skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yikes, what is it with 60 Minutes lately?

Sunday night they carry water for Amazon or NSA. Right before Monday, the big day.

(My presumption: The NSA knew a ruling was coming today. Getting a puff piece on 60 Minutes is positive spin regardless of whether the ruling turns out good or bad for them.)

Edit: Link

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/nsa-speaks-out-on-snowden-spying...
I'm using it now for a project that's due to go live early next year and so far it's been a dream. Case in point, I ran in to a bug on Monday and it turned out to be with engine.io itself rather than Primus. The workaround was a one line code change swapping the transformer to something else.

Arnout Kazemier (the lead dev) is a really nice guy and when I pinged him about the egine.io bug, he pushed out a change to Primus 24 hours later that worked around the bug and let me continue to use engine.io as the transformer.

YMMV but so far I've no regrets using it.
Came here to say this. The author chooses a poor solution upfront and spends the rest of the article kludgeing around conceptual flaws. I love that keyboard shortcuts are getting some attention though, Gmail and Asana are so much nicer for it.
And let's not forget about FedGov reportedly activating laptop cameras without the indicator lights turning on (presumably microphones too):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/2013/12/06...
Reader Appreciation Day
I totally agree with that. Bitcoin is not going to replace banks.
> It strikes me as a rather tortured reading of this that makes it a limitation of the artists' rights, rather than the publishers'

I'm personally not entirely against the law as it stands, and I agree that publishers have a great deal of power to define the terms of an agreement they can force on an artist. That said, I don't think it's so tortured to think someone really might not want her heirs to meddle with her license grants to a university or museum.
Software Metaphors (2003-2004)
They could have waited until after the wedding, when the Al Qaeda suspects were apart from the non-suspects, avoiding the risk of collateral damage. Just a thought.
> We know so little about human organizations generally, and so few have been tried, that it borders on insanity to argue that the large business corporation, a form that has existed for only a couple centuries, has been perfected.

This is hardly a valid rationale for saying that what Lampert did was a good thing. Unless you're going by the "fail upwards" strategy.

The embodiment of an ideal is only as good as it's execution. Lampert's was clearly a failure. How can you call what he did as "good"? At best he was attempting a Sisyphean task (Merging Kmart and Sears), but then again, that was his idea as well.

Ultimately, I fail to even see that Lampert was punished for his failure - nothing in the article says that this corporate raider didn't do exactly what he intended - i.e., to profit by the destruction of companies.
Exactly my arguments about CDR's, I have mixed feelings about disclosing location with CDR's - but if it were a landline, the location part is sort of a given, unless using a beige box or some other diverter like object (like a DISA on a PBX).
You wrote: "the stuff that would have been captured by a pen register decades ago"

Yes, but pen registers (as noted in Judge Leon's opinion today) were different: they lasted a few days and were targeted at an individual. Neither case holds for bulk NSA surveillance that lasts indefinitely and vacuums up billions of records.
By being able to "choose to avoid," what do you mean? Simply that anyone can avoid surveillance by choosing not to communicate over phone, email, or http, and by not living in communities that directly or indirectly pass any of your information over any of those?

With 1984, at least, the book implies that the proles had some measure of freedom from surveillance (though the plot also suggests that it's still there but more surreptitious). Short of living on a commune and totally removing yourself from the broader economy, what can people actually do to avoid NSA surveillance as it exists today, let alone a decade from now?
Done. It's called reddit, and unfortunately not federated.

We're in a recentralization cycle of services, because it's easier to build (and more monetizable) than similar distributed services.

When we have the technical building blocks and business creativity to break the cycle, things will get interesting again.
You might want to read the Supreme Court's recent Jones case re: GPS devices.
Maintaining Russian Power: How Putin Outfoxed the West
Agreed.

Just like a startup tries new tactics so does the US military and foreign policy organizations. And just like startups, some of those ideas fail miserably and look like ideas that should have never been tried in the first place :)
Monty hall problem extended.
Implement CSS grid already
We need to generate tangible evidence to the political system that the defenders of the NSA have no credibility. Restore the Fourth SF and others have created a mechanism for Californians to do so.
https://shameonfeinstein.org/
Great, welcome to the age of bulletin board.
I very fondly remember ThinkGeek's early days, if you start a new venture, let the HN community know! I'll definitely be in line as a customer and I'm sure many others here would be too.
Unlikely. I have never had a facebook and with the exception of spotify, which now has email sign up, no service I use has required fb to log in.
Um, the judge went as far as he could given the procedural posture of the case. He was not asked at this stage to go any further; nor could he have.

Yes, many provisions of the Constitution and BoR are widely ignored by congresscritters, bureaucrats, and judges. But this is not one of those examples.
> Another article[2] agrees with the article kindly submitted here in reporting that the United States district judge (appointed by President George W. Bush) has stayed his ruling, pending a very likely appeal by the federal government

Note that staying a decision pending appeal is the norm, to preserve the status quo until a final resolution. There are exceptions, but it is usually not noteworthy (even if it is frustrating to those who support the decision that is stayed) that that has occurred.
Learn to co-exists. Otherwise you are just putting evolutionary pressure for the bacteria to become super bacteria.
It is also the past, for several hundred years now.
Maybe, maybe not. We don't have all the intelligence...I guess we just have to hope that was the best call given the circumstances. Not saying that I'm happy that this happened though
I think you may have missed the entire point. "Everyone knows" is also not a very tactful or impressive way to argue your point - since, as included with "everyone", I fully disagree with your point. Bulk collection of metadata across "everyone" in the United States (and other unfortunate countries through collateral damage) is not OK in any way shape or form lest the constitution has recently been changed. The fact that this idea has direct ties to surveillance of foreign governments only exemplifies the point in it's weight and severity.

Your assertion that his credibility is somehow diminished based on his actions doesn't leave much room for your version of the correct way a whistleblower should go about his business properly. I'm not sure you fully grapple what this man has laid out on the line for everyone else here and has signed himself up for a life that will always be in question. Arm-chair NSA antics don't seem to justly appreciate the level at which someone has gone to great lengths to do the job fully and, IMHO, correctly.
>Please, remind me why Amazon should be blamed for this and not praised.

The fact that they would have been left to starve does not make the person who, exploting their need, had them work like shit for shitty money in exchange any better.

Similarly, the fact that a person gives $20 for a crack addicted woman to do him "favors", does not make him a benefactor compared to those who had nothing to offer her.
Also,

http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/

And a chip I made in college:

http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/cincinnatibearca...
Assuming a tcp connection can be established in 15ms worst case and another 10ms for data transmission, 65ms spent by the dbms for a single insert is incredibly slow.

I am very aware of the increase in performance of batch inserts and batched disk writes and so on.. as an individual who has worked on the development of a major DBMS.
The statute doesn't seem to limit the selling of derivatives, though... it seems to me that it would be quite straightforward for the artist to simply sell the copyright as well as a call option on the same copyright 35 years in the future. So artist really hasn't lost any rights.
-1 for title typo
The meaning is clear from the context as written. I did not respond to the legal ruling but to the article's quote of what the judge actually said. You make some valid and important points here and below, but they are more germane to the procedures of the courts.

I am aware of how the courts operate on and respect precedent law and that it is a process with defined protocols of what can and cannot be ruled on. Perhaps now that the implications of the pen tap is more clear it will be revisited in light of what we know now and the nature of the internet which was just inchoate in the telephone industry when the original ruling was made.

Edit: To be a bit clearer on my last paragraph. I said the second sentence was "worrying" because it can be viewed as the judge signaling the government to give him proof of success fighting terrorists so he can approve it or it could indicate that he is now questioning the prudence of the pen tap rulings given what we know now. I hope it is the latter but we will have to wait and see.
There's a copy at http://legaltimes.typepad.com/files/obamansa.pdf .

The opinion says i) the NSA program constitutes a search under the 4th, and cannot be compared to Smith v. Maryland, along with four different reasons for why they are not comparable, and ii) there's significant likelihood that the search is unreasonable.

The judge points out that while "reasonable" is in general individual in character, the Supreme Court does allow a few exceptions. For example, parolees may be searched to see if they are following the terms of their probation even if there is no individual suspicion.

The opinion then looks to see if the government's claims fit that "patchwork" of exceptions. The judge writes "Given the limited record before me at this point in the litigation - most notably, the utter lack of evidence that a terrorist attack has ever been prevented because searching the NSA database was faster than other investigative tactics - I have serious doubts about the efficacy of the metadata collection program as a means of conducting time-sensitive investigations in cases involving imminent threats of terrorism."

Don't apply your contrapositive logic to that statement. It still doesn't mean that the NSA program, had it been effective, would be constitutional. The opinion points to the government statement that the government could use other means with fewer 4th Amendment problems in order to get the plaintiff's telephone metadata. Had the NSA data gathering been effective, the judge could still have decided that the "plaintiffs have a substantial likelihood of showing that their privacy interests outweigh the Government's interest in collecting and analyzing telephony metadata and therefore the NSA's bulk collection program is indeed an unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment."
Actually, the world isn't burning. Everyone should be glad if we're talking about a wedding party bombed as a single, rare incident - if the same pilots were doing proper bombardment instead of those drones, as in previous wars, then we'd have a bunch of wedding parties killed every day and they'd be invisible in the total casualty list of a major city firebombing or napalming of a few villages.

The 'world burning' today is ten times less of actual burning than in, say, US actions in Vietnam or Korea, and hundred times less than ww1/ww2 - I'm glad that the scale of suffering is shrinking so much.
Companies who release iOS apps before Android are frustrating
Royal Jewels on Display for First Time in U.S.
Pushing code to GitHub as Linus Torvalds
Sorry about that! The ARM naming scheme confuses the hell out of me. I always mix up the processor generations and instruction sets.
I too interned at a telco and I was given free reign over this kind of data -- and more. As were some external, temporary contractors.

I wrote a little about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5969957
I used `;` remapped to `:` for some time as well, but native functionality of `;` is just too awesome!
"I’m superstitious, so one night I told myself, All right, if I win a game of hearts with less than 15 points, I’ll do it. I’d never scored that low in my life, so when I landed at 11 points, I thought it was a sign and decided to buy a ticket."

There's your problem right there. People like this are prone to other irrational thinking. I would bet that the vast majority of people who fall for this stuff are also deeply religious.
Squarespace under large DDOS right now
I've built a medium.com-like experience for blogging newbies (http://www.postagon.com) and I can tell you that people do indeed pay for it. I think Ghost just needs some time to find its identity between all the different options and target groups.
I'd assume that they're taking a word count and then using a predefined number of words per minute to figure out approximately how long the article will take to read.

For example, https://medium.com/fragmented-musings/295cc75cd1fd has approximately 600 words and has an approximate reading time of 3 minutes. From this we can deduce that they're assuming that around 200 words can be read in a minute. By diving 600 by 200, we arrive at 3.
The world is perfectly just. You never get something for nothing.

God says...
you_think_you_could_do_better bank enough_said God Icarus
straighten_up awesome fer_sure Okilydokily Boo hippy Ghost
delightful nerd Catastrophic_Success caution no_you_cant
kludge You_fix_it bye you're_no_fun nerd insane not

Highs and lows balance. Joseph in the bible was wrongly imprisoned for 7 years for false rape. Then, he ruled Egypt. Yer fucked.
The broadband problem: a quest for high-speed fiber
I think Open Source would benefit from having both models.

Your model/the gittip model is good.

So many times, there are only a small handful of people who care about a bug being fixed or a capability added -- but that small handful are both willing and able to tip generously for work that meets their specific need! We've all been there. Either as an individual, an agency, or a software company, we've been in a place, dependent on a relatively lower-profile project where we'd cheerfully tip in the $50-$300 range. That's probably good for everyone. There are a few ways of doing this, but what you've described -- 'tip for this specific commit' -- is how easy we all wish it was. I wish it was a feature of github.

But their model is good, too.

Some open-source projects are relied upon by thousands, tens of thousands, or more people, and they want to know that everything, small and large, is being done to keep the software stable. As others have commented in this thread, this would be a way to pump up the ecosystem for popular, highly-depended-upon open-source software projects.

Sure, adding features like this might induce gaming. But if I understand their model, this may just mean that those reviewing pull requests may just need to take an additional factor into account -- whether or not the commits involved are substantive, or if they're too 'gamed'. It seems like it might be a self-licking ice cream cone, because larger-scale gaming (attempts to earn Real Money through mostly-frivolous PRs) could be caught by review, whereas minor cleanups for docs or comments in the commits of a PR that includes more substantive work might be, as other commenters have mentioned, perhaps just a few percentage points of 'wastage'.

I don't think we really know if it's feasible or not, but I applaud these efforts tremendously.

I also wonder if a hybrid system could work -- perhaps as a feature to be added to the 'tip for all commits' approach. Allow tipping for individuals, but a certain percentage (50%? 25%? something?) could go into the general pool for all accepted commits.
Free Marketing Ideas part 14
When an inexperienced founder/manager hires a direct sales team, the sales team sets to work on selling the founder/manager instead of the customer base.

This made me spit out my coffee. I've never heard it expressed that way, and it's a hilarious image, but come to think of it I've observed that situation more than once.

Can anyone recommend some resources for learning to manage direct sales teams?
We have a shorter word for 'not enough evidence to try them', it's called 'innocent' or 'not guilty'.
I'm guessing simply dividing word count by average words per minute[1]

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Reading_and_co...
The judge's opinion enjoins NSA phone metadata collection only as it relates to two plaintiffs:
https://twitter.com/declanm/status/412697277363286016

But legally and politically, especially if the ruling is upheld on appeal, it will become difficult for NSA to continue the program in its current form. The key is less the order than the legal reasoning that led the court to this result.

Note Sec. 215 metadata collection was one of the more benign NSA programs that Snowden revealed. Bulk warrantless data collection on Americans ("incidental" of course) through fiber taps is a much bigger deal, IMHO.
I work for a religious organization. My boss likes to take the 4 members of his group out to lunch for our birthdays. Three out of four of the group are female. Due to the environment, he takes the 3 women out as a group on each birthday (we love it) to keep up appearances. On one side, I don't see it as a way of being respectful of everyone involved (everyone is married, and we're all professionally friendly). On the other side, it is sad that it takes that much effort to uphold an image of propriety.

I have heard of inappropriate office romances that have happened and started with instances like this (seemingly harmless but rolled into something more).
There's a Wonder Drug That Prevents HIV Infection. Why Haven't You Heard of It?
Why do you feel it is "ripping off" when people copy?
You're absolutely right that there are reasons to believe this might not stand up on appeal. However, the reasoning from Smith is hugely problematic with the advent of the cloud. Smith is based on what's called third-party doctrine: basically that the Fourth Amendment applies to your stuff that's in your possession. If you give your stuff to someone else, they don't have a Fourth Amendment right to it, and the government can take it without a warrant. Before the digital age, it was unusual to entrust sensitive private information to third parties. Most of what we had was kept on paper. Now, people put huge amounts of information in the hands of third parties, often without really realizing it. Extending third-party doctrine to all digital information would decimate online privacy.

This is where the future of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence is headed, and how the courts decide will have huge ramifications for the future of privacy. So again, you're right that there's significant precedent that must be overcome, but it's by no means a done deal. Even some of the conservative Justices in the recent Fourth Amendment cases seem pretty concerned.
Ask HN: Moving to Morocco for a year, keeping my US job, what do I need to do?
Please pardon the throwaway account; I'm a long time lurker, very infrequent poster, and I don't comment. For that matter, I don't comment anywhere else either.

Some background: I work remotely doing devops and application engineering for a company in the US on EST and have done for over a decade. In addition to the job, I have several side projects on servers in the US, whether through shared hosting or VPS, some of which earn money.

My wife has been offered a job in Casablanca, Morocco on a year contract. We can't do the move unless I can maintain my existing employment at its current level. We'll be in housing outside of Casablanca proper, so the suburbs, I suppose.

My family will maintain a US address through one of our relatives. Likewise, we want to keep our US financial accounts and insurance coverage.

My questions are thus:

1. I fully intend to pay income tax at both state and federal levels for the money I earn while working for my US employers during my time abroad. Is a simple address at a relative's house sufficient? Do I have to return to the US at some point?

2. What are internet connections like in Casablanca, for those who can give an idea? Are they throttled?

3. Will a US billing address be sufficient to maintain my existing shared hosting and VPS services? Are there any gotchas I should be worried about?

4. Are there any coworking spaces in Casablanca?

5. Finally, again if anyone can speak to it, what's the quality of life in Casablanca like?

Thanks very much in advance.
regardless if they're trying to make a go of it as a business, the mental model inside the users mind is going to be "They're going to take the first $60 of adwords revenue before I get a penny, that isn't cool".

Only a microscopic minority of bloggers blog to acquire billable hours.

Hobbyists are pretty cool paying "magazine subscription rates" as a household budgetary line item. All the spouse hears is "I'm gonna spend $30 on my hobby blah blah blah" and that goes by a lot easier than $60.
I like to go one step further and simply add a global event delegate to transparently tie DOM elements into a UI controller scoped to a particular portion of the application (to account for sidebars acting differently than the main content). Since 95% of the events handled are click events, it saves a lot of time.

The whole thing ends up being about ten lines of code to implement and handles event binding for practically the entire application. Literally ends up cutting out thousands of lines of boilerplate in larger applications.

I've also found that the actual event object is only useful in a very small amount of cases (drag events and such), to the point where if I ever really need to pass it along, I'll just write a custom event controller for it (using data-handler to specify the custom controller).

When I have too much free time on my hands, I cut out the data attributes entirely and instead route using good old normal hrefs, which as a bonus can render on their own if something goes wrong with the JS.
That's a legit criticism, but it sounds to me like it's more a criticism of the inheritability of copyright than of termination rights per se. (Is it any more fair that my heirs could sell my work to Disney?)
If they're mentally ill, can they really choose by themselves? There's not much point in making offers to someone who can't distinguish or understand their options. People with limited ability to make decisions or take care of themselves shouldn't be out on the streets.

Now, you can either give them a home and a caretaker individually (let's say, each of them gets a full-time social worker), or put all of them in the same place where they're taken care of as a group (aka an institution).
Darwin's theory proven right once again
> It's not necessarily any more meaningful than "people ages 65-70 don't use Facebook".

From an advertising perspective, there's a massive gulf between "teens don't use Facebook" and "senior citizens don't use Facebook".

To put it flippantly: one group is headed into a coveted demographic, the other group buys denture paste.

That's not to say that Facebook wouldn't do fine even if the only people that used it were "uncool and old" like the rest of us, but to an advertiser it's a bit of a worrying sign.
A new career in journalism? I think Glenn Greenwald and Pierre Omidyar are hiring.