skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right, Loren, so:

* even though Congress was lied to/mislead about the scope of the NSA's programs, by none other than the Director of National Intelligence [1]

* despite the fact that the NSA hastily rushed to justify an invasion of Syria with misleading data [2]

* despite the fact that the NSA helped produce evidence to justify the false invasion of Iraq [3]

* despite the fact that the NSA helps to subvert crypto software and backdoor services, which makes people and businesses less safe against electronic warfare (despite the fact that al-Qaeda is at least aware of the need for building their own crypto, even if what we've seen so far is possibly crippled by stupidity) [4] [5]

* even though the NSA were unable to catch the Boston bombers (even though the ФСБ warned the US multiple times about the brothers, they were tied to Chechnya, had jihadi content on their social media profiles and were already tied by association to a homicide) [6] [7] [8] [9]

* despite the testaments from former Intel folks that mass data collection doesn't work and that Gen. Keith Alexander is incompetent [10]

* despite Alexander being unable to come up with problems the NSA's mass surveillance has solved without lying [11]

* despite the fact that Alexander is a monumental douche who used taxpayer money to have a Hollywood set designer make his office into a re-creation of the Starship Enterprise [10]

...we should be "reassured to know how capable and thorough your cyber spy agency and military command are." We should rest assured that our electronic communications being scooped up and stored couldn't ever possibly be used for nefarious purposes against a citizen of the US, that it isn't a gross violation of a person's right to privacy and dignity and that even the majority of the NSA are kind-hearted people looking out for America's best interests in the big, scary world full of North Korea's and Muslim radicals and that my virgin, uninitiated mind just doesn't understand. This isn't all just a big, dumb, out-of-control bureaucratic freak-out or an attempt to instate a Stasi-esque intelligence regime.

Fuck you and your condescension, Loren. You are a coward and a liar, unless there is some grand plot the NSA has helped unravel, Clancy-style, that you just can't tell us about (I will apologize and retract my statements when it comes to light).

sources:

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/13/james-clapper_n_374...
[2] http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n24/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin
[3] http://www.thenation.com/blog/174744/remember-when-nsa-surve...
[4] http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/05/nsa-subverts-most-encryptio...
[5] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/02/mujahideen_se...
[6] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/russian-off...
[7] http://www.thenation.com/article/174026/there-chechen-connec...
[8] http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/20/us/brother-religious-language/
[9] http://articles.latimes.com/2013/oct/23/nation/la-na-nn-bost...
[10] http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/09/08/the_cowboy_...
[11] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/15/1247400/-NSA-Direct...
Right, but it still demonstrates how nominal subtyping could be added to Haskell.
I would love to know what you are working on!
you have to use 64 bit and know a bit about uefi. (or give up and do lubuntu)
UEFI Fuck-Up. Or, try waiting 30-60 seconds until the Legacy-BIOS-Mode kicks in..
Here's an insightful reddit comment from /r/changemyview

Q: The United States is moving towards facism CMV (sic)

A: Does the US exhibit some fascist traits? Sure. But I'd contend that we are moving farther, rather than closer.

http://np.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1se6cr/the_unit...
Well, sometimes you need to dist-upgrade, even when not switching distros.
To add to (3): we really miss the mark when it comes to trying to connect with other people's issues. Not everyone can fix their problems by "learning to code" nor does everyone want to use our binary lingo of "problems and solutions" to describe the world. We're far less interested in genuinely understanding others than in attributing our suggestions for improvement.

Ultimately this ties back to (1). We're essentially an autistic male industry.
Options:
- use only variables, and put `body { background: #eee; color: #333; }` so this is the 'fallback'
- prepend a fallback style: `color: red; color: var(main-color);`
- use a css preprocessor to mangle all the things -- somehow.
Just out of curiosity . . .

What followed the phase in which you were writing everything in C?
I'm a fan of bitcoin in many ways, but this is fanboy fiction with no understanding of money.

> Fractional reserve banking entails the creation of new money that is fungible with already preexisting money, i.e. it can be used interchangeably within the currency’s payment systems. This is impossible with Bitcoin.

Not true. Currency can easily be issued against bitcoin. When USD was backed by gold, there was plenty of fractional reserve banking and no-one could issue more gold. In fact, there is already debt-based money backed by BTC issued on the Ripple network.

EDIT: I should add, that fractional reserve banking does not mean infinite money supply. Depending on the amount of reserves required (by customers, government, etc.), as long is it's greater than 0%, there is a limit on the supply. E.g. if the reserve is 20%, only 80 BTC can be loaned against 100, and only 64 against wherever the 80 is deposited, and on-and-on until it approaches 0. Fractional reserve is not necessarily a bad method to allow for risk assessed expansion and contraction of money supply.

> ...blah blah... make it certain that ... Bitcoin will be adopted as the global currency

Oh really? It's certain that the globe will adopt a currency because of it's asymptotic money supply and proof of work algorithm? That makes no sense at all.

The world will adopt bitcoin because it's an efficient means of exchange and safe as a value store / investment from dilution by central banks.

Also, the "security" row in the currency comparison chart is misguided. Bitcoin is far less secure than bank maintained fiat currency networks, because in the latter, fraudulent transactions and electronic theft are generally reversible.
I looked at the alternative ARM boards too, but unfortunately they are only 100Mbps ethernet, which is really slow for a media server :(

Any ideas of boards with gigabit ethernet?
> 2) simple feelings of being left out...that's what people don't like about Google shuttles. They're mysterious. Let people in them, see what they are, see how they're really not that amazing or great: but then that would hurt recruiting.

So your proposal is that people who don't work in tech, say someone who spend upwards of $100000 on an expensive liberal arts education and has a good sense for making good soundbites but not enough money should be allowed to enter the Google bus and drive down to the South Bay and back? It is a fucking bus that moves from point A to point B. There will be people who will hate you for anything you do. Always.
How much did low-income earners contribute to the Mayor's last electoral campaign?
Im not a computer science major and got functional programming naturally but when I first encountered OOP i found it immensely confusing.I couldn't understand WHY you would want to do any of this, thinking about manipulating data was natural to me,but mapping classes onto so called 'real world ' ideas seemed like an immensely leaky abstraction.
I eventually got a mental map that while functional programming resembled maths OOP resembled biology,considering an object as cell which can be a compartmentalised abstraction which could could change state and provide an interface.Probably not the most useful mental model for everybody but it helped me.

What i learnt was:
Forget about all this dog inherits from Mammal bullshit(it doesn't work that way,its just wrong!). OOP is good for a few things.
1. Sharing state between a collection of functions(call them methods if you want to use two names for the same thing).
2. Code reuse (inheritance)

Im rather amused that test driven development forces you to simplify OOP as much as is humanly possible,thereby going against the advantages of a shared state,which is one of the reasons you would use an object in the first place.
That's true. Yet it's an complex way of saying "the complaint is that rich people don't support poor people." In Noe Valley, the rich people have moved away from the poor people, "out of sight, out of mind", but in the Mission the rich and poor are still neighbors.

Noe Valley isn't a solution to the problem, it's just a NIMBY way of papering over the problem.
It's sad though, to think that tech could ever be considered the new finance.
We're supposed to the LSD experimenting, sandal wearing, authority deriding rebels. That's why we're rooted in San Francisco to begin with.

We're threatening our own existence.
Backups are of course always a good idea, but you don't need them specifically to work with git. Git is its own backup system. If you think you might do something potentially harmful, do it in a new branch. If something goes wrong, you can always throw it away.

If something has already gone wrong, and you didn't do it in a separate branch, you can still go back to a previous situation.

Rewriting history in any serious sense (beyond a local reset or rebase for stuff that hasn't been pushed to anyone else yet) is always a bad idea. History is history for a good reason.

Of course any existing commit can always be reverted; that's not rewriting history. A revert is simply a new commit.
> That's a bold claim - do you have any evidence that lorendsr

I meant "you" the NSA, not lorendsr... I don't know him.

But yeah, sorry if my distrust of people who say they worked for a government agency that has as its main PR policy lying and manipulating public opinion sounds harsh... I'm just a bit angry because I'm not a US citizen and I know that my use of pgp,otr,tor,i2p,self-signed certs is enough to make some powerful organization start registering every single move I do on the Internet.
Aye, those things are certainly problematic. I think that people disturbed by those things need to consider directing their outrage and effort at the causes of those problems, and solutions.

Tech people who can afford commutes are not the cause of poor public transit, they just serve to highlight it. Upper-middle class tech workers are not the reason that there are so many homeless in SF, they just provide start contrast that makes the homeless problem highly visible.

Getting rid of tech people so that these problems are not as apparent is not a well considered solution.
Good luck! 8-)

It's doable - have fun and a superb quality of life! ;-)
I think it's fair to say the majority of SF residents strongly oppose increases to housing density through rebuilding, so the mayor and the supervisors should not be defying them. If SF residents also don't like the resulting market prices and gentrification, they need to change their minds about which is worse. I think what they really want is to be a city-state that can stop the farang/Ausländers from deciding to relocate there, but in the US they can't have that.
Governments set rules which directly affect markets - housing in particular is subject to tons of planning and manipulation by government. They absolutely can change supply.

Want to bring on more high-density housing? Change zoning rules so it is easier to get permits.

Housing regulations tend to be extremely local and I'm not a SF resident, but it is stunningly naive to claim that "housing supply" cannot be influenced by government. I realize Americans love to hate them, but city planning is one thing that governments are actually really helpful to have manage.
I strongly suspect that the Bitcoin developers and mining community will eventually choose to inflate the currency. Not for any economic reasons, but rather to provide the funding for a large and secure mining network, because future transaction fees might prove to be insufficient.

That 21 million number is not set in stone, and will change if there is a need for it.
You cannot build a polyfill with full feature-parity with the sole CSS. How do you manage the following one:

a:link { color: var(main-color); }
.important-quote { var-main-color: red; }

/* <div class="important-quote"> <a href="#">Hi, I should be red;</a> </div> */

Mh.. Well you could actually do some kind of @extend-on-steroids, if you do not care to bloat your styles.
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."

That is exactly right. Employees of intelligence agencies are selected primarily for loyalty, not critical thinking. Most people find that hard to believe, especially those inside who tend to have a very high opinion of themselves. In intelligence, recruiting independent minds is a mistake.
I'm saying show people the interior on a "google bus open house day in the mission" so the google bus isn't like a red velvet rope and bouncer protected nightclub --- looks pretty fancy from the outside, but not much really going on inside.

Disambiguify it and say "we're not trying to be a bunch of nightclub bouncers... we just have a large car pool"
While I'm certain you and your organization have a perfect record of never checking inappropriate things into your git repository, mine does not. Even if all the employees at your company were perfect, there is still a chance of inappropriate information getting into the repository.
You really should have read what's in the parentheses immediately after that: "without materially impairing their ability to consume or invest".

In other words, don't invest all your money in it.

I wish people would continue reading instead of stopping at arbitrary points to rant.
As read on other comments: preprocessor variables have nothing to do with this kind of variables. Read the spec, they're a very powerful tool.
I was just going to write this comment myself before checking to see if I'd been beaten. It's definitely one of the great stories of computer history.
> 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.

Did you read the same essay I did? He didn't argue for less accountability (indeed, he argued for more). He did argue that the capability had to remain in order for the U.S. to maintain its ability to survive in the ongoing shadow cyber battles.

I agree with you that the high-level concerns are the real key, but you seem to working at it in the opposite direction. You have a specific end in mind, seemingly independent of any high-level examination of the effects of achieving that end. Then you say that the high-level things (law, trust, comparisons, etc.) should be arranged to meet the specific end.

Rather I'd argue it from the other direction, just as I have from day 1 of all of this: Does a country need to have the ability to monitor the goings-on of electronic communications (including the Internet) for its welfare & national security purposes? If so, what capabilities are needed? Is "pre-emptive self defense" needed (or even allowed)?

Do the totality of these capabilities introduce a risk towards civil liberties, or otherwise conflict with law? If so, can they be mitigated, must the law be changed, or should the state simply abdicate its security/welfare reponsibility (noting that it would be only the US doing the "abdicating" here)? Can the state employ other capabilities that can achieve the same essential effect with less risk on civil liberties?

Some of these questions you touch on, e.g. "you haven't proven that you are doing more or better compared to other ways we could push back against scary people.", but many are ignored completely as it is simply assumed that absolute privacy on the Internet is sacred (but only for the NSA; criminal organizations, other nation's intelligence agencies, and the local cypherpunk wardriving around are obviously not a threat), even while absolute privacy on the old landline phones was never a reality.

The best argument I've heard so far has been that the sheer scale of this type of network surveillance, along with its near-undetectable nature, makes it different in kind. I actually agree with that viewpoint, but I also think that this matter of scale makes it possible to install good oversight and accountability if the capability is actually needed. It would take probably at least 10 people just from a "command + control" sense to launch a U.S. nuclear missile; there's no reason even better accountability, oversight, and specific legal guidance and safeguards can't be baked-in to a one-and-only central monitoring system.

But the question is whether we need the capability, and no one seems to want to take a specific answer as to why the U.S. (and the U.S. alone) can survive without it.
> Bitcoin isn't acting as a middleman here-it's the end.

No, Employer > USD > Bitcoin > You. If you're using dollar equivalent for any reason whatsoever, then that's what you're really being paid in. Your salary is being priced in dollars, not Bitcoin.

> You can't really claim someone is paid in dollars unless (1) they receive actual dollars, or (2) the thing they receive instead is guaranteed to be exchangeable for that dollar amount at any point into the future.

Yes I can. Your employer is paying out dollars, that it's converted to something along the way is not relevant, they're paying you in dollars; you just receive something else through a middleman, in this case the Bitcoin network.
This is something I often wonder about on HN: Is this guy being downvoted simply because we disagree with him/he's making absurd claims? His comments are correctly punctuated, grammatical, at least tolerably respectful, etc. Though his map does not seem to correspond to the territory, in my eyes that alone doesn't merit downvotes.
Would you please write an article about Bitcoin monetary policy with your understanding of money?
If someone have a similar need or problem then someone taking lead to stir up a conversation and anger about an issue - why not? It's only really a problem when there are lies being stated, which I have no idea if there are.
Where Startup Funding Really Comes From (Infographic) | Entrepreneur.com
I'm a fan of bitcoin, as well, and I totally agree with you on their #3 (Fractional reserve banking). I was going to come here with exactly the same statement about gold.

There is, however, a key difference in that unlike contemporary FRB, any FRB with bitcoin will necessarily have all of the inflationary effects of monetary expansion through debt exactly counteracted by deflationary effects of debt amortization and bankruptcies.
My understanding is that the first (self-described) technology evangelist was Guy Kawasaki at Apple:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Kawasaki
Hey, you should check out https://github.com/VarnaLab/node-organic - organic development with NodeJS :D It has implementations on java & php too :)
Yes! I watched the movie "Bullitt" a few years ago and noticed that half the action wouldn't have happened if the participants had had cell phones.
How does the mother's body know the sex of the child? Is it detected somehow during the pregnancy and if so where is this information kept?
There is no more acreage in the Mission. I'm all for bulldozing it and building 900 foot towers as soon as downtown Palo Alto does.
We're not talking about that kind of variables. CSS ones are a dynamic, inherited, cascaded (is that a word?) set of vars.
Btw, fellas, Expose and Spaces is still around, just under a different name in the preferences called 'Mission Control'.
Bitcoin and the Byzantine Generals Problem
"I want a media backlash"

The "story about the story" doesn't come until the story is rehashed and played out many many times. Milked until the only thing to talk about is the coverage itself.

(I know nothing about this subject so I am not weighing in with agreement or disagreement - only pointing out how stories play out in the press not what you are actually saying.)
"I think we can all agree that this nonsense is great for sfgate's page views. And they clearly know it. They just keep publishing the same two stories over and over."

Don't know about that, but I do know this: for every article about the tech backlash, there's a top-rated HN comment dismissing the whole thing as a cheap ploy for page views.
Another commenter here notes that "People have been hating yuppies since as long as the concept has existed" but as a yuppie myself, this misses something more crucial to me: the disconnect between the techno-utopian ideology of the bay area and the (apparently?) increasing divide between haves/have-nots. Something about the juxtaposition just really troubles me.

Of course, there are larger social trends happening here that complicate the picture, such as a shift in the distribution of poverty between urban and suburban areas:

http://www.brookings.edu/research/books/2013/confrontingsubu...

There are people who say that it's okay because these technologies of convenience will eventually become affordable for everyone, essentially a trickle-down theory of technological progress. Maybe that's true.

I just want to avoid an Elysium-like scenario of futuristic enclaves surrounded by poverty-stricken shantytowns. As long as we can avoid that, I'll be much happier about building the future.
I had a dream last night that I went into Walmart. Everything was a penny so I went home to wait this terrible situation out. And because the economy is dependent on SPENDING not producing the economy collapsed as a result! What a nightmare.
I don't believe the NSA should be giving data (or even just "tips") on citizens to LE. It's either illegal or done under a law I don't know about. Do you know what this is talking about?

>FISA surveillance was originally supposed to be used only in certain specific, authorized national security investigations, but information sharing rules implemented after 9/11 allows the NSA to hand over information to traditional domestic law-enforcement agencies, without any connection to terrorism or national security investigations.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intel...
Are Macs different enough that the amd64 Debian installer won't boot on it?
Thanks for the answer! What do you mean by "Operations"?
>in 2007 the US suffered an "espionage Pearl Harbor" in which entities "broke into all of the high tech agencies, all of the military agencies, and downloaded terabytes of information."

Man, I would hate if an entity downloaded my information! Poor agencies. But it's probably fine, I mean, those "entities" couldn't look at terabytes of information. It's probably just sitting in a database somewhere. So, nothing to worry about.
Yes, but who are the "people" that you show things to? There is no clear split between "tech people" on one side and "locals" on the other side. Just like there are people who have been living in the Mission for 30+ years, there are people who moved in at the same time as I did (two years ago) but are getting priced out. Why am I less of a real "San Franciscan" than they are? This is as another commenter pointed, half parts bigotry too. This has always been happening too. Hell, the Mission was once occupied by poor German and Italian families. They fled with white flight when the Latinas moved here. Then, now the Mission is gentrifying. This is a process that will keep happening throughout the years in every neighborhood. A Google open house day will not help people who want to manufacture outrage for their pet causes.
It all seems so sincere. Except when you see how closely this matches the talking points the NSA sent home with employees (https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/8445...)