skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The NSA does not have a mandate from Congress: it was created by an executive order of President Truman in 1952 (https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/truman/truman_memo.pd...). That order was classified for a very long time.

That's to say that you're starting from false premises. It is not the NSA's job to advance the security of the nation at all. Hence the need to split it up now. It's time to move the legal basis from executive order to something else, that something else publicly debated and mandated by the people.
New Startup Tackles Wasteful Spending to Raise Money and Awareness for Charities
Hoping to get feedback on our website to raise money and awareness for charities: www.beyondgoodybag.com. We created it to eliminate the wasteful spending on goody bags that are handed out at birthday parties and other events. Most goody bags and party favors go straight to the garbage. The goal of our website is to convert the money that is spent on goody bags and party favors into charitable donations.. and to teach children the value of giving.

Our solution: We provide digital party favors (e-gifts) that can be handed out at events (birthday parties, weddings, baby showers, bar/bat mitzvahs). These digital party favors are then used by the party guests to donate to a participating charity. Whatever they do not donate to charity can then be redeemed for a gift card.

We are hoping that our website will teach children valuable lessons. For example, children decide how much they give to charity and which charity will receive their donations. Also, they decide whether or not they want to save their digital party favors to redeem for a larger gift card in the future.

While birthday parties are a big market for us, we are interested in other events, including both private and corporate events. Also, our e-gifts are being used as gifts for any occasion.

Looking for feedback..
The "each service owns its data" scenario shouldn't take precedence over cases like this, where consistency is aligned with obvious business rules. If Person gets deleted, then "on delete cascade" should take care of that Person's Address and Billing records.

For updates and maybe reads, it's a different story.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9106905
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

"Apps that browse the web must use the iOS WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript"
Seriously though, stop animal abuse. That includes yelling at your pets. They're not robots and they don't speak english. It really bothers me when people who bring animals into the workplace treat them badly.
The (dollar) cost of the NSA makes us less secure.
> No Benz means you can drive a Toyota. Big whoop.

It can be much easier to get a job, and achieve other things, if you have the proper toys to signal your social status with.
Here's your oversight:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover

Giving NSA powers (or archives) to the NSA is a really, really, really bad idea.

The court system and legal system in the US these days is a joke and a farce--just look at the number of cases that make it to trial. We can't afford to give this sort of power over to any law enforcement agency.
So we should be left in the dark? I would not want the NSA/CIA shutdown unless the same is done with Russia's FSB or Pakistan's ISI.
Campaign Monitor Hires Up, the Hottest 10 Year Old Startup Comes to Town
They are (possibly) doing something right, and they certainly have gotten lucky, so yay for them. But this isn't 1994.

Launching a service now without thinking about scaling is an amateur move. It is the kind of thing that can kill a company, or at least wound it severely. At best, you are wasting a zillion first impressions in the hope that you will do well enough that they'll eventually come back for a second chance. There are plenty of well-tested approaches to prevent that from happening, and they're not particularly hard to implement.

It seems pretty reasonable to me that people have put the time in to learn how to do this right are critical when it is done wrong. It reminds me of the tension between a person who has worked their ass off to get into a good school and the one who got in because he won the ovarian lottery and his family's name is on a building. Sure, we should be happy every time somebody gets a good education, but I think it's asking a lot for skill never to resent luck.
"Actively attacking enemy networks is an offensive military operation, and should be part of an offensive military unit."

Key word here is offensive military unit, like a bomber squad or tank devision. You should not send out this kind of units to allies, neutral states or neighbors, not matter how "valuable" it would be in trade negotiations. Its to the benefit of all that on-line communication is restored to peace, rather than a free-for-all combat zone.

Of the 3 changes suggested by Schneier, this I feel is the most important change that internationally need to happen. Since NSA is the biggest offender here, fixing that actor would encourage other nations to do the same.
The security issue noted appears to be https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2011/06/16/webgl-graphics-..., from June 2011 (FF bug was actually fixed May 26th, 2011).

It was a Firefox issue, not a spec issue. AFAIK, Microsoft never explicitly detailed what their security concerns were.
I've been using Google Flights since the middle of last year and love it. However, as a frequent traveler for business/conferences, I think there are some things people should be aware of:

* Google's data seems to be not as fresh as Kayak or Hipmunk's is. There have been multiple times when I've tried to book a flight via GF only to be told that there were no seats left when I arrive on the airline's page. I suspect part of the greatly improved speed comes at the cost of aggressive caching that runs a risk of things being out of date.

* Google's data is all over the map on pricing. Very frequently the airline's price will be much cheaper than GF. And more than once (especially on United or American Airlines) I've noticed that if I book directly through an airline over a VPN, I save several hundred bucks versus if I click through from Google Flights or Kayak. Conversely, sometimes GF is less expensive and when I land on the airline's page it's more expensive.

I think the best thing to use it for is route discoverability: which kind of planes and which airlines fly to which locations, on which days at which times? It's also great for doing complex open-jaw routes or hidden-city fares -- and since those routes don't change very often, the data is more likely to be accurate.
Men have hands amputated and replaced with bionic ones
Where does this idiotic idea cames from that being "idiomatic" is some kind of virtue?

I can't say for sure, but I'm guessing it probably came from years of experience working on the sorts of projects that Go was designed to address. Go is really geared toward large distributed projects with a lot of contributors. In that context, it makes sense to value some sort of conformity. It may not always result in the most efficient code, but it makes the code much more maintainable and accessible to newcomers. Once you're familiar with idioms you don't need to spend so much time figuring out what a new piece of code is trying to accomplish.

You seem to argue that since old PHP and javascript code had terrible coding practices, therefore Go shouldn't try to enforce any particular type of practice. I don't see that your conclusion follows from that premise. Now if you're arguing that good coding practices arise from the community, that's well and good. Idioms can change and I expect that idiomatic Go code in 2020 will be different from idiomatic Go code today. That doesn't mean there isn't value to writing idiomatic Go code today.

I haven't actually seen any cargo cultists explicitly say that no one should be writing in other programming languages for any project. That would be a pretty stupid sentiment, although I shouldn't be too surprised if some people felt that way. Go's strength is really on server side code where storage is cheap and network and I/O latency is a bigger issue than CPU or memory utilization. If you're developing for that kind of environment, there's a lot to be said for using Go. And while you're at it, you'll save yourself and anyone else who's working with your code a lot of hassle if you follow best practices and write idiomatic code most of the time. If you're in a specific situation where you can get better performance or whatever by deviating from the standards, then go for it, but leave some comments explaining your choices to anyone else who has to maintain your code.

If I'm going to write a one-off script to process a million lines of text, I'm probably going to write it in Perl, not Go (and yeah I know it's 2015). My Perl code will follow TMTOWTDI whatever-the-heck-works practices. If I'm already writing Go for something, and others might want to peek at my code, then I will make an effort to make my code idiomatic.
I wonder if the front-back case is the top-most red dot. This would be explained if the front person was innocent and the person behind them copied. Not having the benefit of collusion, they have more shared wrong answers. Also, they have less answers in common overall, which supports the non-collusion theory.
It's all about who you know. That's all that matters in the startup world.

How is texting a pizza order to Magic, who then text it to a pizza company (Introducing a middle man) making the world a better place?

It's so well suited to startup founders though - Hey I'm way too busy and important to do menial things, I need a personal assistant on my phone that can do things for me while I'm saving the world by making some crappy website, which will never make any money, but will get bought for billions by some bigger fool because we know people who know people.

Magic sounds like it's right out of "Silicon Valley" (The TV Show).

I'd be surprised if anyone remembers Magic in a years time. Either that or it'll get bought by Amazon for $20bn. Or maybe both...
Never heard the word "proctor", in Canada they are always called invigilators.
Bingo :)

Actually, not just embedded systems. There's HSMs (hardware security modules) which also can't be updated to support new functions. Often this is because the underlying primitives have been implemented in fixed-function hardware to prevent timing, power and even RF analysis.
The data wouldn't go through them, nor would they be responsible for auditing the algorithms themselves. The comparison with the FDA was exact: they would simply require the company to execute a study proving (to peer review) the data-integrity of each change they were going to make.

The one interesting thing is that this would likely enforce an open-core-SOA software development model: companies would be incentivized to build a "trust kernel" of services that the government regs apply to, exposing an API with stringent access controls; and then a view layer that consumes that API, which can have whatever sloppy code they wish. The trust kernel would then have to be at least shared-source to enable the peer review necessary for study. (The company couldn't just pass the code around within a cabal of trusted peer companies, since those peers might be unfairly positively-biased.)
Android-Based Apple Pay Competitor Will Support Bitcoin
Although I find it interesting that in a future that probably won't happen, campaigns like this may become necessary. We're predicting our future moral failings, and using them as satire.
I don't think one is entitled to a good job straight out of college. I do, however, think that in a marketplace saturated by unfairness (berkowitz's dad is a partner let's hire him) and bullshit (jump through these hoops to make us like you), one is entitled to employ any and all effort necessary to further one's interests.
having the government be the gatekeeper for private company data is a horrible idea
From the article: "Just as she was graduating in 2001, a new law made it possible for undocumented Texas students to attend public universities at in-state rates."

Actually this law made it easier for her to attend college as an undocumented immigrant. But then what ? what are undocumented immigrants that graduate from college supposed to do ? go back to working as cooks and maids ?
Usually we have programmers take the Odersky coursera course. [1]

1: https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun
Same. I love the functionality SourceTree provides, but it frequently ends up eating all of my CPU (2.3 GHz Core i7) even for trivial operations.

I have recently tried Tower and it provides similar functionality without the performance issues.
that should be democracy with a small d. Stross wasn't referring to any particular system, polity, or party. he was talking about the general philosophy of political power that is based on the assumption that sovereignty is intrinsic to the people and that governments are granted legitimacy due to consent of the governed.

I also don't see Stross assuming that democracy is an end in itself. I think he is commenting on the projected future of existing nominally democratic systems of government.

I do agree with you that Stross assumes that increasing imbalance between labor and capital is a bad thing. I agree with Stross though. We've seen the political and economic damage that can occur under regimes with excessively high inequality. We should try and learn from history and not repeat past mistakes.
Photographer captures bizarre, intimate scenes of Chinese factory life
I could spend my whole life correcting people who draw an equivalence between legality and morality, and that would be a life well spent.
Ugh, sorry to hear that. I bet the big ones are being picky merely because they CAN be, a fun predicament for a company that quickly turns into "have to be"... Some HR person has a glut of applicants, literally thousands of submissions, and has started making arbitrary cut-offs to justify to his boss and the team he serves why he bothers calling certain people or picking one interviewee over another. "No internship? I guess we'll toss that one... I mean, we need SOME way to pick between all these excellent people..." When you're throwing your application into a big pond like that, you're lucky to get more than 60 seconds of sloppy, eye-scanning, initial consideration, and they're literally LOOKING for reasons to toss you. So you end up at the less well known company, even though the famous company could quite literally have picked at random from among the best candidates and ended up with equally good hires. No HR person is going to say, "Oh, well, I just pick candidates at random, they're all good, after a certain point my screening only adds so much." That's basically saying, "Yeah, I'm not worth my salary." Nobody says that.

So the trick with an application mosh pit like that is one of two things: (1) insider connection (a friend recommends you or gives you the email of the person with hiring power, you email them directly with a coherent, company-specific cover letter + resume), and (2) informational interviews. With informational interviews, you reach out to someone with the role you're interested in and say you want to visit, get coffee, or chat over the phone to get a sense whether this field + role are a good fit for you. No, you're not necessarily applying, you're doing research to figure out if you and the position/company are a good match, for a prospective job change down the road. You're interested in specifics: nature of day-to-day work, nature of problems, best/worst things about the company/field. That really throws people. It impresses them and reverses the whole dynamic. You're not the groveling supplicant anymore, begging for job-crumbs... you're an autonomous person who knows his/her own worth and is shopping for a good fit. That's powerful stuff that commands attention and gets you interesting referrals, maybe even back to their friends at the big companies.
At such a big company, I doubt anyone could get a job just working on algorithms coming out of undergrad. Maybe if you had a PhD in a relevant field I could see it. I'd bet almost everyone at Google is extremely good with algorithms when compared to the whole population of developers so I really don't see them giving this kind of sought after position to someone so junior. There's just too much risk for the managers to give it to someone who's still unproven.
It's better to keep the good parts and reform the bad parts than to throw the entire baby out completely.

Let's draw a parallel to something more tangible than the cyberwar we don't see. Recently there was a number of high-profile cases where police got into a clash with unarmed civilians, with disastrous results. Should police be shut down completely? Would you be safe in a city with no police? Many cities in the world have places where the police don't go, and those are dangerous places.

NSA and CIA serve important functions. They just need to be properly balanced.
float happiness;

there you go.
Ask HN: Canadian demographics data
Hi,

I am currently trying to build a customer analytics product and am looking for Canadian demographics data. Unfortunately, it costs $4,500 and I am wondering if there are other alternative sources out there? I have taken a look at Statistics Canada but even there, I'll be required to fork out $900 to make the data useful.

If anyone has ideas, please share. Thanks!
> It's all about who you know. That's all that matters in the startup world.

Exactly. If they were't connected to YC or someone else that could grease the wheels they would have their merchant account and CC acceptance terminated in the first 72 hours for the obvious and flagrant violations outlined in the Wired article, and quietly fade into the ether.
It's the little things. It allows you to focus on whatever you think is more important, while someone specialized in the task can do it maybe more efficiently than you can.

It's the good ol' fashioned trade of money for time, and trading is what makes an economy work.
As long as you believe in Santa Claus, how about the NSA also be put in charge of delivering Christmas presents to children who are nice by drone, and punishing children who are naughty (also by drone), since they are already monitoring everyone and everything, and they make it their business to know who's naughty and nice.
I only played with docker briefly on my laptop, and never in a production system. Do you think there will be any performance hits in a system like this?
> How is texting a pizza order to Magic, who then text it to a pizza company (Introducing a middle man) making the world a better place?

In the old days we used to call this a personal assistant. Now an Uber for personal assistants is something that would be really useful because I sure as hell don't have the money or the need for a full time assistant.

Although I have considered hiring somebody on a retainer basis to just be available for a few hours of menial tasks a few times a week or month.
List of Good Free Programming and Data Resources
cgh, I've hit the reply limit, but I wanted to ask how you'd implement the cascade deletes thing over services? Would the People service have to emit events describing that a person was deleted that the Address and Billing services would be expected to subscribe to in order to handle that the person was deleted?
Perhaps you could also as "Why is it bad to ask poorly formed questions?"

If you're engaged in billable time practices, responding to e-mails is little different than phone calls, faxes or letters. It's all about the time you spend engaged on the work for the client.
I understand the difference between our thoughts. Where we differ is that I think college is not a place of learning. In general, it is a sequence of hoops to sort out the labor force.
> Yes, but it's cryptographically well understood not to provide the properties we need.

If you're talking about perfect forward secrecy, surely that's fundamentally impossible for a protocol that is both asynchronous and decentralized? If one party can only send a single async message to another, then that message necessarily must be decryptable by that second party using only what that second party knows, and you lose PFS. PFS only works for synchronous communications where both parties can use a key exchange protocol, or centralized communications where an asynchronous message can be implemented as a synchronous message to a central authority. No?
The unjustified fervor behind Magic reminds me of the Yo frenzy from last year. "A stupidly simple startup went viral? That's an example of a good startup!" Except that logic is circular; it's getting controversy because it's getting controversy.

Yo led to an innovation collapse in Silicon Valley as many tried to do a "Yo for X" without realizing that Yo became popular due to dumb luck. That time could have been used to spend time on apps that have a legitimate purpose and are not trying to chase stupid VC money.

At the least, Magic is not as easily cloneable. That just means the clones will be even worse.
I think the Twitter school is pretty up-to-date. Scala-by-Example is older. There are also a large number of good books teaching Scala. I believe it's worth investing in one or two. And, there's my Coursera course, if you want a more rigorous introduction not just to Scala but to functional programming in general.
I'm prepared to be convinced otherwise! Like I said, I'm speaking only from intuition.

I have a piece of paper on my desk. I put my hand on it and slide it. It does pretty much what I ask it to. I would say it's 'well behaved'.

If I have some slippery surface and a slippery jell(y|o)-like object, it will wobble. To me, that's a sign that I need to pay more attention to it because it's not 'well behaved'.

Modelling not-well-behaved objects for interfaces seems counter-intuitive and (I suggest) takes more mental energy to interact with. This is the point I (hope I) made above.

As for the rotation, the origin-normalising in my previous comment is both affine and rotational (yes, I didn't consider that when writing it). But if you look at the examples, they also have rotational momentum. Paper doesn't have that, as it's got low mass and is dampened by the friction. The closest I could get to the Facebok examples is waggling a piece of paper about on the end of a stick, or moving a heavy object on a slippery surface, and that's not how I'd model an interface!

I just clicked 'compose' in GMail and the compose 'window' just appears. Likewise in my text editor, and creating a new window in Mac OS Finder and creating a new tab in my browser. Granted, there are lots of subtle (and not so subtle) movements in various operating systems. But it's a world apart from Google's Material Design demo video [0] and the 2d and 3d waggle [1].

Mac OS introduced the bouncing icon in the dock about a 15 years ago. Modal 'sheets' slide down. Ubuntu has things easing in and out. These can be disabled (to a greater or lesser extent) without any problem.

But I think we're going to see a fundamental shift in the paradigm, especially with Material Design, where movement isn't just easing things in and out. It's bringing movement directly into the representation and manipulation of objects.

It's a really cool, novel idea, but may leave some people behind (visually impaired or just, like me, people who prefer minimal movement on screen). Your jarring because the screen suddenly changes is my jarring because everything slides around.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8TXgCzxEnw
[1] http://facebook.github.io/origami/examples/