skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I don't get the Apple hate. And at the risk of getting downvoted, I'm gonna paraphrase Steve Jobs,

That comes from the same guy who, in private, said:

I'm going to destroy Android [...] I will spend my
last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every
penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this
wrong
This reads like it was penned by someone who's never heard of the Stanford Prison experiment or Milgram's research. When I read "I have a very high opinion of my former coworkers ... NSA employees are the law-abiding type ... You take a long automated psych test that flags troubling personality traits," I take away "the NSA is full of the kind of person who won't look at the big picture, who will follow orders without exercising critical thinking, and who can be counted upon to be a Good German."

The problems that the HN crowd (speaking broadly) has with the NSA and related entities, are systemic problems. They are not about, "is act X legal or not," they are not about "was this particular incident harmful or not." They are about root of the thing: about the high-level agenda, about the strategies, about the ideas. It does not in the least address these concerns to say "oh, my coworkers are fine folks, we work hard to obey the law, there are scary people out there!" This says nothing to the counterarguments of "we shouldn't have to trust you" (really, you could say that the field of cryptography is about replacing situations where you have to trust a human with situations where you only have to trust math), "the law itself is a problem," and "you haven't proven that you are doing more or better compared to other ways we could push back against scary people."

As with any government agency, the more they insist that they must not be held accountable, the more accountability we should jam down their collective throats. The first sign of someone who can't be trusted with power is that they ask for more of it.
Javascript is absurdly complex, awkward, dishonest (in trying to appear to be OOP), and often a completely unintelligible mass of callbacks. I not only don't want beginner programmers to learn in javascript, I don't even want them to see js until they have experience in another functional language (although that ship has sailed.)

If you honestly think

if __name__ == "__main__":

is more complicated than js variable scoping rules and closures, I'm intrigued by your mind.
North Korea surely has contacts with the rest of world, to deal with China, for instance.
Just clicked your link to check it out, 500 with a stack trace :/
"People who build security tools" are in the set of people under active monitoring and exploitation by governments. I'm personally far more concerned about China and Russia and others than I am about NSA, but if I were Nadim (who I believe is personally not a target of NSA, but by virtue of Cryptocat most definitely is), I'd be quite concerned.

I was actually waiting for the big reveal in this ... "x, y are good, but Z is not, and is why we have the problems we have now." I guess not having that is why it went through publication review.
Discussed three days ago; 76 comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6893756
I was actually working on something really similar. (http://i.imgur.com/w4F8ms4.gif)

It really is true that at any moment there is probably 4 other teams working on a similar idea as you are.

Well I will not give up.
Good luck to you too!
Any idea what optimization flags were used? It's rather strange that they're not reported. I would be surprised if GCC 4.8 was that far from optimal with -O3.
Push Notification Pet Peeves and What To Do About Them
My developing theory is that monopolies can be great for innovation. What do ATT, Google, Xerox, and the old HP have on common? They are/were, if not outright monopolies, insulated from competition by virtue of network effects, brand or trademark monopolies, or simply a lack of competent competition. They weren't like the Acers of world, in highly competitive markets, struggling to make 1-2% profits on their revenues. They had steady sources of cash from products that had little market competition.

This allowed them to bankroll things like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. Freed from living on the margin, they had the security to invest in blue sky projects.
Don't fight it. Just let it take over. Stop struggling. Once you'll have stopped struggling, it won't hurt anymore. You won't feel any difference anymore. And it will be like it was never different.
It's been illegal in every state I've ever lived in, but every employer I've ever had has expected it.
Except that unlike with China, the US is allied with some of the foreign countries spying on you and assisting them in their data collection, and quite likely even using the results of that spying themselves. Likewise, I'm in the UK which is allied with the US and assists them in spying on UK citizens.
If you'd never heard of parallel construction before today, that seems to powerfully undermine your credibility. Why should we take you more seriously than someone who says "I was a secretary at the NSA for years and I never heard of anything bad happening, therefore nothing bad happened"?
I don't think this is really accurate. There are many reasons that the people who live in SF might not love the number of homeless that are in the city, but I don't think most of them are thinking "That could be me any day now."

This is conflating two groups in SF: startup people and big company techies. The people who are driving up rents (and seem to be the focus of recent controversy) are the big company techies. I do not think that those people that work at Google are worried about being homeless any time soon. Similar for Facebook, Genentech, Apple, and other bus-providing companies. People working on startups full time may feel more at risk of being homeless, but I don't think that even they are actively worried about being homeless -- though everyone is different, so maybe some are.
The post-Concorde world and the risk of planetary entrapment
He said and did lots of things that we will consider wrong. That doesn't make what I paraphrased any less true.
I don't use LaTeX simply because LaTeX outputs pdfs. Pdfs stink in their own right but furthermore, pdfs are for printed documents and I don't use paper anymore.
> 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.

That's the kind of attitude that pushes competent programmers away from bioinformatics. End result? Almost all bioinformatics software is a steaming pile of crap.
Really? why should anyone trust in anything coming from the NSA when you are systematically lying again and again? why should we listen to anything you say when historically, part of your strategy is to try to influence the PoV of society || specifics groups?

Specifically: how are you so sure about what the NSA is doing? in your article you say that the NSA does not do SI on US citizens without a warrant, but how can you really know that if you are just another worker? I don't think you can... but hey, you seem like a smart person so why are you making that kind of statement?

> I was not asked to write this, nor guided in its contents by the government.

I find this hard to believe, especially coming from someone in your area: if there is no way for us to verify this statement, then how relevant can this comment be for us?
I'm always a bit shocked that people can be so dismissive, is there really a precedent of a value construct like bitcoin that we can extrapolate confidently from?
Could a company avoid NSA's do-not-discolse agreements by making all customers employees or part-owners in the terms of service?
I won't get into the emacs debate since I am not sure I even know what it is about. But I think browser editors are the wave of the future, for the same reasons web software has been widely successful despite all shortcomings.

I am the founder of a browser based IDE software company, our product uses Codemirror exclusively and extensively..check my profile for the link if you want to check it out.
When teaching Python to a 5-year-old, you wouldn't use that line.

You'd just have statements in global scope and no main() function.
Important voice in the whole discussion around NSA, but forgive me being suspicious - it comes around the time his Kickstarter campaign is to end...
Did your post have to go through some sort of internal review before you were allowed to publish it? I find it weird that you're allowed to blog, let alone blog about the NSA.
DNA is not just a sequence that encodes proteins. We just found out there's a secondary higher level code in it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6896779

And then there's RNA, which can fold and form structures, sort of like proteins.

Anybody who has ever seriously dealt with things produced by evolution knows that evolution "cheats" and optimizes when constrained by resources, producing structure upon structure upon structure, crazy indirection and non-obvious side-effects, as long as it helps the goal (survival and reproduction usually).

That's why I don't think human brains will be understood any time soon. We might figure out all the layers, but to figure out all the hidden structures would take a superhuman AI.

EDIT:

Example of circuit design by evolutionary algorithms:

http://hforsten.com/evolutionary-algorithms-and-analog-elect...
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE...

>One current federal prosecutor learned how agents were using SOD tips after a drug agent misled him, the prosecutor told Reuters. In a Florida drug case he was handling, the prosecutor said, a DEA agent told him the investigation of a U.S. citizen began with a tip from an informant. When the prosecutor pressed for more information, he said, a DEA supervisor intervened and revealed that the tip had actually come through the SOD and from an NSA intercept.
A Javascript router in 20 lines
Using Price & Demand Curves To Inform Startup Product Roadmaps
The U.S. was in a dilemma because Saudi Arabia was protecting the value of the petrodollar.

Even if Saudi Arabia attacked the U.S., it was not worth undermining the U.S. Dollar as the world fiat reserve currency.

Hussein, Gadhafi, al-Assad and Iran all moved away from the U.S. Dollar, and had to be dealt with accordingly.
It depends. Is an hour meeting every other week saying, "We tried thing A, it went badly. Let's modify A or stop doing it, instead trying thing B."

At the end of a project, do an overall retrospective, and perhaps make changes for the next project.

Small, incremental experiments and changes are great for process improvement. They can even feed up the chain and promote cross-team experiments, so long as there isn't a top-down directive to implement new thing B at the same time.

Do experiments, keep what works, discard what doesn't.
At university, one of the exercises in the HPC class was to optimise a piece of Fortran code. I managed to beat the TA's code by other means, but missed one of his significant optimisations: manually unrolling a dot product. This was on Intel's Fortran compiler, though admittedly almost 10 years ago. (It did already support autovectorisation etc. at the time)

Anyway, goes to show you still need to look at the disassembly and do plenty of profiling with Fortran binaries too. No such thing as a free lunch.
Author here. I completely agree. I wrote this just because I could and because I was going through a phase of writing everything in C. I wouldn't recommend anyone actually try to use it.
I see they trotted out the ol' "vinyl is better" argument. Pity they put so much time and money into something, and then dictated that it would only be used with a medium of inferior fidelity.
> What Bitcoin really needs is a central bank to stabilize its value.

The whole point of Bitcoin is that there is no central governing authority. I'm not sure if this statement is meant to be funny, but if it isn't the author clearly has no understanding of how Bitcoin works or what it aims to achieve. I think given this statement its fair to ignore this piece all together.
> By all means come on in, serve us our coffee, drive our busses and clean our toilets – but wipe your feet before you come in, and close the door on your way out.

Wait, what? COFFEE?! No, I'm allergic to coffee. If they're going to make it in the Valley, they should only be serving Vyvanse.
I'm with you. This feels like a pretty big reach.
I find the example is incredibly confusing. I expected this to be an optimization of a dot product or matrix multiplication or similar but as it stands it seems to be an element-wise square of a VECTOR_LEN * N matrix with subsequent accumulation of columns (not the most common operation in typical signal processing).

It should be also noted that this can be trivially implemented in direct SIMD using GCC/clang vector extensions, without having the compiler 'guess' the SIMD part, which btw would be also make the code much easier to read.
Author here. Yes, I can only look back and cringe.
I think that giving credit to the terrorist, and saying that they have won, is wrong.
The kind of paranoia that defense forces have operated under has always been there since WWII. The only thing different now it that people are a lot aware of what could be/is happening.
In general: people's attitudes towards the type of work and competency of women in certain roles entirely culturally engrained, not sexually engrained. Just because a particular company's boss is a woman doesn't mean she wouldn't see other women as not suited to particular jobs, or men more suited, etc.

In this particular case: The people I have met and talked to were on the web programming side, not product development. Between their stories and my own experiences at other companies, companies that focus on Area Of Business X tend to be founded by experts in X, and have no clue what Y or Z are even there for. So if ThinkGeek were, say, founded by product developers, then IT would get the short end of the stick all the same as if it were founded by sales people.
Use CTRL and +/- to zoom in/out.
Nice work! Would be nice to have more tips on graphing. I spent 10 minutes and still can't figure out how to do graphs. The video on website is pretty helpful though.
> The leaks suggest that all data a non-US customer stores with them is fair game for being snooped by NSA etc. without any judge or due process.

I agree.

> turns "complain about your own country spying on you!" into "Don't do business with an American company if you care for legal protection/are not stupid".

I agree. As a US citizen, I was quite upset when my employer started mandating Gmail use, and this was before the Snowden leaks.

Foreign companies are obliged not to use US cloud services, just as US companies are obliged not to use Chinese ones.

That is all water under the bridge now. There is no going back.

So you are not actually rebutting anything I said.
It does say "computer animation" in the audio.
Awesome site! :-) Is most of your revenue from affiliate marketing of Lego items (most obvious one)?
There is a plugin called "Windows Credentials", which according to the description uses Windows credentials instead of saving the passwords as plaintext.

I am unfortunately not exactly aware of what this means in practice, but I doubt it is worse than the default behaviour. But for Windows only, one could assume.
IIRC RISC is a category of architecture, rather than a concrete implementation
I disagree with the conclusion of this article. I think the hate has little to do with the actual people, and more to do with how bad SF streets look and smell.

Yes, these issues are because of homeless people and homeless people deserve our sympathy and help. However, for better or for worse, I think most people complaining aren't complaining about their fellow humans. It's easy to try to turn this into an "us vs them" class war. Rather, I think most people are simply upset by the resulting aesthetics.

SF right now reminds me of Times Square before it was cleaned up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Square#1980s.E2.80.93pres...
Pixel perfect web design implementation
PDFs stink, but I've yet to find something that stinks less!

What I need:

* High quality fonts and images

* Single file

* Cross platform

* Simple to create using LaTeX

* Excellent support for math

* LaTeX style readability considerations

* Massive user base

* Many extensions
And you should be fighting for the UK to break that off, because the UK is your defender.

It doesn't really matter if the US spies on you as long as the UK is your defender. The US doesn't have jurisdiction there.

This is all, really, a political issue. Ultimately, it is about political speech. Everything else you can simply encrypt and secure, and you should.
Obvious to any one who have read a bit of Marx.
Unfortunately that will stop to work soon

http://blogs.skype.com/2013/11/06/feature-evolution-and-supp...
These days, I think Javascript is a superior beginner language:

- Nothing to install, you most likely already have a full blown development environment installed (e.g. Chrome or Firefox).

- The language is straightforward, functions everywhere, easy control structures, very little to be distracted by.

- The reward loop is very high for beginners: load a page, tell them to write a Javascript one-liner and see their face light up when the HTML page gets instantly modified
So, if I'll meet someone who wanted to work more on personal coding projects and start a company and is making a mayonnaise as his first product - I'll know the guy must be from NSA!

:)
2 questions if you don't mind.

Firstly, why do you think it's worth it and do you notice a substantial difference in your life when you stop for whatever reason?

Secondly every time I read something like this, or talk to people that meditate, it seems extremely unscientific and filled with subjective analysis. Can you point me to something that would convince me that it has real world benefits, past that of taking a nap, or stopping for 45 minutes to think about your day/life.
"Why Bitcoin will Never Be a Currency".

And yet it only takes an arbitary 5 minutes to realise that it is being used as a currency. People are buying goods and services in exchange for bitcoins. Sure some people horde in the hope that the value will double but the same is done with US Dollars. I mean isnt that what FOREX trading is?
Some trendy buzzwords in the title, no relevant information in the post, just opinions,... Imho it's just a disguised advertisement for his kickstarter campaign.
Does anybody else see really weird vertical kerning on this page. It seems like the line drops by a few pixels every few words... interesting, since this is a page about how we should switch to something more like HTML for typesetting...
Finally, somebody with a basic understanding of economics decides to chime in. It is not possible for bitcoin to be a currency due to its deflationary nature.

Bitcoin might be an interesting investment vehicle, a storage of value, but something that will at some point replace the dollar? No.
You don't need to be an entitled techie to be disgusted by people openly defecating in the streets.
The file it saves your password in is only readable by you.

Pidgin needs to supply the plaintext password to the server to authenticate.
> What Bitcoin really needs is a central bank to stabilize its value.

Neither did the U.S. before WWI... Once they added the Federal Reserve they really didn't know what they were doing and when the stock market collapsed they raised overnight lending rates and essentially caused the great depression (or made it significantly worse).

Point being, although the Federal Reserve may have a better handle on what is going on now, it does not mean that it is necessary for a currency to have a central bank.

The author pretty much has no idea what he is talking about.
Never mind... The video is in intro guide!
What's particularly interesting is that some of the recent disclosures don't seem to be visible inside the bubble. Take this assertion, for instance:

"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."

In fact, it's been known for months that the DEA receives intercepts from the NSA in such volume that they have an office devoted to handling them (the DEA's "Special Operations Division"). And as for search warrants, the manuals for that office describe a practice of "parallel construction" which involves, not to put to fine a point on it, lying about the ultimate source of the information they're using, with the clear intent of evading judicial scrutiny.

Details here: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/07/us-dea-irs-idUSBRE...
SV and SF techies hate the homeless b/c they think they are all self-made. They walk out of Philz with their $4 coffee, look down at a bum, and think to themselves "Why doesn't he learn Ruby on Rails and become YCombinator millionaires like us?" At least in "third world" countries cited by the author, the wealth disparity is much older and there is a social contract between the serfs and lords.
This is news to me. Each to their own, I guess.
Off the mark. They don't have enough insight to think, "Hey, that could be me". No, they hate the poor because anything else would force them to give up their treasured (although, entirely misguided) belief in the justice of the status quo.

They hate the homeless and poor because their narrow worldview requires it. Nothing more to read into it.

Fuck, these VC darling assholes are uncouth. When people posted that elitism shit on Xoxohth in 2005 it was a fucking joke. These wankers are serious when they gripe about "the poors".
Your comment is intellectually bankrupt comment.

My comment asknowledges potential error, raises issues, asks questions, and does not provide answers that I can't provide yet.

Rather than dealing with any of that, you just make an assertion.

If you want "socalism" to mean only a subset of collective political coersion, you have to defend that intellectually with reason. That is how a shared language works.

Personally, I think of state ownership of the means of production as "communism," and redistribution of wealth, separate from ownership of the means of production, as "socialism."
What would be great is if LaTeX compilers could output to HTML or other more portable backends. I've grown to love LaTeX since my undergrad- I don't have to worry about how things will display like I do with markdown, html and MathJax, it just works. I don't know how possible that will be to replicate in a browser.
Bid for Wozniak's Apple
> Now, it doesn't make much sense, but there's actually a currency designed to create these kind of economic calamities.

I wanted to stop reading right there.
See bottom of post: This essay was deemed UNCLASSIFIED and approved for public release by the NSA's office of Pre-Publication Review on 11/21/2013 (PP 14-0081).
Barb by Jets' Santonio Holmes incenses Panthers' D
Can't tell if you're trolling. Ignoring the fact that you don't actually need the if __name__ == "__main__" thing in Python...

<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready();
</script>

int main() {
return 0; // may or may not be needed depending on version of C/C++
}

class Main {
public static void main(String args) {
}
}

Perhaps you should try Haskell, since you seem to care so much about how to write main...

main = print "blah"
Shameless Carriers
Copy our data without our consent. Lie about it to our representatives. But just trust us.

The ends do not justify the means; on the contrary, nefarious means imply nefarious ends.
The Feed Reader Reviews: Six Months Later
Ever tried tbook? http://tbookdtd.sourceforge.net/

I've had some luck with ConTeXt personally
Ok. So it's a very poor currency.