skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To play devil's advocate, one could argue that there are two separate narratives being employed by Snowden and the journalists he entrusted.

The first is that many of NSA's activities are unconstitutional and/or illegal, and as such represent a grave threat to the very ideals that the U.S. was founded on.

The second is the "world citizen" narrative, which asserts that mass surveillance is inherently immoral and an affront to the rights of people everywhere.

Many of the stories we've seen so far, substance included, tend to be of the latter narrative. A prime example of this would be the network hardware implants story. The implanted hardware in question was modified en route to foreign destinations, and it's probably a safe bet that no "Five Eyes" countries were on the receiving end. Another would be where it was mentioned that U.S. intelligence operatives use geolocation data derived from intercepts as a tool to help them shake tails in the field. Items like these have no relevance in context of the first narrative, clearly live up to NSA's mandate of foreign intelligence collection, and arguably impact national security in an adverse manner.

In my opinion, there's a compelling argument that Snowden's actions have indeed satisfied the technical definition of treason. However, that is not to say he wasn't well intentioned, or that he failed to disclose a good deal of information directly relevant to illegal domestic surveillance activities. On the contrary, I'm sure his intentions were good, and he has in fact contributed a fair bit to the domestic surveillance fight.

---

EDIT: I've moved this post from the duplicate thread; tptacek's reply can be found here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7853468

In response, I think there is an argument for framing his intent as being ill towards the United States, at least in a willfully negligent sense. One could argue he allowed his world citizen narrative to override concerns regarding U.S. interests.

Hypotheticals aside, I agree with you that treason really is not an appropriate charge in this case, and that in general throwing the term around tends to detract from the discussion. Moreover, even with lesser charges, I don't think that the standard life-in-solitarily-confinement sentence would be appropriate.

As well, there is the notion that USG inhibited his ability to assert editorial control over the leaked content in the first place, perhaps making the severity of the leaks worse in the process. Repeatedly calling him a coward probably didn't help either.
Parallel construction proves my statements.

On the books, legally and in front of a judge, the NSA and DEA are not allowed to work with each other. Parallel Construction is a (probably illegal) technique that DEA agents are using right now to get around the legal authorities.

But it involves DEA agents lying under oath towards judges. IE: I don't think the practice of parallel construction is going to hold up in courts in the long term.
I don't know OPs pain points, but mine were quite simply that the query DSL for ElasticSearch seems to be a thin wrapper over Apache Lucene. If you have experience working with Lucene, picking ElasticSearch isn't that difficult. If you've never worked with Lucene before a lot of the concepts aren't necessarily obvious, and it's incredibly easy to write queries that won't return what you expect but won't fail either. My experience trying to configure analyzers and trying to adjust search parameters involved a ton of trial and error.
The speed for a market maker (largely passive and posting limit orders) isn't about how fast you can place a limit order, it is about how fast you can cancel it. It is a defensive mechanism against predators who are even quicker (arbitrageurs, aggressive HFTs).

Imagine that there is a "true price" of some security at price x, and your bid and your offer are positioned around that true price at x - d (your bid) and x + d (your offer). So your spread is 2d. Then some external (public) event happens, which moves the true price by an amount greater than d. Let's say it is a big event, and the true price falls by 4d. Now there is a race. If you don't manage to cancel your bid in time, a predator will 'pick you off', take out your bid, and they'll sell to you at (x - d) when the true price is now (x - 4d). The predator has made an immediate (paper) profit of 3d, and you've made a loss of the same amount. If you're fast enough, you can successfully cancel your bid and repost it further down the book at x - 5d.

Now, as a market maker, a liquidity provider, you could increase your safety margin by quoting a wider spread, setting your bid and offer at +- 2d instead of +- 1d. Now it takes a larger move before you're in danger of being "picked off", but you'll also attract less customers and make less profits. Speed (latency) is directly correlated to how tight a spread a market maker can quote.
I don't see much of an upside doing this. Better audio? Not anything that will be discernible to the regular user. More controls on the headphone wire? This reminds me of the remotes that came paired with a lot of minidisc players; there is no need for a second screen if it's wired. This seems like a step in the wrong direction with the push for wearables that could communicate wirelessly.
It doesn't make much sense to challenge the liquidity provided by automated market-makers while conceding that they reduce spreads; spreads are essentially a proxy measurement of liquidity.
Excellent list. I'd like to add education to it.
Why the New Obamacare Website Is Going to Work This Time
Certainly the case.

I think you're missing the point of the example, though. It's not "OMG there is no solution for this daycare" - there is, as you say, an obvious economic solution. It's that it is interesting (and relevant) that the different kinds of incentive don't stack, which is contrary to the naive assumption. Therefore, if the proposed mechanism cannot come up with sufficient money, it might actually make the situation worse - this may not be a "every little bit helps" situation.
> The better solution is to make fair rules, and have the resources to apply them fairly.

No, the better solution is to just open the borders and let everybody in who wants to work. Bigotry against foreigners is no less ugly than bigotry against any other arbitrary group. Letting in people who are willing to work cheaply isn't "illegitimate" or "abuse", it benefits everyone involved.

Here's a good short video on "anti-foreign bias":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXMnAPGY1uE
> I don't see much of an upside doing this.

Well you ditch the huge, thick lightning connector for starters. That's why the MacBook Pro doesn't have ethernet anymore, it's just too thick for the case.
We need the vacation
We are two desperate PhD students and we want to make one small request.

We haven’t had a f* vacation for a f* long time. Due to f* financial constrains we won’t be able to have a f* vacation for at least 5 more years.

https://www.fundmytravel.com/Ugne-Lilith-1401984039/campaigns/Two-PhD-students-have-deserved-a-rest-1401984503/view
> like the SCDP office on “Mad Men“: mostly private offices, but with a pseudo-open “Creative Lounge“ that facilitates collaboration but retains basic human stuff like doors, for some sense of sonic isolation.

Except SCDP's creative lounge doesn't have doors, see the floor plan: http://www.jordanorlando.com/other/scdp/
It's total nonsense. The connector is not the problem with the quality, you would need something like $5000 drivers before the connector is the problem.
> If Netflix is 35% of global internet traffic at peak capacity..., is it really fair to treat them like every other company?

Yes it is.

If you solve their problems in the general case, then that solution will also work for the next big user, and for the small users as well. If you special-case handling for them, then it will be harder for the next new entrant (who could even be a Netflix-upending upstart) to become established.

They do use more resources, there is no question about that, but they also have higher costs to their ISPs. This cost could be mitigated by them running their own internal network and peering directly with other backbone providers (they already do this to some extent). But in an architectural sense that option is available to anyone (in practice, of course, nobody is doing BGP for their home network).

If you believe in the original promise of the end to end network (a promise which is currently lying in the street gasping for breath) then you don't want netflix special cased.

It's no surprise that Verizon (with POTS roots) and Comcast (hub and spoke cable provider) don't have end-to-end in their DNA, but rather a tollbooth model of the world. It doesn't mean we have to go along with it.
Snowden and Schneier endorsed Reset the Net. Google, Mozilla, EFF, Twitter, and many others endorsed it. A bunch of awesome users participated, and shared how they are making positive changes as well. Feel free to share too, if you have anything positive to contribute. https://www.resetthenet.org/#add-yourself
"Christian" is an ambiguous term. Mormons qualify as Christian by some definitions ("worships Jesus of Nazareth," "considers self Christian") but not others ("adheres to the Nicene Creed," "considers the Old and New Testaments to be the only sacred books").
That's true except in markets where saturation has been achieved. In a market with 80-100%+ saturation, the per subscriber revenue does not increase year over year. In these cases, creating a customer doesn't actually increase shareholder value because there aren't enough customers that can be created to combat the atrophy of existing revenue.

Jack Welch was hugely successful in creating and competing in new markets specifically because competing in saturated markets is not profitable.

Those models are great for industries in the 0-80% saturation growth period, but aren't really applicable to high saturation markets.
I'd be curious to see how atheism fits in, if for this purpose it was counted as a religion.
The Political Fight Against Polio
Prolo. Be Found
Denmark has already been doing this 'experiment' since 2012[1] and unfortunately the bankers didn't jump on the streets shouting: money! credit! credit at cheap prices!

Time will tell, but the precedent isn't a good one.

[1] http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/Documents/ccbs/cew20...
Thanks :) I've heard of it before but never saw it in real life.
Step 1 - Wild speculation on something Apple might be doing.
Step 2 - Why we are all doomed!
Step 3 - Shame on you Apple!
You should blog about it. That way your arrogance can be documented. Apple is the one company that would do it. You can join this guy:

http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2001-05-20/commentary-so...

Personally, I think HN readers should be a little more open minded. At some point, headphones will need to evolve.
Makes perfect sense: To combat a crisis which was caused by an overabundance of cheap money and a deregulated market we will put more money into the system and continue deregulating.
Liquidity refers to the fact that when you want to sell a stock, you can sell it immediately.

The more liquid something is, the closer it is to cash.

Think about your car -- if there was a public price for your car and you could decide at any moment whether you wanted to sell for that price, or close to that price, that would be a benefit to you. But instead selling your car is quite a chore and you are never sure whether you are getting ripped off or not. A liquid market has a public price and a degree of fairness and confidence baked into that price.

In order to provide liquidity market makers agree to buy stocks from anyone who will sell them, and then take care of finding the buyer on the other end. The difference between what they buy it for and what they sell it for is called the 'spread' and it is how market makers traditionally have made money. The spread is also the fair fee they charge for the service they provide, which is liquidity, and the risk they take. If market makers did not know for sure that someone else would be willing to buy the stock right away, that they might have to sit on it, they would be taking on a very large risk. The more people that buy and sell, the less real that risk becomes.

HFT makes their money, generally, by front running. Front running is the practice of buying a stock because you know the California Pension Fund is about to buy it, and so you know the price is about to rise. You can immediately turn around and sell it when it goes up.

Front running by a bank is illegal, but it is widely suspected that many banks engaged in the practice for years. It is illegal because the bank is supposed to be acting on their client's behalf and in their interest, so when they are trusted to place the order, they first buy some of the stock for themselves or for the bank's inside funds. It is basically insider trading.

When HFT engages in front running, they have detected that an order is coming down the pike, and they jump in front at the last nanosecond. The reason they spend so much money trying to do this is because it is essentially fool proof when done correctly. You can argue that by not taking any market risk, and not holding the stocks, they aren't providing liquidity, they are parasites on real stock traders and they are essentially using inside information. But its not that cut and dried because there is almost no way to eliminate the problem. At least HFT reduce the time window during which someone's signal to purchase something can be exploited.

It used to be that humans managed all of this. Large brokerage houses would be responsible for executing these trades, and it was common practice for brokers to tip each other off when they received large orders. These tips were very valuable because they guaranteed a winning trade. If you ever wondered how meat-head frat boys could make millions of dollars on Wall Street despite not being especially intelligent, this was a big part of it. At least now the people who are scalping everyone's orders have to be brilliant.
Things that work better when they are socialized than when they are privatized. Like healthcare.
You're looking at this all wrong. It's not that Netflix is taking up 35% of all bandwidth. It's that CONSUMERS are choosing to spend 35% of their consumption on Netflix.

The ISPs are punishing consumers for their choices - it's just ridiculous.
This seems like FUD. Being able to stream audio through Lightning is necessary for audio docks and other accessories. It's quite a leap to say they're going to remove the headphone jack.
It seems unlikely in the short-term, at least. Give them a few years, and Beats supporting it widely, and who knows?

Though as a counter-argument, I might have said that about removing the 30-pin adaptor for lightning. It involved dropping a huge legacy accessory market, after all...

(Of course, this is all wild speculation and completely unsubstantiated. So there's that.)
You're not as far off as you think. It seems very few commenters to this thread understand how the internet actually operates from a business perspective.

When you install a server in a colo, you don't get free transit. You find a transit provider (like Level3, Cogent, or NTT) and you pay them for bandwidth. You can understand this very intuitively as most hosting services (like AWS) will charge you for bandwidth.

As a service provider (like Weebly), you are paying your own transit provider for a certain amount of bandwidth, and they are covering the costs of delivering that bandwidth to (usually) anybody globally and the costs of maintaining their network.

If a network gets large enough, they may often negotiate peering agreements with other networks. So Level3 and Cogent may have a peering agreement, or Level3 and Comcast may have a peering agreement. These are generally set up when two networks deliver roughly the same amount of traffic to each other, or it's considered beneficial to both parties to get the networks closer, and it simplifies the working relationship.

These peering agreements can often become contentious when they become imbalanced. Very early on, I remember a fight Cogent and France Telecom had over peering -- FT felt like they were getting the raw end of the deal, and de-peered with Cogent. Cogent refused to pay another transit provider for access to FT's network and so traffic from the Cogent network to FT would drop. They resolved about a week later, with lots of unhappy customers caught in the middle.

As you can see, it's simply not the case that (a) service providers never pay for bandwidth because the end-user already pays for bandwidth and (b) peering / free transit is guaranteed.

Maybe I'm not understanding the nuances here, but it seems to me like Netflix is taking an ideological stance to hide behind the fact that they are trying to negotiate a better business agreement for themselves.
"I assume X is more performant ... I haven't actually benchmarked it"

I believe that's usually spelled "I am making this up".
Trusting Hardware
Oh no, not the "maximising shareholder value" argument again! This argument has three fundamental problems. First, it is difficult to tell what would "maximise shareholder value". Second, it misses the fact that something that could "maximise shareholder value" on short term could very well minimise "shareholder value" on long term (or the other way around). Third, and this is the biggest one, people involved in a private company (employees, directors, shareholders) often have an agenda that goes beyond simply making more money. That's because they are human beings.
I completely agree with you. The last mile should be public, with anyone permitted to provide service to customers (similar to the old DSL/CLEC/ILEC model).
Remember that when the cable companies started they were competing with over-the-air TV. To convince people to switch to cable, they had to provide something valuable enough to justify the cost. Content was that thing.

The reason ISPs can charge both the customers and the content providers is because we have no other choice. Where I live I have a choice of two providers: Comcast or Verizon. My choices are: use one of these two, or have no Internet. Not much of a choice.
Someone please clarify my doubts. When I run a server, I have to pay for bandwidth costs. For eg. My website hosted on linode gets me 20TB of data transfer limit. I expect end users to be able to view content worth 20 tb of up/down data transfer. Netflix runs its own servers but the ISP providing connectivity must be already charging Netflix for a certain bandwidth and data transfer limit. If the ISP is charging for data transfer already, I expect the ISP to provide the entire service. For eg. Let us assume that Verizon charges netflix 1 usd per tb of data transfer. And Netflix uses 20000tb of data in a month. Then Netflix owes Verizon 20000 usd a month. And Verizon has to serve the data according to the bandwidth agreed to.

Is Netflix not paying Verizon for the bandwidth and data transfer?

If Netflix is not paying Verizon then why does my hosting provider charge me for bandwidth and data transfer?
You can view the source code of all extensions installed in Chrome. The folder names are gibberish, but if you look at Date Created you can usually figure out what extension corresponds to which folder.

Windows: C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\<Name>\Extensions

Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Extensions

Linux: ~/.config/google-chrome/Default/Extensions/
I've heard from some people on H1Bs it was easy to transfer from one company to another.

Not sure how it happened, but maybe it's not so hard after all (especially if they lawyer up)
Django includes local variables and contextual lines in stack traces.
https://i.imgur.com/Iyk81mp.png
Funny how you assume headphones are the only thing anyone ever plugs into a headphone jack.
I'm honestly not sure what the Representative meant. This is just what my mother told me (non tech person, she could have misunderstood).
I left out the part where the rep told my mother she was already on the cheapest plan. Fortunately they had just mailed their yearly "price sheet" that listed Economy Plus Internet, with prices. Magically when my mother mentioned this by name, it became available.

My general sense is that these types of conversations happen daily at Comcast and such...I've heard too many similar stories over the years.
Sure. What you're asking for is ... The graphic itself is powered by CSV's of the relevant data, pub'd out here:

Jobs: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2014/03/05/state-o...

Wages: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2014/03/05/state-o...

(Note that you'll want to adjust those wages for inflation, and those jobs for population growth, depending on what you're doing.)

But our versions aren't really "cleaned up" in any meaningful way. The BLS already seasonally adjusts the jobs numbers for their CES series, which is super handy. Instead, go to the original source here:

http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/dsrv?ce

... and walk through the wizard to pick which data points you'd like to include in your query. One big tip, once you're on the results screen, is to click on "More Formatting Options", and then choose the "Multi-series table" format. That'll give you something much easier to pipe into Excel or into a database.

Enjoy!
Gates Foundation financed PBS programming which promoted Microsoft interests
Wild theory: the bezel has 4 sensors - including the earpiece, FaceTime camera, ambient light sensor, and proximity sensor[1]

They already have a patent to put the proximity/light sensor in the display, now they're removing the earpiece. If they get rid of the camera, they won't need a bezel. Boom?

[1] http://www.macrumors.com/2014/06/05/solar-cell-ambient-light...
Or when your ISP 'requires' Windows
I think the issue is more that the ISPs are demanding payment at both ends of the tunnel. They charge you and I for transit (best-effort though it may be) and then when a bulk of their customers traffic turns to a popular network, attempt to charge that network to upgrade their port speed. (something which is customarily handled for free between peered carriers since both are charging their customers) Think of it this way - it's as if I pay UPS to send packages and then they request fees from the cities they deliver to, or they only deliver 100 packages a day to the municipality. That would be insane, and laughed out of court, but that's what Comcast/Verizon are doing.

Also, intentionally physically underprovisioning the connection is throttling, plain and simple. You are limiting the amount of traffic that can traverse that network boundary to 10G/40G/Whatever your port speed is. What difference does it make if I do it in software or simply refuse to bind more ports to the team?
Do you consider Verizon a cable company? I don't.

Come to think of it, what really separates cable and telephone companies these days? Most of them sell the same things as the others (TV, internet, phone), and the distinction is largely historical and technology based.
Y'know, Forbes, there's enough somewhat-questionable stuff that Apple gets up to that an utterly unsubstantiated "well, they MIGHT be doing this and it would be BAAAAD" post is really not needed.