skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://www.maymounkov.org/js/shatter.js

Thought it was an attempt to troll the crowd that LaTeX draws, but its embedded across his whole site, or at least the parts I looked at.
I see a lot of negativity in this thread, but I think a lot of folks should stop for just a moment and consider the opportunity that's presenting itself: a former employee of the NSA is posting online about his experience and is an active member of HN. He doesn't appear to be in a position where his continued employment with the government would be an issue (he's apparently got his own business), so he doesn't have to worry about talking frankly about his experience, positive or negative (although I'd image that he's still under obligation not to reveal anything classified).

Just about everything we've seen about the insides of the NSA have come from only one source. Snowden was only employed there for 3 months, and has publicly stated that his primary reason for seeking employment there was specifically to gather information on NSA surveillance systems[1] - in order words, his opinions on the NSA were solidified before he joined. To top it off, Snowden is not available for interview.

I'm not even saying you're required to believe him. I do, however, think an insider's perspective has been sadly lacking from most of the conversation that's been going on. I don't expect journalists to have a complete understanding of all of the details regarding these programs and systems that have been leaked - they've never worked with them.

So, lorendsr, thank you for your contribution. Don't let the flat out negative comments get to you. I hope your post encourages others with a background in the NSA to share what parts of their experience that they can. Everyone else, please take advantage of this opportunity to ask questions, gain any insight that you can and don't just dismiss him outright.
If your coding your CSS by hand, without tools like SASS\LESS, I would say you don't actually have much of a workflow.
TL;DR

1. The NSA only hires earnest, ethical people

2. There are real threats we need to protect you from

3. So everything's OK

Commentary:

I believe the first two of those statements. And if the people at the top were also ethical and earnest, I'd believe all three. But, as Angela Merkel can attest, the people at the top do not respect boundaries.
I'm not an American. So what you say does not apply to me, correct?

What about Americans who are 2, 3 or 4 degrees removed from suspected foreign agents?

Does 'looking' include automated processes that scan for, for lack of a better word, suspicious behavior?
Easy selenium+chrome+Firefox installs with Docker
Tesla Model E Reveal Slated For 2015 Detroit Auto Show
Oh yes, I was a bit unclear but I meant two processes (from the same binary) communicating.

Without that condition, you've got all the original problems, as listed. You can also have incompatibilities between compilers, or even compiler versions - e.g. gcc has ABI changes between some versions.
Note that this is either an imposter account, or the author themself is mostly unaware of the publicly-divulged NSA abuses -- let alone any non-divulged abuses.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6910972
Come on, "left hand isn't aware what the right is doing" isn't just plausible, it's standard practice at any organization larger than a dozen or so people.

He never claimed to have more than anecdotal evidence regarding the NSA. He never asked to be taken more seriously than, as you so derisively put it, a well-placed secretary (actually, I suspect a secretary would have a much better high-level picture of what was going on, but I don't think you intended an actual comparison).

I'd like to thank him for adding his perspective to the discussion. Even though I'll be keeping my opinion, it is good to know that in some (most?) parts of the NSA, the culture of taking jurisdiction seriously still pervades. It could be a lot worse, and absent this admittedly anecdotal evidence it's difficult to know what to believe.
Was it an actual vintage microvax or are people reproducing FPGA microvaxes now? If it's an FPGA one I'd like to know where to get one so I can play around a bit.
Where are you getting stuck?
HoF is functional nature. The rest just help things along that path. I'm not sure why people get so hyper about classifying things. The map is not the territory. Where you draw lines has no bearing on how easy it is to attain functional style in a language.

FP is far more clear a concept than OOP. OOP has no real fundamentals apart from encapsulation, which really isn't specific to OOP. OOP is whatever haphazard setup a language designer feels like using. FP concepts (like the ones you mentioned) are pretty clear across languages.

FP is certainly in its first cycle; ML just keeps going on. Industry is only now catching on.
Elisp isn't really horrible. It sits on top of a local maximum in the fitness landscape. So often, little tweaks are needed, and dynamic scope lets you tweak more than a more engineering-oriented language would. It gets adapted to the task at hand in a worse-is-better, almost Darwinian way. The ability to redefine and tweak functions called by other functions, eval'd live in a buffer, is key. Without that, it would be a tenth the editor it is.

JS would not be a better language. Guile could be.

I used to think a more semantically aware setup would be better. But the costs of semantic awareness are enormous, because a single mismatch between what your editor understands, and what the underlying language can represent, breaks everything. This makes things fragile; parser error recovery is not an easy thing to get right. Some artfully written regexes can go further, in a practical sense.
Thanks for the response. I think I was being too harsh before. And I think you are putting forth a reasonable and commonly held view. I think it's a crime against comprehension to take well-known words and try to make them mean something else.

That said, I'm not actually sure I'm doing that when I equate massive taxation and redistribution with socialism.

High taxes and redistribution is an attempt to get away with socialism, without calling it "socialism." I don't think that is even controversial. It is the same goal with only slightly different means.

So in calling that "socialism," I'm just calling it for what it really is, in terms of motivation and goal, and partially in terms of method (which is still coercive, just at a different point).

In further support of my point---different socialists disagree on the precise techinical means of implemnting socialism anyway, so that would suggest that it may be a flexible enough term to encompass what I am talking about.

And yet further support of my point is that there is no existing word to describe what I am describing other than "socialism;" if there were, I would be obliged to use that other term.

The closest thing would be a "mixed economy." But 51% of Americans now take more from the tax system than they put in, and taxes are what I would call "very high." If you are taxed at a 50% rate, and you live to be 100, you have spent 50 years serving others. Plus we are in the process of implementing universal healthcare. Sounds like what socialist advocates would call a victory. (Of course socialism works so badly that you don't see good things coming out of it in practice, so nobody is claiming victory; but in terms of methodology, they are getting what they have advocated.)
Robots Compete To Mimic Common Human Tasks
>There's always O'haskell.

No, there isn't. Last update was in 2001. It was never really alive, but it is very dead now.
Hey Andrew, thanks so much for commenting.

I actually agree with what you are saying, which may seem at odds to what I have written, but the idea of big breaks in my day was essentially so that I could have this 'useful' time to myself throughout the day.

This is something I am going to be tweaking and changing with time so I am really glad for your input, thanks!
The only time I've seen where it wouldn't be exempt is if you paid them hourly.
Slightly ironic that due to the lack of sub-pixel positioning in HTML my browser (FF 26) has trouble rendering that blog’s (weird?) random rotation and skew transform on the main DIV elements.
Southern Europe (Italy and Spain specifically) it seems to be more of an issue than London or say Hamburg.
Oh, yes, HN replaced * with italics. I was talking about raw pointers, i.e. the second example is:

f(&mut x as *mut u8, &mut x)

and there is no dynamic borrowing checking for that.

Would it become some form of undefined behaviour to have an *mut aliasing with an &mut?
Because economies aren't individuals, your spending is my income and my spending is your income. Household economics does not scale up to an economy, the rules for an economy are entirely different. And I don't have to prove anything, deflation has a well established meaning: reduction of the general level of prices in an economy. One or a few sectors dropping prices simply is not what economists mean when they talk about deflation.

Now you're welcome to make up your own definitions of words, but then you're not really communicating with everyone else nor understanding what they're actually referring to since you're ignoring what they mean by those words.
Thank you!

I've been looking for something to replace my Dreamplug for a while and this might do it
Odd scoping, equality, type coercion - those seem rather significant distractions. Having to explain that == doesn't really work and === is probably what they want seems beyond bizarre. And "function" as a way to introduce an anonymous function is just verbosity for verbosity's sake.

Unfortunately, the two other points you mention probably outweigh the actual language design.
Credibility and scope are two different things. His claims can have limited scope and still be credible. I don't see any reason to doubt his character.
Or they could just lie.
Is that actually a standard though? ISTR some compilers complaining if you use delete with a const pointer (sorry, this is from ages ago, I cannot recall which compiler...)

You can make a fair argument that using delete with a const pointer is a type error, after all the data can hardly be considered const if it has just been eradicated...
Note that this blog post has been vetted by the NSA PR office, and so should be taken with the same grain of salt that one takes with all NSA-approved communications, recalling that the NSA has admitted they will lie to Congress and the Supreme Court if it suits their mission.

"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)."
>Did anyone...

Over months I read many articles describing cool things you can do with emacs you can't do with vim, and eventually I switched.

So: one article, no. Many, yes.
Great post!

On a side note, for the newer (not the newest) edition of the WD My Book Live (and its 2-disk brother My Book Live Duo) NAS device, the OS is a full-featured Debian already, and you can easily enable SSH to login and `apt-get` almost everything you want. The processor is a MIPS one, though, not an ARM one, which might affect the availability of Debian packages. However, I've heard the newest edition called WD My Cloud NAS runs on an dual-core ARM processors.

People who are less hardware-hack-oriented (like myself) should definitely give those a try.
Done and done. Unfortunately, I've already used up my lifetime allowance of time spent arguing with cranks, so I have zero time left for goldbugs.
At a certain point they're likely to cut you off and stop wasting their time watching you fail the poly.
In this case it might not be needed, but some controllers have calls that are made on initialisation (like NgResource) which makes harder to use $httpBackend (you have to mock all calls if you want to verify that no calls were left at the end).
I took the article more like best-practice for unit testing controllers.
But truth to be told, it would be nicer if author would explain why to initialise controller in a method etc.
Ask HN: When should a startup lease office space?
The recommended setup for YC startups is a couple of founders in a cheap apartment, but at what point do you go out and find an office? At a certain funding milestone? After hiring X employees? I can see wanting to keep costs low as long as possible, but sometimes having an office can make you look more legit.
This is why I don't believe the president's assertion about the employees of the NSA being innocent of wrongdoing or anyone's assertion of them being "good guys".

This is apologia for crimes against the world and the American people. This is saying, "If you don't have anything to hide, you have nothing to worry about." This is demonstrably filled with lies and misrepresentations, whether intentional or through ignorance of what the rest of the NSA beast has been up to (but, if he has followed the Snowden leaks with more than passing interest, he would know he's lying in blatant and obvious ways).

I'm sure this article is meant to quell fears about NSA spying practices, but it only makes me more angry and more fearful. It confirms something I suspected but didn't want to believe: The entire organization from low-level analysts on up to the leadership (who will repeatedly lie to Congress to serve their ends) is corrupt and will exhibit little or no remorse even when caught red-handed, and will spread astroturf and refuse to acknowledge that their behavior crosses lines that should have never been crossed by a US agency.

I'm getting close to believing that starting any online service in the United States is unethical, because of what it will do to its users.
Just my 2 cents...

As somebody that spent the past 1.5 year traveling around the world while working on a bleeding edge software that requires deep mathematical research and non-trivial integration, I came to the following:

- dedicate time during the day when you focus solely on the task you need to solve. Don't allow anything else to interrupt you nor do any interleaving with other activities. For example, you decide to focus between 7-11am, then do something else and come back between 3pm-7pm or any other time suitable to you. Don't slack off when you have to think, manage your weaknesses.

I found that this does wonders to my productivity. Often during the breaks/sleep I get excellent ideas and have enough power to carry them out. I also suddenly have a plenty of time when I can focus on my hobbies (a lot of them), persons I like to be with and on running my own business on the side.

There was some research in Germany comparing the lives of virtuoso pianists with average ones - the only difference was the virtuosos got completely immersed in their practice twice a day, whereas the average ones interleaved all kinds of activities with their practice.

This is coming from a person that prepared some of the most challenging and business-differentiating algorithms for a start up in the computer graphics area (mostly advanced geometry, SIGGRAPH Pioneer member), and still manages to dedicate time to fashion photography, making hyperlapse movies, composing electronic music, playing piano, fiddling with interesting technology like drones, writing training materials and e-books, place at the top 1% of multiple pilot MOOC courses and loves to socialize.

If you need to ask anything, let me know, I would be more than happy explain to you my recent nomad lifestyle! This is a throwaway account as I don't want to be easily identifiable ;-)
it's mostly a consequence of arrogance and too much money.
after all, this is the same geographic region where you have anarchocapitalists microchipping the homeless and less well-to-do under the guise of "we're perfect; everyone else is flawed."
why should anyone trust in anything coming from the NSA when you are systematically lying again and again?

That's a bold claim - do you have any evidence that lorendsr, who is by his own admission no longer employed by the NSA, has been systematically lying again and again? Or that historically, part of his strategy is to try to influence society or specific groups? Or are you claiming that part of the NSA's employment process is the removal of independent thought and plugging into the collective hive mind?
Hipster robot stops you listening to any music it deems "too mainstream"
At the end of the day I end up with bitcoin in my account, not dollars. So what you're saying does not seem correct to me. The conversion is just a way of determining how much bitcoin I should be paid.
Some protocols use OAuth, such as Twitter.
Why does it need to replace the dollar, though? Why can't it be just some form of hedge? Why can't I negotiatiate my salary to be 70% paid in USD, and the rest paid in some X BTC, with X being the remaining 30% at the day's rate of BTC/USD?

People keep saying that just because it's deflationary, they are never going to spend the coins. But as someone who grew up with hyperinflation (1980's Brazil) I can tell you that people still saved, they just used other currencies. I clearly remember my father buying dollars after getting his paycheck. Investment-wise it was a bad idea, but all people wanted was some sense of safety. When hyperinflation finally came to an end and I knew that my lunch at school would cost the same thing every week (instead of costing 20% more every Monday!), people started spending/selling their dollars.

The problem of BTC now is a problem of trust. And this lack of trust is due to the crazy volatility, not its deflationary nature. So, it is a chicken-and-egg problem. The more merchants you have accepting BTC, the more people will be able to spend their coins. Sure, the merchants buy be turning the 100% of their BTC into fiat right as they get them, but BTC could still be defined as the transaction currency.
circuits reference reminded me of this - http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/
> I stopped reading after the patriot paragraph.

So you read two sentences and felt qualified to post a comment about the article anyway? You're nitpicking.

> I love my country but I never met a patriot that could think straight.

If you bothered to read more, you would realize that you/OP are talking about the same thing: "I care about the US and its future". You merely disagree on the means to that end.
S.F. tech companies' civic image at stake as backlash grows
Then please fix the transliteration and the ring. Isn't the whole point of transliteration is that you can "accurately" reproduce the sound ?

"Sa" means 4 different numbers in order to make it work. That's not reasonable.

Even if it does fit, it's still a hoax. Look how far shakespeare got. Do you believe that he intentionally put 8 references to 7 digit approximations in his texts ?

Without (at least) the inverse tangent expansion of pi, this number could not have been constructed. Furthermore, if it came from divine inspiration, there's a glaring omission : why doesn't it mention the irrational nature of Pi ? Otherwise even a 100 digit approximation would lead any reasonable reader to a wrong conclusion. In this case to nothing better than an Indian version of this : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill.

Every "real" mathematical book on Pi contains three proofs. First that it is irrational (that you can only approximate Pi, it doesn't have any finite representation), that some method of series expansion approximates Pi, and that said series converges. Without these 3 bits of data you don't know what Pi is. The actual value of Pi is almost inconsequential, and can be trivially measured using a rope and a measuring stick by a first grader to an accuracy of at least 10 digits. Alternatively you could calculate without an explicit value, like the ancient Greeks did.

Furthermore there's nothing special about this. When it comes to written references to the value of Pi, there are documents going back ~4000 years (E.g. the Rhynd papyrus). If you accept buildings that could not have been constructed without an approximation of Pi's value, then we can go back 6000 years before we really get into trouble. If you accept the reasoning that pyramids which are the "internal" pyramid of a ball shape could not have been a coincidence, knowledge of pi (which is necessary to construct such a shape) goes back nearly 10000 years.
>Biology is completely different from Computer Science and metaphors between the fields build no understanding and can only be misleading, every time I hear someone comparing DNA to a computer program I fall into pieces.

What? As someone who can write code in several different languages and who has also made de novo designer modifications to proteins at the low level (biological equivalent to assembler, if you will: http://ityonemo.github.io/acs2013/#/, if you're curious) I can attest to the metaphor between the two. It's not totally simple and not one-to-one, but in many situations it has helped me. Hopefully it keeps helping me as I move into my next stint (http://indysci.org/projectmarilyn)

If your idea of "biology" is "going into bioinformatics", well then no wonder your perception of the metaphor is skewed. Bioinformatics is more like "big data on biology"; what is more analogous to computer programming is Synthetic Biology.

Now, I would happen to disagree with many of the metaphors in the OP (and have, as a practitioner of both, better ones in mind that I use in my work), but that there are no connections is, I think, misguided.
I agree with your general statement, but I completely disagree with anybody implying that the correct time is now or just a few years in the future.

We do not know how to use interactive documents well.
> I would also notify the users that their data was accessed, if it was legal to do so.

And of course you'd also put up a warrant canary [0] on your website, am I correct?
--
[0]: http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt
Node-Webkit Boilerplate to get started on windows
> I don't see any reason to doubt his character

His character is secondary to his veracity.

> His claims can have limited scope and still be credible.

His claims were about the NSA. That is the scope over which we all agree he is not a credible source on.
I think it's important to distinguish between historic Austrians, like Hayek, and the nutjob libertarian variety that tried to turn economics into an apologia for anarchocapitalism, like Rothbard.
Hey Martin, cheers for taking the time to write your thoughts.

Right now I am certainly finding the work more than engaging in fact I kind of have to force myself to stop working in the evenings at the moment!

The converted chapel sounds pretty cool, do you have any pictures or links? (Just being nosy!)

I have always considered my work as one big hobby that I am lucky enough to get paid for.

I love your last line, this is certainly something I want to look out for, and you are right, my fiancee will certainly give me plenty of signals!!
> Or are you claiming that part of the NSA's employment process is the removal of independent thought and plugging into the collective hive mind?

That is most likely the reason. Even reddit doesn't jerk this hard.

The OP's submission is a valuable one, even if you disagree with his views.
Quickly navigating large repositories from the terminal
Interestingly enough, 60 minutes will have an "Inside View" of the NSA tonight. This just keeps getting better… I'll be sure to absorb this message and the probable similar message that will be broadcasted to the masses tonight.

Yeah, buddy, I'll believe you… just keep telling me over and over and it will sink in eventually. ;)
Honestly, the altitude and airspeed indicators provide a completly suitable situational awareness in cases like this.
2 is intriguing. Would this sort of functionality make a reasonable replacement for vagrant?