skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a support ticket open with Amazon about this. I'm hoping not, but I have to accept a certain amount of responsibility for leaking the key in the first place.
This post is fantastic and the paper is fascinating. I particularly enjoyed his writing:

> This is why God, in Her wisdom and mercy, gave us the bootstrap.
Conquering the U.S. today would require an unconventional & asymmetric approach.

One possibility could be intentionally dragging the U.S. into multiple seemingly unrelated wars along several fronts (Iran moves to blockade the Straight of Hormuz, Saudi Arabia bans export of oil to the U.S. and 'dares' them to come take it back, and China shuts off all exports of goods to the U.S., while on their campaign to 'liberate' South Korea). Each of these actions are designed to seriously wound the U.S. economically thus inviting a military response.

While the U.S takes the bait to engage in these 3 conflicts and overextends herself (the U.S. military is built to fight just 1.5-2 wars), a group of sleeper agents who have risen to positions of considerable power in the House and the Senate begin the next phase by obstructing the war effort (denying funding to the troops), and generating significant domestic dissent (raising taxes considerably, while simultaneously cutting spending to subsistence levels (no more food stamps, delay social security checks to make grandma go hungry).

By this point, the country has no access to oil beyond our strategic reserves, the economy is in shambles, rich people are pissed by the 80% war tax, and poor people are pissed because they're not getting anything from it.

Now we enact phase 3 and send in the Canadian Mounties. They'll be greeted with open arms by all Americans.
San Francisco has no worse social issues than New York, with its famously female-heavy population. Google shuttles and hipster coffee are nothing compared to stop-and-frisk.
I drink coffee already, so I guess it's more a matter of degrees than would.
Yeah, I'll discuss this with Amazon when they get back to me, but I don't hold much hope for a positive outcome.
I'd recommend skipping the intro and skip right to the Q&A.

It's an interesting article with a needlessly polemic intro.
I don't think most people realize how bad this is. It's not just a rash of bad blood. This is a turning point. The last bubble was much more unreasonable in terms of raw numbers, but it didn't have the mean-spirited aura of this one.

Even after 2001, people liked tech and Silicon Valley and wanted to see these ecosystems succeed. That was the respectable way to get rich: to move to the Valley and start a company. No more. Average people hate tech now.

The problem is that, as often happens, the wrong targets are being attacked. People are lumping the $140k/year programmers (who'll never be able to afford a house in San Francisco) in with the $250k product executives and useless scene kids working 11-to-3, much less the $2M/year lawyers who figure out how tech companies can never pay a dime in taxes, which means they're not seeing the source of the real problem.
Why not do all that and also take smart drugs?
I can't view this from the UK?! On the British Broadcasting Cooperation's website crazy.

"BBC Future (international version)
We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new BBC programmes. You can find out more about BBC Worldwide and its digital activities at www.bbcworldwide.com.

If you are looking for health, technology, science and environment news in the UK, please visit:
Health, Technology, Science and Environment."
I had the exact same thing happen to me. 2 days of 20 instances running and then amazon called me. I shut it down and revoked permissions immediately.

They did refund the money.
A nuclear war would end us all. There are no winners in this scenario. If you think a country would stand a chance, you clearly do not know the nuclear capabilities of today. One thing I hate though is the "we are invincible, nr.1 etc" attitude of some americans on vice.com. I don't understand why they keep going with that mentality. It's ridiculous...
Exactly same thing happened to me. 20 x xlarge instances raking up a total bill of $1800. I've opened a support case with them.
I'm drinking a beer from that exact mug right now
Not sure about the airs, but on the 2011 macbook pro, you could boot a lot of things from cd, but not from USB. Apple doesn't have a very good pre-boot environment if you're not running Apple software. (No PXE, either, just their proprietary netboot)
We (a16z) would love to see more innovation along these lines and would be excited to try to help.
Uhh...way to go on stereotyping people. Because everyone who is in tech does this. There are countless tech people who take the Muni and Caltrain to work in Mountain View. Also, the shuttles are an option, designed by companies to optimize the amount of time you work. Quite a lot of people get work done in shuttles. I am not sure how this makes it the fault of the employee because they are using a benefit which exists. What is next? Complain because someone is not refusing a higher pay package just because of your silly conceptions of equality.
> Audit code before open sourcing

It's important to remember that open-sourcing is generally one-way: once it's out there, it's impossible to completely eliminate all traces. Always audit code, and if there's even a remote possibility that you'll regret it you should check again
I really like agile precisely because of this. I get tasks given to me, and I can prove the amount of work I have done.

Without metrics, you can end up at whim of managers gut feeling rather than what actually has been done.
here is a post talk about it http://expectedpayoff.com/blog/2013/03/22/bitcoin-and-the-by...
Realtime wind maps
A cursory look at your link reveals that it was caused by an incompatibility between different versions of the bitcoin client; the older client wouldn't accept blocks as large as the later one. People downgraded to the older version, and then "The network reached consensus and continued to operate as normal a few hours after the split."

So I guess you could say it only solves the problem when everybody's software implements the same protocol.
Yeah, I'd say that anyone on Github that has somehow leaked keys is in for a nasty surprise (or has already received one)
Yup, I too believe that agent-based imperative thinking is very deeply anchored in us and for sure helps a lot to explain a computer at conceptual level

agent: computer

imperative commands: instructions you give it

... but later on once the understanding of the machine/tool is established i see how much more powerful the declarative resp. transformational "paradigm" gets for "computers" applied to the "platonic world"

I believe that the transition towards the declarative paradigm and understanding of it is essential to grasp the idea of how "computers" and computation differs from other physical machines mankind invented.
Carriers are expensive: they imply lots of expensive aircraft, specifically developed just for carrier service, as well as the carrier battle group that trolls around with it.

Plus the logistics pipeline to get fuel and food and such to all that hardware floating around in the ocean.

I have no idea what a carrier costs to operate, but for a normal mega-yacht, it's said to cost about 1/5th original purchase price per year. I'm guessing with the wear and tear on a Navy ship with aircraft banging around on it every few minutes it's something much higher.
Doctorow makes a big deal about contracts and so forth, so as to blame Amazon. But that's like blaming Oscar Meyer for the fact that bologna isn't made out of free-range heritage-breed pork: eventually the consumer will learn what's actually in the package. Of course contracts between companies play a role, but from the consumer perspective this is what you "own" when you purchase DRM'ed media. All DRM'ed media will be taken, eventually. Don't buy it unless you're comfortable with that fact.
He's no longer employed by the NSA. He left to play with a startup and some personal coding projects; the last paragraph of his post links to them. Any discussion of his employment there still gets reviewed by the NSA, but that's routine for anyone who does classified work. (And he does say up front that he sought that review, and that they had no problem with him posting what the rest of us read.)
No idea really. I know quite a bunch of people who live in SF and do the South Bay trip. Enough of them spend money in the city, walk dogs for the elderly and so on. I think we are getting into "No true scotsman" territory with all this misplaced outrage.
Depends on the risk. Assuming that the risk is proportionate to dosage, and in the absence of a regulatory mechanism, widespread use of performance enhancing drugs will lead to a level of use just shy of being lethal over the duration of employment, say three years.
Idiots exist in every culture and creed, US citizens are no exception.
About eight months ago I took the data from the Angel Investor Performance Project(1) and ran it through the powerlaw software(2).

The software said the data on angel funded startups (at least the ones in the AIPP survey) did not indicate that returns followed a power law. Given how often we say "power law!" in regards to startup outcomes, I just thought that was interesting.

(1) http://www.angelcapitalassociation.org/data/Documents/Resour...

(2) http://code.google.com/p/powerlaw/
The problem is a climate that is conducive to the homeless. Here's my modest proposal: move tech companies to the rust belt. From Detroit to Utica, we have the pleasure of watching the homeless die of hypothermia every winter. Every time I see some begging scumbag on the street, I just think to myself, "thank FSM that piece of shit will have a shallow grave in 6 months." You know, because he can't afford to get put 6 feet under. Natural selection is a beautiful thing.
I know they feel compelled to show some graphic on the page, but they should at least caption the drawing to indicate it's nothing but a guess. I say this because if the Model E looks like that, it wouldn't be a proper Tesla.
The intro is intended to be comedic and set the stage for the questions, but it's not necessarily obvious at first.
How did 60 Minutes get cameras into a spy agency?
Possibly because it would cost the FBI orders of magnitude more than the damages to investigate.

The damages which amazon will likely refund.

The FBI does not target petty thieves.
You think gold can't be divided into arbitrarily small units? Really? The smallest unit of gold is (179/(6*10^23)) grams. That's pretty small.

Dividing bitcoins into small micro-denominations does not solve the problems of deflation in the same way that adding zeros to Zimbabwean currency doesn't solve the problems of inflation.
Dogecoin should probably be on Encyplopedia Dramatica, or Know Your Meme, or Urban Dictionary. Probably doesn't need more than a footnote on WikiPedia.
Show HN: My Electronic Cigarette Startup VapeSecret
CPU mining of scrypt-based cryptocurrency is highly inefficient. Let's do some math.

A cc2.8xlarge is reported to mine at 85 kh/s, so 20 of them would give you 1700 kh/s. That's roughly equivalent to a couple of high-end AMD GPUs (say a couple of overclocked 290x). This hashing power gives you a little over 0.5 LTC per day. It mined for two days, so it gained a little over 1 LTC. Let's call it $40.

That's right, the idiot behind this cost the OP $3000+ for $40 profit. A smarter criminal would have spawn GPU instances on EC2.
How does it progress what we know about prime numbers?
I am not sure but FBI can only be involved on financial frauds over 1 million (I vaguely remember this and could be wrong)
As a counter to the author's own romantic example: my wife and I probably would never have gotten together without modern social networking. When my wife and I met, she was living in Oregon and I was living in Chicago. We met while she was in town to interview at the law school I was attending. She was in professional mode and I was a stressed out first year student, and we never would have pursued a relationship in the days before gchat. But instant messaging is a very unique medium. The lack of visual feedback tends to encourage frank conversations, and the "who else is up at this hour?" aspect tends to encourage reaching out to people you wouldn't necessarily call up on the phone. By the time of our "first date" months later, we had met each other exactly twice but already knew a tremendous amount about each other.
"I want a media backlash. That always comes, right?"

Actually, no it doesn't. A group most of us identify with (techies) is cast as the villain of the piece. The designated villain doesn't get a reprieve. Ask anyone who identifies with any other group the press latches onto as an oppressor.
The Agency is an intelligence organization, not a law enforcement agency.

Monstrously disingenuous. The term "parallel construction" apparently means nothing to him.

In 1991 the USSR dissolved and the Cold War ended. The world let out a sigh of relief, safe in the the knowledge that humanity wasn’t crazy enough to destroy itself. That security we had is gone. North Korea has nuclear weapons and is threatening to fire them at the US.

I'm missing the part where collecting my email and phone records will help with this problem.
> 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.

I think it's fair to say most rank and file NSA employees are honest and actually do believe in their mission. The far scarier thought is how things may work at an extremely senior level (contractors included), where there's literally nobody there to watch the watchers, or at least challenge them without being fired and blackballed.

That said, "US selectors" shouldn't return the results that they do in the first place. Obviously there's incidental collection, which is unavoidable. But the notion of incidental collection, as with metadata collection, was hijacked and used in public relations messaging as a cover for actual domestic collection programs that intentionally capture the full contents of nearly all domestic communications within the United States.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/government_programs/july-dec1...

Despite exceptions such as the article above, this messaging has largely been successful. Even The Guardian and The Washington Post---organizations who publish stories directly sourced from documents leaked by Snowden---routinely fail to underscore the critical difference between actual collection, and "collection" in the sense of mere authorized access to data that's already intercepted and stored. The two have been intentionally conflated as part of a semantics game, and it's working beautifully to mislead the American public about what's actually happening.
At the same time though, isn't it kind of notable that a 'meme becomes a currency'?
One cc2.8xlarge instance will give you 85 kH/s so 20 instances would give 1700 kH/s which only nets about $18 at current market prices / difficulty. So over 2 days he would have made off with a whopping $36.
sigh I was afraid it was THAT stupid.
This started with an interesting idea "We need boots on the ground on the White House lawns." but for some reason moved to analysing the foreign military forces. I understand that there are quite a few people in the US at the moment who love their right to own/carry a gun exactly so that they can oppose the government. (I assume there's at least one book/movie with this plot, but don't know any) Isn't the best course of action for anyone outside to pretty much start a civil war? Instant deployment of armed men across the whole country with no need for oversea transport, perfect knowledge of local area, spread too thin to act against in a centralised way. Then convince the neighbouring countries that they'll either support the upraising or they'll have a tyranny based military policed country that will have to closely control their whole population for the next decades to make sure there's no more anti-government action.

Ok... now I really want to read that book if it exists.
Is there a good explanation on how bitcoin addresses the problem out there? I haven't come across a simple explanation that validates the approach (in my mind at least).
Modafinil is overrated. There are modest gains, but meh...

No idea what paracetem does...

Amphetamines are great until you get a heartattack or go batshit crazy. Not worth the risk. Ok for weightloss but way too dangerous in my opinion. Quit it and you'll be down for what seems forever. I put phentermine in the same class

Beta blockers, now that's a first... Always thought they're boring blood pressure drugs or something...

Ritalin is OK, but you can get habituated, not entirely sure there aren't any negative side effects (certainly not as creative on Ritalin).

IMHO Best cognitive enhancer with few side effects: Exercise! Read "Spark", tried the 80% of max heartrate for 30 mins a day and boom! It works! Good ol BDNF. Better concentration, creativity & less depression. Also helps create new brain cells... I hate exercising, but now I pop in a audible & take the much needed 45min refresher every day. Haven't tried with any combination of enhancers, though beta blockers are probably not a good fit right off the bat & I wonder if Amphetamines wouldn't make you heart just want to explode...
The issue is tech-salaries are so high these days, that the once decently priced apartments of SF are now increasing beyond what their non-tech jobs can support. So even the Starbucks employee who moved into SF 2 months ago is always wondering how long he can afford to be there.
I'm not sure what it adds to the reading experience other than distraction.
In the absence of good tech news, HN usually starts to veer political. Politics is the HN "slow news Tuesday".
Infographic of US Gun Crime
Data from FBI.gov
No, the strawman constructed to represent these people espouses libertarian ideals and refuses to participate or share. Actual shuttle riders require the shuttle (to the degree that they really "require" it) because it drives them to work. There isn't much more to it than that.

If Caltrain or BART made the same trip and was even a tiny bit faster or more reliable most would switch in a heartbeat.
Quitting amphetamines after a long time of use would definitely make your brain go blank for a while.
Elysium-like scenario of futuristic

Jokes on you. Like most dystopian works, Elysium was about the present day. Those enclaves are already in almost every country.
> He just bought it retail. There was a great interview of Kim Jong-Il's sushi chef awhile back, the way he gets ingredients is the chef makes trips abroad to foreign markets and buys whatever he needs from wherever, presumably paying cash. If you're willing to pay the price premium and take care of packing and shipping yourself, you can buy anything you want to, legally, without anyone else knowing.

Right. Most nefarious actors just buy most of their stuff retail. Figuring that out, from whom, what was purchased etc. and if it violates some sanctions regime is one of the things the NSA might participate in, handing off the findings to the State Department of the Commerce Department or whoever for action. The action being that participating companies would not be allowed to do business in the U.S. and would be monitored for further sanctions violations in case other U.S. involved companies want to do business with the retail outfit that sold the whiskey. No big deal if you're Mom & Pop liquor store in Italy with no U.S. involvement. But who knows? It could mean that your supplier is a U.S. based company and may not be allowed to supply you any more in the future.

In practice nobody gives a shit about a few cases of whiskey, but the same practice might be used for large shipments or for items that are undesirable for North Korea to obtain.
Rails trending gem
Makes you wonder why the criminal didn't launch g2.2xlarge instances which would get 185 kH/s per instance. In fact for awhile there litecoin mining was profitable at spot prices.

http://www.completefusion.com/profitable-litecoin-mining-on-...
Budget 2013 - Budget Plan: Chapter 4.2 - Fiscal Planning Framework
Calling All Detroit Kids: Learn How to Be an Entrepreneur
Small point, the US has plenty of oil at home and will very soon be in the surplus. Also, you should probably check the actual manufacturing figures for the US.
No drug is 100% safe or free of side effects, and these effects might only surface after long-term use. Some of these side effects are not currently known, since large numbers of people haven't taken some of these drugs on a daily basis for a long time.

For example, some psychotropic drugs, such as antipsychotics, can have severe side effects which are sometimes permanent, such as tardive dyskinesia (involuntary, repetitive body movements)[1]. Others, like SSRIs, can have very unpleasant withdrawal symptoms. Maybe I'd risk neurological side effects if I had a mental illness that prevented me from living my life. But would I do it just to become more effective at work? No way.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardive_dyskinesia
I also hoped for a macro style color function that just text-replaces all occurrences of color: hackernews with #ff6600 when you define hackernews as def: hackernews, #ff6600; That would allow total mumbo jumbo style CSS-Sheets that look like Java or C++, if the authors would go that crazy..

However, I think that just copying how mixins and variables work in SCSS work into the CSS4 spec would do wonders. I'm 100% for it
I'd rather take mushrooms.
Well, theoretically he could still be an intelligence officer. Claiming to be a former NSA employee who got out to start up a mayonnaise company is a frankly strange and unusually high-profile cover to work under. Maybe someone can order some mayo from him and tell us if he's legit.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lorensr/payo-paleo-mayo?...

Alternately, maybe this is some giant conspiracy to get us to buy NSA-sponsored mayonnaise.
As a person who has employed remote workers both successfully and unsuccessfully, I'd say that it is really important to have a good understanding of deliverables and time estimates.

I was really pissed when one guy would blow 5-10 hours on something that he should have called me about... again and again. I couldn't get it through his head that remote != uncommunicative.

Basically, my requirements today for remote workers are (1) daily scrums and (2) bite-size deliverables. Keeps everyone on the same page. The guys that are good at it deliver x2-3 what I expect so that I am never concerned about hours worked.
This doesn't answer your question specifically, but:

For the Bitcoin network to properly operate, it requires at least 51% of the computing power of the network to be "good", well-behaving nodes. That 51% means 51% in terms of block-mining. So, computing power in this case means "ability to find plaintext that results in a certain double-SHA-256 digest".

Therefore, Bitcoin has not come across a completely rock-solid solution (as with many cryptographic protocols), because a determined attacker or group of attackers could theoretically achieve control of the network with sufficient computing power. At this stage though, it's difficult enough to basically be considered infeasible, unless a global superpower tried to tackle it.

See more here: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/658/what-can-an-a...
Evangelism means "spreading the good news," which is why it's adopted by Christians, but it didn't originate there.
Future Plans for C#
ThinkGeek slowly becoming the Spencer's gifts of the internet. Shame since I used to love the shit they'd come out with. Remember the 8bit tie? The 1up mushroom?
when you troll please at least put a little effort into the craft.