skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Word abut the surveillance programs (dubbed Echelon) was common-sense on #phrack as far as 2002. We have had American and German Intelligence agencies capture traffic at the Slovenian Internet Exchange at least since 2007. When the affair broke out, Germans stated that they will cease cooperation with the Slovenian Intelligence Agency, and the entire thing was swept under the rug.

Unfortunately, whistleblowing really takes substantial evidence, and that's what Snowden provided.
90% of Startup Growth Advice Is 100% Bullshit
Show HN: Securefs, a better transparent encryption filesystem
Former Google Recruiter Tells: Here’s Why People Want to Work for You
>Every single thing Snowden released could have easily been faked.

If it were faked, it could easily have been denied.
Moral sentiment evolved, more or less, on the plains of the Serengeti in groups numbering around 150 individuals, people who knew one another by sight. Compare that to the "sentiments" held by major corporations, corporations like Goldman Sachs that walk away from real estate deals that have gone bad, and do so without so much as a single qualm. When a major corporation defaults on a loan that has financed an endeavor that has gone bad, that's "just business." When an individual does such a thing, he's a "welcher."

I think the smart individual plays by two sets of rules. If you borrow from a person, play by the rules that have existed from time immemorial. But if you borrow from a corporation, play by the same rules they play by -- do what's good for you. You have to realize that these are two very different environments. To do otherwise makes you a sucker.
> I think if I applied for a job I'd get rejected as there is no track record of being able to work with that tech.

This is a big assumption, that is simply not true for a lot of opportunities out there. If you are able to show proficiency in what they are looking for, many companies will take you seriously as a candidate, even without 5+ years on the resume in said technology.

Worst thing you can do for yourself is to not try and apply. Worse case is you get a "no thanks" and you move on to the next application.
Apple to develop high-speed cloud and data centre infrastructure
Xiaomi’s Mi band is the world’s second most shipped wearable: Report
You don't need a rich type system for null safety. Something like what Kotlin offers[1] is more than enough (in fact, I think it's better than what languages with far richer type systems offer).

My point isn't that types are not helpful -- they are extremely helpful. My point it that on the continuum between no types and "types try to prove everything", there is a point that is the most useful, and that point is probably far from either extreme (I don't know if it's equally far from both, but I think it's pretty far from both).

[1]: http://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/null-safety.html
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It's the reaction. With faked documents, the administration is free to say the documents are faked. The leaker can be immediately discredited. The wiser approach to faked documents is no comment, but that lacks the political power of completely discrediting opposition.

With real stuff, people freak out and tip their hand. Media contact is made, discussions about endangering lives are had, and everyone accepts that the core idea is true.
If you want to read an even earlier version of the script you can find it here:

http://www.angelfire.com/movies/coolscreenwriter/scripts/The...
I believe you're actually agreeing with the author here. I took his comment to mean "Don't have unnamed numbers/strings/etc., refactor any 'magic numbers' into constants, that way they will be in one place with a sensible name."
Marjorie and Gerald Selbee also figured out this flaw in the Cash Winfall game, presumably independently of the MIT team. Somehow they managed to buy $600,000 worth of lottery tickets over a three-day period by themselves. That's a lot of time at the ticket kiosk...

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/08/01/elderly-couple-che...

That article also gave more information on the lottery's stance on the matter:

But Paul Sternburg, the lottery’s executive director, believes they have no reason to apologize or even change the lottery's procedures -- pointing to $11.8 million in profits in 2011.

"It’s a niche game for a different audience," he told the Boston Globe. "You want to bring in as many players as possible. Some people chase a huge jackpot. Others are looking at odds."
We do this. For bigger apps, we usually have a db layer, so local config file -> db config -> default in code.
If you have an employer, this is usually a pretty easy sell. Approach your boss about transitioning Aging Product X to a new technology stack because the current one is becoming defunct. Of course this will require some training for you, but it is easier to teach you a new skill set than to hire someone with that skill set and get them to learn about Aging Product X.

If you aren't employed and are contracting/freelance, it is just as easy. Since your skill set is niche, not everyone has it, and you can charge more for that niche. Up your rates enough that you can cut 10 hours a week out to study something new.
It is pretty typical to split sensitive personal information (e.g. SSN, pay, health records, etc) from administrative activities (e.g. leave requests). In the event that the administrative side gets compromised, it will limit how "bad" that compromise might be, additionally they may be required to store sensitive information differently (e.g. better physical security, server-drive encryption, etc).
I don't know how you get those traits out of those quotes. "We don't value money, we value security, stability, happiness, health, connections, influence, power... you know -- all the things that money buys for us."

But if you believe those quotes exhibit selflessness, you can just call me Charley 'Adolf' Manson: Paragon of Virtue. I've got a nice cult you can join. We've given up money, greed, and materialism.
Many linux distros release a new version every 6-12 months, depending on the distro. While ubuntu offers 5 years of support on long-term support (lts) releases, desktop users tend to like the latest version and reinstall or upgrade every 6 months. A lot of the time, upgrading to a new release causes packages to skip forward by several versions. This often breaks packages with kernel dependencies, like graphics drivers, so it's common to advocate a fresh install every release. If you choose to remain on a lts release, you can easily run the same install for many years-- the price you pay is not necessarily having the latest shiny packages in return for a fairly stable system.

Archlinux, as a rolling distribution, does not have new release versions. Packages upgrade continuously-- as long as you pacman -Syu somewhat frequently, you avoid skipping package versions, reducing general breakage. Of course, most frequent maintenance is the cost you pay for a smoothly running archlinux system, but it's nice not to worry about reinstalling while still having the shiniest new packages.

I've used archlinux on my personal laptop for roughly 4 years now, and I've only reinstalled once when I upgrade to an ssd about two years ago. Prior to that, I used to install the latest fedora every 6 months.
Most medium to large companies are going to have an HR department out of necessity. Hell I worked for a 30-employee company for a bit and even they were forced to hire HR people after a harassment incident.
Doing consulting work? If you can solve companies' problems, they won't mind if you don't have a track record with that particular stack.
> but certain vocal academics have managed to push a view that math is nothing but formulas AND that there is no controversy here.

This isn't really a thing, which may explain why I'm having trouble understanding what you are trying to say. To be more concrete: from what I can understand of your somewhat incoherent characterization it does not match any mathematical community I know of - it may exist, but if so it is not mainstream.
> So the argument that there's this overwhelming proof that the public can't ignore seems like weak sauce to me.

Your argument is that someone could fake them so having documents or not doesn't matter.

The one big issue is when they aren't fake and that people look at the documents no matter how real or fake they look and test them to see if they are true. That is what happened with Snowden. He got documents and SOME of them were able to be used to show validity and than the other documents and his actions build up the case. Without those this whole Patriot Act would have just been extended. Not that this new one is extremely better.
As an American, I had to Google Fred Dibnah since I had never heard of him. The quick-and-dirty: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Dibnah

Extra bonus video: here he is at age 50 scaling a chimney... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R3-YwDZrzg . Made my palms a bit sweaty just watching it. Amazing that he didn't even use a harness.
Au-Mazing Cornwall Sold GOLD to Ireland Back in the Bronze Age
I didn't say you needed it. Nor does having a title make you good at the job.
I think the tone of the article is because the lottery officials did nothing to stop the practice.

"The inspector general’s report claims that lottery officials actually bent rules to allow the group to buy hundreds of thousands of the $2 tickets, because doing so increased revenues and made the lottery even more successful."
> This might be obvious to everyone, but gambling expenditure is higher (as a percentage) in low-income households

As is everything. Your household grocery bill is higher (as a percentage) in low-income households. Everything is a higher percentage because the cost of stuff doesn't go down when you have little money. Gambling, alcoholism and drugs, medical bills, life don't cost less when you're broke, you just have to pick and choose what you buy to make ends meet.

Hope and escape are the biggest sellers on the market. When everything around you is geared towards selling "bigger is better", "newer is better", "richer is better" and you have no means to participate in that "Xer is better" society. Beauty companies sell us on "just use our makeup and it will cover all your flaws and make you look beautiful", fitness companies sell us on "just use our product and it will make you look beautiful", clothing companies "just buy our clothes, they will make you look beautiful"... The media constantly brainwash people to act that way.

Is it any wonder that people will spend out on anything that will let them hope (even if just for an hour or two) that perhaps, no matter how small the odds, they just might have a shot of "belonging" and joining those that have made it... or purchase some means of escaping from that whole system - if just for the hour or two it takes the drugs to wear off.

That's human nature. We live emotionally. We will die emotionally. No amount of math or education is going to change that. As long as the media keeps drumming its ever present beat that you need money to belong, you need stuff to belong, you need to be someone to belong, people will keep spending money on the hope of belonging... or spending money on a means of escaping from that pressure.
Your statement is not accurate, because the "rest of the world" has different concepts for morality.

For instance, other parts of the world have moral principles more in line with "don't get caught" or "don't embarrass your superiors" or "never side with anyone against The Family" than with "do no harm".

The typical American standard of morality is set so high that no one, other Americans in particular, including the very person professing that moral standard, can be reasonably expected to live up to it. Hypocrisy abounds among those with ultrahigh moral standards. Furthermore, the details of American morals are so diverse that anyone who manages to be a paragon by one person's standard may be no more than a low-life slimeball by another's.

In contrast, compliance with the letter of the law is a far more achievable standard.

If there is anyone who is at fault here, it is the mathematically incompetent person who designed the payout system for the lottery. This was, at its heart, no different from a finance quant unraveling the details of a complex derivative to discover an arbitrage opportunity for the firm. Discovery and use of the exploit corrected the artificially high margin for the state in administering the game to one more realistic for the mathematically flawed payout model.
Currently, SSF only supports standard TLS 1.2 handshake but the new networking design will allow to add new protocols easily. The tunnel implementation (currently TLS over TCP) will be modifiable without impacting the higher networking layers.
Elon Musk seems to have a particular version of a progressive vision of the future that accomplishes environmental sustainability without requiring people to make any real lifestyle changes. After all, his solution to the environmental unfriendliness of cars is more environmentally friendly cars (Tesla), not other modes of transport that are more efficient per passenger.

So, the cynical take: of course he's going to back a high-speed transportation option that still assumes cars and driving everywhere, rather than one that potentially obviates the need for them by taking people directly from high-density center to high-density center.
"While we had recently tested presenting easy-to-decline third party offers..."

...indicating they actually have such as thing as a "hard-to-decline third party offer". Wow, SourceForge, you really suck!
Thanks a lot for asking this - I'm in a similar boat¹ and will follow this thread with interest.

Good luck from another 30-something.

① For me 'niche tech' is one thing, and 'investing a lot of time in the bowels of the corporate product over 10 years' the other one - the latter just WILL go away if I switch and is absolutely not useful elsewhere
The big picture is not going to change. There are two broad categories of programmer. 1) people who build applications by gluing libraries and APIs together to get what they want. There is no shortage of things people want the machines to do, and this is by far the biggest swath of programmers and will remain so for the foreseeable future. 2) The people who do deeper dives and build high performance subsystems and components and wrap them in APIs for the first group to use. The older components will see slow replacement by newer/better versions of the same, while new areas are opening up all the time. Vision, voice, image processing, genetic analysis, communications, payment systems, medical records, you name it.

If you're the first kind of programmer, do some programming with some of the tools that interest you to learn new things and broaden your experience/understanding. If you're the 2nd kind, pick and area that interests you and roll your own. It doesn't matter if there is a big commercial code or even a big open source version out there, chances are if the right person does their homework they can build a better mouse trap. Just because something is big doesn't mean it's the best that can be, some things just have a lot of momentum.

But no, I don't really see much changing other than the list of things people build and then glue together. That basic pattern (build tools, apply tools) seems to be very persistent. Rather than worry about the future, you should open your eyes to just how wide the field is today.
And meanwhile, I keep using Android because I enjoy and prefer several things about the platform versus iOS and sometimes have to deal with an app being unavailable. It really is the one thing that I dislike about the platform. The freemium model (when done properly) is something I vastly prefer as well.

I look at it like the old shareware titles. I get a free demo that's either time limited or where I need to pay to unlock the full version. That way I can test the software or play the game or whatever, then if it's something that meets my needs, I can pay $1-10, secure in the knowledge that I won't be disappointed or surprised after buying something that turns out to be unwanted.

I'd say that the vast majority of apps and games I've purchased worked that way. Free download, mess with the app or play the first 5 levels of the game and then when I run into the limit where I need to pay, it's not a big deal because I know what I'm getting. The plague that is pay-to-win or other microtransactions in games is awful but that's probably not too relevant to this thread and is just as big a problem on iOS.

When I see the comments on the Play store or the App store, full of people complaining that the dev has the gall to ask for $1 or $2 for some useful or entertaining bit of code, it is very disappointing. That's the sort of money people pay for a Coke or to have someone drive a pizza 10 minutes to your house. I feel like if I get more than a day or two's use out of a mobile app, it's easily worth at least a buck or two and I'd vastly prefer to pay once than to deal with popup ads or recurring subscriptions and microtransactions.
If this interests you, definitely consider taking https://www.coursera.org/course/reactive
I expect you're being downvoted for appearing insensitive to a person with cancer. The person you replied to has cancer. It's likely difficult, and it's easy to think of it as a battle -- but the person you replied to is allowed to complain about what we call it, whereas we and the familes of people facing cancer are not allowed to complain about it __to them__. (I also realize that many people with cancer might _prefer_ the "battle" term, as well.)

This is based on something I've read that was very formative [0]. The main idea is that the central person is allowed to complain to anyone, but anyone not at the center of a tragedy is only allowed to complain to people farther from the tragedy. A short version of this is, "comfort goes in, complaints go out", if you think of these layers as rings.

Cancer patient: Can complain to anyone about anything
Cancer patient's family: Can complain to anyone __except__ cancer patients about anything.
Bystanders (me): basically has no standing to complain about things ("this is so hard for me to deal with!"). ;)

Sorry if this seems a little preachy, because your feelings are valid. I think that the downvotes are mainly because of the way you said them, and on who you replied to. I found this article really helpful in framing my own thoughts and words about tragedies, because I've been inadvertently insensitive in the past about things like this. I hope you enjoy it too.

0: http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/07/opinion/la-oe-0407-s...
Lotteries are generally a corrupt enterprise to begin with, so the moral scales probably lean toward the side of the MIT students.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PK-netuhHA
You weren't down voted for the CIA System Admin job he had (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden) You were down voted for saying he "Took One for the Team". I didn't down vote you though. You were presenting a conspiracy theory.
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Whiteboarding 101:  Don't Make Stuff Up
The examples are meta-constraints. The fitness function is the parsimoniousness of layout constraints, under the constraint that they reproduce the examples.
The way I read it, that would work.

But since the intent of the action is clearly to cut off the competition, why would we assume they will stop at "just" email address? That's their first sortie in what could become a long war. Next it could be IP address, then they could subtly alter their API to break automated access (and give out a different API to trusted insiders), and so on.

Ultimately when it comes to web-scraping and unauthorised usage, the advantage is always with the home team. They have the ability to change things any time they want, and the user is always caught behind every change (and they could literally change things once a day).
Well, if you are on a rolling distro like Gentoo or Arch you are going to run into breakage eventually because you are out on the leading edge. The tools are evolving quite steadily, so it's the price you pay to run the latest and greatest. Package dependency management is the trickiest part of package management, especially the reverse dependencies.
An interesting vision is that we'll go from programs that can be executed to models that can be solved with generic solvers (e.g. SAT solvers [1], or CP solvers [2])

So if you need to sort an array, instead of programming quicksort, you will simply specify that you are looking for a permutation of the input array T such that for all i, T[i] < T[i+1] and the solver will search and find a solution to your problem (i.e. a sorted array) using whatever technique it likes.

Many constraint satisfaction and optimisation problems are already solved this way, there's a possibility that this generalise to other problems.

There's many advantages to this: first you need less (no?) testing, because if the solution doesn't match the problem specification it can only be a bug in the solver.

Second, there's a chance that solvers will eventually be as fast as human programmers at finding solutions. Just like the compilers are almost as good at programmers at generating assembly, and often better. If this happens programming in general will become as useless as programming in assembly today.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_satisfiability_problem#...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_programming
The FRA puts out a lot of stupid safety regulations that don't apply in Europe and which make high speed rail much more difficult. US trains have to be built like tanks in the theory that this will help them survive collisions with freight trains. The fast accelerating French trains can't be used on US rail without special permits.

https://bikeeastbay.org/rail/fra.html

And for various reasons rail construction in the US costs about 5 times as much as it does in France. And because it costs more we do less of it. The figures below are for subways but I believe long distance rail sees the same effect.

https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us-r...
When it's my money on the table; jerkiness of the counter isn't the issue. When I have a $1000 bet and the dealer is showing a 6 and some moron betting the table minimum hits a 12, leading to the dealer drawing a 21 when they would have busted: that's real jerkiness. Playing to win is never being a jerk. I went to the Collision conference this year and raised more money at the blackjack table than I did from investors. If that's being a jerk, I'll take it. I made $25k in a few hours starting from $500: such a better use of my time than endless meetings begging for checks. Vegas equity is the best kind. Also, if a table gets hot, people don't drop out; it becomes a crowded party spot. A card counter helps everyone: piggyback on his strategy and do what he does and you'll win too.
Well, I'm gonna be one of the "all levels of the systems" guys. Honestly, if suddenly my job was nothing more than piecing components together, only writing stuff in super high level languages, I'd quit. I love my job, because I actually have to use my brain to do it right.

And then I'd work as a garbage man or something, and write good old code at home. ;-)