skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reading https://muckrock.s3.amazonaws.com/foia_files/12-12-13_MR5970... might be a good start.

The Code of Federal Regulations section governing mail covers seems to indicate that the requirements for requesting a mail cover create absolutely no protections for USPS customers. For purposes relevant to the article, section 233.3(e)(2) is the most interesting. All that is necessary is to "specify the reasonable grounds" that national security is endangered, a fugitive is involved, a felony might be involved, or that forfeitable property (probably cash and/or drugs) needs to be identified. The request need not be restricted by person or place. If I think Walter White is cooking meth, the DEA can literally ask for a cover of all mail that passes through the USPS system, and the Chief Postal Inspector (or either of 2 possible designees) could give it to them for 30 days. Only communications KNOWN to be between a subject and his attorney are exempted.

Sections CFR 233.3(f)(2) and ASM 274.5 imply that the USPS cannot record data from the outside of mail in the absence of a mail cover order or other prescribed reason. That, in turn, implies that since (according to media reports) they have been doing it continuously since at least 2001, the head of DHS could simply be requesting a mail cover monthly, to support investigation of unspecified threats to national security. The CPI is required to keep those mail cover records for 8 years, though the data the send pursuant to those mail covers would be governed by the receiving agency's rules.

I would argue that the protections the USPS already has in place for the prevention of mail tampering generates a reasonable expectation of privacy in the external appearance of mail entrusted to the USPS. Since the mail must be placed in approved, closed, and statutorily-protected receptacles, are protected from viewing and tampering in transit, and delivered to [potentially lockable] receptacles, the mail itself is never in public view. There is no vantage point from which an ordinary member of the public could see and record the external mail data included in a mail cover. When I write a letter and mail it, I don't expect my neighbors to know to whom it was sent.

The courts have determined otherwise. In theory, the only way to trigger reconsideration would be to follow around postal delivery trucks, photographing and replacing mailbox contents. When you get arrested, bring up the precedent in your defense.

Mail exteriors are either private and confidential, and thus worthy of "reasonable search" protections, or they are not, and anyone should be able to photograph your mail. You can't have it both ways.
The post says that compliance is disabled by default and that all users will be notified via slack itself if it were to be enabled for your organization.
While I am currently trying to teach myself Haskell for exactly this reason (understand the "real big picture" in FP), I don't know if there is much harm in starting the journey by exploring some FP concepts in languages one is already familiar with, despite how lacking the language is in that regard. This presentation does point out many features that JavaScript lacks from "true FP" languages.

I, for one, don't know if I would have ever tried to start learning Haskell if I didn't discover some of the benefits of FP first hand through a familiar language.
I also don't see how that "stays true to the identity of the state".

I assume the red color it evoking the 'Big Apple' nickname for New York City. That, plus the skyline overlay makes it clear that this is a "New York City" license plate, not a New York State license plate (despite the fact that ~85% of vehicles registered in the state are registered outside NYC)

EDIT: I'm not currently able to reply to the child comments (which seems odd, as they're not that deep...), but it does appear I did misremember slightly. The actual percentage is closer to 80%.

10.9 million vehicles in total, 2 million in NYC.

http://dmv.ny.gov/statistic/2013reginforce.pdf
I think that is a reasonable approach. The question my days working on NASD (FINRA) compliance have trained me to ask is how Slack controls employee and vendor write access to the audit log. I now work in a nearly regulation-free environment and we are happy users of Slack, so I'm just asking out of curiosity.
My impression is also that if you try to impose a deadline on the check signing that is in any way traceable to you going out of business if the check isn't signed, the check will never get signed.
SnapJet: A portable, open source Polaroid printer for smartphones
Seriously fuck those memory cards, 4x the cost of SD/microSD and you could only buy them from Sony.
What do you mean by morphological operations?
As also someone who started coding at 13 and now mid-40s, mine too has been quantum evolution. Usually from needing a particular technology for a project and then learning it or just a didactic itch I scratched. Novel coding techniques distract you from solving the problem and exploring the novel for its own sake is a common pitfall in the programming world.

10 Solve problems with tools you know
20 Learn new tools
30 GOTO 10
I'd say human language is the superset of artificial language and natural language. Though the artifical/natural labels are a poor fit.

Experience is a big factor, but I think there's a limit to the amount of language learning most 50 year olds can undergo, even in a decade. But luckily for us we agree young exposure to code is a good thing :)
Trsst: a secure and distributed blog platform for the open web
H1B visas are an excuse to pay less for high tech workers IMO. That is what I've always seen as American workers aren't chosen for those jobs because they can make more money else where. Why isn't this more well known?
Nobody says that it's only a women's issue. But, if that servers your rhetorical needs, you keep putting those words in peoples' mouths.

Childcare is vastly a burden born by women, thus considered a women's issue. That doesn't mean "there are no men who are burdened by childcare." It means that, in aggregate, the impact falls far more on the women.

It's so egalitarian of you to not want it to be so, but until women are paid the same and men are taking on equal responsibilities (in aggregate) with the child rearing, the feigned "equality uber alles" cry is the fight song of the MRA.

"I found an outlier, therefore WOE ARE THE MEN MEN MEN!!"
you should read up about Thalidomide and then be thankful that the U.S. government "got in the way".
Professional mathematics is more like English Literature than computer programming: you need extensive background in the area to follow it; and you can't just run it to see if it works.
Great. What are the actionable next steps? We don't need ideas, we need execution.
I'm still wondering how HTTMock didn't do the job for them... Unfortunately, comments are closed on that blog, so I guess I'll never know..
I think this is a great project. But one quote stood out:

> Interestingly, many said it got them attention for being unusual, and that they'd used this to their advantage.

This is what I have experienced as well. But do I want to be `unusual`?

Instead, let's strive for making it a norm that female developers are just as common and just as good as their male counterparts. Stop looking at me like I'm some freak for being a competent woman developer.
The feature is opt-in, requires a somewhat formal process to turn on, and all users will be notified "via Slack that the feature is active and that their private messages are subject to export". They don't make it clear if it'll be made sufficiently obvious to a new user who joins after it's turned on, but I'd guess so.

Also quite nice that "Compliance Exports are not retroactive and do not apply to past private conversations before the feature is enabled"
As an old boss of mine said when hiring, "Does this person have ten years' experience? Or one year's experience, ten times?".

What he meant (i think!) was that someone who's been doing something for ten years might not know any more than someone who's been doing it for a year - they've just been doing the same thing over and over again.
I agree with this sentiment. Do you have any good recommendations for books on the history computer science? Lots of options available, but I'm looking for a technical overview of the subject.
Funny, I just posed a related question:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8652432

You might check out the Lego Wedo set, or Sphero:
http://stemkids.io/robots/

Or perhaps Snap Circuits or LittleBits:
http://stemkids.io/electronics/
We had our first a year into the first startup I founded myself, and our second just before I left for a senior role at another startup. Balancing work and home responsibilities is always hard. Having a young family might not be an especially difficult burden for founders.
Pop quiz: What's the most important feature of a license plate, by far?

1) ṚЁÄḊÄḄЇḶЇṪŸ

2) ɌɆȺĐȺɃƗŁƗŦɎ

3) READABILITY

Hmm, kind of hard to read options 1 and 2 because there are a bunch of distracting elements over or near the text, huh?

As far as readability goes, these designs are sore on the eyes. The backgrounds need to be significantly toned down to keep from overwhelming the tag numbers.

Right now, for instance, Abraham Lincoln's giant head is competing with the tag number for my attention, and if the plate is on a vehicle that's fleeing the scene of a crime, that's not going to help me discern the most important information on the plate.

I do, however, like the idea of trying to come up with some design uniformity across all 50 states (e.g. using the same fonts for the same elements, and using the same layout).

I know it's probably too much to ask to have boring plain text on a boring plain, high-contrast background -- which would be the easiest to read.

But there are some easy ways to tone down the busy-ness. Two suggestions immediately come to mind:

Make the tags letters/numbers completely opaque, rather than translucent.

And try to keep the most detailed portions of the background images away from the center (as with the Arizona plate).
So they are indeed going through with it. I thought they would push back a bit since Unity isn't ready on WebGL and Silverlight is still used on Netflix. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.

Hopefully Unity can get Unity 5 live and WebGL solid by April 15 latest.
I don't agree. Did you ever try Isabelle/HOL? It let's you "run it" to see if it works.
These plates demonstrate a pretty myopic naive design view; Washington, for instance, is a lot more than just the Seattle skyline.

The current Washington plates feature Mount Rainier: http://www.plateshack.com/y2k/Washington3/wa-1145wsp.jpg

How is this WA plate design better? Just because it's trendier in its flattyness? It has limited appeal to anyone in the state outside of the Seattle area AND it's harder to read.
And so what? They are copying, most of the companies out there copy each other. Copy is also part of innovation. It's OK to shout against copyright and it's wrong to copy a SaaS service? Really?
We were talking about the revenues - the idea was that all tax revenue ultimately comes "from people", every economic decision affects people - because people are the only willful agents in the economy, there's nobody else.

>>> The only thing taxes change is who gets to control where the money goes.

Not entirely. The government usually proves to have quite inefficient with how it spends revenues. Sometimes it is necessary - i.e., feeding the destitute produces no money, but has a humanitarian value. Sometimes, it is not - like spending billions on bridges to nowhere and crony projects that collapse the minute government financing is withdrawn. So we also have to consider the destruction of value that the government involvement usually brings about. Of course, corporations can destroy value too - but usually can't survive for very long once they started to do it unless they manage to stop. For the government, it has to be extraordinarily destructive to collapse, for a company, the bar is much lower.

>>> your assertions about profit going to hiring, supplies, and services are clearly false. It happens, but it's certainly not a given.

Err, I'm not sure where your "clearly false" comes from. Is it clear to you that corporations do not spend money on hiring, supplies and services? How they then manage to have people show up to work and suppliers to give them supplies and services, if they don't pay for it? Also, if some fairyland corporation ever managed to pull off such impossible trick, it still wouldn't change a thing, as that would only mean entire revenue goes to the corporation owners - i.e., again, "people".
The Internet itself. For all the big greatest things and little nothing things in it.
A Flock of Tasty Sources on How to Start Learning High Scalability
Why do you sound surprised? Look at the Top 10 Sponsors of the H1-B's:

http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2014-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx

Top 10 H1-B's are being sucked up by Indian Outsourcing companies with low wage scales

So when we hear isolated cases like the article or your friend example, that's fine, but for the rest of us working schlubs, we can't forget the table above when considering the cases that H1-B is suppose to address.
"This whole post kind of sounds like someone redesigning road signs to look pretty instead of meeting the key requirements like being able to read them at speed."

Even worse, if we encourage them, they're going to apply themselves the same way to web pages.
Why would you expect anything you tell the DMV to be private?
Same thing happened in Chrome, think it's just a bug with their demo JS.
Completely agree with all of that. But that is the standard reductionist argument.
Interview with Mr. W.B. Yeats (1893)
Meanwhile, on the HN front page, we have:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8651499: Kill init by touching a bunch of files

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8650952: on Linux, 'less' can probably get you owned

One can argue that the research needed to prevent those was done decades ago, but this article doesn't make that argument.

We may have hit upon a 'good enough' solution that is so hard to displace that it may never happen, but I think systems software research is very much relevant. Someone will have to polish a more robust/secure OS (may already exist in unpolished form, but possibly even must still be written) until it is shiny enough to replace the C-based (or equivalent) mess we have now.
Just hit 500 backers (and 42% funded) on Kickstarter!
I'm a bit skeptical. I don't know about you but my smartphone screen isn't always super clean. And yes, you can clean it before using it, but I'd love to see how quality looks like in a closeup.
The Intercept have now reported on this:
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/11/24/secret-regin-m...

For the truly curious, interested and daring enough to want to analyse nation-state malware, here's an actual live sample they've published. (Obviously, don't just run this code! Trite, I know, but… - password: "infected")
https://s3.amazonaws.com/tiregin/regin.zip

Your tax dollars at work! … and mine. Bah.
Data on the power of WhatsApp for sharing news stories
Good point; a year would be far better than better "processing".
Woodward's been doing physical experiments on this for quite a few years now. Eagleworks is testing a different idea.
Child care is not a "women's issue". That idea has the unique property of being insulting both to women and to men in equal measure.

No institutional change is going to solve child care for company founders --- which is, after all, what we're talking about here. If your "investors" provide child care, double check to make sure their proper title isn't "employer".

Tech workers with young families should be especially careful about asking for child care benefits. They're a powerful form of lock-in for employees. Altering child-care arrangements is often traumatic for everyone involved, and is at the very least a logistical headache that most people who change jobs don't have to face.

Tech jobs are already very amenable to child-care arrangements. They almost always feature flexible hours and often support WFH arrangements. The problem with tech isn't that it fails to account for child care. The problem is that tech companies have a terrible habit of stigmatizing child care responsibilities†. That's what needs to change, not the child care itself.

† https://www.dropbox.com/s/s4npejyy4hg76tj/Screenshot%202014-...
That's kind of a cool approach. As long as you can "salvage" the trick, then nobody needs to know about the failed portion.

One of my friends had a card trick that involved me selecting a card. Before starting the trick, he jokingly picked a card at random from the deck, and asked me if that was my card. He had 1/52 chances of being right, but it would have been an insane trick if it had worked.

He guessed wrong (naturally), shrugged and went on with the actual trick as though the first attempt was just a joke, to be forgotten because an actual trick was about to take place.
It's a business tool, paid for by the employer. You shouldn't expect anything you do on there to remain private, just like you should expect your company mailbox to be private.
Node.js Tools RC for Visual Studio: improved editing/formatting, npm integration
The going rate being $9000/mo for an intern?
To Anticipate the Future Is to Abandon Intuition
> Can someone help me understand what the new reforms are?

The basis of the "reforms"[1] is that the Administration will not enforce certain parts of immigration law. I don't think anyone can truthfully answer your question until the shakes out in court.

1) you really cannot call them reforms since they have no legislative backing to provide a foundation for new rule making or court decisions
This part of the article really stuck out to me too. Are we supposed to feel bad for Zenefits here? If Zenefits is able to find someone else, then they didn't need the H1B to begin with...

Not that it matters in the grand scheme, but I'm willing to write off Zenefits as a potential employer if this is the attitude of the founders.
I'm not too knowledgeable about this subject, but I've been interested in learning how native code debuggers work for a long time. One thing I wonder is, if the debugger inserts an invalid instruction or a hardware breakpoint instruction into the code at runtime, wouldn't all of the in-memory code need to be reallocated and recalculated in order to make room for the new instruction and recalculate jump addresses? How is this handled?
There is typically only one (or a small set) of hardware instruction pointer breakpoints. Every time the CPU is about to execute an instruction, it compares IP to the IP breakpoint register (or set of registers) and if they match, a debug exception is thrown. These are what you must use to debug the BIOS/bootloader executing in-place from ROM with a JTAG or XDP hardware debugger attached. Later, software can add the proper exception handler once enough of the hardware platform is configured. (Not all architectures exit power-on reset with exceptions enabled or even exception vectors mapped to a valid memory location.)

If the code you are debugging is executing out of write-able memory, then your debugger can support an effectively infinite list of breakpoints by writing some instruction that causes an exception to be thrown anywhere you want a break, then handling that exception by looking up the faulting instruction address in your breakpoint list.

Most processors also give you hardware data access breakpoints as well. These typically sit on the CPU's data bus interface and can fire when the address or data that's about to hit the bus match the respective breakpoint registers. There is usually an option to only trap reads, writes, or both. Sometimes you get interesting things like a mask register that lets you trap on a whole block of memory.

One of the most interesting hardware debug features of modern processors is the branch trace which keeps a running list of the last N branch instructions that lets you reconstruct a "how did we get here" story.
3D human tissue culture is the most promising area for lowering this cost.

Unfortunately for many diseases, there are not good animal models. 3D human tissue culture allows for much better laboratory testing of efficacy and side effects. This would allow for better drugs going into clinical trials and better design of clinical trials to show a particular drug's effects.
Compared to Hipchat, Slack has handled this compliance issue much better. I am personally uncomfortable with the idea of managers seeing employees communications, and Hipchat didn't put any consideration into this when they released that feature. Slack on the other hand seems quite aware of this issue and done things which make me much more comfortable, at least short-term. It goes to show what careful and empathetic product thinking can do to enhance your customer's experience.
Thanks, this answers a lot. Reading a bit further, it's interesting that everyone focuses on the legality of the government requesting and receiving information rather than on the legality of the company giving it to them.

Can a company that hands over information "without a fight" be sued for a breach of some implicit trust? If not, what about explicit promises or contracts? If at some point the company is not allowed to freely hand over the information, is the government still allowed to receive it in breach of the confidentiality arrangement?

And what about companies giving this information to other non-governmental third parties? In a lot of the contracts I've read and signed, companies have explicitly informed me of circumstances in which (and people to whom) my information may be disclosed. What does this imply about people not named, and what is implied by a contract not having such a clause?
> Who should care if GPL is bad for a SSL library?

An entity which actually ships software?
For a grad class on future computing paradigms, I wrote a paper on computing with FPGAs that are capable of reflashing themselves every cycle, allowing a system to exchange memory for logic on a fairly arbitrary basis. As a total non-expert, it seemed to me like there was a lot of potential there. I wonder if this is a similar concept, or something totally different.

In any case this sounds truly revolutionary.
I typically don't think European things, but I think they got license plates right. Black on white. Very small designation of the origin.
I understand the reasoning behind this, but this is super annoying, since:

1. I am required to use GWT 2.5.1 for our java webapp

2. I choose to use Chrome on Mac OS X

3. Chrome 39 just auto-updated to support 64-bit on OS X

4. Chrome 39 stopped supporting NPAPI

5. GWT-2.5.1 and the GWT Chrome extension are not 64-bit compatible, and require NPAPI.

6. I have a major deadline this week finish styling our webapp

I've heard that enabling SuperDevMode can workaround all these problems, however I'm just an HTML5/CSS3/GWT-UI-Binder developer, not a Java/Eclipse/GWT expert. PITA.

(Perhaps I should enhance my calm and work on some LaTeX or Python)
Well, you could "downgrade" them back to dial up speeds and trade cool hacks for Mbps.
Ask HN: What's the future of Google?
in 10 years?
in 100 years?
That, I think, is working with the grain in Javascript. It's extremely difficult to do static checking in the language in any case, because in the language `foo.bar` is just syntactic sugar for `foo['bar']`. A FP approach in JS is by its very nature going to be different from one in something more strongly typed like Haskell; this is actually one of the easier differences to swallow.
I think an optimization pass for speed is due. I really like the styles and animations though.