skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First, I apologize if that came across as one dimensional, but it's a very complicated issue which is difficult to really cover in a single HN comment. I also don't lean one way or the other - I think the American hegemony has served humanity very well, and an intelligence advantage is critical to that.
But, on the other hand, just as there are countries "on the brink of nuclear capability", which posses the technology and material and can develop a bomb in few months time (like Japan for example) - so is USA approaching an "on the brink" police state, with huge surveillance capabilities, militarized local police and a whole lot of armed federal agencies and national guard units. These capabilities, in the wrong hands or at a time of crisis, can lead America down a very dangerous slope.

So I definitely don't take this issue as a simplistic one.

However, more to your point:

1. The "American Establishment" is part of the problem, not of the solution. It's a classic case showing failures of checks and balances and of a shady power grab in the executive branch. The support of NSA activities is not a partisan affair.

2. In the Snowden case, a significant part of the media chose to label his actions as treason. Some did so directly, and others through adopting the official White House line. It was even worse with Manning.

3. The constitution, free market and gun rights lend America the notion of the "land of the free". That resonates across a significant part of the American public, and that's certainly a common perception (not necessarily a hawkish one). Freedom is a concept that's rooted deeply in the American mind. It's easy for an ordinary citizen to assume that a country placing so much emphasis on freedom would act in good faith to uphold it.

If you survey Americans about "what is the most free country of the world", they would say USA. They wouldn't believe you if you told them the USA has more monitoring measures to track its own citizens in place than any other country in the world, North Korea, China and Russia included.

So while my post was a bit one dimensional, so I say is the perception among the American public, and this good faith the public has in the country has given each administration a blank check to do as they please.
That's true, but it's also worth pointing out that the worst case can be trivially prevented by shuffling the array before you Quicksort it. Which is maybe a confirmation of your larger point.
Fair enough, maybe the author can explain why it's ironic.
Some -- including the one used in the video -- can be programmed to automatically return home (based on GPS) in case of a comm failure.
Show HN: Marketplace for Ghost Blog
It is? I'm not saying you're wrong, but I haven't seen legally organized protests (yes, you do have to file the appropriate paperwork) recently which have actually been shut down by an enormous governmental show of force. Do you have any examples?
> incredibly sensitive to phase

Under contrived situations such as square waves and headphones. However, in general, the ear is not particularly sensitive to phase. [0] [1] which both discuss, in particular, [2] and [3] as well as many others listed in their bibliographies.

The stated conclusions are, emphasis mine, "Given the data provided by the above cited references we can conclude that phase distortion is indeed audible, though generally speaking, only very subtly so and only under certain specific test conditions and perception circumstances." [1]

Reads may also be interested in an additional conclusion which reads thusly: "Room acoustics further masks whatever cues that the hearing process may depend upon to detect the presence of phase distortion." [1]

[0] http://www.silcom.com/~aludwig/Phase_audibility.htm

[1] http://www.audioholics.com/room-acoustics/human-hearing-phas...

[2] Lipshitz, Stanly P., Pocock, Mark, and Vanderkooy, John, "On the Audibility of Midrange Phase Distortion in Audio Systems,' J. Audio Eng. Soc., Vol. 30, No, 9, Sept. 1982, pp 580-595.

[3] Toole, Floyd E., "The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms - The Stereo Past and the Multichannel Future," 109th AES Conv., Los Angeles, Sept 2000.
Please don't misunderstand my post as an attack on research that has a more theoretical impact. What I'm saying is that if you claim to have found a faster version of some algorithm, then it should actually be true (preferably with working code). I have no problem with people showing a theoretically better version as long as they explain whether or not it's useful in practice.

Also I would point out that as computers get faster things that were suboptimal before become feasible and begin to outperform the tricks people used before. A good example would be spellchecking, which had to be done using a wide array of cleverness but now we can just throw tons of computing power at it and get better results.
based on even just his last few blog posts i can see "blowhard" or "shill" but intelligence asset? what's your reason for saying this?
That thought went through my head regarding the XKeyScore link as well. I clicked both that link and your Tor link.
Fear Files Dar ki Sachi Tasveerein 5th July 2014 Episodes Online | BigTvForum
Pedantic: daemons, not daemon's (the possessive) :)
A good way I found to store and use markov chain data was through the filesystem. Each words gets its own file, and every word that comes after that word is put in that file. The problem of the probability of one word coming after another solves itself if you just let the word be added to that list multiple times, one for each occurrence.
Look at all of the people that have gotten fired (or lost their careers) for things they said or did in their private time over the past year.

The firings were brought on by mob mentality on Twitter and Facebook with no judge or jury. All to silence opposing view points.

If such behavior is accepted as normal, why is it any surprise that our government is doing the same thing..and worse?

Big brother is here, and it's us. I'm glad I learned early on to stay anonymous on the Internet.
I have some methodological problems with this piece. They're making claims about the makeup of this data set, that 50% of the documents contain minimized references to US persons for instance, or that 90% of the account holders were not intelligence targets, but we don't actually know whether this data represents NSA collections as a whole. There are 160,000 documents over a four-year period. That seems far too low to be the sum total of all NSA collections, so it must be a sample. But is it a random sample or was this data selected by Snowden using some criteria? How do we know that Snowden didn't choose data from one particular program or using certain selectors and that that particular data tends to have more or less US persons or a higher or lower percentage of intelligence targets than NSA intercepts taken as a whole?

I also find the following claim problematic:
>> Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy...

So there were 65,000 minimized references in 160,000 documents. But we also know that a "minimized reference" doesn't actually mean the a US person was the sender or the recipient - for instance, we know from Gellman that someone talking about President Obama would constitute a minimized reference. The first sentence, "Many of them were American" is not quantified, likely because the Post doesn't actually know how many participants in the intercepts were American.
This comment covers much of what is wrong with common interpretations of acoustics.

> the human ear is largely insensitive to moderate variations in volume/frequency... but it's incredibly sensitive to phase.

No, it's not. The human auditory system is sensitive to time variation. Phase shift may contribute a time shift but only at frequencies low enough that their wavelength has reasonably relation to the spacing of the ears. For example at 10Khz the wavelength is far too short for 'phase' to impact arrival time. Ultimately what actually matters in this regard with the human auditory response is group delay, not phase.

> Phase is how we discern directionality (stereo), among other things.

As mentioned above, what matters in the context of what your saying is group delay, but that is far from the only thing that matters for directionality. The human psycoscoutic system is very complex, part of directionality is group delay, part of it is frequency attenuation caused by sound wrapping around the ear from the ear, part of it is a half dozen other things. 'Phase' doesn't come even close to being a catch all cause.

> To my ears, the best and most musical sounding speakers

And thus we've devolved from science, as this usually goes. What on earth does 'musical sounding speakers' even mean?

> It's very easy to measure frequency response. It's very hard to measure phase alignment.

I have no idea where you came up with this statement but it is very easy to measure the response of a loudspeaker, both in amplitude and phase.

> If you want to see serious map-over-territory thinking, look at THD specs for amplifiers. It's super-easy to measure THD - just isolate harmonics of a sine wave a 1khz.

THD can be measured at only 1Khz, but it isn't something intrinsic to what 'THD' means. Measuring at only 1Khz is generally indicative of a crappy amplifier manufacturer looking to inflate their power numbers. Proper specs will provide a 20-20kHz THD rating.

> Dynamic recovery behavior, intermodulation distortion, stuff like this is what gives amps their distinctive sounds - but it's nearly impossible to measure!

If an amp has a distinctive sound, it has failed to achieve it's core design goal. I'm not sure what you think is impossible to measure, but I assure you it is not.
after three weeks of being bought the seller desided that he wanted it back. He expressed this by locking it with a 4 digit PIN and a message that stated “Give me back the laptop and give you back the money”, with out calling or anything.

In other words, the seller somehow had remote control of the laptop and locked it remotely? Things like this are why you should always reformat and reinstall all the software on computers you buy...

Bruteforcing it is the long way, the fastest way would be to use an EEPROM programmer to clear the EEPROM and rewrite the BIOS. This can usually be done in-circuit without any soldering with a little clip that goes onto the chip. A lot of laptop repair shops have this setup. Some of the newer models store the password in TPM, which caused the shops to initially replace the TPM with a new blank one but some RE later revealed that many (not all) can be cleared in the same way as before.

The fact that BIOS/EFI passwords can be easily cleared must be one of the worst-kept secrets in the computer industry - the companies will often officially say that there is no way to reset them and that the whole motherboard has to be replaced in a not-so-successful attempt to propagate the myth that this protection is so secure that even they can't bypass it.
XSSnake - Online multiplayer Snake where the winner is allowed to do XSS
^ Q.E.D.
That's not a property of immutability. That's a property of certain specialized data structures, see "Purely Functional Data Structures" for a start, implemented in clojure.
Looking at the site and knowing a lot custom website development - I cannot see why this site would cost $500k other than the obvious answer, that it is state government willing to pay $500k for a $50k website.
I guess NSA owes Robert a beer for the helpful QA service!
Decouple Bootstrap from your html
just an idea I'm playing with - I'm mostly back-end stuff, so interested in thoughts & opinions
At first blush it seems fine to me; updating a purely-functional tree requires work that's O(depth of tree), and updating a Merkle tree also requires work that's O(depth of tree). I think that means that using a purely-functional structure to implement a Merkle tree requires at most a constant factor of extra time/space over using a mutable tree.
I like "Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small." -Rob Pike
I think as a practical matter, sure. But it's also really fun to explore "fancy" algorithms, even when you don't have a practical need for them. I certainly felt the tone of the article was less "I need to sort a shitton of data" and more "I'm checking out this cool thing."
Btw just to give a little bit of context, I thought I'd make a small mockup of what I mean: http://imgur.com/XqkMzUB

Basically, desaturated the two header colors a lot (still not perfect, but at least maybe it gives some contrast. I also ripped out the orange buttons and the redundant search box because they were garish and really hard to read. I also tweaked the fonts a little bit.

(Disclaimer: I am not a professional designer, these are just ideas so you can at least see what it would look like in an alternate universe).
Strictly speaking, it is not true that shuffling first avoids the worst case. Given a deterministic shuffling function, some permutation of input needs to shuffle to sorted order, which will again trigger the worst case.

Of course, shuffling is still potentially helpful because ascending/descending order is often common in many applications.
This is correct. Sadly, the first paragraph of the article contains some glaring errors.

"For Markov chains to be effective the current state has to be dependent on the previous state in some way;"

This is trivially untrue. A sequence of independently and identically distributed (iid) random variables is a Markov chain. An iid sequence is clearly effective at many things (e.g. Monte Carlo integration).

"Not every process has the Markov Property, such as the Lottery, this weeks winning numbers have no dependence to the previous weeks winning numbers." As lambdaphage pointed out, the Lottery does have the Markov property.
In the opposite direction of pragmatically avoiding "fancy" data-structures, you can find a description of a persistent min-heap via Brodal queues in Chris Okasaki's wonderful book _Purely Functional Data Structures_. Otherwise, it doesn't make too much sense to use the Fibonacci heap algorithm without mutable update.
> on why Excite management was having difficulty buying PageRank

The big money was in portals not search during those days. If I am not mistaken even the Google founders initially had no idea how to monetize it.
Gmail limits users to receive email 86,400 items per day
1. Couldn't a random hacker do that? Or a hacker affiliated with a private institution (e.g. News of the World)?

2. There's this terrible virus going around that locks you out of your PC or server meaning you lose all your data unless you pay the ransom of $500 in bitcoins. With this new trend in un-regulated crypto-currency, this scam cannot be stopped through the traditional means - financial/bank account freezes. Does this give any privacy proponents pause for thought? Also there's the old hack your webcam and blackmail you which has led people to commit suicide. Again, malicious hackers, not a gov't conspiracy There's actually a reason we've given power to police/enforcers in every aspect of life: because criminals are ruthless and prey on the innocent and gullible - physically, financially, and of course, now cyber-ly.

3. You've actually started to glean the important point in how we deal with cyber evidence as a society. Nobody's life has ever been ruined by getting put into an internal watch-list. But when list become enforceable (like the No-Fly list, or the McCarthy-era communist list) then lives are ruined. This is similar to your point about planting evidence: when the local police and prosecutor get brought into it, lives are at stake. I again wonder though why a spy agency would need to hack evidence onto your computer when they could simply plant in your house; that has happend thousands of times by dirty street cops, while your example - being carried out by a gov't agency - has never been reported to happen even once.
I hope there are sensor mechanisms that confirm and/or failsafe the exposures nowadays.
At the time of Therac-25, FDA was only budgeted to investigate 6 percent of device applications.

Currently, the same mistakes made in the eighties with Therac-25 are being made in many radiation therapy devices. The two NY Times articles (Pulitzer Prize winning) in 2010 and 2011 describe some of the newer cases.

What's shocking to me is that the incidents are always reported in isolation. People become briefly outraged, then the furor dies down until the next death.

Many of the comments in this thread suggest that people can't or won't face the fact that this is a current, ongoing problem of great complexity.

A couple of comments mentioned the coverage of Therac-25 in schools. Very little of what is taught in schools makes it into the programming of radiation therapy devices. History has shown that schooling is not a sufficient solution.

Other comments claim (erroneously) that the FDA is attending to the problem. The FDA has been carefully defanged by the medical device lobby. The FDA has gotten smarter, but has nowhere near the funding to keep pace with its charge and never will.

I wish I could say that I see some hope but I don't see it.
Extensive discussion here, from four days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7974023
The good music didn't go away. We just keep adding to it.
USA claim AQ have been using stenography since the 90s:

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/2001-02-05-binladen...

Commercial companies then built tools to identify most common steg, and AQ adapted by writing their own algorithms - which turned out to be not very good:

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/04/30/world/al-qaeda-documents-f...

It still breaks down, because you need to pre-share the arrangement of how you will exchange information that is hidden in images.
sub divisions in the usa are typically wood construction so this wouldn't really assist in residential construction
Link to the original article that this article is quoting from:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329762.700-conscious...
Is better possible?
The P/E comparison at the beginning sucks but it's an eye-catcher for the average reader.

I guess the real question is whether you believe, at the same value point, delivery costs will be less than prime real estate + customer service costs. At the moment the answer is no. Delivery is expensive at the scale and speed necessary to compete with going out to grab a meal. But if you believe in a future where autonomous cars are delivering people and shipments in a highly efficient way, mixed with a future of resource abundance (ie robots taking all the boring jobs) where human time becomes incredibly valuable... then it's not unlikely that a service like Sprig would beat out the traditional fast food model.

In fact, it's not unlikely that restaurants and most other brick and mortar business would just become API's on top of the delivery model.

However, I personally think Sprig is way too early to the game. Given an autonomous, speedy delivery system is (more than) a few years out, they must be handing out their investors' money trying to compete in the food business in today's market while waiting for the distant future. I bet order-taking companies like GrubHub end up partnering with Uber to fill this gap in the market early on, rather than a startup trying to do food + delivery at once today. But that's just my 2 cents.
Just some spelling errors:

Once pricing has been confirem you will receive the 30 day free trial period as if you had signed up on the day we launched payed version.

Should be:
Once pricing has been confirmed you will receive a 30 day free trial period as if you had signed up on the day we launched the paid version.
Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth
So, genius decides to fuck with God's ability to get publicity.

You one stupid fucken nigger. "Hey God talks! Let's fuck with him."
I believe you can use prepared transactios and some client smarts to mitigate this depending on your use case . There is some back and forth for sure, and the risk of locking the database is higher.
So I honestly never comment but felt moved to ask... What are you trying to test? What's the hypothesis you are trying to prove disprove?

You've spend 200k on a website which seems to function as intended, with a robust back end, and some comes tic issues.

Is your hypothesis:
"will ppl make list for me (for free)?"
"Do people care about lists"?
"Can i trick people into making lists and for me to profit off their user generated content"?

I'm sure there is something far more worthy here but I don't get it.
Among my favorites is Claude Shannon's model of language as a Markov processes in his seminal paper on information theory [0]. His presentation of ergodicity is also remarkably clear compared to the usual muddle about ensemble and time averages.

(The book version of Shannon's paper [1] is even a bit better.)

0. http://www3.alcatel-lucent.com/bstj/vol27-1948/articles/bstj...

1. http://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Theory-Communication-Clau...
And people are concerned about how Facebook ranks their wall posts?
Ah thanks wnscooke.
That has been updated and deployed..
There's a dead comment on this from hell-banned user uaygsfdbzf that is quite worthwhile. It's short so I'll just quote it here:

"All trusting trust posts made in the past 9 years should also link to David A. Wheeler's Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling - http://www.dwheeler.com/trusting-trust/dissertation/html/whe... (or the poster will be condemned as lazy :-)"
One could fork fibers and have smaller stacks and even make their size dynamic, but actually the number of active fibers per process has been fairly low in all our use cases so stack size was never a concern. The more interesting problem is that of running multiple processes in parallel so you can saturate the increasing number of cores, while retaining low jitter and having a sensible end user API.

My co-founder alexlamsl and I are actually working on something akin to Scala actors for JS that is portable between the browser via Web Workers and the server using Node and Common Node (https://github.com/olegp/common-node). We'll blog about it at https://starthq.com/blog/ in the near future.
I once had a prof who designed his own speakers and built them out of concrete. They were massive, full-range beasts that were flat down to 20 Hz. (in the right room). As it turns out, concrete is surprisingly good speaker material, aside from the near total lack or portability. Some crazy (and crazy rich) audiophile bought them for $50K. Selling slabs of concrete for $50K a pop sounds like a great business model, but there is a severely limited number of people willing to pay that much for speakers, and the speakers apparently took hundreds of hours of tweaking to work "properly" anyways.
Yes. Changed from http://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/07/consciousness-on-off-switch-....
I love that page! I link to it from my own semi-outdated page: http://theory.stanford.edu/~amitp/GameProgramming/Implementa...
i will join you.
They're pointing a zapper at different "areas" of someone's head and seeing what happens. That's what counts for brain science today. We have a long way to go.
I live in a CIA jail. The silence of the lambs -- the FBI wants to know my psychology because I am unusual.

The CIA want to employ me cracking their security. I have no skill in this but that's what they want. I should make bombs for them and see how long it takes me to get good. That would be fun.
I don't think reformatting would have helped in this scenario (in fact according to the blog post, he believes it made it work).

I don't own any macs, but I think this is some sort of "remote lock" function provided by apple.

It sounds like the buyer did not re-register the device with their own Apple ID (assuming that is possible).