skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Come on, folks. I feel like it's pretty well accepted that using "retarded" to describe something you don't like—or don't think highly of—is offensive.
I don't know if Loren is sincere, or if he's part of a disinformation campaign. Either way, I don't believe his reassurances. I think NSA surveillance is first and foremost a tool to control the American citizenry. The next Martin Luther King, Ralph Nader, or Daniel Ellsberg isn't gonna stand a chance.
The trick is that Kraus describes a clearly delineated set of social groups: Germans, Austrians, Italians and French. Perhaps he's saying that if 'the form is the function', ultimately, the group is susceptible to natural forces and the ambitions other groups that were founded on a sound functional basis. Moreover, modern groups do not have the barriers of geography to separate like-mindedness.
I already take a rather dumb drug for that: coffee. And lots of it. I'd gladly replace it with a more efficient and safer drug, preferably one that doesn't cause a physical addiction.
Taking the battery out of the phone should work. Anyone tested or tried a Faraday cage case for a phone? Would a nice copper mesh case work?

Also in DC it is not illegal to wear a mask. In Virginia it is a felony, though (not an Onion article):

http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?000+cod+18.2-422
Tweaked the caching layer for one of the busiest technology media site on the Internet. using only 2 varnish servers I was able to front millions of hits to 5 web back end nodes running wordpress. The configuration for varnish was tweaked so good that we even considered dropping Akamai.
I actually see that pretty often. When the movie requires it, people forget that they have cell phones. It's the same way the horror movie universe apparently doesn't have horror movies, or people would know not to split up or have sex while camping.
3. note the use of the word target instead of listen
I agree, but man would it be tough for a company to offer this.

As CEO you have shareholders, competitors, customers, blah blah blah all expecting growth or seeking to take your growth.

So to do this, either
a) everyone works more efficiently, but how many will hold themselves accountable to this?
b) you hire more people, but creates more organizational complexity
c) you ask people to work more hours

Seems most companies would take C.
From the same article:

>The modern academic sense of the word, in the context of social roles of men and women, dates from the work of John Money (1955), and was popularized and developed by the feminist movement from the 1970s onwards (see Feminism theory and gender studies below). The theory was that human nature is essentially epicene and social distinctions based on sex are arbitrarily constructed. Matters pertaining to this theoretical process of social construction were labelled matters of gender.

I think most places people hear it is that gender is the male/female/other self-description, and sex is the physiological state.
What a puff piece if ever there was one. I'm actually concerned that 60 Minutes would actually air such obviously pro NSA propaganda especially after their Bengazi disaster. How anyone can take this seriously is beyond me. And the fact that Alexander could blatantly lie to the world on national television is outrageous.
> the 'rent' vs 'buy' discussion is pure semantics.

All truth in advertising laws are about 'pure semantics' if that's how you choose to refer to those kinds of distinctions. That doesn't make truth in advertising any less important.
Why won't the Winklevoss twins just die?
I got my first job. There's nothing like a dose of the real world to break you out of such phases. However, I still hadn't reached maturity, I just had a complete reversal and started writing everything in Haskell instead.

It's only been recently that I have started sitting down with projects and thinking, which language makes sense here?
What's the best way to handle api keys without storing them in a repository? A separate configuration file?

I've saved api keys to a repository, but only ones with no payment information attached and read only access. Mainly because I couldn't think of a better way at the time.
I want to again remind folks that the 29k guess/rumored price is / will be the 'starting at' price.

The Model S "starts" at 60k, but the version that isn't nerfed due to a small battery is $90k. The people giving the amazing, raving reviews of the Model S are talking about the high end of the price range model, not the 'starting at' model.

The next revision (model E) won't be an 'everyone' Tesla - In order to be an 'everyone' car, they'd be looking at going head to head with the Honda Civic (18k) and Toyota Corolla (17k).

I want that as much as anyone else - but it's still another tech generation away to get those batteries made at a low enough cost to be viable. I think they can do the 30-60k car merely with economies of scale, but to halve the cost again is going to take a new generation of battery tech that isn't here yet.
I am one of the few who remember a time when 60 Minutes actually did investigative journalism and not biased propaganda pieces for the likes of the NSA. Now you'll be hard-pressed to find any investigation in a 60 Minutes story, let alone the journalism part. Sad.
ASK HN: Information Systems versus Computer Science
For the people out there that are in the business of making money from computer related stuff. How viable in the job market is an Information Systems degree with a minor in Computer Science, as opposed to a Computer Science degree. (Just a Bachelors for both).

Reason being, I am currently a Computer Science major and I am not exactly fond of the Calculus, I can do it, I'd just rather not, and after doing some research on the subject. I discovered that Computer Science tends to be more Research/Academia related now, and MIS is more aimed at business. Although these opinions were that of yahoo answers and some random google searches. I figured I'd ask my trusted HN community for more insight on the topic.

Thank you for taking the time to answer this.
In essence:

The current welfare programs are already funding those people, so let's replace it with one that covers everyone instead of those who enrolled.

Also, how can you give without first taking?
Sigh, more about phone records.

Phone records! Just metadata collection! Data collection? Oh, right, we do that, too.
And more worthwhile. Having a registered copyright allows you to potentially collect punitive damages with a successful lawsuit rather than just the actual market value of the usage.
To put things in perspective: taking the (presumably) wildly optimistic forecast of the Wilklevii, the total future bitcoin appreciation will be approximately equal to the year-to-date performance.

So in an optimistic scenario, the bulk of any appreciation is behind us, and the fortunes made to-date won't be made by the current batch of speculators.
I want Dustin Curtis to spend some time reading http://gatesfoundation.org and then rethink his I Want list.
Unbelievable Oakland nonprofit startup w/NYT coverage & Clinton Fdn partnership
Arbitrarily small. Can it be divided down to (179/(6*10^24)) grams? And can you do international online micro transactions with it?
"I want to have something to eat, to go to school, and healthcare" said a lot of other people.
Greg Norman on his mission to grow the game of golf globally
What should they have done differently? I think the sentiment here mainly is going to be any report from 60 Minutes that isn't 100% negative about everything the NSA is doing is not going to be good enough.
> Imagine falling in love with someone in perfect silence

All primates have vocalizations of some kind. All apes have fairly complex vocalizations. Humans are an extreme case, but we're not entirely sui generis; it's pretty well guaranteed that any species recognizable as proto-human would not be courting in complete silence.
I don't understand. If Bitcoin appreciates to $40k like the Winklebosses are saying, then I stand to 40x my money. How does that equal the year to date performance, or mean that the bulk of the appreciation is behind us?

(I think appreciation to $40k is delusional, but that's what they're claiming.)
To be fair, using consumers as fodder happens in other situations that aren't SaS. Consider the content fights of DirecTV. The problem comes down to how intellectual property has become defined as a license instead of outright ownership. Digital rights have been significantly eroded over the past decade.
Did this PR drone hack HN to plant his comment [1] from "745 days ago" too?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3296691
I don't think he mentions that.
Going on and off abstraction layers is not done enough. I like articles where the authors iterate/feedback through high level code and low level results. Saw some in clojure and was happy to have conscious notion of cpu cycles floating next to s-exps (of course I mean this comment to apply to any kind of abstraction layer).
Why Are Americans Staying Put?
Impala: Another Google Inspired Platform Enters The Mainstream Data World
How about asking some hard questions instead of tossing softballs? For instance, why wasn't Keith Alexander confronted by the fact that he lied to Congress and the FISA courts? But no, that would have cut into their driveby on Snowden. Did you know that Edward Snowden kicks puppies? &c.

I watched the interview and it was a real puff piece. Last week, 60 Minutes doled out advertising to Amazon. This week, they did it for NSA.
according to this wikipedia article, the price in december 2012 was $13:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Bitcoin#Prices_and_v...

the average today is $827, 827 / 13 = 63.6153846154
Because their current practice can only be described as fraud.

Despite what the fine print says (which I'm sure explains they're allowed to do this), most people are under the impression that they are buying a product, much like you would in the store.

To someone who believes they have bought/purchased something, it's like discovering that one day Amazon or Disney snuck into your home to steal your DVDs so they can re-sell them to you again next christmas. But then you read the fine print in the contract and realise that clause 14.2 (a) stated that they're allowed to do this.

The fix is for them to state "you will have access to this video for a period of 12 months" or similar.
I think they own about 1% - a fair bit less than Satoshi Nakamoto, but yeah agreed on your point ... totally useless story.
I want this blog post to be the #1 result when you search Google for "first world problems."
Minor warning, people need to be taught a little bit of ~database like ideas before using Excel, otherwise it's gonna be a printer-fest backfire.

It's so absurd it made me numb, but when people interact through Excel they accumulate very large matrices of redundant rows and columns that are unsuited for LCD/keyboard interactions thus ending up killing trees again.
This is a pretty tiring argument.

"Retarded" to me doesn't mean what you may think it means to me. When you call something "dumb" do you realize that the word was originally used to refer to mute people? No? Well, neither does anyone else. Words evolve, and I'm sure that no one uses "retarded" because they want to make fun of people with real medical issues. They use it because it evolved to mean something completely different.
Usally in environment variables rather than a config file.

for example
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/config-vars
Keep away from the formula aisle if at all possible!
You are most likely correct.

It seems as though the Intelligence Community is being forced back to 'siloing' since the pooled resource approach seems to be so vulnerable to singleton conscience-ridden whistleblowers. In a way this plays right into Assange's analysis of the cognitive structure of rule by conspiracy in that an organization can know things, but cannot both discuss them internally and keep them secret at the same time. In effect an attack that requires internal barriers to communication to prevent; is also an attack on the organizations overall cognitive ability.
I am really glad people (or at least some) saw right through them.

I caught only like 10 minutes of it, but one of the NSA official was talking about how they discovered a state sponsored malware that could infect your BIOS and brick your computer. I was like, wait, what? So you spy on our phone and internet communication so you can protect us from computer viruses?

But if you were to view that as a lay person, what the NSA official said about cyber attacks must have sounded really damn scary. After hearing something like that, most people would accept that the NSA's actions are justifiable.
The legal principle is that once the government legitimately comes into possession of evidence, it doesn't have to "pretend to have not seen it".

What this means is that if a given surveillance transcript is obtained legally (which is easy to do for foreign communications, even if a U.S. person is a party to the conversation), that it can be legally passed to LE. Once LE knows about it, they don't have to "close their eyes" to any U.S. nationals on the transcript, similar to how the police are not required to ignore evidence in plain sight (even if it wasn't listed specifically on the warrant).

By this route it is possible to pass incriminating evidence to LE about U.S. nationals even without a warrant, as long as one of the parties to the communication in question is actually a foreigner.
> I find it perfectly acceptable to lie during an open session hearing about top secret programs if those doing the questioning are doing it to be politically motivated

As opposed to what other kind of motivation? The only kind of questions they ever get are political so it seems like you think that people at the NSA can just lie about just about anything and it's just fine.
The lying to Congress issues aren't so black and white as I mentioned in another thread. Here is a writeup about Clapper:

> There is an added wrinkle here, however, is that it is not clear to me whether Clapper could have given a direct (and truthful) answer in a public hearing, as such an answer would have required him to disclose the existence of a then-classified government program. Even a non-answer or evasion could have revealed the existence of operations the NSA was trying to keep secret.

http://www.volokh.com/2013/06/11/did-james-clapper-lie-to-co...
You've asked us to give you advice not based on the brand, and yet, all you've really given us for information is the brands. "The OS group" at Microsoft is thousands of people and probably hundreds of projects, ranging from cool glorious shit with smart people to mundane drudgery.

I interned at Microsoft, and later Google. Google absolutely trumped Microsoft in my experience. I think of the atmospheric difference between them as similar to that between university and high school.

If your previous intern experience did not include free food: go to Google. I find it impossible to overstate the mental and material difference that removing any thought of groceries made to my life. It was huge. Unlimited, healthy, and varied. The people at Google were wonderful and the level of support available to you for personal and career growth is immense.

You do need to get a good team, but if you've been accepted by more than one already, your recruiter will have high confidence in placing you and probably be helpful in finding the best fit. They are strongly motivated to get you hired.

Microsoft was not an interesting place to work. I met two or three insanely smart people there who joined years ago when Microsoft was more like Google is now (or, was, a few years ago), and they were all swamped and cramped and not in a position to be good mentors.

I don't know anything about what working at Fog Creek would be like. Trello is nice. Joel Spolsky's old blog posts are pretty good reading. Does that make it a good place to work?

Are you a *nix or a Mac or a Windows person? Even if not for your daily use, what about for your programming environment? What technology do you want to work with in the future?

At Microsoft, you'll probably be writing C# or C++ in Visual Studio on Windows. At Google, you'll be writing C++, Java, Python, or Go, in vim/emacs/sublime, on a Mac or on Ubuntu. I'd imagine Fog Creek would be JS/C#/C++ in Visual Studio in Windows, but I really don't know.

The offer probably won't expire, by the way. People don't invest money and time interviewing and vetting you and then seriously put a pointless clock on it. If they do seriously mean it: don't work there. That level of bullshit should signal a lot of bad HR experiences down the road.

grain of salt, your mileage may vary, all that. Good luck.
Braver man than I am, that's for sure. Someone even canceled their Kickstarter pledge for his mayo over it.
Deflation is only a threat because of fractional-reserve lending. The world ends up owing itself more than it actually has in currency, and it collapses in on itself in a massive disaster if and when the currency deflates.

Fractional reserve lending of bitcoins seems highly unlikely to happen any time soon, if ever. And if it does start happening, it is likely to be made quickly illegal, because the system simply won't work.
Definitely true, although I do believe they've been invested in bitcoins for quite a while now and have profited big time from the recent bitcoin boom.
user "laszlo" did first transaction – bought 2 pizzas for 10,000 BTC.[67][68] User "SmokeTooMuch" auctioned 10,000 BTC for $50 (cumulatively), but no buyer was found.[69][70]

EDIT: I know, it was just a funny event.
I'm confused about this. Somebody got OPs account number and password because it was written down in a file he put on git?
Yep, he does. Read the article more carefully :-)
It's really disturbing how 'it's just metadata' is one of the lines being used to make the whole NSA debacle sound like not such a big deal, when in reality metadata is what makes this information USEFUL.
Obviously North Korea isn't near the threat of the Soviets/Axis, but I'd say they have a very real capability to destabilize, at the very least, the Korean Peninsula (non-violent dissolution), and at the most all of SE Asia (A nuclear attack/violent dissolution)
I remember reading that exact article a couple of months ago. So the publishing date of December 10 seems strange to me.
(9) Meet-ups - each city should have at least a few for various topics
Yeah, I suspect that if he named any actual members of Red Team that it would have been squelched almost instantly.
If you are already in an apt then the need for an office space is minimal. But if getting an office space will improve productivity then when you get the $80k. In NC we have an 1100 sq ft office space to work closer together and pay $750 a month. It has increased our productivity by 5x. If the business is going to fail based on a $750 monthly expense then it's time to rethink the model IMHO. For us it went from building a SaaS in 6 months down to 2 months. Your mileage may vary.
Well, maybe they should have touched on it, then. I wonder why they didn't!
I don't think the money supply will shrink at a rate that has any significant impact. Maybe it will increase deflation from 5% to 5.1% annually. It's money - people don't like to destroy money. There's a natural incentive to keep it. :)

The problem with having a mechanism to adjust the money supply in proportion to economic growth is that someone has to make those decisions, and historically they have ALWAYS ended up abusing that privilege.

Currently we have representatives of banks, hedge funds, and investment trusts making those decisions. Who's interest do you think are reflected in monetary policy?
those aren't year-to-date events
It's ironic to me that your second to last paragraph is about the mentally ill not getting the help they need. That cries for help fall on deaf ears. Then you conclude with the idea that hate was the only thing that kept tribes of humans together and that now we're a big happy world.

I'd argue that compassion and tolerance are best practiced in those small groups as well, as you are forced to recognize the person behind the stereotypes (Note: I live in a town of 800 people and can tell you the names of many people who struggle with mental illness, some of whom I've been blessed enough to be able to help at times).

So I'd actually argue the opposite of your point. Sociologically it's been demonstrated that humans tend (not always) to operate best and honestly in a certain size group. DuPont set up their labs based on this number, though I can't remember it off the top of my head. No human is capable of honestly considering the needs of the entire human race. That's just silly.
Feinstein is a hypocrite.

http://www.infowars.com/dianne-feinstein-i-carried-a-conceal...
...ie to embrace the President.

Yeah, because Wyden's motivation in asking the questions he asked was totally to buddy up to Obama.
> The data from extremistan will more likely follow a power law distribution.

That's exactly the kind of logical inference that the linked article warns against, unless you have some additional reasoning behind that assertion.
A Congressional declaration of war would, by law, put an exceptional amount of wartime powers in the hands of one person, the President of the United States. For what are hopefully obvious reasons, Congress has not chosen to go through with that.

On the other hand, they have passed an "Authorization for the Use of Military Force" which is still current, authorizing military action in Afghanistan and wherever AQ or other terrorists groups might be found.
It's on HN because someone posted the link, and people are voting for it because they found it "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." [1]

If you don't like it or the author, why bother posting?

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The way things are going, I wouldn't be so sure.
I think he mentioned modern newspapers.
At first glance, mining appears to use a lot of energy. But it has a very important property:

mining is "fair" in money generation.

And being fair may be much more important than the energy consumed.
Stop being such a girl!

No, wait, you see, it now means something entirely different! It doesn't mean anything to do with gender, it means you should have a thicker skin. So it's not actually offensive, right?
Government contractors are not considered government employees.
Hrm, there have been so many articles about this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/magazine/adam-davidson-mob...

http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up-front/posts/2011/11/17-mig...

http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/web-exclusive/why-are-america...

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/november_december_...
I am pretty confident that stuff like this does more harm to the bitcoin community than good.
It further encourages anyone remotely involved to sit on their coins and not use them.

The only way something like bitcoin can flourish is if the majority of users are spending them (trading them)... if 90% of people buy bitcoin in the hope they will go to $40K then they are supporting all the things that the naysayers are claiming (ponzi scheme and what not).
We also evolved with immune systems. This does not mean that supplementary tools such as antibiotics and vaccines are not useful.

I believe rayiner's point is that infants can thrive on formula milk as well as breast milk. Please don't mock parents who choose to formula feed; there are many cases where it is preferable and/or necessary, just as there are cases where it is necessary to use antibiotics to supplement the body's immune system.