skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A truly great read, in particular when it comes to how the author explains the fallacy of the "nothing to hide" argument. I will definitely be re-using some of these examples in my own conversations.

That said, there is a sad irony to the proposed solutions. Having to take measures to hide from the authorities is precisely what Anne Frank and her oppressed peers had to go through, and we all know how well that panned out for them. It is also, in its own way, a form of self-censorship and a huge impediment to one's freedom.

Not to say that I don't appreciate the author's advice on this, as I do take some these measures myself, but the problem first and foremost is the ridiculous escalation of power by those in charge. The article even discusses some of the core issues on this matter:

Although the law is incomprehensible to the governed, ignorance of the law is not a defense when you’re prosecuted by the government.

As well as:

The institution of government is defined by its monopoly on both the creation and enforcement of law.

There needs to be real transparency, accountability and separation of concerns. Short of a revolution, I'm unfortunately not completely sure how this can be achieved. One of my hopes is that those who advocate and profit from this disgusting system will be exposed by this very system. Another hope is that people at large will downright refuse the legitimacy of the current system, in an organized and peaceful enough fashion that an alternate coherent system can safely emerge.
Given Apple's target market is not hobbyists, that there is already an embarrassment of components you can buy and build your own system from, being able to add after-market memory was never a priority for them for this spot in the product line.

Historically it wasn't advantageous to lock it down like that, people would typically upgrade their memory several times over the course of a system's lifecycle. If you look at what the original G3 case was like, where there was a latch on the side that lays the case open with easy access to memory and hard-drives, a design improved upon throughout the early Mac Pro models, you can see they were never intentionally user-hostile.

In the interests of shrinking components and improving reliability, though, in an appliance-like product such as the Mac Mini, it makes sense.

Notice that the new Mac Pro has extremely easy access to the memory slots.

For most people, the memory that comes with their computer is the memory that computer dies with. This holds true for all kinds of systems, especially laptops where in most cases people don't even know or care how much memory they have.

It was nice to be able to save a little by buying third party memory, but it's not the end of the world that you can't. The Mini can only go to 16GB, so the savings are minor. The Mac Pro can go to 128GB, so it's almost expected you can do that.
How many times do we have to see prosecutors using laws in ways never intended when passed before we stop passing these broad laws?

After Enron anyone fighting against Sarbanes-Oxley passage was laughed at for claiming it was over-broad. No prosecutor would misuse it, of course it's just meant to reign in other evil doers like Enron.

Why is it that anyone even considers the idea that we can rely on proprietorial discretion to keep laws in check? Shouldn't that concept be laughable by now?
Here's what app makers want from WWDC
His name is Lebowski!
It only needs to work for one quarter, one year at most. Long enough for the execs to get their bonuses and move on to ruin the next company.
"To cover rent, mandatory health insurance and other expenses, Hunter's mother sends him between $6,000-7,000 each year."

That's actually a little bit low for Munich. I think two or three times that would be more realistic to cover living expenses.
Those are F15E aircraft.

The F35 has some signature green lights that really stand out at night (I assume they'll be turned off during combat): http://www.edwards.af.mil/shared/media/photodb/photos/2013/0...

Here is a picture of 2 F35s being refueled at the same time: http://breakingdefense.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2013/0...
Your logic is flawed. It doesn't matter if even 99% of the addresses all belonged to the wallets of a few hundreds early adopters.

As of today (as of block 350,000) there are 102 addresses with 10,000 BTC up to a few 100,000 BTC in each of them. They represent 2.8 million BTC! Most of these addresses belong to exchanges or online wallets and contain their customer's funds, because no one owns that many bitcoins. So these 102 addresses most certainly represent the 2 or 3 million bitcoin users worldwide that exchanges and online wallets claim they have: http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-future-consequences-of-the...
How does it compare to Ratpack http://ratpack.io ?
Thanks Pasha for letting me be a part of your brilliant idea.
DNSimple is amazing, and we do our reselling on SimplyBuilt.com through them.
As a UX person, I'm intrigued by this idea, but I would probably avoid creating situations where it is necessary to apologize. If you confirmed a flight, hotel and rental car, but then came back with a "Sorry!" later, that would be a negative experience for a user. They may have passed the confirmation on to others or set other plans in motion, which may also have to be "rolled back". You would need to compensate customers for the inconvenience.

The way to avoid that is to show requests in a pending state, but this has other implications. Users will want to continue to shop and to cancel pending requests, which might mean lost sales.

Generally it's more important to paper over the realities of a complicated system when you have a customer-facing self-service tool. Exposing those realities might create too much complexity for self-service, and you may need sales and service people to manage it. Basically you've built a travel agency instead of Expedia, which, again, is more costly.
INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER. [0]

[0] http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
He wants to make his job easier, consequences be damned. It should be easy for the "good guys" to monitor and catch the "bad guys", give us back doors and unsecured communications with which to do our jobs.

He's too focused on his narrative to be able to understand the web of unintended consequences of what he's proposing. The same way law enforcement and lawmakers fail to see all of the unintended consequences of the drug war.
The one that always comes to mind is the Empire State Building. It was built in 410 days, 12 days ahead of schedule and right on budget. I guess the design drawings were produced in two weeks, which is staggering to think about.

I'm pretty sure the race for the tallest building at the time probably had something to do with the rate at which they it got it built. They were competing at the time with the Chrysler building for bragging rights as the tallest building and both wanted to get done first.
Click the back button in your browser
> We have banking laws for a reason: people need to trust that the money they entrust to others will be there when they want it back.

If we trust the system that pulls the wool over our eyes, should we really trust it?

Have a listen to TAL: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/536/t...

The problem with the creation of law in the USA is that it unequally favors those who can pay to finance elected officials campaigns and thus non-elected governing bodies.

A transparent financial blockchain is the core difference in philosophy between backroom decisions made on our behalf supposedly with our best intentions in mind by non-elected appointed people and a mathematical equation that we can all see and test. Math we can all trust because it is true at it's core, can we do the same for people?

Yes some payment processors can be shady, but so can some fed officials who are incharge with our entire financial system.
You may want to remove "Court Order" to future proof the standard.
You really need to specify some better context here--was somebody hurt? Was somebody killed? Were you just arguing with people on the internet who don't believe people should bike in the street with cars?

As it is you kinda just look like somebody advocating censorship and trying to shame a newspaper into doing something you want.
good one. it's what one famous blogger calls the 'elop effect': http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2011/08/coining...
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Has this been fixed since you posted this? I'm not sure which fields you are referring to.
You sure can do this on your own machine. Have a look here for how to set this up on your own machine: https://github.com/valhalla/chef-valhalla/blob/master/README...
> Huh. I'm about to go read the the books, but that sounds like a wild interpretation.

Well, its not an interpretation from anything that Coinbase is willing to publicly point to from the relevant agency, its what Coinbase "understands" to be the agency interpretation, these three things are all potentially different:

1. Regulation,

2. the Division of Banking interpretation of regulation,

3. Coinbase's understanding of the Division of Banking interpretation.

Reading #3 and #1 isn't going to tell us if #2 is reasonable.
Actually, California had a very nice electricity market. We even had green energy companies that you could choose to buy your power from even if it was a little more expensive.

Then Enron crapped all over it with fraud and collusion. And, of course, since it was Dubya in charge, the Feds did ... absolutely nothing.

I'm not a free market defender. However, we will eventually need something like a market in electricity; there are going to be too many suppliers sending electricity into the grid.

In addition, had lots of electricity suppliers existed, Enron would not have been able to get away with what they did. The whole reason Enron could do what they did was that they could deplete the grid capacity by taking single power plants offline for "maintenance". If you could backfill that capacity and make money, Enron never have been able to pull that off.

That was why the Republicans went out of their way to sell off California's electricity producers.
I know this is a small gripe, but the name of the company (even though it makes sense) makes my skin crawl a little. The name does stick in my memory though, so I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing.
Blood Test Can Detect Every Virus You’ve Ever Had
I think you might be using more math than you realize. You might not have LEARNED about it in a math class, but it is math. Set theory, statistics, etc.... I know a lot of what I do involves those things.
networking is the real performance bottleneck these days. cpu's, memory, ssd's are plenty fast and cheap. if your cluster isn't on at least 10gig switched ethernet, you're probably nowhere near the potential performance limit.
Just to be clear - if they say "no" then I don't recline.

But I can see that this isn't clear from my original post so sorry for causing confusion
You have a good point. If California repeated like it did 15 years ago and made a "market" called the California Water Exchange, and required water-supply entities to sell to separate aqueduct companies... and if the aqueduct companies were required to deliver water to farmers/consumers/industry at a government-fixed price ... with the supply available on a 1-day-in-advance contract basis only ... and if they made up special mandatory fees when water moved across state lines that people could exploit for fun and profit ...

then yeah, that'd be pretty stupid and wouldn't solve anything. because the entire point of moving to a "market" structure is to make the price variable (and in the case of a drought, making water more expensive). Then everyone is financially incentivized to conserve and the high-water-seniority low-margin alfalfa farms could sell their water rights to the almond farmers who just want their expensive trees to survive until the drought ends.
Yes. Aphyr has an excellent article on Cassandra.

https://aphyr.com/posts/294-call-me-maybe-cassandra/
"companies shouldn't put their customers' access to encryption ahead of national security concerns"

Encryption IS a national security concern.

When government agencies discourage encryption, or fail to report known software vulnerabilities, they're acting against national security interests.
In the type of situation you describe I'm very tempted to take action, but I'm afraid of nobody backing me up if I get into trouble, especially if I know some people are aware of the theft and were just going to let it slide.
I found the question of whether he really doesn't understand the technical meaning of "back door" or is conscientiously trying to re-brand away from the negative connotations of the term particularly interesting. Maybe "side-door" would work?
Beautiful data.

But what was the advantage of processing all that local sensor data? The article never explains it.

Were they able to deliver more accurate rain forecasts than the NEXRAD radar? (say, to the minute instead of the hour?) Did they predict the cold front and/or rain where the NOAA & NWS did not?
Starting with the easiest:

boolean logic, boolean algebra

What does O(n) mean?

The compound interest formula

matrix/linear algebra, numerical analysis

The statistics behind A/B testing

numerical approximation of a derivative, integral, differential equation

Read "numerical recipes in C"
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Diffie-Hellman already paved the way for encryption for everybody. There's no stuffing that genie back in the bottle.
1A: Wikipedia, github (e.g. awesome-*)

1B: named-data networking, camlistore, ipfs.io, bittorrent's web -- very easy to censor since all content is uniquely identified by a hash

1C: ?

1D: Usenet, Wikipedia, Wikidata

1E: technically difficult, see history of YaCY and http://juretriglav.si/an-open-distributed-search-engine-for-...

2: Wikipedia, but content is rejected under arcane citation policy

3: Wikipedia, but content is rejected under arcane citation policy

4: http://ipfs.io & https://crowdprocess.com/

5. blockchain publishing

6. standard challenge of bootstrapping user-generated content in any new online network

The role and funding of libraries have changed over time and across cultures, e.g. being associated with cities or nations, being associated with universities and churches. Current libraries are struggling to retain access to book stacks, e.g. look at the history of the successful community fight to prevent the flagship NYC library from removing many of its books.
I agree with you. In the real world, communication skills are important. Far more issues are caused by poor developer communication than by poor coding skills. Blogging, teaching and tweeting help you build those skills. Coding is only one part of development, and it's by far the easiest part to master.
This has been fixed. Just update moped:

gem "moped", "~> 2.0.5"
When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line too labors, and the words move slow;
He can't see himself as the bad guy, or enabling the bad guys in the future by making the law enforcement apparatus all powerful.

Of course he'd fling the same accusation at us, from his point of view. What if there was a terrorist attack that could have been prevented if only they'd have been allowed to see through the encryption? I mean, let's be honest, on its own merits, that's not the worst argument in the world.

It's just that as an old-school true-blooded American patriot, I can't help but notice that "just giving them all the powerz" is not the way we do things around here, and there are reasons for that.

(Before reflexively downvoting because I dared sound a bit patriotic, consider why I feel compelled to wrap myself in the flag here....)
The closure-based solution has been around for a long time; the symbol-based approach is new.

My reaction to the article's approach was largely: okay, cool, this seems approximately as good as the closure-based solution; is there any reason for me to switch? Or is this just a cool toy example to show off classes-as-expressions?
You can't check that the convention is being broken which makes refactoring more difficult. There will always be a temptation for some developers in some situations to mess with the internal state of objects.
As I understand it, real life terrorists are rarely competent enough to make this a major worry.
> Does bitcoin have a "face value"?

No, clearly not. Which is one thing that makes either the interpretation or Coinbase's understanding of it ludicrous; given that we have no source for the actual interpretation by the Division of Banking, its kind of hard to tell which, though.
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Thanks yeah it seems to be an effective technique. I figure this forum has smart people so they deserve to know.
Just thought it was quite bad UX design not letting me click the background or adding an X somewhere ... oh well.
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Once you make it illegal to do/have/use ___, Only criminals will do/have/use ___. (guns, encryption, drugs, etc.)
I don't understand, who else than the government has the right to tap internet lines ? If there's nobody, encryption does not protect your privacy, since investigations require warrants.

The problem is that the more the government watches everybody, the more people will encrypt. The logical path would to forbid anybody to tap lines. Then, of course, encryption would not be necessary, since data would flow securely.

Also, as long as its the authorities, as long as data does not fall into the hand of private interests (which is a risk), I don't see what the government would do about this ability to spy on its people since government represent the interest of voters. Ideally of course, in reality there would be many abuses.

By the way I don't understand why the authorities benefit for using Tor.
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Nothing annoys me more than ignorance. How are you going to outlaw math?
Where did the paper/article talk about stealing? It's mostly about arrests and "juvenile detention" [1]. That is, a measure of how frequently the US state imprisons people, which it does more than anyone else. And it targets an ethnic minority which it can no longer enslave.

(BTW, what's the excuse for the US sending killers across the world to steal control over people's resources? "Amusement and status" as well? Such answers lack any systematic analysis. Not to mention consistency; you could apply it to any ethnic group. Unless of course there's racist motivations...)

[1] http://www.nber.org/papers/w21178
I assume you want to calculate the driving distance from the user's location. So you pick something like 20-50 nearest points (a very cheap and quick operation with a geo-spatial index) and then you will calculate the driving distance to each of them using something like Valhalla, which is much more expensive, but it scales linearly and can be parallelized.

So the 100+ million number is irrelevant.
Working in the international London-based tech industry
If you have a cite to the numbers, I would be most interested.
Sounds like this dude works for Her Majesty's Secret Service, not the USA. He should be fired for this.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

So they would argue that this doesn't apply once we eliminate paper as a medium.

Also, but, but, but... They're only collecting metadata, right?
Yahoo pipes was obviously influenced by UNIX pipes and as such is one of the best demonstrations of flow based programming to date. I really loved Yahoo pipes and it influenced the way I think.

Pipes was a basic web "agent". It made basic programming available to the everyman much like HyperCard. Perhaps is just needed a runtime UI that matched the excellence of its design time interface.

Yahoo is focussing on mobile yet here they had this custom agent building tool that could easily be re-purposed to mobile to make a killer platform for Yahoo users.

Hopefully they will opensource the first generation perl version.

Some of my favourite flow based programming links follow.

Surprised nobody has mentioned noflow node.js workflows:

https://github.com/noflo/noflo

Also this (untested) will convert your yahoo pipes into Node.js

https://github.com/neyric/pipes2js

and this one (also untested) will do the same in python:

https://github.com/ggaughan/pipe2py

There is also python pypes which has a yahoo pipes like frontend with a stackless based backend.

http://pyvideo.org/video/400/pycon-2011--large-scale-data-conditioning--amp--p
https://github.com/fullscale/pypes

Other python flow based programming tools

https://wiki.python.org/moin/FlowBasedProgramming
http://www.kamaelia.org/Home.html (BBC research)
http://www.ruffus.org.uk/index.html

Wireit is a javascript pipes like frontend

http://neyric.github.io/wireit/docs/

As you can see I loved pipes and I can
Welcome to the tech groupthink brigade. How dare you criticize capitalism!

It's because tech people think they're all going to get rich. They don't realize that the genuinely rich regard them as stupid peons to be exploited--if they regard them at all.

"Work work. Zug Zug. Dabu."
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Résumé/CV: http://www.personal.psu.edu/fah109/Frank_Hardisty_3_June_2015_1600.pdf
Email:frank.hardisty@gmail.com

I want to join a team using the best technology for a good purpose (widely speaking). Please contact me if you have an opportunity!
Not exactly what you asked, but... SimpleCV is a derivative project of OpenCV that's easy to dive into it and worth considering. O'Reilly published the short book "Practical Computer Vision" on it. Easy to go from that to OpenCV after some practice.

http://simplecv.org/
I personally don't feel like my role or those around me are at risk of being replaced by an out-sourced team

Neither did they. Good luck.
I tried to be careful to only condemn the racist imagery. I don't know enough about Swiss politics to comment on this particular debate.
> It's where I want to go. Also you have YET to show ANY evidence that we are more safe or more free from terrorism by surrounding our rights to privacy.

If they could show that, credible evidence would have presented by now. ;)

But in all seriousness, the 1st & 4th amendment protections are the most vital freedoms we have and they should not be abridged outside of a direct link to harm. [e.g. Things like child porn, words designed to incite violent harm, violent prisoners shouldn't have privacy ]

So you have to be rational about it but yeah, mass surveillance and reducing self-defense tools to protect ourselves against criminals isn't "rational" behavior.

Criminals are going to do illegal things and we have the right to protect ourselves. If it inconvenience the government? So be it. I'm not going to bend over for any criminal who wants access to my financial data "because Terrorism".

Similarly, banning tools of self-defense [e.g. encryption for financial data, access keys] are simply guaranteeing the criminals will be the only ones to possess them.

I'm aware alot of people will be like "what about the 2nd"??

Yeah, that provides no protection against the government since they'll always have the ability to drop bombs on you. When you can afford a F-16 and the ability to pilot it for "self defense" purposes, let me know.
This seems like a pretty clear signal that the ability of the state to conduct mass surveillance may be slipping.