skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Analysts don’t care about what’s going on in your life.
Only until they do

> the Agency makes the distinction that looking at data is surveillance, while gathering it from locations outside the US is not. We gathered everything, and only looked at a tiny percentage of it."

"Cheer up, we're just collecting everything about your private life, we're not looking at it...mostly!"

So, besides a lot of fear mongering about Cold War and Nuclear Weapons (yes it is fear mongering, and mostly irrelevant to the debate, given your average citizen, whom you're spying on, is not about to go detonate one), what you have to offer is anecdotal evidence of your own time at NSA, who are all supposedly highly intelligent and trained individuals who can do no wrong. And what you're saying is that essentially, we're supposed to feel at ease because you don't care about our lives.

...and of course, your post is approved for publication by the NSA.
That. Plus the hability to break your document over several files, the several kinds of automatic numbering, and the completely logical structure of the markup (your book is divided on sections and chapters, not in divs).

Add to that that TeX is the only user friendly portable markup of math available.
Your dollars are being delivered to you via Bitcoin, but your salary is designated in dollars, thus you are paid in dollars.
Last year, Apple spent $1.1B on R&D (http://www.google.co.uk/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AAAPL&fstype=ii&ei...). Google spent $6.6B (http://www.google.co.uk/finance?fstype=ii&q=NASDAQ:GOOG). The big spender will suprise many: Microsoft spent $10.4B (https://www.google.co.uk/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AMSFT&fstype=ii&e...).

Also, the majority of Google R&D (at least that I am aware of) is much more applied than fundamental. The Google Car and Google Glasses are cool, but they will never win Nobel Prizes.
> nor guided in its contents by the government.

Are you sure about this?

The government tells you what is classified and what isn't.
If you have ever been privy to any classified material, you will have made the decision to self-censor that information, to keep the essay unclassified. In other words, you will have removed information that the government told you it didn't want published.

Granted the control wasn't overt, but the government has influenced your writing via your past and the controls that were embedded when you went though your initial security induction.

If it works differently to this, please do explain it to me, as I would be interested to know.
Millenniums ago, Socrates warned his students against the rapid spread of a technology that would lay waste to their memories and their instinct for the truth: the written word. In some ways he was right. We’ve lost the memory skills that oral storytelling cultivates, and we’re often manipulated and distracted by seductive writing.

But how many of us would give up the profound gains — scientific, economic, social and artistic — yielded by the collective knowledge, dispersed across the planet and the ages, that writing made possible?

I see this sort of mistake/fallacy a lot. Someone is worried about something they cherish (in this case, oral history), they identify a threat to this cherished thing, and then decry that we should all fight against this threat. Ignoring the possible gains, as highlighted by the Socrates example above. I think there's two factors which contribute to this mistake:

a) the person delivering the warning appeals to 'the greater good' without having to be too rigorous about what that is

b) the upside is hard to imagine. It's easy to see the risk, ie. the things we have which we stand to lose, but hard to see all which we might gain.

Recent examples include resistance to Bitcoin/cryptocurrency on the grounds that we need to be able to manipulate the money supply to sustain our modern economies, or the worry over Apple's 'walled-garden' iDevices.
They've also been saying "and we're not allowed to look at it without a court order, either." The laws and authorities that allow them to conduct their activities were all written by elected representatives. You can say the NSA might someday want to look at it, but it's kind of equivalent to asking what the point of having a constitution and laws is if they might changed sometime in the future.
"Syntax" highlighting is normally done with lexical analysis, not with a parser, and is far, far faster than regex-based syntax highlighting, because it can use a simple tuned state machine, and it only needs to redraw text attributes until it gets to text in the same state (from the state machine) it's trying to repaint. Turbo Pascal was doing syntax highlighting in DOS 20 years ago.

Parsers have been used to do semantic highlighting of symbols, e.g. paint identifiers in different colors depending on whether they're interfaces or classes, etc. But the big win for parsing isn't highlighting, it's completion. You can't do super useful completion without a fairly rich parse tree, and not just for the current file, but also for all the libraries.
Oh ok then. Stupid of me to think otherwise.
Very interesting article I think. But I think that says Google is the new Bell Labs is a bit exaggeration. While Bell Labs did most of its inventions from scratch and with a lot of search, what Google do in most part of its products is improvement of existing ones. And no, I'm not a Google hater.
"Salary" jobs are exempt, but certain jobs are non-exempt by law, because the work is considered so hourly-like and non-independent that the "salary" is considered a sham.

(Example: You can't be a "exempt, salaried" clerk at a store if you are required to be at the store from 8am to 6pm and are required to do a specific set of tasks in a prescribed way.)
There were actually bigger planes, like the Martin JRM Mars (a large WWII flying boat) with a gross takeoff weight in excess of 165,000 lbs. They use a mechanism called a "servo tab," which is sort of like a control surface for the control surface. In essence, it deflects in the opposite direction of the control surface, and usually in proportion to the control force (a system of levers and springs measures the amount of force being transmitted to the controls by the surface).

The primary disadvantage, aside from the complexity of the system, is that it tends to delay feedback, which results in PIO.
funny. I tend to have a low opinion of bioinformatics[0] (no personal offense intended), and I do think of DNA as a programming language (I'm a synthetic biologist).

[0] only because so many times I've relied on the bioinformatic analysis/annotations and actually figured out what was going on by looking at it by myself, and then thought, goddammit, if the bioinformatician ever spent time in the wetlab they'd never have missed this! Not saying that a wetlabber could have competently written a script either (they'd either be too dumb to or too lazy to - that's what informaticians are for). Anecdotally, Ham Smith and Clyde Hutchison, used to write their own fortran programs for identifying promoters, ORFs, and what not. A few weeks ago, they realized they had totally screwed up an analysis because the excel sheet of ORFs they had was mapped to the wrong sequence by the bioinformatician they handed it over to...
"Other people are committing unethical acts, therefore it is ok for me to do the same"
Don't forget to Clang.
Or you could buy a Beaglebone Black. I did the exact same project above, with more memory and way faster speed for $49. I just nfs-mount my drive instead of using the onboard SATA.
I had a geek friend
If you are not a terrorist or a foreign government official or work for a large corporation or bank or travel or communicate with people in certain countries or use certain keywords in your communications you have absolutely nothing to worry about.
It vastly depends on the actual science which standard of proof is accepted.

For maths, with a 5-sigma result you can maybe get a mention in the "curiosa" section if it's weird enough. It is certainly not considered a valid mathematical result.

For biology, a 1 sigma result is considered pretty good. And due to experimental restrictions, this is actually more strict than medicine requires.

Many science disciplines work with known-wrong theories. Civil engineering for example, works with pre-Newtonian mechanics (not even "turtle mechanics" : in the best simulations a building stands on ground, which stands on a plate which is magically suspended in a "downward" gravity field, not on a planet).

The idea of "this is the standard of proof for 'science'" is a nice one, but it doesn't exist in any reasonable sense. Only the utilitarian definition sticks : we have 100 standards of proof, and if the theory works (or gets enough money if your cynical) we'll find the standard of proof that allows us to call it science.

Furthermore, there are several inconsistencies in the science underpinning, for example, the Higgs boson discovery. We do not actually have rigorous proofs for constructing even natural numbers by the standards of first-order logic. And second order logic has paradoxes that stand unresolved (there is a lot of research to find something "more flexible" than first-order logic, but stricter than second-order that works, but this research has been going on for more than a century and there are no really good candidates, only really bad ones like the famous failure of the Choice axiom)

The standard model doesn't even contain gravity, so if you're being pedantic you could drop a pen from your desk and claim, correctly, that you've just falsified the entire standard model, or at least proven it's incompleteness.

Less pedantically in the physics itself there is the massive open question. The Higgs field only causes inertia, not gravity. Yet the measure of interaction with the Higgs field of any object we've ever measured matches exactly the value we've got for that same object's gravitic interactions. Does anyone believe this to be a coincidence ? Major open hole there.
Hey anon! Thanks so much for writing this.

I love that research - I think I had heard of it or something similar before, certainly something I should take on board.

My hope is that a 2 hour time frame should focus me to work on one task, and if the task is bigger than can be completed in two hours, it probably needs to be split up anyway.

This comment is a huge inspiration, cheers!
>Emacs Lisp is such a horrible language

Beats the hell out of javascript.
He said something very similar about Bill Gates/Microsoft. But I can't recall exactly what.
Show HN: TabsToSpaces.com (fast formatting when pasting to markdown from IDE)
I'll make the distinction if you'll explain to me what Hayek proposes other than let the market handle it. From what I've seen, they're all cranks, Hayek included.

The Austrian school of thought is little more than don't touch the market, you'll break it, it's magic and it'll always work. That's not a serious field of study; that's a golden hammer theory.
3 Lessons We Can All Learn From Being the New Kid in School
What do you think of the NSA tapping datacenter traffic, gaining access to company source code, passwords, and everything else companies incorrectly assumed wouldn't be sniffed? Was that justified? How do you know that data didn't get into the wrong hands, other than assuming every coworker was trustworthy.
Desoxyn is kind of a "drug of last resort" for ADHD. Most of the time Adderall is sufficient, but there are some people who just don't respond to anything else.
Just general trading restrictions to prevent excessive intraday trading.

I guess that's why there will be a Premium service and an API.

With zero brokerage, you can write bots that make money and abuse the market to no end with very small capital.
Boys and Girls may get different breast milk
It's quite interesting to me that someone who has worked for the NSA can write such an article and not have heard of William Binney and Thomas Drake's experience with the NSA. Ethical, upstanding people my ass.
>But Latex comes with a lot of liability too.
>
> It produces “dead” documents, whose faint attempt at modernity are clickable links.

That's because Latex is supposed to be used for printed documents. Printed documents don't care about clickable links.

> It is incompatible with almost all but the most advanced information crawling and organizing technologies, for its lack of meaningful meta information.

So is my C code, word documents and those macos stickies. PDF document generated from a latex file can fullfill all your meta information needs though.

> It is grossly non-interoperable with other modern scientific tools, and mainly it is unable to embed interactive (i.e. “non-dead”) content generated by other tools.

I'll try to remember that next time I am embedding lua and R code to generate lab reports.
Believe it or not, "Forget Academia. Startups Are the Future of Knowledge" was the original title. I believe the author changed it because of the controversy.
The most dangerous are the Cynics who pretend to be True Believers, they are the prophets who know damn well that the eschaton isn't here but that there will be money to be made in the reconstruction. Some folk don't mind how small the pile is as long as they can stay near the top of it.
I just did 'strings /dev/urandom > stuff' for 100M.
Got it in memory first with untimed grep, then:

$ time grep -i blah stuff
bLAH
blAH

real	0m7.227s
user	0m7.194s
sys	0m0.011s

$ time LANG=C grep -i blah stuff
bLAH
blAH

real	0m0.486s
user	0m0.467s
sys	0m0.016s

So a pretty big difference. My default lang is en_US.utf8.
reading it feels like reading a PR document, just made to shed a positive light on the NSA.
I just can't see what the path to adoption of this looks like. How do you achieve backward compatibility?

You put a box-shadow on your elements today and while it won't look quite as shiny in browsers that don't support it, it's not going to affect usability. If you put a variable in that stylesheet, say to make the background of all your clickable elements blue, how do you provide a fallback for the browsers that don't understand the directive? If my elements aren't blue in anything except the latest build of FF, there's no way I can justify using the feature, obviously (as much as I like the idea of it).
Exactly. And even with printed money, one could reasonably argue that the fact that money is printed centrally is irrelevant for the behavior of the economy.

After all, central banks typically just react to the demand for physical money that they observe via the requests that come from banks.
Hmm,

Book plots, movie plots and real-life drama in many ways revolve around missed connections.

TV shows where everyone has a cell phone now have to use the device of turned-off, missing etc phones.

A world of perfect connections would theoretically have no drama but since connections are never perfect, we would never have that. On the other hand, in the technologically connected world, missed connections become tech failures. But someone, the richness of "a passionate glance in a crowded room" seems much greater than "a pic I saw just before hard drive crashed".
Okay, sorry, my arguments have been a little imprecise—the disadvantage of typing on a phone. I'll try to do better now.

(1) Given two typeclasses which have `class A x => B x` then the type `forall x . B x => x` can be coerced to `forall x . A x => x`. You can do this explicitly using existential types.

(2) Functions are a little weird since (->) is a profunctor and thus is contravariant in the first argument and covariant in the second. Thus, using the coercion above you'd note that any function where `forall x . A x => x` is an input may be replaced by `forall x . B x => x` and when it's an output then the replacement goes the other way.

(3) fromIntegral is a bad example because it relies on the specific functions in the typeclasses Integral and Num--- it's just `fromIntegral . toIntegral`.

I think this kind of stuff is a kind of subtyping. It seems to follow the Liskov Substitution Principle.
Everyone I know with minimal HTML skills that has ever struggled with LaTeX has eventually thought about it.

A HTML-like templating language, provided with an ACM-style CSS stylesheet and math/graphic/wtv Javascript libraries does seem appealing but simple problems arise from this.

Different browsers render different results, and that's not even remotely acceptable for a to-be-published paper; this lack of consistency is, to me, the greatest obstacle to that reality.
Even considering _very_ similar results on every browser, PDF export would still be incoherent, resulting in mis-pagination (empty pages), "read-while-selected" text and the usual PDF-export-from-format-X bugs.

Using Javascript libraries to provide extensability is a clever design, but the same problems apply. I often find textual bugs (hidden text, text above/bellow flow) on websites that rely too much on web fonts, and that shouldn't happen by now (as some are reporting, even on the author's website).

Too many factors come to play for this to go wrong, but it all comes down to different browser implementations of every single technology in this HTML/CSS/JS stack (and that's a lot to go wrong).

So while it does seem appealing (give the form and I'll sign it!), I don't think HTML+CSS+JS is even near of getting that experience consistency that typesetting-heavy documents need.
> The mental leap here is subtle, but substantial. Since I have been told I can't use US selectors , I assume the system enforces this. As such, US citizens have nothing to worry about.

For the life of me I cannot figure out why people refuse to accept the concept of training and policy as being relevant to proper civil liberties safeguards in addition to technical ones.

Imagine applying that idea to any other field, and keep in mind the unintended consequences.

For instance consider from a soldier's perspective "Since I've been told I can't shoot citizens or non-combatants, I assume the system enforces this. As such, US citizens and non-combatants have nothing to worry about." And yet our troops do have issued firearms (at least during things like field exercises and training), and the republic has not fallen to a coup. There are missile siloes dotted throughout the Midwest, yet no rogue junior officers or missileers have launched ICBMs at people.

You're missing his greater point, which seems to be that it didn't even occur to him to "test the interlock" since he knew that by law and by policy, it was wrong to even try. He also made quite clear (if you'd bother to read to the end instead of cherry-picking quotes to declaim) that this doesn't mean such technical controls can't or shouldn't be strengthed, merely that there is indeed a "culture of compliance" among the analysts instead of a bunch of voyeurs.

> > one employee spied on a spouse

> So much for automated analysis, besides not being able to filter out US citizens' data it can't even filter out an employee's direct family. But there's no need to worry citizen, the NSA has a very high-quality workforce.

Is it really your claim that a workforce must be 100% perfect in every way for an organization to be legitimate? Even the anarchists don't try to claim that there won't eventually be murderers amongst them, nor is there anywhere else in the real world where spouses are always exceptionally nice to each other in everything they do. Just ask Ashley Madison.

> The most technologically advanced intelligence agency in the history of the world and they have no idea what files were electronically taken by one of their own.

They also haven't solved the Halting Problem.

But anyways I know I'm going to be speaking to an uncooperative crowd but perhaps you all should consider the high-level points of his "peek inside" and then discuss the ramifications of that, instead of always drilling down into the weeds. Many of the same arguments used here could be used with equal logic toward every large civilian IT concern, which would tend to devastate the need for things like YC capital. :P
Bitcoin Heading To The Cliff At Full Speed
Maybe off-topic but, as a fellow nomad, I'd love to read how you deal with the weeks before moving. As active as I can be upon arrival, I feel my energy depleted when the time to part approaches. This means I'm less productive, and less prone to social interaction, as if looking forward to the next destination.

Has anything like that ever happened to you?
Difference between computer scientist and computer engineer
I haven't used the visitor pattern in OOP in over 10 years and I write lots of code. There are many other better solutions to the expression problem than visitors. I don't bother with design patterns much or UML at all. I do mix my style up with FP when appropriate, but OOP is my dominant organizing principle.

OOP really is just about object thinking, just like FP really is about thinking in terms of functions. All the other baggage in either paradigm is quite optional.
Upvoted for "cockwafflery".
Of course it's valuable - as evidence of the brainwashing NSA employees must go through to justify their actions to themselves and their families.
> Given that IBM can probably show a court order, if necessary a retroactive one from the NSA.

This is precisely why many tech companies weakly supported CISPA. The NSA currently does this, but it's on a case by case basis. CISPA was blanket immunity as long as the company said "security".
I don't see Google working on detecting cosmic background radiation from the origins of the universe any time soon.
It would be a joke if they rule against Google after having thrown out the MLS investigation.
People have been hating yuppies since as long as the concept has existed. This is nothing new at all; it is standard distrust, fear, or dislike of people who are perceived as different.

There exists a certain segment of the population that will always consider newcomers (less charitably called 'outsiders') as an intrinsically bad thing. These people should be ignored; they cannot be satisfied by doing anything but giving in to them.

(I don't live in SF, but I hear the same complaints about "techies" in my city, particularly in my neighborhood.)
Whenever I watch a movie or TV show more than a decade old, I can't help but think: that would never happen now, they'd be too busy tweeting/facebooking/instagramming it

Like, "Hamsterdam" in "The Wire"...as if a drug free zone could last two minutes before someone uploaded footage to YouTube and Buzzfeed got a hold of it.
> Well, following his explanations, you can fail the polygraph and just do it again.

He didn't say you had an arbitrary number of opportunities to pass, simply that the screening (of which polygraph was one of many he mentioned) is such that it's not as if NSA analysts are able to simply wander their way into the NSA so that they can then spy on the people.

That doesn't mean people can't make it through all the screenings (just ask Snowden), simply that it's one of many safeguards that are put in place to make it so difficult to land an NSA job for nefarious reasons that the many other layers of oversight and controls should be adequate to prevent gross abuses.