skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Certainly terrorists are already aware that they are under extensive surveillance, and did not need Mr Snowden or the Guardian to tell them that.

I see this argument used frequently, and I don't understand it all. I've been under the impression that most people did not know about the scale and capabilities of the NSA. This stuff was not public information. If the average person didn't know about it, why would the people being actively targeted know about it? Does the Guardian have evidence that "the terrorists" know about the sources and methods used by the NSA that are being disclosed now?

Rather than hauling in journalists for questioning and trying to intimidate them, the Commons would do well to encourage and join that debate ...

I can't speak for the UK, since I haven't followed the reaction over GCHQ as much, but the heads of the US intelligence community have been called in front of Congress quite a few times since the leaks started to be questioned regarding these programs. Several of their appearances were public, which is rare for intelligence committee hearings. This debate is happening. That said, if the press is holding onto a trove of information that the government claims could do serious harm to national security, what exactly is wrong with calling them forward to answer questions about how they intend to use it and how they intend to ensure that what they disclose will not affect national security? I would think that answers to those questions would certainly fall in the public interest.
Conservatives all over the globe have been using Greece and Portugal as reasons to slash public services. The public figures are well aware that public spending makes up a large percent of GDP expenditure, despite being a fraction of private wealth. So it's no wonder why austerity doesn't work.

Greece and Portugal simply have irresponsible taxation systems that were pushed too far, so their debt accumulated. Greece has people driving million dollar cars paying the same tax as common people.
If a failure mode was likely to happen once every 70 chip-years of operation, then it seems like if you sold a few hundred thousand chips then you would expect several instances of that failure mode to occur across the population of chips every day?
"Allow users to disable/enable preset blacklists"
https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/issues/78

This was on my todo list, but there, I formalized it.
It's not a paywall. Enter your email address and select the free option. They make you jump through hoops, but you don't have to pay.
Free doesn't always mean good though. I recommend reading things that are rated well and reviewed properly by a community. I think that would be the most optimized way so you won't spend time reading books that don't explain things very well.
You can always try other books if the one you're reading isn't explaining some parts very well though.
Yeah, it's hyperbolic. I was trying to emphasize the difference between a random guy and nation state.

Dropout was also convenient because it applied to both Manning and Snowden.
TFA is arguing to use the router for navigation without having it push a separate URL to the bar, and still have back/forward work correctly. Essentially, creating a route change that isn't a route change, so it can properly trigger a router action. Of course, this is the actual point of `stateObject` as far as I understand it.

I think this is a good idea and would make a nice simple Backbone plugin. I've run into similar issues before; sometimes you want to display a temporary menu or other interstitial without a refresh taking you back to it.

Some purists get annoyed by this sort of thinking; they think that the URL bar should always reflect the current state of the app. I disagree with that line of thinking; different apps have different requirements and one size definitely does not fit all.

I've been writing Backbone applications for a while and I constantly run into router limitations that require creative solutions to get around. Backbone.routefilter is a great way to get some more flexibility - in every project I usually use a home-rolled combination of routefilter and a few more injected events. One of my favorites is to add permissions checking at the router definition level, to provide routes that only specific users should be able to use.

I've also been floating the idea around in my head of the url being essentially just a text representation of a state object - could easily just be a query string or something similar. Instead of a router globbing the url, you could attach event listeners to events on specific properties (similar to model/collection events), giving you all the power that most server-side routers have. For example:

var MyRouter = Backbone.ExtendedRouter.extend({
routeEvents: {
'var1' : {'change' : onChange},
'var2' : {'change add remove' : onVar2Event},
'' : {'all': onRoute}
},
// ...
});

And so on.

It would then be great to use the above microstates idea to create a navigation api like the following:

App.Router.setState(publicState, privateState, triggerOptions)
App.Router.replaceState(publicState, privateState, triggerOptions)
App.Router.addState(publicState, privateState, triggerOptions)

That way, we can trigger routes exactly when we want them (with or without an actual url change), store private state using the History API, and support microstates. The best part (IMO) is that different routers can listen to separate parts of the url, allowing a URL change to trigger multiple routes on completely separate routers. This would go a long way toward true separation of concerns in larger apps.

Of course a lot more needs to be fleshed out. If any BB devs are interested in helping with idea, please let me know (email in profile)!
>He argues that expanding government crowds out non-governmental social activity, giving the example of hurricane response

My house was ruined by Hurricane Sandy, I am grateful that our Republican governor went against the grain and backed a relief fund program.

Fuck you and your advocacy of disaster capitalism. Towns were wiped off the map, if you think the solution is a bunch of vultures looking to profit from a tragedy and not government intervention, you've been blinded by your ideology.

Here's a hint: despite locals' efforts to help one another out, all of our shit was wrecked, but we still did it. Everyone's everything was gone, we can only help ourselves so much given the fact most people didn't have a home, electricity, or running water.

We must be the domesticated humans you're going on about. What does that make you? Who benefits from such an disgusting ideology? Only people who are infinitely more wealthy than you'll ever be.
Very true ...
THAT is really weird! Because in NLP and Machine Translation the symmetric translation of text is seen as proof that the algorithm works perfectly.

And I had the opinion, that professional linguists or bilingualists, should all come up with almost or mostly identical translations. And when their translations are published, they should easily be able to have consensus, that one translation is better than the other, which reflects the coherent structure of language.
That's really interesting! Could you post any examples of how you're using it?
"Groundbreaking" New York Times story coming tonight
Trailing slash in URLs - which style is preferred?
> "the title nor the github account are up front about is that this is an ad/privacy blocker that comes with a rather large blacklist"

This has been there for two months:

https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/wiki/Quick-tour-%...

"Thanks to these preset blacklists maintained by good spirited people, nothing from these locations could make it to the browser"

The slide is a bit dated though, as you can graylist or whitelist a preset blacklist entry, which was not possible back then.
Unfortunately, it's rather difficult to tell the difference between real Christians and those who merely say that they are Christians.
I'd rather pay than fill out a form.
> different parts of the world.

Still takes just one asteroid.
reddit could really start a nova business model like that. Think there are already many novelty accounts and bitofnews, youtube linker bots, etc.
I started the book and enjoyed the first few chapters. My recommendation is to learn Haskell before you read this book.
I think that's an interesting interpretation of these events. According to TechCrunch's post, the people laid off were part of teams that "weren't making money." According to SFX, "To allow us to adapt and improve our service, it was necessary to make some organizational changes." Translation: the savings realized by cutting unproductive (or less productive) parts of the organization can be put to use in areas that management believes have higher productive potential.

Even if the motivation for "looking at the finances" more closely was the fact that SFX is now publicly-traded and has a new set of shareholders to answer to, what's the problem with this? Most companies (established or not) don't have the luxury of indefinitely letting performing parts of their businesses subsidize underperforming parts of their businesses. In many cases, the best and/or only source of needed investment dollars can be found in expense reduction.

As for feeling bad: layoffs are always unfortunate and it's worth noting that, from what I have seen at least, the good times of the past several years have left many, engineers especially, with the mistaken impression that they're impervious to the financial realities of their employers. It's always a good idea to understand the relationship between your role/team and your employer's finances regardless of how valued you believe you are in the org chart.
I've recently been toying with a few ideas and was thinking about building a discovery platform. Would love to co-found or work on one. Feel free to email me - AlexBGillis@gmail.com
Is this really an issue that surprises anyone? If you are paying for a lower tier of insurance then it makes sense to limit the hospital choices available to you. The whole "I'm going to pay less but still want the same level of care as someone paying a premium" attitude needs to go.
Show HN: Quindo, The new on-the-go, mobile app for the curious
http://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch6-2.html
very interesting article on the computer system of the Voyager. It turns out most of the systems is not powered for most of the time, even the component that is doing the health checks - its called CCS.

"The frequency of the heartbeat, roughly 30 times per minute, caused concern [176] that the CCS would be worn out processing it. Mission Operations estimated that the CCS would have to be active 3% to 4% of the time, whereas the Viking Orbiter computer had trouble if it was more than 0.2% active15. As it turns out, this worry was unwarranted."

They are using DMA a lot; instruments write to memory, occasionally the CPU is turned on and picks up the new values. Also they had to manage with the fact that memory is degrading, so the system needs to adapt to working with less memory. The bus is 16 bits wide, but actually they are processing 4 bits at a time, so addition takes 4 cycles. CPU registers are stored in RAM, so probably they can reassign them if a memory cell fails.

Parts of the system were reused from the Viking mission. Also they where reprogramming the system in flight during the eighties ! That's the reason why they could start the the mission, even without having the full software on board, the mission was extended thanks to reprogramming. Just for the Jupiter visit they had 18 software updates, think about that next time that a software update breaks something on your system.

Also its all a distributed system with several CPU's, and some elements of redundancy, awesome tech. I guess one day alien hackers will have fun with reverse engineering this system.
From a consumer perspective, I'll only go to Beatport if no other store is offering a track I want. I'll even briefly consider ordering it on physical media before paying Beatport's ridiculous WAV surcharge.
It does invoke the same "this is utterly broken" knot in my stomach.
"You're comparing writing a simple PHP script on a remote server to deploying a full Rails app" <-- the point is, Can you do that in rails?
The whole "I'm going to pay less ...

That's the fallacy right there. Nobody is paying 'less'. The system is absorbing new risk, so service is being cut. I'm not so sure why that's hard to understand. Read the article, and its quite clear the reportage is about incremental exclusions, required to offset "new costs"...

When the Obama administration was asked whether the new healthcare exchanges were offering adequate network options to new consumers, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) emphasised that the new exchanges would “vastly increase” the access to medical providers to millions of uninsured Americans.

So, part of the deal is belt-tightening.
Whoa DNC Chair: We Give You Health Care – You Give Us Votes (Video)
Keeping Parts of Your Codebase Private on GitHub
The amount of A/B or other systematic testing in the news industry is...well, a bit behind par compared to the tech industry. So Brian's work is probably one of the most methodological studies done within a news organization.

Yes, it is true that media companies have long been obsessed with ratings and circulation figures, but these numbers have been, IMO, pretty "fuzzy." Before the Internet, there were also audience surveys and tests that purportedly tracked how readers progressed through headlines and stories...but how could such measurements be precise without computers?

Even on a news website, the testing is not so straightforward. Does one story get more eyeballs than the other because of a great headline, placement, wording of a tweet, use of a graphic? Or did it get more eyeballs because it was of a particularly salacious or notorious event? Since the number of stories that a news site can produce in day is relatively small...around 100 to 1000...and the number of variances between topic, length, media assets, time of day, is so large...I think Brian's analytical strategy was pretty keen.

Anyway, here are the original links from his blog. I think there as thorough of analyses as you'll find in other domains:

http://brianabelson.com/open-news/2013/03/18/A-Metric-For-Ne...

http://brianabelson.com/open-news/2013/11/14/Pageviews-above...
You are right...for some reason I had thought it was Asana...maybe it is the rhyming of their names:)
I hear there are three or four doctors on Google Helpouts for free...
no, that's what reddit's for.
Strange, I like it.
> Yes, I have insurance, but it doesn't cover the cost. The state does. My job has nothing to do with it.

Which state would that be? Did you come from Alberta or something?

Sorry if I come off as incredulous. But your story flies in the face of a lot more than just my own anecdotal experience.
Near a Vote, Volcker Rule Is Weathering New Attacks
It isn't a matter of agreement on frequencies, it is that each company paid many hundreds of millions of dollars to get exclusive access to those frequencies during auctions from the FCC.
Because those coins are all worth a million dollars each -- what fool would sell them for $700?
> Are we supposed to believe that a person who dropped out of college, with no computer science or programming background, is hired by a hedge fund or the proprietary trading desk of a large bank to help develop their HFT software and algorithms?

No kidding. Not to mention, if he indeed 'made a killing' in the finance industry, why would he be hustling trying to resell iPads and now Air-bnb suites? Seems something programming-related or becoming an ex-pat in a tropical country with nice beaches would be more suitable for someone in their 20's that hates their job and has a lot of money...
I block most tracking services. I wish I didn't have to do that. I'd love if sites could get accurate analytics, as long as the data stays with the website owners (so, nothing from external companies and no pinging Google etc.), isn't shared with third parties (no, not even "trusted" third parties), retention times are not longer than 2 years, it's reasonably anonymized, etc.

Until a trustworthy self-hosted analytics script that's fast and doesn't consume too many resources appears, my browser/OS and other info will remain underrepresented in websites' analytics dashboards.
That's just it. If it has happened, the Chinese or Russians or whoever don't take their discoveries to the press.

You have to assume that US enemies already more than what Snowden knew even before he released it.
It's a psychological thing, a perception, on the part of the users of your nick. I know people who publicize their nick and real name, still post under their nick and their nick gets more attention by far. There's something about human nature, I prefer to read stories about Notch more than Markus Perrson. I don't know why, it's just that way with the human brain.

I may have just had an epiphany, political figures use their real names (well mostly), maybe this is why their lives seem a bit characiatured to us. Perhaps this helps insulate them to a degree.
I wonder if this is now No Man's Sky works.
Somehow I do find that "Elevated" in 4 KB beats all these 50 bytes spreadsheet in JavaScript that have made it lately on HN! (4 KB, including the music)
The crisis of trust in US telecom gear hits the mainstream media. Cisco should be way ahead of a columnist in USA Today in both diagnosing and addressing the problem, right? Read the conference call transcript. Only one mention of "NSA" and that is in an analyst's question that was deflected.
A fool who realizes no one's going to pay what they're "worth"?
Have you heard of GPS? It's pretty good.
What is your method to block things?
edit: I get that this is a personal issue for you, and you got piled on for giving an anecdote that didn't fit people's expectations. I wasn't following the whole thread, so I didn't see you already answered my questions below. That said, you were kind of a jerk considering you gave no detail (not the province, not the illness, not the complaint, nothing but "Canadian healthcare sucks").

Was language a contributing factor? With the exception of Montral Quebec tends to be like a completely different country, and they definitely prioritize French language services. I could see getting an English-speaking specialist would be tough, especially in a smaller place.
Your mistake is giving any shred of credibility to the statements these agencies release. Nearly every public statement they've made on the leaks has turned out to be a lie or misdirection. For example, the primary motive of the surveillance programs clearly has not been to target terrorists, but political and economic espionage.

They're spying on everyone in the world. Anyone who prefers a free society to fascism is going to be to concerned about that, not the prevarications that officials come up with to try to get themselves off the hook. If you really think journalists are the people that need to be questioned in light of all this, I don't know what to say. You've probably already guzzled way too much of the authoritarian kool-aid.
The Node.js memory "leek" bedtime story
Chalkboard surfaced RC cars
Yea its RC cars you can drive and chalk on with chalk markers. www.chalktoys.com

buy one for yourself and maybe your kid if hes good.
So? The fact that there are good garbage collectors doesn't save us from popular languages and runtimes with bad GCs. As long as there are people who expect to be taken seriously when they release a GC'd language with a bad GC, manual memory management should not be treated as an obsolete, obscure, or archaic skill.
Oh whoops, I guess my VLSI professor lied to me. Maybe it only happens with certain multiprocessors. But yeah, there are definitely disabled cores in a lot of processors for the reasons you mentioned.
>Publicly approved? Publicly approved? The amount of rage-induced facepalming this causes is immense. No one in the public has known what they're up to, and Congressional attempts to get insight have been stymied and shut down. No one knew, that is, until Edward Snowden did HIS duty to country.

This is one of the great weaknesses in how we carry out things in a "democratic" society, imo. We have elections, and use the election to justify everything that happens thereafter as being part of the "public will".
simply yes - but as I mentioned in our case by far the most most were going to be pixel burbles - you'd likely see one in the lifetime of your video card - the chances of the more serious sort of jabbering core sort of meltdown are much less likely - we design against them - but, one has to stress, not impossible.

You can design to be metastablity tolerant - use high-gain, high clk->Q flops as synchronizers, uses multiple synchronizers in a row (trading latency for reliability), you can do things to reduce frequencies (run multiple synchronizers in parallel, synchronize edges rather than absolute values etc), but in the end if you're synchronizing an asynchronous event you can't engineer metastability out of your design - you just have to make it "good enough" for some value of good enough that will keep marketing and legal happy.

It's our dirty little secret (by 'our' I mean the whole industry)
According to this article only if you make money in the US, and therefore fall under the Canada-U.S. Tax Treaty ( http://www.icnl.org/research/journal/vol3iss3/ig_2.htm )
Seems like after an asteroid hitting the earth, "server fault tolerance" is the least of our worries.
>- People won't keep their availabilities up to date. They won't like you asking them to keep their availabilities up to date either. They really won't like you asking them where they're working this week.

StackOverflow Careers handles this rather nicely. If you mark yourself as available and are contacted, you get a notification email. If after N days you don't respond (through SO) to the contact, you are automatically marked as unavailable.

It's not perfect, but in most cases it should remove stale list entries after their first contact.
Soft errors are a very real property of low-voltage digital electronics. I personally observed what could only be realistically explained as a soft error in a unit running customer hardware in the field. A single bit was flipped in the program memory of the embedded application and was causing the system to malfunction in an obvious and repeatable manor. We've since added CRC checking to the program memory and some of the static data sections to flag and reset this in the future.
Opt-in disaster relief led to farmers burning their excess crops to force "Okies" to move on in 1935. The New Deal was a response to the age-old prevailing attitude that it's only kin you should look out for.

It's one thing to think it inappropriate for the state to ensure that disaster relief happens (even clumsily), but the idea that the private sector would otherwise be picking up the slack is unprecedented and and far from plausible. Charity has always been more a symbolic gesture than a real influence.
A Combination Bottle Opener and Wire Stripper Is Just Useful
From a quick look on the pricing page, under REDMINE RAM is missing Mb :).
So basically TACK is a side channel that verifies cert fingerprints right?

The problem with PKI is that there's no collision detection. e.g. Under the same PKI same CN should only have exactly one cert.
Well, then call it 'inequitable distribution of cuts', or soemthing else. The idea behind reducing and reversing the growth in public spending is to allow private investment to grow more than the government. This UK policy doesn't seem to fit that description at all.

It seems to me there is a concerted effort to make austerity an unspeakable word, for reasons that have very little to do with macroeconomics.
Neat. Analogous to using a personal firewall (eg Little Snitch), except for the browser.
I hate to be "that guy", but how is this news? Strikes me as just a random question from SO, asked in 2011 no less.