skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I moved to San Francisco at the end of July 2012 and started my first programming job hunt with the August Who Is Hiring thread. I found a great company to work for (what's up Factual!) and almost three years later I see how my life has completely changed and improved. This community made a big difference, so thank you all and Matthew in particular.
What about J.E. Hoover?

Outside the US, the examples of these abuse are numerous. Probably the most spectacular was Francois Mitterrand in France, who was wire tapping his political opponents and some other "persons of interest" (famous actress). And by using anti-terrorist powers by the way!

And having this power is not only open for abuse from the President. Lots of people in the chain of command will probably abuse it. It will also be open for abuse by law. You don't know what is OK today but will be inappropriate or illegal in 20 years.

All of this has nothing to do with the US but with human nature. The reality of any large society is that you have a portion of the population who are crooks, bullies, rapists, egomaniacs, corrupt, etc. Designing a system that relies on everyone now and forever to be honest is bound to fail. This is why the US constitution introduced so many checks and balances. And one fundamental check and balance is to limit the power of the state. And the state having so much information on its citizens, on everything anyone says to anyone, on where anyone is at any given time, on who talks to who, on who reads what is way way too much power.
A Machine-Learning Supercomputer Woven from Idle Computers
> I fail to see why this shouldn't be the server language of choice. Other than tougher recruiting.

Actually, I hold a position that in some sense it makes recruiting easier.
It's very hard to find idiots that can be taught to write in Erlang (or
Haskell, OCaml, or Clojure), so SNR should be very good.
I sense a strong dislike for Vinod Khosla the person himself in almost all the responses irrespective of his actions. Are a few incidents like the martin's beach and some statistics which he pulls without references the only reason for it. The responses to beach discussion and statistics themselves are very hostile like "If he dosen't like shelling out $500k for maintainence of a public property he should not have bought it" which I think is unfair and "my best dev is an english major" when he clearly meant that for Business consultants and Journalists etc. And can't one pull a number based on a lifetime of personal experience without backing it up with statistical data? Don't we all do that in everyday lives? Even when someone mentions having a good personal experience with him, it gets discounted.

I have never been to the valley. Genuinely interested in knowing what makes a person so universally hated on this fourm. Unless he is the Donald Trump of the Valley. In which case I understand.
I agree. I found especially ridiculous the part of the article where the author tries to dissect "asshole" into "ass" and "hole" and comes up with litmus tests to differentiate the two.
And of course it doesn't explain how planes with symmetrical wings fly.
I'm a C guy, and I never "worry" that if I have to recompile a project I worked on 1 or 2 years ago that I'm going to have to fight the toolchain to get it going again. Make will be make, and it will work.

I have a huge concern when I do anything in Javascript about what happens in 1 or 2 years from now when I have to modify a project I built using some Yeoman scaffolding. Is it still going to work? Will those node modules still be there? Can I update them without it breaking everything?

It's really weird for me, coming from the world of C, CVS/Git, Make, Linux, etc. where it's almost _unthinkable_ to introduce changes that would break older versions. Hell even the world "old" generally means 5+ or 10+ years.
Is this outdated wrt security for zmq 4.0+?

[ed: I see now that the latest version is just a release-candidate -- I accidentally thought 4.0 was "out"]
I would press Bamford into service as a proof, not a disproof, of my point.

How far do you think COINTELPRO might have gone if the FBI had been able to record every piece of mail, every conversation, had been able to lean on members of the press or members of the Church Committee with pre-recorded leverage, knowledge of every single questionable thing they'd done or said in 'private' all the way back to their childhood?

----

On August 17, 1975 Senator Frank Church stated on NBC's Meet the Press without mentioning the name of the NSA about this agency:

“	In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left such is the capability to monitor everything—telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide.

If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.

I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.[9][10] "

----

The power we have handed these people is becoming orders of magnitude more extreme than the power it was technologically practical for an organization to attain in that era. That power is going to grow as time goes on.

The danger is not that the NSA deploys hundreds of thousands of spies to inform on and suppress mainstream political opposition, the danger is that they don't have to, to exert effective control. We're going to need something stronger, not weaker, than the reforms implemented then, to be a durable deterrent to more severe abuses in the future.

"Information wants to be free", said they. But that's not the case. The core of the idea is that information provides an incentive to everyone with access to that information, to use it. The greater the pile of information, the stronger the draw becomes. Eventually the amount of power concentrated in that information will corrupt whatever organizational structure we surround it with, so long as we permit it to be gathered in one place.
How would anyone know if they had done so? The point is they CAN exercise this kind of power, and they can do so in ways that can't be traced back to them. So who knows if they've done it? Who knows if they will? The fact that they could is the problem. Even that shadowy hypothetical threat gives them enormous (anti-democratic) power.
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I agree with you, and it looks like I'm one of the only ones.

deletes account
I usually hear it compared to 1491, which I think is much better regarded. (I loved it. I haven't read Guns Germs and Steel.)
You vastly overestimate the cost of copying 50k elements. On low end mobile you'll get at least 1GB/sec and on desktop you can get easily 10GB/sec. Now sorting at these speeds is a whole other story.

The real thing to consider is if the latency of the round trip messaging is less than just doing the work in place. With something like web workers you're going to have to hit the event loops when messaging back and forth which aren't always empty.
They ran the million dollar challenge[1] to increase viewership, thus decreasing churn.

If you could (make a case that you) consistently decrease churn then you'd pay for yourself at that rate.

1: http://www.wired.com/2012/04/netflix-prize-costs/
Erlang actually does have compilation to native code as well, so I guess other than for native third party libraries or numeric stuff which Erlang isn't well suited for, it requires less C help than Python.

EDIT: just found out some typos
Honestly, it would be equally inapropriate. In both cases you're hijacking symbols that look like other symbols but mean completely different things.
Who's Paul?
Yes, it does not describe the current security mechanisms. I've written articles on my blog to explain those; they need to be reworked into a new Guide text.

Version 4.0 is stable; there's a pending 4.1 update.
For anyone confused, HN's formatting system changed the two asterisks that give this meaning into italics-start and italics-end.

unit64 system_time;
unit64 *system_time_device = 0x1234; // set pointer
system_time = *system_time_device; // read what's pointed to
>The law that the NSA used to authorize its collection of vast amounts of information about the telephone calls of ordinary Americans is no more.

But the US can still snoop on my internet traffic if it happens to parse through the US, because I'm not an American. For the majority of the world the issue was never that the NSA spied on US citizens, but that they pretty spy on everyone else as well.

Don't get me wrong, I think it should be illegal for the US, or any other nation, to spy on its citizens, but it still only half the problem.
Hardly a "comparison" at all. More of an ad for "VanCharts".
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They should start with the shitstorm that is their comment section, I'm all open for a public forum, but holy shit its a cesspool.
Other systems programming languages e.g. Turbo Pascal, Modula-2, Ada, ... you don't have to track everything if you don't want to.
Paul Graham (YC founder/I think he wrote the initial iteration of HN?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(computer_programme...
This is why Carl Icahn invested $100M into Lyft
IBM offers 5.5 PB of storage in a 10 square-foot space.

http://www.ibm.com/systems/storage/tape/ts4500/index.html

The Utah Data Center has at least 100,000 square-feet of data center space. If just half of that space was used for storage then it would be over 27 exabytes worth of storage assuming a density similar to what IBM offers.

Backblaze on the other hand has their Storage Pod 4.5 which can hold up to 270 GB of storage for less than $20,000. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/storage-pod-4-5-tweaking-a-pr...
India’s luxury hospitals now offer cinemas, coffee shops – and Rolls-Royce rides
I would be surprised if that news doesn't get flagged and killed(not by me I have no stakes in this).

This an old a complicated story about people with ego being a jerks to one another especially in the Rails world. Rails used to be the new shiny stuff everybody wanted a piece of it because loads of $$$ so everybody started to be mean and tried to kill other's consultancy for greed.

But the internet doesn't forget so , if you behave like an ass on the internet, 7 years after people can certainly google you and stumble upon your past deeds...

http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/ruby/rails/is-a-ghetto
The worst part is that now you're left with people who don't quite know how to call it. Just looking at the thread, you can see variations like ØMQ, 0MQ, ZMQ and finally ZeroMQ all in both upper and lowercase.
Discovery is one of those problems with dozens of answers that depend on your context. For many cases, UDP broadcast/multicast is perfect. For others, a broker can help a lot (ZeroMQ has a broker, called Malamute, that is easy to use for discovery). For other cases, you need a mix of stable and unstable pieces, and so CZMQ has a zgossip class that does this.

It's an emergent problem. One good pattern that's emerging are clusters of clusters; e.g. each box supports a cloud of small services that talk to each other and to a single broker on the box, and the brokers on a network then discover each other opportunistically with a mix of broadcasts, manual assistance, and gossip.
Well yes, that is exactly what that is. However, you made it sound as if it were wrong for such a thing to exist. Without the proper context, how do we know that that wasn't exactly what the author intended to do?

Furthermore, in the later pages the document does mention the OWASP testing guide.

Maybe the title is a bit misleading? Let a mod change it to the original one: "Tactical Web Application Penetration Testing Methodology"
In fact I have seen several articles in major european newspapers claiming that big countries are going around restrictions on spying on their own citizens by letting friendly countries do it, then exploit the data. I don't know if there is any substance in these allegations but they seem plausible.
I'm pretty sure I'm here for reasons other than to slander people and it's working out pretty well for me so far, so I don't think the claim that this is a place 'only' for slandering people really holds up. Drawing comparison between HN and some abortion protestors is not really a good way to make a point, either - that's just immature and insensitive.

The whole rambling post seems rather crazy and the OP probably needs some help over the (I'm sure very real) issues he faced several years ago. This isn't a healthy means of dealing with it at all.
> Note that dividends are taxed at the corporate level (IS, 15.5%), then the recipient must pay his income tax on top.

Not in every country, for instance in NL you only pay 10% private on top the 15% dividend tax, foreigners don't even pay the 10%.
Sad to see this downvoted, because Paul's full name is never mentioned in the article and someone who is using HN mainly as a news aggregator and doesn't know the full extent of YC probably never heard of Paul Graham in the first place. Get your shit together HN people.
These sorts of comments absolutely infuriate me. Just because we can't point to an instance where we know someone's presidential campaign has been thwarted doesn't mean we should ignore the possibility. If you wait for proof of malfeasance before taking a stand you are by definition always playing catch-up and praying for the next Snowden to bring you up to speed.

The only way to prevent tragic abuses of power is to be proactive. We cannot wait for abuses to occur, we must be constantly vigilant in recognizing potential abuses and stopping them before they occur (just imagine how effective network security would be if it were entirely reactive instead of proactive).

The world got a wake-up call with the Snowden revelations. But anyone with some technical know-how and foresight knew much of what he revealed was happening already (although I'm sure even the most forward thinking technologist was surprised at some of the revelations). I would hope the era of "but where's the proof" would be over when it comes to protecting ourselves from oppressive surveillance powers.

The only way to secure this country from domestic enemies in perpetuity is to make sure such detrimental abuses cannot occur, ever. Waiting until proof is revealed is far too late. And absolutely never trust anyone with unchecked power.

Your argument is also brain-dead in that the amount of information available was minuscule compared to now (thus avenues for abuse and relevant information was proportionately minuscule). The fact that it didn't happen in the era of the largest (known) abuses says absolutely nothing about the likelihood of it happening going forward.
Rand Paul is a declared candidate for President, and the EFF does not make political endorsements, so they're probably trying to avoid discussing Rand Paul too much.
They will replace it with something far worse when the "news reporters" and the general public aren't paying attention.

We know to look for and hate the "patriot act" they will come up with a "puppies and kittens" name that you will look like an idiot to say you hate.
It's long been observed that large firms are like communism "on the inside".
I've read HN almost every day for the last 7 years. In that seven years, I don't recall ever reading a post that said something particularly slanderous about Zed. I have seen post after post about his Learning XXX the hard way, and, in fact, I've even purchased at least one as a result.

The one thing different about HN is that if you even slightly start to get overly negative on a post, you are downvoted into oblivion, and nobody sees what you've written.

So I'm really confused, Zed is upset that things that are negative are written about him (and I can appreciate that, who wouldn't be upset when negative things are written about them) - but the one place he criticizes, happens to be the one place on the internet (that I'm familiar with), where slanderous, objectionable, heck, off tone comments are censored by the community.

Because that's what I love about HN - the community keeps the tone civil, reasonably polite, and holds commentators accountable for their contributions, to the point of hell banning anybody who does draw too much ire.

I think Zed's criticism is a little off base this time.
Jo Walton's What Makes This Book So Great along with about half a dozen of the books it mentions (it's a collection of blog posts on books she's rereading) which I hadn't previously read. All of the previously unread ones I've now finally read are good, a couple great, ditto the ones previously read. One was enough of a downer that I didn't finish it (Random Acts of Senseless Violence).

Definitely recommended if you enjoy science fiction and/or fantasy.
FBI has access to all your email older than six months without a warrant.

So if you use online email like gmail, yahoo, hotmail, etc. it already knows who you are.

People forget about the massive abuse of that law which is far older than the patriot act.
It fits the rant perfectly of course.

"How dare you not know who Paul is you pleeb. Accept our rain of downvotes, it'll make me feel better about myself"
These slides were full of dangerous, elementary errors when they were submitted to /r/c_programming a couple of days ago. The author doesn't know C enough to have worthwhile views on the language.
Yeah... you'll find people being jerks everywhere. Most often, you'll find people being jerks without knowing they're being jerks.

But if it happens to you, then the source is "the cesspool of the internet". I hope Zed knows he's being hyperbolic here, otherwise he's got another thing coming.
People can say what they want about Zed Shaw, in the end, he built things. Things used by millions of people. And he does deserve respect for that.
> I’ll add one more thing to the people reading this: I mean business when I say I’ll take anyone on who wants to fight me. You think you can take me, I’ll pay to rent a boxing ring and beat your fucking ass legally. Remember that I’ve studied enough martial arts to be deadly
It's not a crypto problem. It's not about who you're talking to. It's what they tell you, and where they got the info they're telling you. Mutually mistrustful routing is very hard.
I wanted to read something about logical thinking and cognition. So just started with Godel Escher Bach.
no email address in your profile :(
The Grand Design - Stephen Hawking.

Should finish it by tonight.

After that, it is time for 1984 - George Orwell.
An 8TB hard drive costs about $300. I wouldn't be surprised if the log of all the phone calls (metadata) of the US over a year would fit on one or two of these drives.
Yeah, that's great.

Now try it using some features from that super-recent, edgy, C standard from 16 years ago, C99.
Still a Twitter mention is hardly the same as mentioning it prominently in the announcement. If it were Rand Paul fighting the EFF, it's almost certain that he would be mentioned above the fold. I am also interested in why Hillary's pro-NSA position hasn't been discussed more by EFF. Have they ever criticized a prominent Democrat? Hillary has been a big NSA supporter as well as a customer during her time as Secretary of State. Obama is obviously a huge NSA advocate given he signed Patriot Act extensions.. Not a single word from the Hillary campaign about privacy. Of course, privacy and transparency aren't exactly Clintonian. What's sad is that large numbers of the tech community are still going to raise money and vote for her, regardless of the issues.
For reference, here is the link to the real arxiv page: http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.07647 and here is the blog post announcing the paper: http://engineering.pinterest.com/post/120111908004/building-...
What does Zed actually want to happen here? For HN moderators to remove comments critical of him or his work? This entire post and the attitude behind it seem really childish. I'm confused why anyone is voting it up.
The core point of this (people are jerks, especially on HN) has been a recurring theme ever since the new mods have showed up on HN, trying to clean up our act. Things seem a lot better than a year ago, and I try extremely hard to assume good faith from people on the other side of the screen when replying to comments (helps my mood a lot).

But this suffers from the same thing everything I read from Shaw: such strong language. I can't comment for him (I think I've seen him post before, would be interested), but my impression is that he's genuinely hurt by these people. Is he trying to change anything, or just venting?

> I’d like to point out that one of the reasons most of your moronic baby penis followers hate me is because I wiped out epic amounts of Ruby on Rails with one blog post full of truth.

This doesn't make me want to agree at all. I like HN and don't give 2 shits about RoR. I care deeply about making the internet slightly better by convincing people to stop being assholes. But hey, this is pretty rude! I won't quote the entire thing, but it's a lot of crass imagery.

Maybe this is satire, but I don't think so. I don't have a witty conclusion to reading this, just a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach
Ask HN: Shared email accounts?
I noticed our startup is using a lot of shared email accounts. We have shared Gmail accounts for dev@, support@, contact@. We basically just share the pw.

I doubt this is a one-off case and I think a lot of small businesses are using shared email accounts.

While sharing pw is not that big of an issue. The whole procedure of handling mails is a bit clunky. What tools do you guys use to make this more efficient?

I'm not looking for a CRM/helpdesk tool yet. We love Gmail, just want the email handling to be more efficient. The collaborative inbox in Google Apps is absolutely atrocious, partially because it has it's own non-Gmail UI.
You meant to say, "if you're passing a pointer to an array to a function, the function doesn't know the size of the array unless you pass that as another argument".

When passing a (pointer to a) data structure to a function, in 99.99% of cases there's only one data structure you'd pass, and you build this into the function's prototype, e.g.,

int myfunction( struct my_structure *x )

instead of

int myfunction( void *x )

and so, yes, the function does know the size of the structure. And in the case of arrays, often it's enough to mark the end of the array (with '\0' in the case of char arrays or NULL in the case of pointer arrays), I'd only roll my sleeves up and worry about minimizing length calculations if I had actually done some profiling and determined that such nitty-gritty optimization was needed (it rarely is).
Judging from his previous rants, Zed tends to overreact to things and blow out of proportion. Idiot commentors are everywhere, you don't just shutdown the community because of that. Other than that seems like a great guy.
How to Hack a Parking Management System and Why?