skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I've been told repeatedly that we can't be told what is required under the NSLs by their very nature(despite being overturned by the Supreme Court).

NSL power is defined by law, and is limited to metadata, not content. I suspect what they meant is that specific details about whose information is being requested, and how many requests are received, can't be released.

>Also, I was under the impression a subpoena also requires a judge's approval.

An administrative subpoena is a type of subpoena that does not need to be signed by a judge. An NSL is a type of admin subpoena that the FBI uses for national security matters, but the FBI uses admin subpoenas in other investigations, too. Many other federal agencies also have admin subpoena power, and some states grant it to their agencies as well.
All mainstream modern technology companies are in a no win tragic situation. They are accountable to the state which overrides their ability to make any kind of actual independent decisions when the interests of the state are at stake. Going against this would be an exercise in futility and you may well end up in prison for doing so.

Getting angry at them for what they are forced at gunpoint to do is just wasted energy, though I do agree with seeking alternatives free from the influence of the state and not patronising companies that are forced to operate in those interests purely from the perspective of pragmatism.

All they can do is stick to the letter of the law. I think the harder the state clamps down and the more totalitarian it becomes, the more black market alternatives for mainstream services will come into being and the more pressure there will be for a truly free parallel economy to flourish.
At least in Germany and Austria you are required by law to publish a lot of details about your corporation or yourself (e.g. when doing a one-man-business). It's called "Impressumspflicht" which translates to "duty to publish an imprint/legal information"
Here's what I wrote them last time, more or less:

> Thank you for your interest and taking the time to discuss employment opportunities, but at this time I have decided not to pursue a further relationship with Google as an employer. I wish you the best in your future endeavors.
Bratislava, Slovakia -- Local / Remote / Relocation -- Full Time / Contract

Stack: Python, C++, Qt, Twisted, Flask, Django, PostgreSQL, Oracle (if you want to migrate away), Ansible, Fabric, familiar with audio analysis and IR algorithms, system programming, managing servers, ...

Resume: https://oxygene.sk/tmp/llalinsky-2014-05.pdf

Contact: lukas@oxygene.sk

I basically have two profiles, doing web development commercially for over 10 years and hacking on music related things in open source projects. The things in "stack" is what I have been recently working with, but I'm very flexible regarding technology.

I'm looking for a change, possibly moving away from web dev, but I'm not set on what to do next. If you have a project that you think could be interesting to me and it's something I could really help you with, please let me know.
And why not? Diamonds are nothing but marketing. Red bull is nothing but marketing. Nike is nothing but marketing.
There are more reasons to not work for Google, including their (sometimes?) rather poor interview process.
Not if you are being held on charges related to terrorism it won't.
London Christian Developers Meetup
It's been ~3yrs since I've graduated high school, but my high school (top in the county and an 'A' school in Florida) didn't have any electronics, shop, or computer science classes. I vaguely remember almost taking "Web Development" thinking they would go into PHP or something like that, but apparently they just made small sites on Microsoft Word and played video games the entire class. Such a shame.
amazing battery tech has been around the corner for a long time now, yet energy density hasn't changed significantly since the introduction of lithium ion.
Yeah, so basically nothing with respect to the most egregious violation of every single tenet of what the US is marketed to the globe supposedly is!

So, Cool - its great that Snowden hasn't proved shit to make anyone believe the reality is the inverse of what one may think it to be.

Look, the will of our politicians must only be the whole of the Law! So, we're good here....
Cloudflare is not having any issue, it's just used here as a proxy to help with caching and static files. The real server hosting the application is down.

However this comment was a bit useless.
I thought that it was so ironic that I assumed it was intentional.
>> Got their paws on you?

The inherent bias and paranoia in your statement is staggering. Although, it's understandable if you come from a country with a particularly brutal and pervasive secret police.

In my country, the intelligence agencies have no powers of arrest and must defer to police enforcement.
On a related note, for grid paper for practising Chinese (or Japanese) characters, check out my site: http://www.hanzigrids.com/
I think he's pointing out that privacy violations by private industry carry far less risk compared to those by the government, because private industry cannot legally deprive me of life, liberty, or property.

Because the government has the right of violent force over you, it must be far more closely controlled to ensure that opportunity for abuse of that right is minimized.

To say that privacy violations by the government are bad is not to say that such violations by private entities are good, but they are certainly far less costly.
Microsoft: $327 billion market cap; Google: $356 billion market cap; Facebook: $153 billion market cap.

Did I miss where someone was arguing that Square or Box would become the next $200 billion company? I don't recall ever once seeing that argument made.

So what was the point of this article holding up those straw examples, and then referring to the business dynamics that MSFT / GOOG / FB enjoy?

For every Google, there are hundreds of small to mid size, successful technology companies.

Square doesn't need a monopoly to build a great $10 or $20 billion business in payments, and there's nothing wrong with achieving that scale vs. becoming a juggernaut like the before mentioned.
Yep, 4k is pretty wow indeed.

My first computer was a Sinclair ZX81, which only had 1K or RAM, but there was 8K of ROM, and the BASIC interpreter was pretty, um basic.
How to validate my idea(s)?
One we have some ideas, before jumping to code the solution, what is next steps to validate or to check if they have potential success?. It will be helpful to have some advices from your experience.
Ask HN: Any Hacker News Android apps with intent filter to open HN urls?
Similar to many reddit apps, I'm looking for a Hacker News reader app for Android that supports deep-linking URL functionality (click on a http://news.ycombinator.com link and it opens in the app). None of the top apps on Google Play seem to have it. Might just have to write my own :)
It's a complete nonsequitur - are Luis Vuitton/Gucci/Prada/whatever accesories commodities because "from a technical perspective nothing they do is particularly innovative" ?

It doesn't really matter how you make your product not-a-commodity. The market repeatedly shows that it doesn't treat Apple product as commodities, therefore they are not commodities, and they can have very different business fundamentals than, say, Dell or HTC.

And it doesn't matter if the escape of commoditization was achieved by R&D, PR, divine intervention or whatever else; There are many possible ways of differentiating your products; and the market behavior for commodity and non-commodity goods/services is objectively different no matter why your product is/isn't a commodity.
Why Filipino Girls like White Men
Apparently these sensitive snails are dissolving p <because> they are in an alkaline ocean of around pH 8.14. Amazing. The paper does not point out that some parts of the ocean naturally vary in pH by 1.4 units. Of course none of the massive amounts of chemical junk dumped into the oceans and poisoning the fish we eat, has any effect on these snails. Did they check?

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...

“This natural variability has prompted the suggestion that “an appropriate null hypothesis may be, until evidence is obtained to the contrary, that major biogeochemical processes in the oceans other than calcification will not be fundamentally different under future higher CO2/lower pH conditions””
I agree 4 GB is getting to be a little low for a modern laptop, but I'm curious as to how bad this "chugging" is considering swapping to SSD isn't too bad and is many times faster than any swapping that occurred on those old 5400 RPM drives.
Your honesty is to be applauded.
Apple are sourcing parts from several component vendors, with varying performance, and name the resulting product exactly the same. They don't even specify what variants exist. How is somebody doing benchmarks supposed to test all possible configurations if they don't know how many exist, and have no way of determining which configuration they are buying?
Dunning Kruger in full swing here.

Just because I typed up a quick example (which exactly exists and is used to crack a suspect in certain examples) you have launched into some sort of critique of one written example, of one segment, of one technique of one fictional scenario.

Then proceeded to offer a handful of lines of advice as if you are somehow rewriting the techniques of tactical questioners everywhere.

However, since you offered advice, let me offer you some.

1. We never specified we are in Court. That is not tactical questioning, it is cross examination and techniques exist for that.

2. >> On the other hand, a better questioner would ask questions around the same area and try to find a question they can get a response to.

Actually they absolutely will not do that. They will begin by asking the subject to just walk them through the entire <insert event/subject> in it's entirety and without interruption.

3. >> Did you see anyone or anything suspicious in the area?

That is a horrible question.

Have you established they were in the area? Do you want confirmation of someone suspicious or something suspicious? Why have you asked a closed question? Have you defined the area? have you defined the timebox you are referring to in the area?

^^

I am being overly harsh but that is what happens when you try to impose your criticism on a tiny aspect of complex science.
25 Free eBooks for Web Designers and Developers
Experience from other places that switched to EMV shows that this incentive is large enough to have a rather quick adoption. Yes, there are some niches where non-EMV terminals stick around - those that are low-volume and feel immune to fraud; but all common stores seem to switch quickly as otherwise all fraudsters focus on those who haven't switched yet, and low-margin business can't afford losing that money.
> All mainstream modern technology companies are in a no win tragic situation.

Actually the big companies (and to a lesser degree other significant entities like Wikipedia) that essentially hold the keys to the Internet and have the money -- if anyone, they are in a position to change things. They have tremendous power. Think civil disobedience. Corporate disobedience? There are many legal as well as illegal things these corps could do to flip the bird at the state. And the result might be that they get heard, unlike all the EFF campaigners and individuals who can only complain on Internet forums.
"Artificial Leaf" splits water into H2 and O2 easily and cheaply
Turning a Profit: How quickly tech giants build wealth
Which still means that, if you buy a 2014 model, you might get a machine that's slower than the 2013 model. It's not always the case, but it _can_ be -- which, as a prospective buyer, is infuriating.
The full paragraph is:

"Matt Engstrom, director of monitoring products at Shure, admits there is evidence that suggests transducers in larger headphones can experience burn-in, and that this could, in theory, produce different sound over time. Again, no one has shown this conclusively, largely because a) companies aren’t rushing to tell audiophiles they’ve been wrong all these years and b) there’s no single industry standard for testing headphones."

Matt Engstrom is not very sure is he? His evidence "suggests" burn-in which "could, in theory" (sounds like the colloquial meaning of 'theory' too, not the scientific meaning) change the sound.

So really no one knows.
The test is not in isolation.

People seem to be imagining an interrogator walks in, opens his notes, asks for a reverse version of events and says

Aha, you originally said you left the house at 7, but in you reverse statement you indicate it was 7.30, case closed. This guy is done.

The reverse technique, one of dozens is used to test accuracy and clarity when required to do so with brevity.

In my example I imagined a wife being questioned by a husband as he suspects an affair.

Most people, when put under pressure and are lying will fail the RC test spectacularly.

The majority of truth tellers may clarify aspects in their mind but they will by and large get all of the details correct.

Either way, the test is not in a vacuum.
There are countless books and blog posts written on the topic. The entire "Lean Startup" book by Eric Ries is an answer to your question.

Have you read them?

If not, go read them.

If yes, http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#before
You're a little late to the party, then.[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug
CSS Variables in Firefox 29
It blows my mind that people name ethical issues when choosing an employer when myriads of other more practical considerations come to mind. Well, it really doesn't, it takes all sorts. What blows my mind is to see so many replies to discuss this crazy opinion.
I think that's called "lock in" rather than "network effects".
> They can do no wrong

It's not true. Remember apple maps fiasco? Or antennagate?
I don't think this is an American trait.

Or maybe I'm a freak in my own culture. I don't lie like this article describes.

I've always associated low self-esteem with the need to rampantly lie. The inability to properly deal with reality, so the person prefers to fake it and avoid any potential mental or emotional confrontations. That's just an opinion of course.

I know an awful lot of people that will 'tell it how it is' rather than pretending to eg like a restaurant when they really don't. In fact, there is a historical stereotype about Americans that we're direct / blunt. The reality is, America has possessed a relatively large population + diverse culture for a long time, and accordingly it makes little sense to broadly stereotype the people that live here.
I wouldn't call what you describe a network effect - it's a classic switching cost/lockin, but not a network effect.

A company with 5000 Box users is a single paying customer with zero network effect. It would be a network effect if there was some significant benefit for other companies (other potential customers) to start using Box (and not something else) in order to cooperate, but I'm not seeing that much.
I don't know if ironic is the right word, but it certainly is funny reading the Google's cached version of the article.
Absolutely.

I only referred to one technique for checking the veracity of a complex story.

There is a reason this role exists as a trade with considerable training.
If you have a PayPal account and are earning enough on Gittip, there is a script that will transfer the cash weekly. 41 people were paid that way on the latest run: https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/2340#issueco....
My parents is still running a small business. None of my customers cared about handing over their cards for the 8 years I worked there.

I much prefer LevelUp's system with QR codes than Square's. Everytime I'm at a food truck my card would be swiped about 10+ times before it would go through. Totally agree about the stylus signing, no one reads the signiture anyways unless it's a fraud claim, nevermind that stylus signitures barely resembles an actual signiture (look at driver's license sig).

Transaction fees: These rates are getting pretty bad for credit cards. My parents still uses BoA terminals as a POS/processing and CC rates for AMEX was at 4%+ and about 3.5% for VISA about a year ago.

Edit: Like to point out that I actually checked signitures on back of cards and id'd people. Most people were surprised, but actually extremely happy that I did.
Yes, as you say.

The beauty of the Pi is the fact you can have a variety of SD cards with different OS/Configurations and easily swap between them and play with them.

It is a very cheap educational tool. I have 4 of them, and they also make great network storage tools. Add a HDD, the transmission software and you can easily download TV shows and stream them to you 1080p TV for example. £27 in the UK, absolute bargain.
Can someone explain the main differences between Plan 9 OS and Inferno? Why should I use one of them?
Anyone know of a larger discussion related to this issue?
I'd like to see this tested in a lean way. Perhaps finding a traditional tribe still living deep in the Amazon jungle, giving them this book and observing the outcome.
Somehow, in the context of Stephen Hawking, this joke seems a bit insensitive.
All they can do is stick to the letter of the law.

That's not all that they can do. Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, et al. are some of the most powerful entities in the US besides the oil industry. They matter to the US economy, and for that reason they are clearly in a position to influence government decisions.

This has both positive and negative outcomes. Since trust in terms of privacy is important to Google et al., they are (probably) trying to prevent eavesdropping. This can be witnessed in Google's push to push SSL everywhere, their increased transparency with respect to information requests, and Facebook's lashing out at Obama over domestic spying.

On the other hand, some outcomes are detrimental as a result of a fierce battle between the technology companies, resulting e.g. in blocking of patent reform.
Do those even exist? It sounds like bunk.
Cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp...

(Ironically by Google)
I can't speak for the community as a whole, but the Haskellers I know generally "bash" OO with respect to its use of pervasive mutable state and open recursion, and not because the notion of "object" is an inherently wrong one. Those features must be explicitly included in the above model of object (by manually including reference cells and manually invoking a "method" with its own "instance", respectively) whereas they are implicitly included in every object in most commonly-used OO languages.

As for multiple dispatch, you could always use multi-param type classes:

{-# LANGUAGE MultiParamTypeClasses #-}

class Say a b where say :: a -> b -> IO ()
instance Say Int () where say = putStrLn "Case one"
instance Say Int Int where say = putStrLn "Case two"

which corresponds roughly to the CLOS snippet

(defgeneric say (a b))
(defmethod say ((a integer) (b null)) (format t "Case one"))
(defmethod say ((a integer) (b integer)) (format t "Case two"))

I do not believe that there is a way to use the record-based model of objects I showed earlier to do the same thing, but perhaps there is some way that is presently eluding me.
> fraud costs

Are you making educated guesses or do you actually know that fraud costs Stripe money?

EDIT - Yep, sorry, Square. I'm just in the middle of integrating with Stripe, so it just slipped.
Bitcoin QR code on your Pebble Watch
I built an app so that you can enter your own bitcoin address and generate a QR code on your watch. Using bitpay api to check the balance.
Influencing government decisions is typically done by lobbying, handing more power to the state by way of smothering them in funds. Yes you might get your pet project some extra attention, but it's likely that the funds you use to accomplish that objective will be used for heinous ends elsewhere. It's much like negotiating with terrorists from a game theoretic perspective.

Other alternatives are massive public awareness campaigns with regards to any given issue, but these appear to be losing potency as it becomes clear that basically everything the state is doing is broken from the perspective of citizens in some way, and they are not much interested in "fixing it" as it is working perfectly from the perspective of political parasites.

The only unalloyed good that can probably be done is financially contributing to improved security and other technological innovations that directly thwart the interests of the state. Doing so more advances the interests of their potential free market competitors than their own however.
Well... he loves that company.
plan 9 is the earlier effort of re-engineering Unix and runs on hardware. It was meant to replace Unix, but it never did.

With inferno they went the VM route (the dis VM) and built it so that it runs on myriad platforms, from Unix and ActiveX. It still runs on hardware though. The intension was that you can run a network of hosted and native inferno installations, making it easier to adopt. Unfortunately, inferno saw no widespread adoption either.

The underlying filesystem concept is basically the same (the latest version of 9p and Styx are identical), but the programming environment changed a lot (you write limbo to run on dis). Also the user space programs were rewritten and get overhauled a bit. The community never get divergent enough though; inferno people tend to identify themselves as part of the plan 9 community.
The double underscores are ugly and foreign to Java's conventions.
I thought your first comment was just grumbling, but this comment
suggests some misunderstanding.

The root zsk is split over a group (Shamir share) held by
mostly non-US key holders. (One from the US is Dan
Kaminsky, whose work and my user name has special
relevancy for you. You'd agree he's not part of the US
government.)

I believe all the key holders are trustworthy, and if any were
not, you'd need a majority (5 of the 7) to subvert the zsk.
So an xkcd-wrench-style attack on the key by governments would
require implausible circumstances.

The key ceremony is video taped and can be watched:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9j-sfP9GUU

Other TLDs (some being countries) also hold key signing
ceremonies and video tape them. You can watch other
countries perform key signing as well. But these sovereign zsks are
subordinate to the ICANN community held keys.
I.e., it's more accurate (than your statement) to say that
there are seven people walking the earth who have
parent keys over actual country soveriegn zones. And while you
might not know all these people yourself, they're from the DNS
operator and hacker community. If anything, you're 180 degrees
wrong in your statement that governments run DNSSEC.

You can read more about the DNSSEC root zone key management
process and people (non-governmental) online. Here are informal
press stories with the usual set of mistakes and minor errors:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/28/seven-people-keys-worldwide-internet-security-web

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/07/dnssec_root_key.html

And the root DNSSEC operation in general:

http://www.root-dnssec.org/

I don't see the government in DNSSEC. Not even ICANN
can alter the root zsk (but they are of course instrumental
in any key roll over, since they manage the physical facilities
where the "DNSSEC Seven" must be iris scanned, etc., to sign
any proposed new root key).
With my Thinkpads I always get the international on-site warranty - it's well worth paying a bit extra to have someone come to wherever you are to fix a problem.
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What's the likely solution here? Is it possible to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere without damaging it in some other way? Or are we destined to slowly but surely destroy this planet?