skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Despite the threats, I refused to alter my manuscript or return the documents. Instead, we argued that according to Executive Order 12065, “classification may not be restored to documents already declassified and released to the public” under the Freedom of Information Act. That prompted the drama to move all the way up to the White House. On April 2, 1982, President Reagan signed a new executive order on secrecy that overturned the earlier one and granted him the authority to “reclassify information previously declassified and disclosed.”"

This is truly frightening stuff.

The NSA is above the law. Even when they're not; they have the power to change the law.
No.js, my new solution for JavaScript conditionals (pull requests welcome)
More speculation on rumored Apple, Tesla deal
Disassembling an attempted Shellshock exploit
I found the article rambling and mostly pointless...

However, if you have a weak background in math and want to get up to speed before going into calculus and beyond, I have 2 suggestions.

1) Lial's Basic College Math[1] is adequate and will get you up to speed.
2) Serge Lang's "Basic Mathematics" is great and will cover all you need to go into a rigorous theory based college math class.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&field-keywords=lials%20basic... The editions basically the same... pick the cheapest

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Basic-Mathematics-Serge-Lang/dp/038796...
Fair enough. I'd just use a LTE base station over WIFI and encrypt anything running through it if it was me.
Exercise, and in particular 30 minutes or more, every day, has been successful as one of the best forms of preventive medicine out there. It's highly effective against progression in depression, anxiety, knee arthritis, frank diabetes, and many other illnesses. One of the best videos that illustrates the benefits is 23 1/2 by Dr. Mike Evans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUaInS6HIGo

We based our app on the notion of moving at least 30 minutes every day. We've had very positive feedback from people that cope with depression and/or anxiety. Would love your feedback: http://human.co
>In addition, calling the crimes “an international cause célèbre involving fundamental constitutional rights of United States citizens,” the task force pointed to the likelihood that the NSA would put political pressure on anyone who dared to testify against it. What’s more, the report added, defense attorneys for senior NSA officials would likely subpoena “every tenuously involved government official and former official” to establish that the illegal operations had been authorized from on high. “While the high office of prospective defense witnesses should not enter into the prosecutive decision,” the report noted, “the confusion, obfuscation, and surprise testimony which might result cannot be ignored.”
Isn't weightlifting just picking up heavy things? Isn't cycling just pedaling around a bike? Isn't running just walking fast?

Try a yoga class, you'll see.
"We do Little Data here."

Said no dev team ever.

Who in the world wants to work with little or mildly large data? No one. Everyone does Big Data. I've used the word too when processing < 1TB worth of data. Seemed big to me.

It is really just a fad word at this point "Cloud". *aaS, or how "Object Oriented" was.
> people will still want to archive their downloads

I don't know how true this is. Even the tech-savvy folks I know rely primarily on Netflix/Spotify/etc, and in the rare instances they buy something, they trust iTunes/Amazon/etc to hold it for them. (I continue to think that is nuts.)
How do you suggest “removing empathy” from the decisionmaking process?

Basically, as far as I can tell, you’re advocating pulling the “politics” out of “policy”, but that’s really damn difficult, perhaps impossible. Just stating it as a goal is not useful, without some kind of concrete proposal.

The people in charge are always going to advance their own interests, and there’s no way anyone has figured out to put a completely impartial and dispassionate authority in charge of a government.

The way the US does things (ideally; in theory) is to build a system of checks and balances in the government, and try to spread the power widely enough in the population (e.g. via elections of local representatives who meet together to make policy) that any particular group is unable to exert their will without some measure of consensus and cooperation from everyone else.

The problem in practice is that some groups have gained so much power and wealth, compared to everyone else, that they can game and coopt many or most of these institutions; meanwhile, other groups have so little power or visibility that they are effectively unrepresented.

I guarantee you, if you build an institution designed to be “empathy free” — for instance, some board of highly trained unelected technocrats — to make decisions, their process will be analyzed and gamed to the extent possible by the super-rich.
Take a look at Daniel Willingham's material and his book
"Why Don't Students Like School"

Here's a review of the book:
http://ed-policy.blogspot.com/2009/04/one-of-handfull-one-of...

Here's Dr Willingham's web site with a lot of articles worth reading:
http://www.danielwillingham.com/articles.html

Here's his credentials:
Earned his B.A. from Duke University in 1983 and his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Harvard University in 1990. He is currently Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, where he has taught since 1992.
> holding a particular position

This is the "exercise" part. Your really don't realize how much effort it takes to hold a position until after you've had to hold it for a minute or two. It's my favorite form of exercise. It's not an endorphin rush, per se, but more of an endorphin creep. Also, in my experience, The endorphin high seems to last longer than a high intensity workout. To me, it's just as good, except, different.
>So we had to essentially cold call schools, find teachers/admins emails online, and fish around our personal network for intros. To say it didn't go well is an understatement. Our success rate, of even a phone call, was nearly 1% (roughly one answer per 100 or so emails/calls). We eventually locked down a core group of users simply by contacting so many people. Aside from other bureaucratic factors in the public schooling system we failed simply because we couldn't establish a growing user base.

I've found that walking into the school gets much better results. I work in test prep.

There's no magic bullet for learning about clients, and it depends on the niche. In my case (LSAT prep) I learned about LSAT students because I had been an LSAT tutor. In fact, I still do a bit of tutoring just to stay in touch with what students are going through.

Other niches would require completely different approaches. Steps:

1. Identify target client
2. Find out where they congregate, how they communicate
3. Use *that* approach.
4. Once you find some, ask for referrals.

I found targeted cold calls worked pretty well. Targeted in the sense that a meaningful % of whoever I was targeting would say "woah, I gotta get me some of that", even if they had not previously heard of me.

The way you get that reaction is by knowing the needs of the prospect, putting yourself into their shoes.
When you say exit-intent, do you mean the pop-up at the beginning of the page, or the bottom of the page one? I'm much less bothered by the latter because it's less counter-intuitive to me, and it doesn't get in the way of me reading the content. If that's what you meant, what's your take on the former?

That said, I know that pop-ups work. That does not make them less irritating to all of those people who like to know what they sign up for before actually writing their email address there (the pop-upon-loading one). 42% more of 2% still annoys a large chunk of the 97% left.
http://dvdisaster.net/en/index.html
Unhappy is putting it mildly.
The following was our road to P/M fit. Sorry for the long post...

0.) Identify market
The short version is that one of our co-founders had very deep domain expertise in education and I had been developing a series of education apps for my daughter. We used this domain expertise to formulate our general understanding of the market. Then we spoke with customer after customer about our ideas, their current initiatives, budgets, problems, what excited them, and so on.

1.) Before trying to get P/M fit we created a way to measure P/M fit for our business. As we're a B2B company, we used the following as our top-line P/M fit metrics (a,b are quant, while c is a qual measure):

a. Length of sales cycle (shorter = closer to P/M fit)

b. Number of objections (fewer = closer to P/M fit)

c. Intensity of objections (weaker = closer to P/M fit)

2.) Building on #0, we eventually found an idea that resonated with the majority of customers. So, we built a first MVP. Bluntly, it was a complete piece of shit...and I'm the one who developed it.

However, there were customers who paid for this pile. So we started to try to sell more, but our P/M fit metrics were not good. Cycles were too long, objections were intense and numerous.

3.) Based on #2, we discussed what we thought would be the solution to finding P/M fit. There were two core directions, but we did not know which one would work.

So, we built a 2nd MVP that addressed the problems in our 1st MVP by adding the two groups of features we thought customers would want. We developed both ideas in the same MVP b/c it was a hell of a lot faster than doing two MVPs back to back.

One of the two ideas yielded substantial improvement in our revenue and P/M fit metrics. So, we pushed on this idea by emphasizing and selling only the features that looked promising.

However, we hit a point where our P/M fit metrics were better, but were not improving and were not good enough.

4.) We did not build a new MVP at this point. What we did was modify our sales collateral, our pitch, our emphasis to highlight the features and value prop that most resonated with our customers, while eliminating the areas that caused the most friction in the sales cycle. We kept tweaking the sales pitch until we found one that improved our metrics. Literally, we knew we were ready for our 3rd iteration of the product when customers were pushing us to deliver the product that we had sold them on, but that was not yet developed.

5.) Develop first release of product that a segment of the market clearly wants and is willing to pay for without wasting time or objecting too much.

6.) We continue to do all of the above, but in tighter/faster iterations. We are also using usage metrics to increasingly guide some decision making, but ultimately our P/M fit metrics are still working for us, so we continue to hone/improve them.
I've been using Trigger.io like this for years, it's very useful.

But don't forget that the app download from the AppStore will have old code which may or may not be a problem when you first open the app.
Interesting article about the processes that go into writing software supporting manned spaceflight at NASA: http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff
I didn't think so, it says the source (meteor.com) right beside it which makes it a bit less ambiguous.
I agree with general sentiment, that things are suboptimal, but when prosecuting people where do you draw the line? This is no easy problem that can be readily solved.
> Until the guilty are prosecuted, there won't be any real change in the way that the U.S. intelligence agencies operate.

I disagree. There will be changes, but for the worse.

Because now those running the programs have a real world validated proof that people don't care and there are no consequences. So that is a good signal to crank up the level a few notches.
It's almost certainly more complicated than this. The NSA is scary, but it's also not a revenue producing part of the government, and therefore it must justify its existence in the budget every year. Lawmakers therefore must be doing some sort of cost/benefit analysis and have determined (perhaps by looking at the NSA's secret output) that the cost is worth it.

tl;dr: If Congress wanted to chastise the NSA, all they have to do is not fund it.
Today we'd run them through a portable scanner, upload the individual PDFs to a crowd source site, and have the proper order in under a day.
These two bugs are extremely basic stuff one would find in the most alpha of alphas. If it's been there for 7-8 years, something is either massively wrong with it or development on it is dead (which makes it kind of .. useless, imho)
How to Use Digest Emails to Help Users Build Habits
JPMorgan Data Break
What? No, the operating-system is responsible for the dialog, and it would be saying something like:

"The following USB device has requested direct control over your mouse and keyboard inputs. Do you want to grant it access?"

"Note: If you are unable to interact with your computer, please wait X seconds for emergency instructions on how to enable this device."

You can't make anything totally idiot-proof, but a lot of people will be surprised/scared when a very unusual and seldom-seen dialog pops up when they plug in a particular misbehaving memory stick.
Do you have examples of backdoored encryption from ancient times? I'm curious what you mean.
I've seen multiple studies that suggest a correlation between very high Omega-6 to Omega-3 ratios and various cancers, but I've never seen anything regarding brain damage.

Some casual googling just now suggests to me that this notion of generalized "inflammation" and it causing brain damage isn't rooted in an understanding of how pathology works and seems mostly talked about in rather quacky "woo" circles.[1][2]

That being said, it does seem like over-expression of inflammatory mediators like cyclooxygenase-2 (COX2) in the brain can cause brain inflammation[3], and Wikipedia says high Omega-6 to Omega-3 ratio can result in over-expression of COX2 in some parts of the body, so it's certainly possible that high Omega-6 levels could result in over-expression of COX2 in the brain, but I haven't yet seen anything supporting that.

Regarding Dr. Weil, he seems all over the lot with what he advocates. Sometimes he advocates quackery based on "some religious group somewhere says it works," but other times he points to a small body of positive evidence and rightly points out that there's an unfortunate lack of further higher quality research, and other times he espouses very logical or well-supported ideas. And unfortunately, he often doesn't make clear which category the current thing he's talking about falls under and often doesn't cite sources.

For what it's worth, his food pyramid doesn't ban gluten, and explicitly allows for occasional pasta. According to your link, his main criticism of glutenous foods has nothing to do with gluten but that such foods usually contain wheat flour, which has a high glycemic index, even in the form of whole wheat flour. In fact, he strongly recommends low-GI whole grains, including bulgur wheat.

[1] http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=729545

[2] http://scienceblogs.com/whitecoatunderground/2009/07/23/magi...

[3] http://tpx.sagepub.com/content/32/6/650
Fascinating article.

I was intrigued by the mention of the "Black Chamber," alias the Cipher Bureau and the predecessor of the NSA. Looking it up, I was further intrigued by mentions of institutional cryptography in Elisabethan England and so on. If I'm interested in this at a purely layman's level (I'm more into the history than the practical implications today) what books or essays would you recommend my reading?
double nice:

"The owner(s) of Crypto AG are unknown, supposedly even to the managers of firm, and they hold their ownership through bearer shares"
I come from a very similar background as the writer. As a young man, I showed high potential for languages. So when I went to college, I loaded up on languages, graduating with 6 different languages at at least the 200-level and fluency in 3 of those languages. Unlike the writer, I chose neither military nor government work upon graduation, but instead worked as an ATA-certified translator for 10+ years, primarily translating pharmaceutical documentation and medical studies.

I've since moved into professional software development and am now rusty in the spoken languages I used to be fluent in. I work with a number of different programming languages, primarily doing web development since that's where the money is in remote work (although I also have a strong interest in embedded programming). In between, I also finished graduate school in public health (don't ask!), taking multiple upper-level biostats and epidemiology courses.

Anyway, people were always interested in how I learned so many languages. As it turned out, I used similar techniques as what the writer describes to not only learn languages, but also learn graduate-level quantitative coursework, and now programming languages, algorithms, and data structures (an ongoing task!). People are taking exception to her description of the technique as "rote learning". Perhaps a better emphasis would be on repetition, drilling, and fluency. But for me at least, this did entail things like flash cards -- Quizlet is a godsend -- and repeated, focused practice of short problems.

I have found that the technique doesn't seem to work as well for complex algorithms as it did for math and languages. Maybe because it's difficult to break down some algorithms into small parts, perhaps because I just haven't figured out how to do so yet, or maybe I'm just getting older.

But I am in total agreement with the writer that modern education does a grave disservice to young learners by discarding rote learning and repetition.
first of all, "pop up overnight" is in "quotes" because they didn't pop up over night. this industry and firms have been in existence for decades but only grew quickly in the last 10 years because commercial banks stopped lending money. did you hear about something called the "credit crisis"?

second, what you're saying is so blindingly obvious that it doesn't even need to be said - startups do not fall into the category of traditional businesses with strong P&Ls and great balance sheets and constantly increasing margins, like a bank wants to see. most bootstrapped startups operate at break even, or can even dip into loss for a few months at a time. these are the companies that need the money.

this will immediately disqualify you for a bank loan. which is the original premise of this entire thread - the banks won't give you shit.
Last month at EuroBSDCon, Marc Espie gave a neat talk describing some of the performance improvements he’s made to OpenBSD’s Make (and some positive words about Ninja as well) – http://www.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsdcon2014-parallel-make.p...
Earlier today the flesh on my index finger was torn asunder by a sheet of paper. Do you find that heartbreaking? If I told you that the paper cut was the worst thing that ever happened to me, would you consider it to be heartbreaking?
> I replaced most breakfasts with Soylent.

What were your breakfasts previously?
This is why the education system will never ever change. Too many people learn too many different ways. Some people can read a formula and instantly memorize it. Other's need a connection to that formula. Some need to figure out how that formula was derived in order to understand and memorize it. And some know the formula before you even show it too them.

Not to rehash what you hashed, but it depends who you are. If you are really good at memorizing, you may not need to make connections. You may just be able to memorize everything. Some people can.
Only if everybody uses phones with Apple Pay compatible payment systems will every business see the need to support Apple Pay. I hope everyone gets on the same standard soon.
New Evernote web client
Not if they stick you in a room and say "none of these documents can leave," which is what it sounds like happened here.
It's just a damn teaser. :-(
"The full article appears in the Fall 2014 Nautilus Quarterly. Subscribe today!"
Google threatened with lawsuit over nude celebrity photos
And whoever read page 556 would be tweeting about who kills Dumbledore before the last pages were even scanned.
I could hardly stomach the self-congratulatory tone of the introduction. Jeez.
Ask HN: Review my website: http://colate.it
Hi Guys and Girls
I'm fairly new to web development and have just pushed a new personal project of mine online (with the hope that it will help get me a job!).

In short, the site gathers news links from various news outlets (i know there are probably plenty that do something similar) including less well-known sites in the West like Al Jazeera and China CCTV News to help give a more well rounded view (if the person wants). There is then an Opinions section where signed in users can write their opinion on a news story (the story doesn't have to be from my site). All users can read the opinions regardless of whether they're a signed in user.

You're feedback would be greatly appreciated but please don't be too harsh! I'm still learning and i know there's plenty more than can/should be done especially if i get some traffic. I've already taken on board some feedback and the site now displays images for stories as well as reducing twitter permissions.

Thanks so much
S.F., Oakland at forefront of U.S. minimum wage movement
5 Art installations which will move you
Double-edged sword. On the one hand, I'm only going to marry a virgin now. On the other hand, there might already be kids walking around out there who resemble me.
If you really want to push your body to its limit, try a Bikram yoga (or any hot yoga) class. I was in pretty good shape when I started and it took me almost 6 months before I could even attempt to complete all the asanas (and about the first 10 classes I felt like I came close to passing out a few times). I've been practicing now for 6 years and still have a long way to go before I feel I'll have mastered the asanas. It easily meets or exceeds the impact that weightlifting has on my body.
http://mbed.org/technology/os/
https://mbed.org/technology/device-server/
Etsy’s Trying to Fix Tech’s Women Problem. Why Aren’t You?
aka the Mediator pattern: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediator_pattern
Looks like a nice attempt. Howie Choset (CMU) and Hirose (Tokyo Tech) groups did some excellent work on high end snake gaits though. Take a peek ... buttery smooth! :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8j0jNxMeSQ
I have an idea: a site for crowd sourcing stories
You write a few lines, people continue writing it, then someone else pops in, and then it goes on and on.

Discuss.
I can recognize some of my experience in what she's saying -- as I've been told several times in math/stats "you don't understand this, you just get used to it."

That's a bit of troubling statement at first, but I think it's sortof a shorthand way of saying that much of the understanding available comes through the process of repeated manipulation and observing outcomes.

I've also noticed that a decade or two after going through a math undergrad, the limited material I've retained best was the stuff I learned my freshman year and had to repeatedly re-apply in other coursework.

Still, I think she may be overstating the case about the limits of conceptual understanding, though (or perhaps bringing an engineer's perspective to the discussion rather than a mathematician's. ;)

Practice is crucial, but when I need to dredge old mostly-forgotten material up out of my brain, the interconnections formed by the mapping of conceptual space we call "proofs" often turn out to be pretty helpful. There's plenty of things I can't remember that I can derive from what I can recall.
What's the chance the blacklist administration code is hosted on github?
Do they need anything above and beyond an NFC reader that supports contactless cards? Contactless is getting really popular in the UK - it's super cool if it is just that that it needs to work. Contactless on the tube too!
Tethering/Hotspot + EyeFi Wifi-Enabled SD card.

It's possible the room is a faraday cage, but not likely.