skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps encoder would fit your use of the term better.
A craftsman who takes all of these disparate considerations (design, functionality, speed, sustainability) and measures them up against the known limitations of programming languages and the existing hardware available, and intentionally encodes that experience/exptertise into machine language so that knowledge can be easily communicated from human to human.
Those Somali warlords tap undersea fiber optic cables, intercepting file transfers. Right now, there at least three different safe houses in the outskirts of Mogadishu with several terabyte hard drives rigged to blow up if their demands aren't met. Billions of dollars worth of the world's music is blown up every year by these monsters. Music piracy is a major threat to the US recording industry, and a legitimate target of the NSA.
Germany's economy sounds like the United States economy
years ago. I don't hear American workers complaining
about working in warehouses. Why--? Because in America
we don't have the luxury of complaining anymore. As to
"staying at home and living on welfare"; there's no
welfare Dude, besides food stamps and section 8(which is
next to impossible to relocate). So yes Dude--America has
more than a few problems. Be careful what you regurgitate;
Today you might be in a cube looking at a screen. I have a
feeling those days are numbered, and unless you have a
highly technical, regulated profession -- you are dispensable. Computer Programing is something that crosses
borders. It will eventually go to the lowest bidder. Welcome to "The world of crappy jobs". And America doesn't
need a higher minimum wage?
I have mixed feelings about this.

Some of the metadata in my opinion is obviously OK to collect - the stuff that would have been captured by a pen register decades ago - Who you called, who called you, how long you talked - this stuff, which is otherwise known as call detail records it available to nearly everyone who works for the telco and is not really what I would consider private.

Other stuff - like Geolocation data is in my opinion clearly not OK to collect - it constitutes an unreasonable encroachment on privacy, normally to track someone historically a warrant must be obtained first, and it required probable cause, I see no reason why a lesser standard should be applied here.

I don't consider blanket recording of calls to be acceptable, but I don't see that as something that has been happening, at least on domestic to domestic endpoints (it's not really technically feasible to do with the way the telephone network is structured), its a bit easier to record calls going to international endpoints because of the structure of the PSTN - VoIP is its own deal, and YMMV on weather you can actually capture those calls or not.

I don't want to see us throw the baby out with the bath water as it were, nor do I want the unreasonable encroachment on privacy to continue.
Infographic: 5 Steps To Secure Corporate Data
I would really love to see Mozilla team up (and/or buy) DuckDuckGo. Not only for a better search experience, but it would just be great to see Mozilla sever its ties with Google - a company who seems blatantly at odds with the very principals of trust, privacy, and transparency that Mozilla is boasting here.
Arcade video game programmers of that age have told me warstories of themselves. BitBlits? That stuff is still handled by the BIOS / OS. The real arcade programmers would code at the level of scan-lines manually. (IIRC, Pacman was programmed at this level).

Every 30th of a second, the screen would have to be refreshed. Arcade programmers would perfectly tweak the loops of their assembly programs such that the screen refresh would happen at the right timing. As the CRT scanline would enter "blanks", they would use the borrowed time to process heavier elements of the game. (ie: AIs in Pacman). The heaviest processing would occur on a full-VSync, because you are given more time... as the CRT laser recalibrates from the bottom right corner to the top left corner.

Of course, other games would control the laser perfectly. Asteroids IIRC had extremely sharp graphics because the entire program was not written with "scanlines" as a concept, but instead manually drew every line on the screen by manipulating the CRT laser manually.

Good times... good times...
Hi bmelton. It's yours for $200.
Not to mention increased resistance from bacteria

And of course the needed contact with foreign agents to build immune resistance. Use antibacterial soap when needed: hospitals
Well, first, his claim was 25%, and while my understanding is that it did end up leading to changes in training, you should at least acknowledge the large disputes on how he reached that number (e.g. based almost entirely on interviews available to him opportunistically, no documented methodology, etc).
I didn't say it is coherent. Systems sometimes seem coherent, which feeds simplistic conspiracy theories (also serve as a straw man counter-argument). In reality complex systems are decentralized but often are evolving according to some rules. Those rules make it seem as it is a coherent large system. Think of an ant hill, a beehive, how large organizations are structured bureaucratically.

Chomsky, for example, analyses this in respect to the media. Large media ends up acting in sync with government's propaganda because there are set of constraints and incentive s built in. From outside they often act _as if_ they are centrally controlled by a single government party.
Bruce Schneier on the NSA and digital surveillance
Ask HN: Where is "Big Data" on the Hype cycle?
See the Hype cycle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle
sharding IS NOT similar to mongo, although it's easier, non-primary key sharding + range sharding(which is going away) is missing

and i think those are very important in high-performance sharding (think-per user_id sharding etc)
The US CDC has a nice document called "When is Clean Too Clean?"

http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/7/2/70-0225_article.htm

Some people are expected to wash their hands a lot. Clinicians, people preparing food, etc. It's important to us that they have clean hands.

Some cleaning routines damage the skin, causing places where risky germs can hide. Sometimes cleaning just moves germs that are safely colonising skin into the air, or onto different parts of the skin.

> "Consumers assume that by using antibacterial soap products they're protecting themselves and their families from illness — but we don't have any evidence that they're better than simple soap and water," Kweder said.

Some people are pretty keen on "The Hygiene Hypothesis" - that over clean environments has caused an increase in illnesses such as eczema or asthma, and that some exposure to dirt helps build a robust immune system. I'm not sure what the research is?

> But many of those images "look like people who have viral illnesses" such as the common cold, she said. Viruses are the most common cause of infections in the United States and antibacterial agents have no effect on them.

See also the marketing for alcohol-based hand cleaners, which don't do much against some bacteria.

It's good that the FDA is asking companies to prove the effectiveness of claimed benefits. It's gently worrying that the companies will do the minimum possible, rather than a collaborative big proper study.
TiVO co-founders to release QPlay streaming set-top box
The takeaway here is that "perceived effectiveness" leads to "trust".
From the outside, the way American politics divides people is strange. The psychology of republicans vs democrats, tpartiers vs big staters seems more like the supporters of a sports team.

When you support a sports team, if your player blatantly breaks the rules, you curse when he gets penalized. However badly they perform, you say they are unlucky and will win next season. When you watch a match with other fans, you feel like you are part of a clan, you feel a sense of belonging. Some people support terrible teams because they like that feeling, and they enjoy getting angry at the other team and its supporters. Sometimes they enjoy it so much they have riots, or at least a punch up.

I'm not saying America is unique, and the... sad cynicism you see in other countries is it's own evil. It's just a bit scary watching the fate of the world be decided like a bar room sports argument.

I guess this comment is a dumb generalization, but that debt ceiling thing really freaked me out.
Larry Klayman is an interesting plaintiff in this case.[1] He was a career Justice Department prosecutor during the Reagan administration and worked on the successful antitrust case against the former ATT telephone monopoly. Another article[2] agrees with the article kindly submitted here in reporting that the United States district judge (appointed by President George W. Bush) has stayed his ruling, pending a very likely appeal by the federal government, but it is clear that he thinks the current surveillance program is too broad to be constitutional based on the testimony at trial. That's good legal work.

The link to the full opinion of the district court[3] loads very slowly just now, presumably because many readers are trying to access it.

AFTER EDIT: A legal blogger has put up a copy of the court opinion on a page that loads rapidly.[4]

[1] http://www.freedomwatchusa.org/klayman

[2] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/16/usa-security-rulin...

[3] https://ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2013cv0...

[4] http://www.lawfareblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Klayma...
The dystopian fantasies of yesteryear are now a reality. We’ve allowed the coming of an age where the civil liberties our forefathers fought so hard for are being eroded by the day. Freedom of Press, Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Assembly are mere ghostly images of their original intent. We’ve woken up to an Orwellian Society of Fear where anyone is at the mercy of being labeled a terrorist for standing up for rights we took for granted just over a decade ago. Read about how we’re waging war against ourselves at http://dregstudiosart.blogspot.com/2011/09/living-in-society...
From wikipedia[1]:
"The technique is named for its other aspect, the tracking of moved graphical elements in order to minimize the amount of redrawing required in every frame."

That's all I did, really. Not pretending I did anything more complex than that, I didn't even have access to a framebuffer or anything... Let's say the "principle" was the same, the delivery far from it.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_tile_refresh
And..?

Most people complaining here would happily pay 10 cents more on their $10 Blu-ray if it meant that the workers were treated better.
Low traffic on facebook.com domain = no money
I like frankc's intuitive explanation of the original game given in another comment:

The way I explain is to expand it but also change the frame of reference to so its clear that the host is an adversary. Imagine we play a game called "who has the Ace of Diamonds"? I deal you one card face down and I deal me 51 cards. I look at my cards and then choose 50 of them to show you, none of which are the Ace of Diamonds. Do you want to keep your card or take the one I have not turned over?

Now imagine the same set up, but instead, after dealing the cards, I don't look at them. I then proceed to turn 50 of mine over one after the other and, though unlikely, I happen to not reveal the Ace of Diamonds. Now, is it any more likely the last card I haven't turned over yet is the card, than it is that you have it?

The game is no different in this case to one person lining up all 52 cards and turning them over one by one along the line. If you get to 50 cards and you still haven't found it, that obviously doesn't mean it's more likely to be the end card than the penultimate one.
An update on my AWS bill
This is why freedom of speech applies to illegal immigrants and visitors

Not if we read the text:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Extracting the relevant bit:

Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech

Illegal immigrants and visitors "have" free speech because no laws may be enacted against it, period.
Why are they doing this now? What has changed?
Even if you don't care or agree about what revolves around Snowden and the NSA, I'm sure it got many people wondering about how facebook operated and how information works.

Even if nothing is done about the NSA, it will have the merit of making facebook less and less popular, and make people not trust websites who might be information hungry.

I wonder if people thwarting the way they post their info can really make those info gathering useless. That'd fun to watch.
Way to go, Mike!
Just after learning rails from a tutorial, you are tackling payments, which is a pretty ambitious task that could intimidate even an experienced dev.

Props to Mattan and the state of our tech that taking credit card payments on someone's first app was the easy part. Fussing with CSS display:none, environment variables, and JavaScript error checking proved to be more confusing.

The world has turned upside down. I am freeeeeeeaking out!
> Halting use of USB drives is not enough to protect air gapped systems, as Ruiu's recent research on badBIOS demonstrates.

False. In the badBIOS case the 2 computers thought to communicate using audio were already infected.
Here are some titles for the next story.

"The end of the Apple era"

"The end of the Microsoft era"

"The end of the Netflix era"

"The end of the Yahoo era"

Seriously, why do people waste time writing these types of stories? My guess is that it's because it's so much easier than actually trying to build something of value. The real problem is there is no penalty for being wrong. Everyone simply forgets. Write a thousand stories and if just one of them is right then you get to claim your genius.

Where are those guys who predicated that Apple Stores were such a stupid idea? We need to start keeping score.

http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2001-05-20/commentary-so...
> Leon wrote that the government was justifying its counterterrorism program based on a 34-year-old Supreme Court precedent that has been eclipsed by “technological advances and a cell phone-centric lifestyle heretofore inconceivable.”

It's insane to suggest criminal prosecution for actions taken pursuant to a reasonable interpretation of Supreme Court precedent, even if ultimately that interpretation is rejected (and I'm not confident that this will hold up on appeal).

Or should we start criminal prosecutions for the people in the government responsible for trying to enforce the campaign finance laws found unconstitutional in Citizens United?
All rigid systems of checks and balances impair effectiveness if your definition of "effectiveness" ignores the problems the checks and balances are designed to prevent, as checks and balances almost always involve checking and balancing.

For example, think how much the president could get done if we got rid of congress, the senate, the supreme court and the constitution and we just had an all-powerful dictator. None of this mucking about with government shutdowns and filibusters and pork and vetos and negotiating. No excuses for "I just couldn't get it done due to washington politics". It would be so agile. Probably save a lot of money as well.
Very well written. Bravo! No doubt, facebook hasn't been cool to me for a least 2-3 years now for me -- if it ever was from the very beginning.
The demise of AOL keywords and the future of Online Identity (2008)
Would you mind pointing me to a base in the human genome that you claim is non functional. hg19 coords, please.
Free computer forensic tools
If you need that much styling control over a text area, using a content editable region and Javascript for the interaction is almost certainly a better option.
Federal judge says NSA program appears to violate Constitution
Is Not Constructive website/project still alive?
there was a project posted half year ago which is basically something like stackoverflow without the bureaucracy. Is it still alive? the website is not visitable. see the post from before.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6062876
You need to understand that the division in American politics is intentional. It's the entire intent of making a dual-party system: to make government less efficient. An efficient government structure with a centralized power base could quickly and easily transform into a tyranny, in theory a decentralized multi-branch dual-/multi- party government would require more time.
Hey there,

Just wanted to offer some feedback that you may want to address this issue more clearly. Being frank, I would not feel comfortable gambling the (insanely unlikely) $500+ million jackpot with a relatively faceless entity, especially without confronting this issue of trust directly. Although the terms page is quite readable and free of legalese, the idea of allowing someone to purchase such a high-value item on my behalf makes me skittish.
But why should we have to wait for courts when we've already decided?
The bike test that shows what we're really like at work
In a vibrant ecosystem, sure. But Mars is a dessicated husk of what might once have been a green thriving world. These remaining bacteria/fungi/whatever are like bugs on a corpse. Not an ecosystem; a fragment of a perhaps once-complex ecosystem and worth study. But not anything that should prevent or delay exploration of a planet.
One could argue similarly that collecting email is also OK, as emails are also available to nearly everyone who works for email provider company.

I can very easily imagine people who would want to keep the phone call metadata private.
On eval in dynamic languages generally and in Racket specifically
Judge Rules Against N.S.A. Bulk Collection of Phone Data
The authors' education credentials are impressive, and I admire their initiative. However, they do not seem to have employed a cryptographer to review their design and protocols, so I expect that serious security problems will be discovered.

Personally, my expertise is rather in application security, so I will review some of the source code over the holidays. At first glance the C client is not bad.

The real metric of this project's success will be how they react to criticism, harsh as it may be. I hope they learn from their inevitable mistakes and succeed in the long term.
He is a lawyer, at a guess he probably found it funny to take the cash and reckoned the case would make great advertising.
In a rare showing, common sense has triumphed this day.
Report accuses BT of supplying backdoors for GCHQ and NSA
Wasn't Facebook the "next Friendster?" I feel like it was actually a relative latecomer to the social networking party of the early '00s. Not to diss FB or their achievement, but it certainly felt like an evolution rather than a revolution upon launch. Only once they built up steam did it really begin to become an entirely new sort of beast.

Same with Google, no? I feel like they entered a crowded market of search engines and came out on top, but certainly weren't the first of their kind.
I don't have to run a poll. There's me, and folks like me. That's enough. Colonization never means 'most folks'; it always means only those willing to take risks and try something new. So your greying, senescent population can go ahead and stay at home without affecting anything regarding mankind's future.
I think you are greatly overestimating the US military's competence.
If you don't have the budget like IBM, Microsoft, etc. to schmooze with those with purchasing power, you can do what Atlassian does, which is sell from the bottom up. The idea is to make the product cheap enough that individuals/departments will not have to go up the purchasing chain to pay for it. Hence their use any of our products for $10 for up to x number of users.

If your product is able to solve a problem of theirs, you'll have evangelist within the company and they'll spread the word within the company. And eventually their product will reach somebody with purchasing power.
You do make a good example. Benevolent dictators do appear to be extremely effective.

Of course they are hard to come by, but that isn't the question here.
I don't know--you tell me.

https://twitter.com/BigDataBorat
The AUMF is not a declaration of war; it expressly avoids being called a "war" in much the same way as ye olde Vietnam. What it is is probably illegal under international law, but nobody has the standing to make the United States back down.
A question of legal history: Were warrants required to "tail" a suspect? If not, I could see the case being made that indiscriminately "tailing" all cell phone users is an extension of following someone in a car. I disagree that the same standard applies, but from a legal perspective I think it's important to note whether there was a precedent set that allows "publicly available" or "non-invasive" data to be collected sans warrant.
Can bees be trained to sniff out cancer?
According to Wikipedia[1] over 80-90% (or $163 million in 2011) of Mozilla's funding comes from Google. I'd love to see Mozilla be more independent from Google, but I don't think they're going anywhere without them anytime soon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google
D.school: the whiteboard
I think that would put them in an extremely uncomfortable place financially.
Well, Facebook could be seen as the next AOL, or Friendster, or MySpace.

And Google could be seen as the next Altavista, Lycos, Excite, etc.

Android itself could be seen as a copy of iOS (released a year after the iPhone redesigned to match it) , and it has eaten into its' market (and into the general untapped smartphone market).

So I wouldn't say he haven't seen that "next" stuff happening.

Doesn't have to be 100% the same to be next -- just to cater to the same market and needs.
From the article: "The judge, Richard Leon of U.S. District Court in Washington, said that the NSA relied on 'almost-Orwellian technology' that would have been unimaginable a generation ago, at the time of a landmark Supreme Court decision on phone records."

I disagree strongly! The NSA's technology would more properly be called super-Orwellian. Two-way TV, hidden microphones, and steaming open your mail is nothing compared with what the NSA can do.
If you reverse this statement upside down, you come with a conclusion that "searches involved in the NSA metadata program would likely be permissible under the Fourth Amendment in part because they proved enough that the program has actually prevented terrorism."

I think its wrong on its principle. Constitution does not say it could be suspended, in parts or entirely, to fight terrorism regardless if you can prove your approach works or not.
That's not what a 'unicorn' means in this context. Yes, there are quite a few "average to good" programmers. But a unicorn is a programmer who knows so many esoteric languages/frameworks/platforms that they are nearly non-existent in the wild and almost impossible to hire.
The same thing can be said for comments like yours.

He actually does a pretty great job in this article in my opinion: Strong narrative, uses facts + common knowledge and personal insight to build a strong point.

He is informing people on a particular topic they might not be so well acquainted with. Whether or not he's right about Facebook, we'll have to see but he makes a good case.
Ask HN: How much data do mobile analytics frameworks collect?
Exactly how much data do mobile-analytic frameworks (such as Flurry etc) collect?

As a mobile app developer I'm often asked to add these opaque frameworks to my projects but, not wanting to be Part Of The Problem, I'm curious how much data (beyond the specific metrics you can tell it to track) they collect.