skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An easy bite for a real journalist would've been Alexander's statement in the opening segment that NSA does not collect data ("phone calls and emails") on Americans. He then goes on to detail all the safeguards (FISA courts, access controls) to prevent analysts from mis-using this actually-collected "uncollected" data.

A real journalist, which Miller isn't, would've been all over that. But if it hadn't been Miller, and it had a real journalist, there would've been no way NSA would've allowed CBS inside any part of the complex.

Later in the segment, it is mentioned we share all this data with our FIVE EYES partner countries, where presumably, they don't have safeguards regarding foreign nationals (eg. Americans). Another something a real journalist would've jumped all over.

Another little aside: Miller asked Ledgett (the Snwoden task force head and soon-to-be Deputy Director, NSA) how many times he's been interviewed by the media and he replied "One. Now.". He's been interviewed at least a few times before, most recently by the WSJ. A quick Google search pulled up this URL: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230460710...
I have been programming since I was 10. I finished high school at 14, entered a semester of college at 16 I then dropped out promptly (with straight A's) because I found the material to be boring and inaccurate. One teacher was seriously telling students there was no reasonable need for a computer to ever have 64mb of ram. (Perhaps I might of made a different choice had I chosen something besides a rural community college).

In any event I was disillusioned with the whole college experience and started taking on quite a bit of contract work, and over the next decade started/participated in 5 startups. I intentionally chose challenging projects at the edge of my comfort zone to gain experience and build real-world problem solving skills. During this time I built a wide network of connections which gave me the ability to do contract work for several well known companies and exposure to a wide range of technologies and problems.

Since documenting some of these experiences on my resume/linkedin in detail a few years ago, I have never had a problem getting salaried jobs or contracts making more than most of my degree-holding peers and getting frequent new job opportunities to consider.

I have also been a hiring manager more than once, and have always interviewed people based on their ability to solve real world problems with an actual editor and access to google. I tend to gravitate towards companies that test new applicants this way as well. Companies that dismiss me based on my lack of formal education, I dismiss as well. Companies that judge on paper instead of skill probably lack the diverse workforce I wish to be a part of.

As an added story, I have a friend that applied for Google without a degree. He was denied. He actually contacted them back asking why he was dismissed so quickly. He was told it was because he lacked a degree. The end. He had the balls to push back insisting he is capable of doing the job and has plenty of experience. The recruiter relented and pushed him up to the next stages... and he got the job.

You don't need a degree, but be prepared to network a lot, have a healthy amount of confidence, and be willing to push back against dismissive recruiters. I won't say which path is better, because that depends on the individual... but I can say skipping college to focus on real-world experience was one of the best personal choices I ever made.
Unlike a lot of HN commentators who blindly follow the herd (i expect to get a ton a dv's for that)
Getting an official on the air gets views and sells ads.
Ask HN: Markdown - tag and target blocks of content
I'm working on a project where I could use some input.

I'm building a tool where a text editor and group chat plays the leading characters. I use Markdown in both instead of WYSIWYG.

My requirements for choice of markup language was:

- easy to read and write

- converts easily to clean HTML, ePub, PDF and other formats

- content blocks can be tagged with one or more tags

- content blocks can be targeted to one or more user/role

- allow simple data (key value pairs, lists)

TAGGING

With the risk of provoking a heart-attack on Markdown purists I present my first implementation of syntax for tagging:

#tag Header

Readability is an issue with more than one tag but I can live with only one tag per level of heading.

TAGGING EXAMPLE

The would allow us to write:

#chapter At the riviera

...

##scene On the beach

...

##scene The Ice Cream parlour

...

Which would help to render text differently depending on tagging - use tags as classes when parsed to HTML.

TARGETING

I use a simple and well known syntax at the start of a line:

@username ...

...

...

Is not very loud but allows a parser to understand that content on a certain level and below is targeted to a restricted audience.

An alternative way I've been pondering is expanding the {} syntax used for IDs in Kramdown and PHP Markdown Extra.

{@role,@role2}

{.tag,.tag2} or just {tag,tag2}

Targeting content will allow soft access control as well as being able to write Markdown in group chat and route parts of the text to different users/sub-groups

DATA IN MARKDOWN

I'm hoping to solve data with the

: data

Or maybe do some mixin with YAML?
Some time and funds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars.

I strongly suggest we start a kickstarter.
Why would people spend time on this abomination of a technology? Instead of integrating with federated XMPP it uses closed garden modified XMPP incompatible with the standard. Instead of using normal security methodology it uses privacy breaching insecure by default approach. Proliferating anything of that is really really bad.

May be for security research this can be useful of course. But proliferating it for general purpose usage is harmful.
I'm half joking, but I'm worried someone will try to sell spaceplane trips to some inhospitable alien desert like Namibia and market it as "the interplanetary experience"...

edit: Actually that could be interesting..
The type of work in a costco warehouse vs amazon warehouse I am guessing is hard to compare. One is the moving of entire pallets, the other is picking and packing hundreds of individual items a day (probably thousands).
I guess this is my first personal comment on hn, but boy are you out of touch with the world.

This is low to minimum wage work. The employee benefits are that you are employed. Your work is a commodity and they make you feel it and they have all the reasons in the world to make you feel grateful for having that job...

Group Visits? On whose time? The employer won't pay for the time, since he is trying to get the work done as cheap as possible and the employee won't want to use his private time for it, for the obvious reason of having so little of it...

Get out there and work for 6€/hour before you go about imagining how things could be improved for people in these jobs.
Here's an example that's visual: You are putting interaction widgets on the screen- they display some text, perhaps some other visual indicator, and have a button or text area or slider or something on them (there are some of each). Your base class has the setup: the window/panel/whatever-your-language-calls it, the place where the text goes, and the place where the variable widget goes. All of these widgets inherit the base class, and only differ in the user response portion. This makes it very easy to change the interaction style.
Why Wal-Mart [and presumably, Amazon] Will Never Pay Like Costco:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-27/why-walmart-will-ne...
That's the ad hominem fallacy - shoot the messenger, discredit the message by discrediting the messenger even though the two have no logical relation. It's a testament to our educational system that so many people fall for it. Though part of it, I'm sure, is that it simply gives many people a rationale for believing what they already want to believe.
And not regular boring tried-and-convicted murderers, but suspected murderers who have no trial or recourse.
Yeah, I think there is always so much more to learn, but it's important to take those uncomfortable feelings of, "Hm...maybe I'm just doing this because I'm out of ideas," and do the hard thing of reading up about it and becoming more expert.

Of course, that's not always possible in an emergency, but it pays huge dividends down the line.

As for resources, I like to start with looking at the hosted devops solutions to see if they actually solve a specific problem I'm having, and then play around with them in basic apps, and just kind of go from there.
"They don't provide enough means for sustain a life after retirement anymore."

German pension payment are compulsory, so even if you work one of these jobs for 40 years, you still get a pension. Unless I didn't understand what you were saying.
But a malicious RDRAND is, at worst, useless, contributing zero entropy to a pool of multiple sources. A malicious XOR could reduce the entropy of the pool.
This starts funny, veers near insulting, but then I saw the code: https://bitbucket.org/FeministSoftwareFoundation/c-plus-equa... Reading this is actually a very different experience from reading normal C++ code. It's a real work of art.
It almost certainly does.

Very few people realize they're giving Google insight into their live thought processes as they type a query, maybe refine it a few times before submitting (which gives google a lot of information about if their autocomplete suggestions are working, relevant, etc), then bouncing around search results with further refinement.

Google got greedy and started tracking every click you make on search results a long time ago too. They weren't content knowing "this person got a good result and didn't need to come back for this query again" — they decided they must know what you click on, when you come back, what you click on again, .... It's all quite invasive, but nobody cares.

[but who are we kidding? most people don't "refine queries" — they type "BOOBS" into google and just keep drooling on their keyboard/tablet/phone.]
Look into this:

https://whispersystems.org/blog/advanced-ratcheting/
I found calculus tricky until after I had read Neal Stevenson's Baroque Cycle. Once I knew why there were two different notations and had a bit more of the history behind it, I found it a lot easier.

I often think history departments should get more involved in the other subjects taught at school so that you get a bit more perspective on why things are they way they are.
Automating these jobs is excellent, and I'm looking forward to it. I do wish that the benefits of automation would be shared more widely though - although the average poster on HN is paid very well, and has an intellectually challenging and satisfying job, what should people who weren't educated actually do?
I'm having trouble with your post. You said the right way to calculate it is (t1 - t0)/t0, but said later that the actual amount is (157 - 98)/157, which is (t1 - t0)/t1.

Also I believe the author is referring to speed improvements, whereas you are referring to time improvements. Let's say I take 200 operations to perform a task, then I optimize code to perform the same task in 100 operations. The program runs at 20 operations per second regardless of how many operations there are.

The task which took 10 seconds before will now take 5 seconds, or a 50% time reduction, which is how you calculate it. However, the program is now running twice as fast, because in 20 seconds, the program can run twice, which is how the author calculated it.

Both of you are correct, just depending on what your context is.
Git and a Tease of what is to come at Codio
> There is violence against LGBT, but most cases are severely punished by state. What is 'war on drugs' in US, is 'war on neonazis' in Czech Republic.

HAHAHAHAHAHAH sure man, sure.
You make good points. A few years ago I was converted to the idea of ethical spending - not sure if that is a term? As much as I can I do not buy items that I believe contribute to these issues. It is not always possible but for every purchase (groceries, toys, clothes etc.) I look for items not made in factories in China, that are created by companies with good employment policies and made with materials that are sustainable etc. etc. I prefer this (sometimes half measure) to just giving up altogether. I also find that these days it is easier and there is more information out there to help.
This is brilliant for data analysis. Hands down facebook.
just want to say that I've read this book and it's quite good. I've recommended it to people both in the context of an ebook I wrote on a similar topic (music hacks) and in person.

its introduction to reading music is especially good. it describes musical notation as a graph DSL with lots of legacy terminology. a very clear and sensible intro to that subject, and it made me think about it in a new way (as someone already familiar with the topic).
I had a VC-funded startup during the first dotcom bubble, when I lived in SOMA and Noe Valley, and have a bootstrapped startup (well, a company that we sold last year) now that takes me into SF pretty regularly, and this squares up with what I've seen as well. Nobody who takes our field seriously could reasonably prefer the dotcom bubble to today.

San Francisco's problem is that it is mismanaged. That's not just a message board opinion; it appears to be the consensus of all observers, including that of journalists who cover the city. The city's services are poorly run, its growth is haphazard and pointlessly retarded, and it's hamstrung by its geography. But it also seems to be more livable today that it was in 1999, when the market was crazy enough that I had to pay my year's rent in advance to secure an apartment.
Inside a better CUDA-based Scrypt miner
When I was in college, UVA '04, we had bomb threats regularly from desperate kids who wanted to cancel finals. MO was always someone used a pay phone, called the tip line, and exams got pushed a day in the building they were threatening. Eventually the pay phones got removed. Though I'm sure you could do a VOIP call these days and obfuscate your number? (I'm not sure how though)
EDIT; My God people, I was just throwing a guess there. I Might be wrong in this situation.
Agreed with your sentiment, but I think a plugin approach (many exist) is better than a browser fork. The fork could surely convert some users (and developers), but that just means duplication of development efforts between the fork and (for example) the Mozilla+Plugins ecosystem. Contributing to existing projects (or building a new plugin, if an open one doesn't already exist) seems like a better way to go.
My wife breastfed our boy/girl twins. I wonder where that fits in?
9 Tips for the aspiring Emacs playboy
I have a BA in a social science and have worked as a software engineer for mega-corps, government and startups. Some companies like to filter by degree, but I generally wouldn't want to work for those companies anyways.

The only way it has held me back is specialized fields, like machine learning, would be hard to get into without at least a masters.
This was also on HN not too long ago: "I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave" http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-f...
It doesn't, according to the guidelines:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

There's nothing intellectually gratifying about this story - it's an "outrage story".

That doesn't mean it's not important, just that it's not HN material.
How can you spread information if there's a huge barrier in front of you?

Most people don't want to change their carefully-guarded vision of the world around them. If they already associate your movement with imagery of chaotic lawlessness they're not going to stop and listen to you on the off chance they might be misinformed. They're going to write you off immediately and go on with their life.

On the other hand, if you make a compromise and reform your presentation of ideas in a new way, people will be more likely to stop and listen. It's not enough to simply have a good idea; you have to sell it to them, too.
Because NASA's mission is not to turn a profit.
"Do they go out of there way to foster relationships among employees? Encourage out of work get togethers like Friday happy hour, light team sports? Groups to visit the local zoo or Japanese Gardens, group outings to a new movie, organize a hobbit marathon, a real marathon or maybe just a 5k? Groups for board game enthusiasts? Clans on WoW?"

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic here? It seems like you're saying it's OK to pay people low wages and per-week contracts as long as you have a company WoW guild?

(I'm quite opposed to unions in general and I'm not on the 'Amazon is evil' bandwagon, but you comments doesn't make much sense to me).
I didn't have the option to get a degree, no one told me about loans or how to get them, lots of people told me I wasn't "college material", and I kind of stopped talking to my parents at 18. It's possible I could have figured out logistically how to pay for school at 18 with no parental support, but, I didn't. If you have any kind of support structure that will help you pay for or borrow (cheaply! and not too much!) for your college education, as someone who started working with no degree and then got their degree, I strongly recommend that you get your degree.

I found good jobs without a degree, though it was largely through luck and networking. If you don't have a degree the "normal people" channels are closed to you and you have to use connections and people you know. of course, the "normal people" channels are for suckers so this is probably for the best...

After a few years of working professionally without a degree, I went back and worked on my degree part time. I'm finishing now. I went to a pretty good school (in the top 15 for CS) and I took pretty hard classes with a minor in math. I think that the experience helped make me a better software person. There were definitely concepts in algorithm design and data structures that I might not have experienced professionally, professors were really smart and I could go to their office hours and talk about real-world problems, and I think that learning more about math helped me think better.

I was (mostly) intelligent about what gen-eds to take and where (at a community college) so that the time and money value was maximized. I think it was a good investment. There are many jobs that you will be locked out of without a degree. Some people might say, all the better, but those environments can also be one of the few places doing something you really want to work on, like a university or national lab. Good luck finding a startup that is doing pure R&D in CS...
> "At the Neath working men's club down the road, one of the staff tells me that Amazon is "the employer of last resort". It's where you get a job if you can't get a job anywhere else. And it's this that's so heartbreaking."

So Amazon is the only employer offering jobs to people who tend to be rejected everywhere else, providing people that have no skills to offer to society a chance at getting a job, learning some skills and maybe getting a better job rather than staying at home and living on welfare, which is lower than Amazon wages and provides no future.

Please, remind me why Amazon should be blamed for this and not praised.
rubbish?
Would you start shopping at Amazon again if they replace all of the workers with robots from Kiva?
I think that speaks more about the naivety and agendas of the journalists he leaked to than about himself. Given the apparent quantity of documents it seems unlikely he'd have had the chance to prefilter them.

Anyone remotely surprised the NSA were spying on foreign governments (including allies) is basically an idiot.
Are you posting from the 90s?
Yes, now go away.
Soon, I have, like probably many a person here. A to-do list longer than my life will allow me!
Because long term research requires immense levels of upfront spending with no requirement to turn a profit.
Two random variables connected by a rule still form a random system. The end result of a process that has at least one randomly variable parameter is random. I don't see how that could be anything else.
> That is the stated mission of the NSA and while the details are highly classified, everyone knows that they're doing it and agrees it should be done as a matter of policy.

I don't think everyone considers NSA legitimate. NSA is a bunch of people with lots of information and an agenda that is most probably not in the best interest of all Americans, just those richest and most influential 1% or 0.01%. Their track record speaks for itself.
"Drink

As the Pole is entirely covered by a massive ice sheet, those with the ability to melt ice should not worry about lack of water."
What moral ground does the United States have for directly invading the personal communications of the leaders of its allies?

Ostensibly this is all about protecting the itself from danger. What is the threat posed by, say, Germany?
"If I were asked for a GPA or an SAT score at any job interview, I would walk as well. It's completely irrelevant,"

Its highly relevant if they're going for the stealth ageism thing. GPA is an age proxy. Due to grade inflation, the "respectable" GPA I earned in the 80s would in the 10s mean I was at least highly unmotivated if not outright mentally impaired. There was a time, a long time ago, when mid three something was a respectable accomplishment.

Superficially, if you ask an accountant job applicant how much their first car cost, after getting their first real job, that sounds wise. After all, the more expensive, the better they must have been at budgeting and money management, or at least they were ambitious when filling out loan paperwork, and that sounds like a great skills for an accountant. However obviously due to inflation all it will do is prioritize cheap young meat ahead of older more expensive. My great grandfather's first postwar 1946-ish caddy was only about $3K, therefore by numerical metric definition he'd be only 1/10th the accountant compared to a 2013 grad buying a modern commuter car.
I would say being a self-taught computer expert who out-smarted the most technically advanced intelligence agency in the history of the world at their own game would lend itself to being a body of work. He also outmaneuvered the State Department and as a lone actor has been able to thumb his nose at the most powerful people in the world while his data has been front page news in dozens of countries around the world for months. It's all quite surreal and I would not underestimate the man.
The slow release schedule keeps the info in the news throughout the series. If it were dumped all at once, it would be "forgotten" by mainstream media by the time writers would have time to sort thru it.
And purchasing history, credit records, driving patterns and others. Clearly this isn't enough. I sense a new patriotic start-up opportunity.

PatriotNow - check in with your fingerprint and we'll automatically log your location, browser history and 10 most recent phone calls and SMS messages.

Get our complete corporate or government package, PatriotSense, to issue check-in requests to all employees, students or members of your organization. Members will have 5 minutes to check in or be logged for follow-on questioning.

PatriotNow and PatriotSense - Show your patriotism, foil terrorism and do your part for total information awareness.
The government is a collection of a lot of different entities with different views, resources, and goals. It doesn't make sense to me to say that e.g. the FDA and the NSA are part of the same entity.

Furthermore, what's being discussed involves non-government actors too. Exxon, doctors, and defense contractors are entities outside the government.
On what devices? Source?