skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So both the NSA and the DEA,IRS and ? are breaking the law. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/07/us-dea-irs-idUSBRE...

How about they stop the illegal collection and then the illegal sharing cannot occur.
Thanks! I really hated this entry—it feels like I'm sitting on a porch on my rocking chair with my shotgun and going, "In the old days, we didn't have these fancy MOTORcars! We used horses, and we liked it! And I wore an onion on my belt, as was the fashion at the time."
Are we even able to analyse Bitcoin as we would fiat currencies or precious metals? Why is this assumption left unstated and unanalysed?

Cryptocurrencies have several interesting properties that these traditional mediums of exchange do not, for example:

- the supply is fixed and precisely known at any point in time, with very little chance of that ever changing by unilateral decision (e.g. politics, war); surely this will factor into future decisions to price goods and services, in the same way businesses already factor inflation into their business models

- low transaction costs for high value cross-border payments could see a niche use that no fiat currency can compete with (unless you somehow believe there will be a unified global real-time gross settlement system or the like any time soon)

- settlement times could also see a niche use that no fiat currency can compete with (if it works, and your transaction is confirmed in seconds/minutes/hours rather than days as with ETFs, then I foresee people using it for certain value transactions)

- accessibility (just look at M-PESA in Kenya -- everybody has cellphones, but moving physical cash around is expensive and dangerous)

- up until all the coins are mined, and probably for some time thereafter, the value will be quite volatile; after that, however, value will pretty much reflect real economic activity and volatility will be less predictable -- why is there this obsession over the present volatility? All the coins will be mined within a fixed time frame provided 1 person continues mining, which is almost a certainty, and eventually the price will have to stabilise.

I fear the article is comparing apples and oranges. Maybe the author just wants to sow FUD while he buys some cheap BTC :)

Don't get me wrong - I have my doubts that Bitcoin has what it takes (among other things, I think the initial unequal distribution of wealth is a serious problem), but cryptocurrencies in general are likely to be a successful and inevitable medium of exchange at some point in the future.
> San Francisco is the most sympathetic and helpful city on the planet for homeless people.

Bwahahaha, no, no it isn't. Not even close. There's a huge lack of shelters, housing, food, etc... The problem with SF is that the entire city is stupid expensive, and nobody wants to spend huge amounts of money to build and run the shelters necessary.
Right, so the problem is actually with false promotion and not with Agile at all.

If you picked on the people or the culture making these claims it would make more sense to me. You spend time explaining why Agile can't solve a problem no methodology could solve, which seems rather pointless.
I get paid a USD equivalent. So if bitcoin went down next month, I'd just get a greater amount of bitcoin. I could change to being paid in USD instead, but I choose to be paid in bitcoin.
The flaw is in having this "private" data in a public repo to begin with. If your data are private, don't put your project on github.
After being not very satisfied with OpenWRT on a router as a fileserver (it's great overall, but file transfers are just too slow), I'm now using an IFC6410 as my home server.

It doesn't use much more power than the linked NAS device, but comes with basically the same hardware as the Nexus 4, on a nice board with all those useful connectors. Quad-core 1.5 Ghz CPU, 2GB of RAM, SATA and Gigabit ethernet.
Thank you. Actually my programmer "Mila" suggested I fix the entry—for the first couple hours it ended with the bit about us doing other ports, which was pretty weak.
As long as we're not omitting solutions, Intel could lay off its lowest paid trainees.
One thing that always bothers me is the assumption that we dislike the NSA because we're worried about them reading our personal emails and looking at our photos, and.. "you know.. our Instagramming". We should know it's not about anyone going through the process of reading our communications, it's about having automated systems hooked up to them, keeping them, and having the ability to use them. The human and electronic pieces of this system can act on you and change your life, even without you ever knowing about it.

Being hooked up to machines like this is losing a large part of our own power as a check and balance in our own government. We won't do it. If this program is "necessary" to fight terrorism, will i be considered a terrorist if i continue to disagree? What if i become very effective at disagreeing?

I believe that most should not be very concerned because most are not sending email to intelligence targets.

It's not just directly to intelligence targets. Can someone remind me what 3 hops from a base group of 117,000 targets is again? We're not talking about a home handwritten address book, this is linkedin, everyone i sold shit to on craigslist, everyone i've ever contacted. Heads per hop is like 100, at least. Anyway, should that group be concerned?

The Agency is an intelligence organization, not a law enforcement agency.

So what? Just because there's a boundary between the NSA and everyone else doesn't mean they aren't exploiting the same broken interpretation of Terry v Ohio to build systematic unreasonable-unarticulated-suspicion writ-of-assistance privacy violations. We disagree with the principle, not just the NSA. AT&T works directly with the CIA, the CIA works with the FBI, sharing on that side is just a cluster.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/10/data-sharing-la...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/07/us/cia-is-said-to-pay-att-...

http://bordc.org/newsletter/2013/12/#data

And I would prefer a world in which spying was unnecessary. But humanity is not there yet.

No one disagrees that intelligence is necessary. We disagree with being wired up to management and machines that can (and always will) easily make mistakes. Privacy is a right, violating it to feed the machine is already diminishing us.

I refuse to eat your mayo.
In college there were groups that would throw a thanksgiving dinner for students that couldn't make it home to be with family. Were they wrong or elitist or uncaring? It is a common group tradition in the US to throw thanksgiving for some group you belong to. Besides the fact even a CEO of a startup cannot afford meals for every homeless person or just everyone off the street, it makes it no less nice if it happens to be for a social group and maybe some business is done. If the Churches[1] in SF weren't serving a thanksgiving dinner for the homeless then I am surprised.

1) Churches generally do this regardless of belief of the homeless. It is about the beliefs of the church not the served.
TeX, especially with the MicroType package, still produces the highest-quality machine typesetting available to mortal man (eg. people who are not employed by Random House or something). Any effort to replace TeX with some other tech stack probably ought to replicate this typesetting quality, which is going to be _really hard_. Smart people spent a long time getting TeX output where it is today, and replicating that won't happen overnight with a switch to HTML. Those (few) of us who care about this sort of thing are consequently unlikely to take the bait of the new system.
"I was in the Computer Network Operations Development Program, and my office was S32X: Signals Intelligence Directorate (S) > Data Acquisition (S3) > Tailored Access Operations (S32) > Special Tactics and Techniques (S32X)."

I think it is reasonable to say that he is slightly more informed to speak on these issues than a secretary.

It's really not surprising he hasn't heard of parallel reconstruction, considering:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911200

Also, there's no need to be so hostile. It's simply his point of view, and by the very nature of the restricted work environment at intelligence agencies, it's not reasonable to expect him to have a complete picture.

To quote the very post of his that you're replying to:

"You're right, abuses probably have happened more often than those caught."

He's hardly saying nothing bad ever happened, or that all abuses are known for that matter.
Minor nitpick: at cryptography you are not trusting math, because it has not been mathematically proven that no algorythm exists to break a certain crypto method in five seconds on an off-the-shelf processors given only the cyphertext (except possibly for one-time pads with their drawbacks).

But after hardworking experts try and fail for years to break a crypto method, you can somewhat trust that attackers won't find it either.
That looks terrible to read.
Even if we accept that the NSA is comprised solely of benevolent actors practicing perfect discretion, and will remain so for the indefinite future, the mere act of collecting "everything" is an enormous hazard. OP recognizes as much:

CBS reported that 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."

What's to stop this from happening again to the NSA? They couldn't even implement audit trails internally -- there should be huge doubt as to the agency's competence in securing their data.

Also, OP, did you not hear about parallel construction? How do you rationalize your statement that the NSA "is not a law enforcement agency" in light of this?

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intel...
Great post, OP. Always love this type of HN content the most.
I just googled Rejection Therapy. I don't think I need it but sounds kind of fun. How long did you do it for? Did you buy the cards?
> The strongest force, it seems, that keeps academia in Latex is that it is required, literally, by the publisher, as the scientist's end result.

I think that's false. The author's claim is that "inertia is why we still use LaTeX"; I think the strongest force that keeps the publishing community in LaTeX is that it does a hell of a lot more than HTML.

For people who are reading papers all day, typesetting matters. If I need to digest a difficult concept, I don't want to spend any brain cycles at all on bad formatting, because I want to spend all of them on the content. The HTML experience today isn't capable of producing something readable when I'm at full capacity with the paper's content, and I suspect that reviewers feel the same way.

So, no, "a simple alternative" doesn't exist, sadly.
Why don't you do some accurate reading, it's "64% of bitcoins are in accounts that have never been used". NOT "64% of bitcoins have never been used".

And if you knew the basics of bitcoin that 64% would make sense. Actually, if all bitcoin software was programmed correctly that number would be 100%. Every transaction can create a new "account" for every output, it's actually a flaw in systems using bitcoin that that number is so low.
Did you read the friendly article?

This essay was deemed UNCLASSIFIED and approved for public release by the NSA's office of Pre-Publication Review on 11/21/2013 (PP 14-0081).
C99 and later provide the restrict keyword which tells the compiler that the arrays do not overlap.

It pretty much solves the whole issue.
We can speculate why Bitcoin was created and who did it - I won't be surprised if it was created by the US government either. My formulation was wrong given we know nothing for sure, but at least the early adopters and promoters used that as what the purpose of Bitcoin is.
I thought something was going wrong with my visual perception for a minute.
> "HTML is insufficient to specify all the things you need to make a paper publishable."

Actually I've been wondering why we have to make academic papers "publishable". Majority of researchers read papers on computer. Even they read on paper, it's printed out from a downloaded PDF. If everything is transferred as electronic format, I'm not sure traditional typesetting is still necessary.

HTML based articles have option to be interactive and visually better. This enables better communication, which is the purpose of publishing papers. HTML is also more structured than close sourced PDF, and structured data is more machine friendly. I'm not only talking about SEO, but also citations/indexing/etc.. HTML is also easier to be embedded into other content. This makes, e.g. peer-review, easier.

If any, I think the main obstacle of HTML formatted technical papers is traditional publishers. They make a lot of money out of publishing and this would potentially squeeze their profit.
I completely agree (and I'll avoid starting out by writing 'This.', cause I hate that.)

I've got 15k "geek points" and I'm hard pressed to know what I'd redeem them for...

So, can we get a list of alternatives for nerd (rather than pop-culture geek) shopping? For self and family? (The worst gift I gave my wife was a Micro-Vax one year... But she did like the vintage spectrometer.)

http://shop.momath.org
http://adafruit.com
http://www.sciplus.com
It is slowly racing ahead of the forecast though. The current block was projected for 2014:

http://blockexplorer.com/q/getblockcount

I guess that will slow down as ASIC hardware matures (or if there is a sustained price drop).
Hey Jonathan, thanks so much for taking the time to comment!

Setting a routine certainly makes sense, I just hope I can stick to it!
Yes. There's a good study where the same resume was given to science faculty to rate, sometimes with a male name, sometimes female. When the resume had a female name, it was rated as less competent and deserving of a lower salary and less mentoring. Male and female professors displayed the same bias against the female resumes: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/14/1211286109
If you would like to help some of the low-income youth of San Francisco, consider donating to the education of one through Wishbone:

https://www.wishbone.org/campaigns?location=san-francisco
Actually, HTML is nearly there. I tried to replicate one of my ACM-style LaTeX papers into HTML and convert it to pdf via browser. Biggest problem: position the copyright box on the first page, left column, bottom and flow the text around it. There are minor problems with browsers (e.g. Chrome does not support column-count CSS in print output), but hopefully that will improve over time.

I did not tackle the bibliography problem: Import bibtex into HTML and correctly link citations into bibliography. That will be some work.

Maybe PrinceXML can do it, but it is not Free Software.

My proof-of-concept HTML version: http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/acm_html/test.html You can spot a few LaTeX commands, which got copy&pasted. ;)

My conclusion: HTML is useable for pdf generation, but is not sufficient to replace LaTeX.
Interesting that the HN algorithm that automatically flags NSA stories off the front page didn't penalize this one.
I'd rather live in a world where it's socially acceptable to look down on someone for a lack of abilities and work ethic than the 90% of the world where it's socially acceptable to look down on someone just because their ancestors came from the wrong region.
It's merely very unlikely that the supply changes. Current accepted wisdom is that rewriting the client to produce more coins would fracture the currency. Future accepted wisdom may change.

It's also hard to beat cash for settlement times.
> San Francisco is the most sympathetic and helpful city on the planet for homeless people.

Unless San Francisco actually picks them up, gives them a clean, maintained, regularly inspected apartment with heat, hot water, electricity; pays for that; gives them every month enough cash to pay for necessities of life with enough being given that a reasonable interaction in society and culture is possible; puts them in a program designed to find them useful and respectful work, or with none available, provides them with training courses; and lastly, provides free full health and dental coverage ... unless all that is what SF does, there's 2000+ german cities and who knows how many more cities in other countries who'd like to have a word with you about that claim.
From your other comments you seem to be paid in USD but your employer buys bitcoin for you each month and gives you that. You could buy the bitcoin yourself each salary day and nothing would change.
We had amazing developer advocates back then. Jim Black (he's now at Nvidia), for instance, used to actually pick us up at the airport when we'd fly into town.

Nowadays I don't actually have an official developer's advocate at Apple. The last two people I had quit and they weren't replaced. Luckily I still have people from the old days I can e-mail if needed, but I wish there were official channels.

On the other hand, the number of Cocoa developers has gone from about 80 to like 80,000, so I can see why Apple can't assign each one a person.
As an American, I think it sucks that we are spying on everyone. I don't like being spied. I don't like you being spied on. My interpretation of the constitution would read that for any information to be collected on anyone would have to get a court order. The constitution limits the powers of the government, not the people. And "the people" in the majority of the contexts is EVERYONE, all of us, all people everywhere. It is only by convention that the Supreme Court allows this shit to continue. The "ok to spy on foreigners" thing is farce. It is not ok, and I don't even understand how it continues to get promulgated.

If it takes a 50k strong Federal Corp of Judges to look at every single case, so be it. At least we could decide.
There is a plugin to interface with gnome-keyring:

https://code.google.com/p/pidgin-gnome-keyring/
He merely asks why the city has to be filthier than it should be. Why do you defend filth and danger?
There could be any number of solutions to the problem, but your primary concern is to attack the messenger for noticing.

Unless there is further info I'm not aware of, your character judgement here is unwarranted. That he got "a certain distance..." is the part that bugs me.
http://allthingsd.com/20120604/bombs-away-judge-rules-steve-...
On OS X it's Graphing Calculator. See the amazing story behind it: http://www.pacifict.com/Story/
Hey, and I'm a German patriot.

If the US citizens like to be spied on by its own agencies, fine for me.

As a German citizen I'm not so happy that German citizens, politicians and companies are targets of spying of unprecedented scale and depth. As a consequence we (and others, too) will have to scale back the use of US hardware, software and services. Privacy, data security, confidentially etc. are not provided. A German company would be stupid to store data on servers reachable for US industrial espionage. It's really tough to avoid that - given that the US surveillance and spying is also done directly in Germany in a large scale.

Additionally we should also deny the US the capability to plan their targeted killings from Germany - for example from the US military central command for Africa - which is located in Germany. From there strikes with armed drones are planned and controlled. Unfortunately the German government does not seem to be willing and/or able to prevent that...
Linux on Android Indiegogo
What's the legal term? I think it's "double construction"? Where the prosecution knows it's you from illegal means (wiretap/NSA spying) but by that knowledge can go back and construct the legal case in reverse.

It's been rumored that Dread Pirate Of SilkRoad case was figured out that way.
As far as I know Apple Research department was closed by Steve Jobs at some point, around ten years back. And have not been reopened. I have not seen any Apple employees recently presenting at academic conferences or collaborating with other researchers. Nor have I seen any publications.
Now, DNA is not like a computer programming language. It really isn't. But there are some whopping analogies. We can view each cell as a CPU, running its own kernel. Each cell has a copy of the entire kernel, but choses to activate only the relevant parts. Which modules or drivers it loads, so to speak.

I wonder if we turned this back around, would it suggest some novel designs for computer systems?
Heh. It's not that complicated. How many concepts have common people learned since computers and the Internet took everything over? Computer network. Router. Website address. Domain name. IP address. Email address. File. Torrent.

What if knowledge of hashing and public and private keys become as commonplace? Because of bitcoin?
Video from Las Vegas Bitcoin conference via BitcoinLeah
What sort of everyday value can I get from the bitcoins in my wallet?

The material goods you mention are good for all sorts of things.

(My point being that they are not great comparisons, I'm staying out of the argument about deflation)
"DNA is not just a sequence that encodes proteins. We just found out there's a secondary higher level code in it"

So, I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but we didn't "just" find this out. We've known for quite a long time about secondary (and even tertiary!) "codes" in DNA. That HN article was the result of a press-release about something that was interesting, but certainly not earth-shattering new theory. The reason it was in Science was because they did an extremely large-scale test of a whole bunch of different codons on thousands of different gene promoters, and directly quantified the impact of rare codons. That was an impressive way to settle an open debate.

Anyway, it's good to know that there are higher-order interactions encoded in DNA than just DNA -> RNA -> Protein, but you should realize that this is an old/deep area of research. This is pretty much what bioinformatics is about, actually: deducing the higher-order structures in DNA, RNA and proteins.
You don't need that upgrade. The only difference between upgrade and dist-upgrade is that dist-upgrade can add and remove packages, while upgrade will decline to make any upgrades that would require this. As such, dist-upgrade is almost always the one you meant.
++pandoc. I write all my books in Latex (despite the looks of horror from everyone I mention it to). I compile to PDF for printing and use pandoc to build every other format. It just works. I spent less than 3 or 4 hours, total, integrating it into my "book build".
It looks like LaTeX mechanisms for embedding metadata are improving. XMP looks like a reasonable way to do what needs to be done.

http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/hyperxm...
Always agreeable to see a link from softlab.ntua.gr high in the HN front page!
I'm not sure about your first example—the formatting seems messed up—but the second example is solved with dynamic borrow checking.
Apple grew those industries they did not create them. Important, yes, but also by a large a safer role.