to avoid anything that might be mangled into offensiveness. Purging the course is hardly fool-proof, but it is relatively undemanding, almost morally painless and students rarely notice the difference.

Let me offer a first-hand example. I once taught the basic American government lecture course and Constitution lecture covered the three-fifths compromise - the Article I, Section 2 provision that counted "other persons" (i.e., slaves and untaxed Indians - blacks are never mentioned by name ) as three-fifths of a person for purposes of House representation. I explained that Southerners wanted to treat slaves as a whole person since this would sharply boost their representation while abolitionist New Englanders proposed counting slaves as zero. Unfortunately, this three-fifths provision has now been interpreted by some black activists (including an African American colleague who stated her misinformed opinion in a public law school lecture) as "proof" of America's racist origins. Black students have probably encountered this historical mistruth elsewhere (Jesse Jackson once endorsed it) and it does appear superficially plausible.

Rather than risk being accused of covering up racism or telling lies, I dropped the topic altogether. I similarly removed all discussion of slavery so students thus never learned that the while the Constitution did not outlaw slavery, it did permit a ban on importing slaves after 1808 and this was, indeed, done - which, in turn, made those slaves already in America exceedingly costly and thus at times too valuable to risk at dangerous labor (I further skipped how the ever-plentiful Irish were instead hired for life-threatening jobs)."

Meanwhile, left-wing students steeped in Political Correctness regularly attempt to shut down and silence speakers that offend them. Recently students at Brown University shouted down a former NYC police commissioner[2] that came to speak at the campus, calling him a "racist" in response to NYC's very successful stop-and-frisk policy designed to get illegal guns off the street. It used to be said that the antidote to bad speech was more speech. Now, the PC lynch mob is feeling its power, since its members know that university administrators will not discipline progressives.

[1] http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2007/09/the_hidden...

[2] http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/362874/how-now-brown-ko...
Yes. Stick a simple, cheap 50mm prime on that D800 and it would crush the Lumia.
I don't have the answers that you seek, but you can find out how to format HN posts here (it doesn't support <p> tags).

https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

Also, HN doesn't have private messaging, so you need to add contact info to the about section on your user profile.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ULAM_SPIRAL_OMG
thanks for the spin mark, lets talk about privacy as well
Yeah that's true. Getting everyone to 3 is going to be quite a slog. I have a feeling once Python 3 becomes the default Python installation for OSX and Linux systems you'll see a big uptick in adoption (and probably some abandonment as well).
Users of Python 3 and up will just have to remember that the result of any division will be a float.

It's a breaking change, yes, but in general I think it's a good one.
I just don't understand all this hate towards Canonical. You can turn it off. Yes it was awkwardly rolled out but you can turn it off. What about google search as you type? Google Analytics, hell even the Ghostery plugin tracks data. Is this just the joy of supporting the underdog then hating them when they succeed? Now I don't work for Ubuntu, I don't use Ubuntu (I do use Mint which is derived from Ubuntu). When I think about the things that Apple and Microsoft have done and do I really think adding remote search is really low on the offense list. I mean they aren't making chemical weapons! Again most of this comment is I just don't get all the hate.
It's why my initial signup to virtually anything is via a mailinator.com address (or alternate domain of theirs).

Abuse a privilege? Lose it.
> under current patent law, independent inventions still counts as infringement.

Also under current patent law, "obvious" inventions are not patentable. There's a tension involved in saying an invention isn't obvious, despite its independent development in various places.