skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How much of this can't be accomplished simply through use of materials -- a modest amount of sound-absorbing material and avoiding hard surfaces goes a long way.

To say nothing of avoiding the practice of many restaurants and "social spaces" of piping _additional_ noise into the space.

Acoustical tile (or wall hangings) represent a far lesser surveillance threat.
Google is your friend.

http://holography.byu.edu/Background.html
Data interpretation is NLP, not maths.
Ok. My mystake was to post two Show HN: One for the git repository, one for the documentation.
Often they already are thinking in grays: they have doubt where everyone else has an absolute!

The thinking in grays is great; as you point out, that's the basis of science. But when it comes to making a decision, the actions need to be, or end up being, absolute. You can't "play it safe", stick a toe in the water, and get "half vaccinated" (you either follow the schedule or you don't). You can't build half a nuclear power plant. The gray area thinking leads to an absolute lack of action when it comes to further understanding. These kind of projects and scientific endeavors are large, society-befitting advancements, and they require everyone to get on board.

I suspect that some of this actually is laziness and not wanting to learn or participate in the scientific process, or considering science to be inaccessible to the layman. It's useful to say that more education and empathy is required, but these kind of society-level things eventually need to be considered lab tested enough to get used in the field for mass benefit. And we need to be both confident of that field use and cognoscent that that's just another stage of the data collection. We should never stop collecting data, stop trying to understand it, or stop doing science. One might argue that we, as humans, can't stop (we just get into ruts sometimes where we slow down significantly).

Lots of people have been stupidly, really, really wrong in history. Some of them changed the world.

Unfortunately, the people who have been really really wrong outnumber those who were wrong and also changed the world by significant orders of magnitude. Those who were wrong and changed the world changed it because they acknowledged they were on a path to discovering the truth. Others who were wrong weren't out for discovery.

my mother is a vaccine... 'doubter.' She is a scientist, a biologist, extremely intelligent

Despite that your mother is a vaccine "doubter", would she fail to recommend getting vaccinated? It's a healthy scientific process that is open to new data, but when it comes to action the data already collected that is what matters (even if the data collected is not immediately at hand). That being said, the question with vaccination isn't "do vaccines work" (do they satisfy the need for which they are administered), but rather "does the risk of unintended side-effects outweigh the documented benefits". In this light, it comes down to being able to do risk assessment, not necessarily being able to interpret the data and scientific results. I think we know way more about vaccination than we do about autism, and the risk assessment needs to take that into account.

People like her are fighting against the absolute mentality of the mob and how the issue is thought about in public discourse—not the end result like you might think they are.

It's interesting that the mob has an absolute stance, but is made up of individuals who are comfortable in the gray area of their interpretation. Is there something in this dichotomy here that can help further the education and empathy?
Oh yes, they can do something, for example store the user data in the cloud only encrypted. It seems they don't want to do that, however.
I'm reading a lot of criticism about specific points he is making, but I think the bigger takeaway is to address the implications technology is going to have on society in the coming decades. I think it would be impossible for a single person to effectively take the last 1000 years of society and the current state of society and perfectly explain the problem/solution.

I commend him for addressing these issues in addition to other global issues, http://blog.samaltman.com/china, and I think we need to organize as a community to address these things. I almost view it is as similar to when the constitution was being written in the US. There were an immense amount of factors at play but they organized to pull together some sense of structure to guide society in a better direction. Now we are writing the constitution of technology in a sense.

The problem is that we still have a system that has the government and politics writing the major rules, while some of the biggest influencers on society's future will be technology. I think we need to own this fact as a community and start to work towards something to structure our growth and the impact it will have.
> requires humanity consenting to being destroyed by the AI in some way

We already have.

I mean, my parents car is both cellular-connected and has traction control / ABS. Theoretically most of those systems are airgapped, however, given the number of things controllable from the entertainment console I don't see how that could be the case.

For another example, look at our utility grid. We know they are both vulnerable and internet-connected.

Unless AI ends up always being airgapped - and potentially not even then - it will be able to destroy humanity. And it won't be. Most of the applications of strong AI require an absence of an airgap.
Based on the article, are we to presume that this only affects tech in hostile countries? Or are they doing this to US-based equipment as well?

Seems like this will backfire spectacularly when foreign countries and companies stop buying American made tech for fear of these hardware backdoors. Spectacularly irresponsible.
Perhaps you have cookies or localStorage disabled? I browse that way by default and it is unfortunate the number of sites that just plain don't work (without any kind of message to that effect).
Here's the source regarding being able to make money on elance: http://copyhackers.com/2014/12/how-to-earn-on-elance/
25 Podcasts About Startups, Entrepreneurship and Marketing Worth Checking Out
They don't necessarily need actionable intelligence: just supportive evidence to back up recon/threats/blackmail as part of other agency's actions.
> It's not like Iran asked our permission before they launched their nuclear program

You do realize the U.S. helped launch Iran's nuclear program, right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_program_of_Iran
Yes, this has nothing to do with the article, but the title of the article has almost nothing to do with the article either.

One of the things my kids (6 and 4 now) love more than anything:
1. Go to home depot, buy 20-30 packing boxes of various sizes ($50-$100).
2. Buy a bunch of packing tape and one of the tape rollers ($10-$20)
3. Buy two good box cutters ($10)

Now, when the kids are asleep, stay up all night and build something. I've done haunted houses, Christmas castles, and more. It's really fun and helps work some creative juices that normally don't get worked by just programming. Kids love it and will play with it daily. And when they've finally destroyed it, it can just be recycled. We had this year's Halloween creation up for two months until we took it down for Christmas.
HN is eating my comments. Everything I've posted in the last few days is not showing up. What did I do wrong?
Ask HN: What is the best development stack for custom CMS applications?
I am a freelancer developer. I have a slowly growing list of Web applications that I developed for my customers.

Most of the applications are custom content management systems that are easy to use without requiring any technical knowledge, specifically built based on customers needs and requests. Existing systems like WordPress, Joomla etc are too complex for them with a lot of options/configurations. There are alternative simpler ones, but still the requirements per customer generally do not align with what is provided. So I develop custom simple apps with which they can simply login to dashboard and add something, remove something, edit something etc. If the content of the website tends to stay the same for a long time, I go with pure HTML and CSS with small improvements with JS. These applications/websites has varying traffic loads from 10s of users to 1000s of users.

I simply use LAMP stack, specifically CodeIgniter for custom application development, because I had a dedicated server back in time and CodeIgniter seemed simple, and easy to use and develop (I took a look at others, and tried some of them such as yii, but as I said I needed something simple). The cost for all is around 100$/year, which is cheap.

However, these days with new platforms/solutions like heroku, AWS, Azure, docker, I feel like there may be a better approach. I use ruby (Sinatra) and python (flask) for small side projects, but when it comes a content management I think they fall short. I know there are options like Rails, Django, but I am NOT developing full-fledged systems.

And the free option for heroku draws my attention recently, but the database could grow more than what they provide you for free. DigitalOcean could be another interesting alternative to my current development stack.

What are you guys using? Do you have any suggestions?
We should all be aware of the fact that these people are the enemy. They don't do these things to "protect freedom", they do them to destroy freedom.

Most of the people on Hackernews are uniquely placed to resist. Secure your software. Refuse to cooperate unless legally compelled. Analyze and publish any evidence of government attacks.

If you work for the NSA, understand this: you aren't American. You are the Internet Daesh. You will lose.
Isn't this how a CAT scan works? you build a 3d model from a radial series of xray scans. the machine rotates around an axis with you in the middle, then infers the 3d shapes involved. of course its xray and not just shadows, so we see inside you.
> We can—and we will—redistribute wealth...

Please, someone explain to me how wealth can be re-distributed?

I know how money can be re-distributed (and in-turn made less effective - i.e., more is required to purchase less), but how exactly do you either a) create "wealth" (via government policy or law) or b) take someone else's wealth, split it up into smaller peaces, and make the end-recipients more "wealthy"?

The reason I ask is because wealth is an effect of X, not a cause of X, just like gravity is an effect of mass, and not the cause of mass.

And that X tends to be all the things 97% of the population is either not willing to invest it, or does not have the capacity for...

So when you re-distribute money (as and from "wealth"), you also remove any motivation from anyone to actually create more wealth. And now you have a society that is fundamentally broken on both an economic and personal self-worth level.
This is exactly why a lot of people want to do a start up, or at least start a side project that solves a specific problem. You get to to be the expert in that domain, and in order to get the complete product out, you need to be a generalist.

Another meme that's been thrown around is: "You are not the complete developer if you've not written a compiler." I don't necessarily buy that, but there is some merit: there is a lot of different skills required in a compiler, from domain modelling and DSL design, to theoretical CS like grammars and parsing, to very practical software engineering such as IO handling, string manipulation, encoding, documentation, etc.
Does the AI care how many people there are so long as the aggregate demand is the same? Who is to say that the people remaining on the AI company payroll don't all get super-rich and make up 20% then 40% then 80% then 99% of the market anyhow? Maybe they all want mega-yachts and rockets and personal airplanes and the like. If they have the money to pay for it why does the AI care? There's a substantial benefit to only having 100 or 1000 or 100,000 customers, they're much more predictable and easier to understand.
> The part that wasn't particularly surprising was that mixed drinks and cocktails, along with associated terms ("cocktail hour", "cocktail party") date to U.S. Prohibition, when bootleg (and low-quality) hard liquor had to be mixed with other ingredients to become drinkable.

That's not totally true - Jerry Thomas published How to Mix Drinks or The Bon-Vivant’s Companion in 1862. Punch (sort of the precursor to cocktails) has been around even longer.
Wow, what a whinefest! Hope it was worth the traffic to make yourself look like a complete fool.
In short, marketing. It's a trust thing, so it's easier to start local, in person - when remote, they're usually looking for people with a track record.
Anything that changes NYC's economy to make it less dependent upon those who play with money is a good thing. I'm even happier that tech companies are finding NYC a place with plenty of talent.
The problem is it undermines trust in American technology products in general. If the Snowden revelations were that the United States was bugging Iran, Libya and North Korea and monitoring all their communications, that would be one thing. However, we know now that EVERYONE is under surveillance. Therefore, how do we know they aren't doing this to everyone as well?
Because the serious terrorists avoid anything that may be snooped.
After investigating it using webmaster tools, found out Google recognises my blog as full spam!! however all other search engines indexed that.
Bizarre Martian Plumes Discovered by Amateur Astronomers
>It's just about impossible for an outsider to reverse engineer a hard drive, read the existing firmware, and create malicious versions.

It's hard, but it isn't like this hasn't been done before: http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=3

And to be honest, I think what they call "about impossible" is just a question of investing enough time and having a somewhat decent understanding of microprocessors and reverse-engineering. I'm not trying to downplay Equation Group's achievement, but it feels like arstechnica is starting to exaggerate here.
Great feedback. Record type for the http_response is a good idea.

Right, I really wasn't sure at first how inclusions would work out so I went a little explicit. In some cases, I felt like it was definitely a good layout (rule.ml). But overall, this will be one of the first easy refactors. Thanks!
> Regarding order pickers, I think that's just a question of economics.

I think it will in effect be those tasks that are fully digital. Working in the physical world is a much more expensive and libelous undertaking. So I believe the tipping point for most jobs to be replaced by AI will be when little or no physical action is required on the part of the actor. When a task is 100% digital inputs and outputs AI will be able to use that activity as a training set and replace most of those jobs fairly quickly. That is once AI matures to a point where it can be set up quickly and easily.
Currency represents wealth. You redistribute currency.
Interesting. I don't think of the justice system as concerning punishment at all. The primary functions to me are rehabilitation and prevention (via incapacitation).

Even though my view certainly isn't representative, it seems to me that American culture is far more concerned with punishment or retribution than rehabilitation than we are in Germany. Sure, we have tabloids calling for "severe punishments" as well, but in general the system seems to be far more concerned with protecting the public (and maybe converting the criminal to a law-abiding citizen in the process).
Thanks. I would be happy to hear your feedback: what was nice, what feature/documentation is missing, what should be improved, etc...
If someone accepts a position for less than their worth, that's a market inefficiency, not what the position is actually worth.
That's great, but from a "Show HN" point of view, this isn't a new project. So we've taken "Show HN" out of the title and removed the duplicate penalty from this post.
I'm pretty sure intercepting and screwing with mail is a felony... isn't that a felony? How exactly can the US Government have it's employees committing felonies with no warrants or oversight?
Not to mention cocktail the term dates to the early 1800s.

"Cock-tail is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters—it is vulgarly called bittered sling, and is supposed to be an excellent electioneering potion, in as much as it renders the heart stout and bold, at the same time that it fuddles the head. It is said, also to be of great use to a democratic candidate: because a person, having swallowed a glass of it, is ready to swallow any thing else"

Also, the Old Fashioned cocktail was created in the later 1800s to bring back the cocktails from the earlier 1800s instead of the garish concoctions that the contemporary bars were mixing. Ironic that until the craft cocktail revolution that modern Old Fashioneds included the "garbage" that the original was eschewing
Or perhaps die Gerechtigkeit und die Justiz.

But I must say that in my ear, "Department of Corrections" sounds perhaps even more like propaganda, or doublespeak...
This is pretty intense malware, but at some level it's reassuring how narrowly-targeted these attacks seem to be. Arguably, this is what the NSA is supposed to be doing: targeted attacks against key systems in hostile nations, not mass dragnet-surveillance of everyone on the Internet.
The prison system in the US is designed to create repeat offenders. This is because we have a lot of for-profit prisons that benefit from repeat offenders. There is no rehabilitation going on, I assure you. Quite the opposite is true.
"Who's a good, affordable tax accountant who can deal with the intricacies of money earned while outside the country?"

if you're not an american, perhaps not so important for you...
You seem to be implying that only individuals may have wealth.
Who's making you feel worthless? Write, draw, create, explore, build, do any of the things you'd normally do on the weekend.
In what way are people who work for the NSA not American? They are literally working to protect American citizens from violence. While you may not agree with their methods, saying you are somehow "more" American than they are, let alone that they aren't American at all is a huge stretch.

I think I'm too young and naive to really form a good opinion on what they are doing, but I do know that I definitely haven't done anything I can remember for the sake of this country. Maybe they're being harmful, maybe not, I don't know, but at the very least I like to think they are trying to be helpful.
The bigger point being missed is that the Gigafactory is in the US, greatly reducing import costs. That's why it is important / necessary.
An alternative that isn't discussed in the Why not use ...? section is calc:

http://www.isthe.com/chongo/tech/comp/calc

It is very powerful, has history, shows previous calculations, and it's pretty darn quick too.

Of course, there are plenty more calculators, powerful too. I only mention calc because it bothers me that the name of this new project collides with it, without really providing anything useful beyond having been written in a fashionable language.
NLP is implemented with logical and statistical modelling.
How is it a realm of anything but math? ;)

Edit: if you meant that data interpretation is NP, I agree.
Before you even have an algorithm you need to know what the flight environment and positive separation requirements are. A spec is needed. Is this going to be a centralized system (like air traffic control) or a decentralized one (like TCAS) or some hybrid approach? A whole bunch of rules need to be sorted out about obstacle clearance, speeds, overflight of people's homes or roadways, and emergency procedures.

What do emergency procedures even look like for an autonomous aircraft? A bunch of failure vectors and likelihoods need to be defined, e.g. since a partial power failure can occur anytime. Where should it set down if it has that much control? If it lacks sufficient control to get to a safe setdown zone, how does it crash land? i.e. better to crash in the middle of the road than on top of a car or person. Progressive failure.

The certification and currency process for your algorithm should be more like a pilot because the autonomous UAS software is in effect a substitute pilot. Pilots are certified for life in the U.S. but they have 6, 12, and 24 month (depending on privileges) medical evaluations, and 30 day, 90 day, and 2 year currency requirements for various things. It's not legal for a pilot to fly (at certain times, environments, or at all) if they lack currency requirements, even though they're certified. Similar for UAS. You'd have to have a certain software update that ensures conformance with current version of the public use UAS operating environment behaviors. That way everyone is always on the same page.

Autonomous flight in a shared airspace is non-trivial.
I'm pretty sure it's a different set of rules for regular consumers vs enterprise. It's always been that way in the past. That said, can you really trust any "cloud storage" provider these days? I'd say the most trustworthy would be someone like SpiderOak, as they don't have access to your private key and therefore have had minimal requests from law enforcement which yielded no info[1].

And I say that as someone who has settled on OneDrive for my casual cloud storage, with more important or private files (taxes, finances) stored on a personal server running OwnCloud from my home office. I have all of my files, important and casual, backed up to an external drive that lives in a fire safe. Not as secure as, say, a bank deposit box, but better than nothing.

[1]https://blog.spideroak.com/20150212080057-increasing-transpa...
I also think that with async/await probably coming with the next c++ standard, we will be able to write much simpler async code in plain C++, without Asio.
There are likely secret warrants in FISA court.
"I got the strong impression from reading this that the design team at Apple is small, insular, ignores their competition completely, doesn't want to scale up and doesn't feel any real sense of urgency."

The documents that came out during their trial with Samsung showed that they had analyzed their competitors in excruciating detail.
While this is undoubtedly scary, it looks very Windows-specific and would seem unlikely to affect a somewhat security-conscious Linux user.

Java and IE exploits, autorun files, NTFS...

> The malicious firmware created a secret storage vault that survive

> military-grade disk wiping and reformatting, making sensitive data

> stolen from victims available even after reformatting the drive and

> reinstalling the operating system.

And that's why it's possibly not the greatest idea to replace simple firmware and drivers with small operating systems (Intel AMT, microcode, SSDs, Smart TVs etc.).
According to the report, the malware was delivered to researchers in dozens of countries, including the UK, India, Mexico, Switzerland, France, and the US itself.
Maybe it is what it should be doing for you. But this is exactly what the IT community should work against. We should be able to trust our devices.
Rgrinberg/opium
An interesting basis for a story, but I have to point out that by your own description you've failed to eradicate humans. Also, as is usually the case with these scenarios, the most problematic and unlikely components of the event chain are dwelt upon the least, i.e., "During this process it somehow ends up on its own and is no longer owned (or controlled) by anyone anymore."