skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First, due process only applies to those on American soil and to U.S. citizens abroad. The U.S. could nuke Yemen tomorrow and it absolutely would not be a Constitutional violation. It would be bad foreign policy, it would be an act of genocide, but there would be nothing "illegal" about it. Courts are intrinsically domestic institutions, they do not exist to supervise the conduct of nations in foreign affairs.

Second, "due process" does not mean "trial." The word "due" is used synonymously with the word "warranted" or "appropriate." What is the appropriate amount of procedural protection for someone who evaded attempts to capture him for a decade by hiding in the deserts of Yemen and inciting acts of war against the U.S. during that time? It's debatable, but it's not clear that Al Awlaki didn't get all of the process he was due.
Even stuff like that has enough memory to run something like Tcl or Lua though, which are likely to be a bit safer.
Not just lie down and take it, the foreigners should be re-assured that their communications are also shared to the USA's best friends:

> If you are a citizen of the UK, Canada, New Zealand, or Australia, you may also be glad, because everything the NSA collects is by default shared with your government (the default classification is TS//SI//REL TO FVEY, or "release to five eyes", which are the aforementioned countries and the US).
Profound thinking may involve asking "why are we doing this?", "what else could we do?" or "what if we don't do this at all?"

More planning (at least to me) sounds like "let's break this down into a list of tasks that need doing".

Basically profound thinking sounds like the creative exploration of the idea (and surrounding ideas) as opposed to a dogmatic execution of an idea.
Enjoyed the read, edited by NSA.

On the other note. If you want good mayo: http://www.eff.ca/featured_products.html order from these guys. I am sure they can ship to your door, they do distribute in the USA as well, however, not sure to which cities.
I've been in groups where the management has said:

"Guess what! We're going to be Agile and do Scrum!"

Whereupon they sent a bunch of PMs off to be trained as Scrum masters.

On the first project, Management then said:

"Okay, go do that Agile stuff. And we think it will take you 13 sprints. Also, here's the stuff you'll be doing in the first sprint..."

Soon after, there were daily management meetings where people's burn-down rates were being discussed, based on the daily status reports that the PMs were collecting.

Just another way to micromanage people.
Translation: Trust us, we are the good guys.

This blog post does nothing to answer the fundamental questions that the Snowden leaks have raised. This man basically argues that, with few exceptions, everyone that works for the NSA is a true American and a patriot who only has your interests at heart and what is a little spying amongst friends anyway. Follow that with some scary hints about cyber war with nuclear responses to further raise the stakes (and the fear) to justify their dragnet surveillance police state. This man is a moron if he can't see that constitutional protections were not created to protect us from good people but bad people who can gain control of such a system in the future.

Moreover, if what he says is true that we are facing real dangers then the government has the obligation, in a free society, to reveal these threats and explain what they are doing about it. The method of using such secret threats as a basis for increase police powers and (implicit) suspension of constitutional rights is not proper for a free society.

If the result of the so called "war on terror" is a gutted and shredded constitution then I'd say the terrorists have won.

Edit: Apparently Loren is a man, Sorry.
Right. And monads are burritos. (http://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuitio...)

> The heart of the matter is that people begin with the concrete, and move to the abstract. Humans are very good at pattern recognition, so this is a natural progression. By examining concrete objects in detail, one begins to notice similarities and patterns, until one comes to understand on a more abstract, intuitive level. This is why it’s such good pedagogical practice to demonstrate examples of concepts you are trying to teach. It’s particularly important to note that this process doesn’t change even when one is presented with the abstraction up front! For example, when presented with a mathematical definition for the first time, most people (me included) don’t “get it” immediately: it is only after examining some specific instances of the definition, and working through the implications of the definition in detail, that one begins to appreciate the definition and gain an understanding of what it “really says.”

Inheritance is not taxonomy. If you want to teach inheritance, show a couple of realistic examples of code which, when you add inheritance, becomes clearly better. We can see the pattern; we can make our own intuitive, abstractive jumps.
Github Flow
I guess it is at least useful to teach people that performance isn't one dimensional. Most people don't measure performance in MFLOPS, for example.

Relative to the amount of code in the world there are vanishingly few loops which have this kind of 10x speedup just waiting for the right tuning.
So is it correct to say that elisp isn't bad (since it has lexical scope now), but the text/gui api that are too imperative in nature ?

I remember nicferrier and others discussing how to write lazy streams for elisp in order to have a more functional text processing ~std lib.

All in all I agree with you that the extensions are weirdly integrated and fragile, maybe it's time to build a side-project emacs with better abstraction layers.

ps: What's make me so sad it that elisp editing api is really not lispy in nature. Language doesn't dictate good design...
You said it was created to keep us independent from wall street and government. And then you suggested that wall st's participation in btc would be detrimental if not an existential threat (?) to btc as a medium of exchange. Is that an unfair characterization?

I'm pretty sure satoshi created btc to make a ton of money. All ideological attachments to that endeavor seem to have been added by other people who may or may not understand his/their motivation.
The problems I am facing with being able to work whenever I want
In keeping with others who are mentioning / linking to books about non-new-age meditation, try the book by the Psychologists in the mindfulness movement:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mindfulness-practical-guide-finding-... (Mindfulness: A practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world, Prof Mark Williams and Dr Danny Penman)

It's a great book that leads you through the first 8 weeks of meditating, and contains meditation aid audio clips for various scenarios. The most useful I've found is the 3 minute "breathing space" meditation, particularly for that noisy bus - you need good noise excluding ear buds though.

If you don't like the speaking audio, and/or you've practiced enough not to need the prompts, you should check out Simply Noise:

http://simplynoise.com/ << they also have apps for phones.

I've found it equally helpful for rendering words unintelligible, which makes mindful awareness much easier.
Potential future abuse, whether due to laws becoming more permissive or a radical in-agency culture change that led to more people ignoring the law, is certainly concerning. As are current abuses. I just believe that the capabilities provided under the powers currently given to the agency are worth the abuses and potential future abuse. If I thought there was much chance that in the future, law enforcement and intelligence would not remain separate, my decision would change. I would prefer to live in a free unsafe state than a police state.
Then we will reclassify everyone we want to kill as 'evil', just like the administration reclassified any adult male in a combat zone as an 'enemy combatant'.
Do you think the US (& friends) is the only one doing (or at least trying) to do this?
"Project MINARET was a sister project to Project SHAMROCK operated by the National Security Agency (NSA), which, after intercepting electronic communications that contained the names of predesignated US citizens, passed them to other government law enforcement and intelligence organizations."
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MINARET

The NSA has a history of sharing intelligence with LE, to state that the NSA is not a LE agency is extremely misleading, if not an outright lie. Not only did the NSA do this in the past but the Snowden revelations show that they continue to do this.
Biology is completely different from Computer Science and metaphors between the fields build no understanding and can only be misleading, every time I hear someone comparing DNA to a computer program I fall into pieces. I recommend "Molecular Biology for Computer Scientists" instead for those willing to learn some actual biology:

http://www.biostat.wisc.edu/~craven/hunter.pdf

I think it's the first chapter of this book:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/processes-life

I once considered going into bioinformatics, and did an intense three weeks sprint trying to learn some molecular biology, ending in a seminar presentation to other people explaining the basics. I used this book back then which I also recommend strongly to those interested:

http://www.amazon.com/Bioinformatics-Molecular-Evolution-Pau...

It covers all the basics of molecular biology very understandably and at the same time the scientific/computational content is interesting even for a computer scientist. Still, learning this stuff takes hard work, you have to rehash some relevant chemistry first or you get nowhere, than biologists use a lot of both chemical and biological lingo which you have to understand, and only then the actual biological content becomes clear. Once you do understand it, however, it's beautiful, beautiful stuff, one of the most beautiful things one can learn in general I think, of which you unfortunately won't get a sense from reading this article, or in general from trying to understand it by sloppy metaphors. Do yourself a favour and try to understand this for real.
Blackberry was going to do away with hardware keyboards and ship something with capacitive multitouch in 2007? They were going to use their massive economy of scale to rush out ultra-high-resolution displays in 2010?

New revenue opportunities? Google's #1 revenue source in 2000 was AdWords and their #1 revenue source in 2013 is AdWords. Apple's #1 revenue source in 2000 was Macintosh, in 2005 it was iPod, in 2010 it was iPhone. AppleTV is a "hobby", but by that standard, everything Google does other than AdWords is also a "hobby".
Yes, this was a full-page ad in the NYT.
Don't you think its little hard to believe that a 500B publicly traded company doesn't have an R&D team? I think you should rethink your post. Just because Apple doesn't advertise their research division doesn't mean they don't have one.
You cannot mention Microsoft in the article like this and completely dismiss their Research arm. Even Amazon's PR stunt with "drone delivery" gets mentioned, but not a real-deal research, seriously?
"Coder" - boy do I hate that term. It implies that all the person does is code - no design, no collaboration, no releasing, no testing. It's like calling a roofer an hammerer.

As a software engineer/developer/programmer, coding is just one aspect of what I do.
But thats the point. MS and Google are trying, Apple is more or less only making safe bets, combining existing technologies and executing extremely well on improving those. Thats great, i love my Apple products, but its still a different philosophy.
yeah, all that juicy data, just sitting there. trust us. we won't touch it. neither will the fbi. or the cops. they don't care that you smoke weed. really.

except they do care. and they want that data. and they will get that data. you can bet your fucking LIFE on it.

if it's there, it will be used, and very possibly by someone with less than good intentions. how the hell could anyone convince themselves that this isn't true? it's mind boggling.

look at mccarthy era politics. THAT CAN HAPPEN. IT DID HAPPEN. IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN.
Wow,

Until I read your post, it never occurred to me you were confused by the ambiguous implications of "verification".

You remind me how easy it is, once you get the jargon and the concepts, to not actually write out everything into a form someone from the outside can understand.
As opposed to the weekly hipster-named gxstmo.io or whatever similar comes along?

Tydlig at least means something in a real language ;)
In certain forms of Theravadin practice, the bliss is the "engine" which motivates the concentration on the target object. Fostering the bliss does tend to make it much easier to settle down, particularly when the mind is disturbed.

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/painhe...
Ah, this reminds me of my childhood. No- seriously, when I was in high school almost 25 years ago I thought this way. My interest was more in the similarity between the C preprocessor and intron splicing, and even dabbled with the similarity between the ribosome and the compiler (except, the ribosome is simultaneously far simpler than a compiler, yet infinitely richer in complexity).

It's useful to have these analogies, and to some extent that really do represent true universals. In particular, in reading the history of Crick, I realized that he was a huge fan of information theory, and it helped guide his thinking about how DNA sequences are interpreted and converetd to protein sequences.

However, it can be dangerous to fall down this path. In particular, biology is hotter, wetter and messier than computing. It requires scientists to have extraordinarily flexible brains; I woudl say after many years, I think the people I met in MIT Biology are smarter than the people in MIT CS- their ability to reason over ambiguous data and come up with predictive conclusions is downright amazing.

If you're a computer person who wants to learn more about this, I have a couple suggestions:
1) buy Molecular Biology of the Cell
2) read the whole goddamn thing, slowing down to understand every concept rather than skimming.
You are missing the important aspect of it, and that is, just like their citizens are fair game for us, we are also fair game for them.

I would be highly surprised if those agencies are _not_ allowed to "look" at our data, since they won't be breaking any "laws".

Fuck everything about finding loopholes and skating on the edge of what is legal. NSA has repeatedly lied so far, never apologied for it. A lie would come out and bam! exposed by Snowden's docs. It was spectacular to watch.

The bottom line is, I am more scared and afraid of our NSA than of the Chinese bogey men or "cyber warriors" out there. I have not seen anything but lies, trickery and dishonesty come out of their mouth. I think they are traitors and unpatriotic.

They are betraying fundamental principles this country is founded on. I can see how slimey mafia lawyers would want the laws re-interpreted to fit their clients' purposes ("well, it depends what 'is' is, your honor"), I don't want out government doing the same. It technically might be legal it doesn't mean it isn't shitty.
"is the godfather of huge apps like Facebook, Twitter, Vine, Instagram , Snapchat, Uber, Square, Candy Crush,"

Um, no?
No offense to OP, but this reads like propaganda to me. It feels like someone at the Pentagon realized they weren't winning the war of the minds of hackers, so they encouraged some of their own to blog about their experiences.

I hate to sound like a tin hat wearing conspiracist. I really do. But I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of concerted effort by the NSA to encourage a dialogue with hackers on platforms like HN.

Sorry for the paranoia OP. Glad you enjoyed your time at the NSA.
I am the author of the blog post, would genuinely love to hear any thoughts or feedback :-)
If you say that the US is "living under socialism"... you don't know what that word means.

Wikipedia says: "Socialism is an economic system characterised by social ownership of the means of production and co-operative management of the economy. "Social ownership" may refer to cooperative enterprises, common ownership, state ownership, citizen ownership of equity, or any combination of these."

The US lives under a regulated capitalist economy.
Here's a nice paper from the Thomas Jefferson Law Review, "Are Foreign Nationals Entitled to the Same Constitutional Rights As Citizens?"

http://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar...

It's a good paper (you should read it), but the answer to the title question is a pretty clear "yes".
Well looking at the end it says that its declassified/published with the NSA's blessing.

If an employee had a contrarian opinion to the NSA would it be declassified like this one?

Its hard to read it and feel that it is balanced or even truthful.
One of the worst, I think, because it encourages developers to make connections, rather than enforce isolation.
> the state should not be allowed to assassinate unarmed citizens or anyone else without trial, due process, etc. if he was guilty they should have tried him in absentia.

A trial in absentia would be wildly more unconstitutional and also a much more dangerous precedent. The right of sovereign nations to kill foreigners on foreign soil is well-established, and a bright-line distinction: either someone is a foreigner and on foreign soil, in which case due process rights do not apply, or they are not either of these things, in which case due process rights do apply. Awalki's case is complicated by the fact that he was technically a U.S. citizen, but you can justify the assassination on the basis that his decade of evading attempts to apprehend him in Yemen amount to an implied renunciation of his citizenship.

Trials in abstentia are much more dangerous precedent. There, you're basically acknowledging that Awlaki was not only entitled to due process rights, but that the "process due" was a full trial. The Constitutional rights applicable to criminal trials are deeply established, and they do not allow trials in abstentia. If you proceed with one anyway, you're creating this whole new class of exception to Constitutional rights in cases of terrorism.

> What do you think about the killing of his son a few weeks afterward?
This seems to be quite well written. However, this is a really bad idea for anything other than learning/hobby work. Writing a web application in C is just asking for security trouble.

Writing in C introduces whole families of vulnerability that aren't a problem in most other languages. Format string vulnerabilities and buffer overflows are the two that immediately come to mind, and these will be added to the normal host of web application security considerations like SQLI, CSRF, XSS, etc.
This is interesting, but the first comment in that site is apt:

> Meanwhile, the Fortran programmer writes y = dot_product (x, x) and moves on to the interesting bits. Plus, if auto-parallelization is on, or if this is in an OpenMP workshare section…

This is titled "optimizing loops in C" but this level of optimization is actually programming in assembly language, specifically x86 with SSE extensions.
Watson is actually sort of boring stock-in-trade stuff for IBM when looked at through a certain lens. (Not that it isn't noteworthy or anything.) The phrase "IBM researchers have..." used to be attached to things like atom-by-atom manipulation (the atomic IBM logo was the PR piece), superconductivity (Bednorz and Müller)... things that might one day mean a whole heck of a lot, but in the meantime amounted to allowing some very smart people to piddle around trying interesting stuff. There was always hope that some technology might fall sideways out of the work, but the IBM of the day was significantly less attached to success. Pre-PC Revolution, they were in a position to afford it; Gerstner's IBM could not.
On one hand, I completely buy his assertions about China's pervasive hacking attempts/successes and that the NSA is our best tool for stopping them.

On the other hand, you're right on the money about parallel construction. In my book, that's the one thing that sent the NSA "over the line." It's good to hear that many NSA employees take the police/military distinction seriously, but we know for a fact that some higher-ups don't and he didn't mention the most egregious case of this, not even once. Also, he invoked the "it only happened if they get caught" assumption while commenting on the frequency of abuses, which is highly suspicious.
Much of the driverless car tech is from CMU and other universities who have been working on it for 30 years. Google hired several people from CMU and Berkeley. Are they putting resources into it and improving it? Absolutely. I just don't see them as being like Bell Labs here.
I admire Venter's ability to withstand years of toil and criticism to prove something that is absolutely fucking obvious.

Given enough time and energy, you can build an organism from scratch. Of course, Venter's still pretty far away from that goal. But I suspect he will succeed; we all know there are none but technical barriers.
Only a few of them. I'd say:

1. Instantiate Object.
2. Invoke Method.
3. Get or modify attribute.
4. Do some introspection (even if the term is not used)

Most importantly, learning how to define their own classes isn't really important for beginners.
Take a drive around the googleplex. Go by the LinkedIn offices to the south. See those buildings off on the end there? Look at your google maps. Do you see them online? Will you ever? Google has it's secrets too, ones it doesn't want advertised.
It makes it fast and easy to back out if you screw anything up. Even if the data is still there, it can be complex to pull it back out and configure it the way it was when you started (as the commands in this tutorial demonstrate.) So a fast, easy snapshot before executing complex commands is a smart move.
There's also little analysis (here or elsewhere) of the consequences of widespread data warehousing. Why pay agents to listen to personal calls, when you can stockpile intel for the day you might need it, and analyze it via algorithm?

I foresee a day when every American has a dossier, a smear campaign, and a law enforcement attack plan on file, in case they decide to "make trouble" for the powerful. It's highly probable we're there already. Look at the history of harassment against MLK if you don't believe me. Even if they're not doing it now, sweeping up all the data in perpetuity guarantees that they'll do it later.

(I may disagree with this guy fervently about the NSA, but I'm extremely psyched to try his mayo. Good for him for transitioning into something useful.)
Silicon Valley, you are tardy to the messaging app party
Got your point son. I am a Pakistani and I know what it means to me. fuck you with love.
Yeah nice exercise, except Fortran compilers get to optimize the loops without requiring so much help from the developer.
<lie type='omission' subject='parallel construction'>

The NSA copy of my emails won't be viewed by police or FBI investigating me about marijuana use, for instance. Law enforcement might get a search warrant and retrieve a copy from Google, but not from the NSA.

</lie>
How do you answer questions of the NSA's known past involvement in targeting political figures such as Martin Luther King[1], US journalists, and US antiwar activists? The NSA was known to pass this intelligence to LE.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MINARET#Domestic_target...