skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my opinion, a Soft Developer is one who mainly just writes code. Whereas, a Soft Engineer is somebody who looks after the project end-to-end (requirements gathering, coming up with a solution and then coding it)
So just because we can't have zero spying, we should accept incredible levels of intrusion rather thank working to put more roadblocks in NSA's way?

That's not a rational argument.
I like this distinction. Software engineering feels like you are building a system, considering infrastructure, optimization, caching layers, etc., versus just writing the code that runs on such a system. That distinction may be a subtle one, but that's how I see it.

Source: I am director of engineering at a 35 person startup
Ruby.js
When my company was acquired, all of our "software developers" received the title of "software engineer", so yes I refer to myself as a software engineer. My title is trivial to me, but I would consider my day-to-day activities to be a form of engineering. I apply my software knowledge in order to design, build, maintain, research, and improve systems and/or processes.
LtU discusses exactly the issue of how 'interpreted' can be faster: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5075 .
> If we subscribe to the belief that ideas can be judged within a vacuum, uninfluenced by the social weight of their proponents, we perpetuate a system in which arbitrary markers like race and gender influence the perceived correctness of ideas.

I don't understand this. If ideas are judged in a vacuum, then by definition, their perceived correctness is not influenced by race and gender. If those ideas are perceived differently based on race or gender, then they're not being judged in a vacuum. Or am I missing something here?
Only a small fraction of users know how (and are willing) to use modifier keys like that. I don't think it's practical to assume they'll change their behavior in this case.
I was mainly commenting on the design. I actually haven't looked at the implementation.

Also, I would put AES side channels somewhat low on the list of practical vulnerabilities.
Is it possible that you are referring to http://sblom.github.io/openj-core/ioj.htm ? I found it linked at http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5075#comment-82793 .
I've been part of three teams who attempted monolith->microsystem transitions. Two succeeded (though at wildly different costs in terms of engineering time and delay) and the other was abandoned after person-years of effort.

The common aspect of the successful migrations was their incremental nature: rather than "killing" the monolith all at once, there was a careful and gradual migration of performance-critical sections into services running atop dedicated machines/storage/etc.

Neither of the successful moves happened all at once, or indeed ever 100% replaced the monolith.

It wasn't just a question of planning, either. The failed migration had a team of three engineers spend ~six months writing detailed component specs, migration plans, etc. The business simply couldn't stop (or even maintain the status quo) to let them build the shiny new V2, so it kept getting pushed out and restarted long enough that the plans and specs bit-rotted and the whole thing got scrapped.
Can we start a white house petition? Is that a thing that make a difference?
Except he has no chance of winning. I'll vote for him anyway, but...
Ask HN: Americans, how would you change the H1B visa?
Immigrant visas, most notably the H1B, is a hotly and long debated topic on HN and elsewhere. There seems to be three camps: the employers who claim that they can't find enough skill employees in the US, the want-to-move-to-US employers that just want to live and work in the US, and the American groups that opposes H1B either on ethical reason (indenture servant of the H1B employees), or out of job concerns for themselves (the employees are using H1B to repress wages) . Considering that all of us are probably biased to our own selfish reasons, the truth is probably somehwere in between.

That said, one of the things I've noticed about the third group is the lack of proposing of solution. Yes, the H1B is a very shitty visa, and as one of those currently on OPT with large group of friends who are also immigrants in one way or another, I can say with certainty that H1B is not a visa I want to be on. If you're opposing the H1B visa, what do you have in mind as an alternative system? Do you prefer a more restrictive, more open process/ visa? Or for some reasons I don't have yet an alternative that you like?

If at all possible, I'd like to hear a best-case "if I have magic" solution, and one that you think is a more realistic scenario?

Since this is a very emotional topic, please do read anything in this post, as well as the comments in good faith.
Iceland has the world's best diet?
> Also, I would put AES side channels somewhat low on the list of practical vulnerabilities.

Sure, but if they're concerned about weaknesses in AES enough to cascade it with other ciphers, ignoring the side-channel inherent to the AES design is pretty silly and indicates a lack of research or foresight.

Combine that with no response from their team for threee months after I opened the issue, and I think we can safely conclude that this library is not currently trustworthy.

(in b4 "TripleSec Considered Harmful")
Have you tried couchsurfing.com ?
Are you supporting discrimination against foreigners?
I don't know, but the EB2 and EB3 backlogs for India are longer than for China so there must be some difference.

Assuming those numbers are from PERM applications though, they don't correspond one-to-one to immigrants. For example Indians have a multi year wait to get a green card after their PERM is approved, and anytime they change employers while waiting they will likely apply for a new PERM, so by the time they get their green card one Indian could have gone through many PERM approvals (which this website will probably count separately).
Sometimes (albeit rarely) it is luck. I was offered $400k/year to be a CTO at a big (yet relatively unknown) company. Most of my other job offers have not been above $200k.
Hacking Team Founder: Hey FBI, We Can Help You Crack the Dark Web
Many OpenGL implementations use a "virtual function" pattern where you look up the driver's function pointers and call through that (AGL, CGL on OS X, WGL on windows, probably more). It saves indirection when there's more than one possible vendor but means you have to remember to wrap each of those when doing interception.
Lego Worlds Puts Walt Disney and Electronic Arts on Alert
No, but the game lends itself to it. =) But it's different from that, anyway. Ultima, I feel, is a game about you-the-player, whereas UO (and all MMOs, really) are games about you-the-collection-of-numbers.
> There are a myriad of other ways he could have done this

Can you be a little more specific in your armchair whistleblowing? Because we've seen other whistleblowers try to do it other ways -- on many of the same issues -- and fail.

> And let's be honest, it was something most people already knew about anyways.

It was something many people inside and outside of government, some of whom are now advocating -- or actually, in the case of members of Congress, taking -- action to rein it in, were directly dismissing previous reports of. It is not something everybody knew (the "everybody knew it already" line is something that defenders trotted out once enough details had come out that the "you're paranoid, there's no evidence anything like that is happening" line they'd been using with previous reports couldn't be maintained with even a shred of credibility.)
Are the OS X drivers really that bad in comparison to the windows drivers? Instinctively, I have a hard time believing that if only because the Linux drivers are so much worse than the OS X ones. :(
"The most annoying one was a phone call from one institution, that I received [...] 6 months after the application was submitted."

Was that institution the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, by any chance? (Or possibly another federal entity?) I've heard that story and have reason to believe it several times.
Remote Control System (RCS) Galileo
The reality is that this is a positive thing. India's economy could be the next modern miracle if enough people start companies and create another Silicon Valley in Mumbia or New Delhi.
Ha, the usual mit/sicp theme. Timeless.
Not a bad idea - in fact, it's much better than a secured credit card.
It's curious that you follow up a "really dated" article from 2011 with an article from... 2010.
I don't have time for anything comprehensive, but if you feel like doing your own research look into:

- NGOs and CSOs the US has in China and their support of Civil Society; Civil Society is a comprehensive word that means signon to US standards, expectations, culture, economic norms, etc

- Source code (hosted on GitHub) that supports civil dissidents and websites (greatfirewall) that align with US narrative work that have US support or funding

- DoD MINERVA's study of housing crises in China and the possibility to use home ownership (surveillance of) for prediction or (propaganda of) nudging into unrest

- Broadcasting by the Board of Broadcasting Governors, such as VOA into China

- Anything you can find via FOIA requests from the Bureau of International Information Programs (this was born to take up responsibilities formerly in charge of by the late USIA)

If you want to get hypothetical there are number of suspicious events and coincidences - but these have no definitive link (smoking gun) pointing to the United States so they are excluded here.

It's important to note that NGOs do not mean that they are not related to government or the USG's national security objectives. ZunZuneo for example was set up through a series of NGOs that were ultimately CIA fronts.
> (...) his intent was clear to damage the government more so than expose government surveillance.

No it was not. His stated intent was to expose government surveillance in order to spark public discussion. His unstated intent, derived from his actions, was exactly the same.

Had he aimed at damaging the government, there were much more efficient -- for that effect -- ways of revealing the information.
Does it increase the cost of the proverbial wrench?
> The former is arguably whistleblowing, but the latter is not.

It's not because something is technically legal that it's moral. For instance, killing civilians with drones, torturing people, or recording the whole world's communications may be legal according to some twisted laws, but it doesn't make it right. At least voters should have a clear view of such issues, and it's not coming from the US government.
You say that like it's a bad plan.
If you want to work in a big corporation or bank, then Java (or even C#/.NET) is a good thing to have. If you want to work at a startup, it's not that valuable.

For the past few weeks, recruiters have been calling me a few times a week saying that they have Java positions that they need to fill, so it's absolutely not 'dead'.
From Bitmap to Base64 and Back with Native Android
Celebrities often use causes to further there career, which makes many of these things seem less important. Also, the often advocate pointless solutions which can be either pointless or even harmful.
Who do you charge for the API calls?
No, not dead. And a foundation in Java will still help if you do transition to another language (read: Scala) in the future.
FYI: If you Google the article title the search result will bypass the paywall.
In Canada at least the title "engineer" is professionally regulated, so the terms "CS classes" and "software engineering classes" are non-interchangeable as with the titles "software developer" and "software engineer". The second requires an accredited software engineering degree and a license to practice engineering professionally.
Voters pretty much do have a clear view that the nsa's job is to spy on foreign countries.
There's a distinction between legally wrong and morally wrong, Snowden makes that distinction I think, whereas you seem to think that the NSA's actions being defined as legal makes them ok. It doesn't.
My company does not allow anyone to have the title of "Engineer" unless they actually have a P.E. license.
On the flip side, by not bringing charges against the NSA, there is a clear double standard:

"...the agency had breached its own privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times a year since 2008."

"Mr. Snowden committed very serious crimes... that he should face."
Anyone with experience in telecom will immediately recognize this as a traffic engineering problem easily solved with the Erlang formula: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(unit)
Not to be confused with the Erlang Language. ErlangC assumes queuing, which is probably applicable to this case.
If I was Edward Snowden, I don't think I would return to the USA, even if the president offered me a complete pardon and a medal on top.

I don't think I could trust the US intelligence apparatus to not get me into some kind of "accident" or come up with some fake charges to put me into prison. Not to mention the risk of some "patriot" taking justice into his/her own hands.

Which is very sad, but unless the political landscape in the USA - and internationally - undergoes some major changes, coming back to the USA would be a stupid move for Mr. Snowden, unless he is ready to go to Jail for a long time. And given the example of Bradley/Chelsea Manning, that does not sound very inviting.
Since it has salary data it must be based on PERMs, which only cover a subset of employment green cards.
There have been serious issues with performance in the 1.6 releases (including Windows).

There are a few Git specific things if you're running Git < v2 that you can try:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4485059/git-bash-is-extr...

And in Sourcetree, set options under Options -> Diff, set Size Limit (Text) to 128KB and Size Limit (Binary) to 1024KB.
Or don't...and invest that money during the year. It's trivially easy to earn more investing than you will pay in interest to the IRS at the end of the year.
>legal foreign spying

I'm not a lawyer, but that doesn't sound right.
The end of suffering?
"Since The Order: 1886 is completely rendered in real-time with no pre-rendered frames..." http://blog.eu.playstation.com/2015/04/13/order-1886-gets-po...
Examples of this actually happening? Genuinely curious, as I've never heard of this phenomenon.
I think that expecting the information a whistle-blower leaks to correspond 100% to illegal activity is a ridiculous standard to hold them to. Certainly police are not held to that standard when gathering evidence.

Let the possibility of other information being leaked act as a further risk entailed in breaking the law.
As for me, I'm still waiting for a response from the SouthWest Research Institute. I know, I know, most people would have given up by now, since it's been 25 years, but the initial interview went so well....

[Edit] Holy shit, I'm old.
Quite interesting that it was seen as women's work then. Would that mean her team was predominantly women as well?

Does anyone print out their source code nowadays? I remember seeing that some 15 years back..
I call myself whatever the job is asking for if I'm applying for jobs and I've the skills. Other than that I tend to call myself by my name, or if I'm really pushed to describe my job to others as a 'programmer.'
I Made an Untraceable AR-15 ‘Ghost Gun’ in My Office–And It Was Easy
See this instead: http://www.cryptofails.com/post/75204435608/write-crypto-cod...
This is a reasonable point, but not in of itself conclusive of anything. The Espionage Act of 1917 has a history of being applied quite liberally and is not without contest, notably in the case of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, who did very much leak information on misconduct pertaining to foreign as opposed to domestic policy, but was acquitted because of parallel construction and other criminal acts done in response to his leaks. He is now generally held in a positive light.

As such, simply looking at this in a legalistic vacuum isn't helpful at all.
Supreme Court: Statute Requires Jury to Consider What the Speaker Is Thinking
I don't see either of those, particularly the latter, as different than non-celebrities. Non-celebrities often use paid or unpaid association with non-profits to advance their careers, and non-celebrities often advocate solutions which might be ineffective or harmful to the stated goal of the cause they are supporting, because, celebrity or not, advocacy for a cause doesn't require expertise in the domain necessary to design solutions.
> The telltale signs were there: an iPhone on the dashboard, someone sitting in the back seat.

Do drivers mind if you sit in the front seat? It sounds like the approach would avoid legal problems (but perhaps increase danger, both between driver-occupant, and in the event of an accident).
But most folks I talk to (even not in tech) know that the nsa is supposed to be doing foreign spying and are fine with it. You quickly fall into a minority thinking that exposing foreign operations was "right".
UN Experts Condemn the Human Rights Costs of Secret Trade Agreements
Interesting conclusion. No explanation.
Show HN: SlackDeck – Multiple Slack Teams (Chrome App)
You might prefer Cloud Foundry, which is switching its underlying container scheduling fabric to Lattice[1].

In particular, Cloud Foundry has more advanced security groups features, because it's mostly being marketed to enterprise customers.

Disclaimer: I have worked on CF and I work for a company which is a major contributor to CF.

[1] http://lattice.cf/
Before I properly noted the URL, I had a moment of thinking this was Penn Jillette's library. Now I'm kinda disappointed.

Back vaguely OT: I'd love to find access to something like this for certain domains of Japanese texts, with the major barrier that I don't actually speak or read Japanese yet. Both language and access as research barriers can be frustrating.
4K and VR is going to drive the performance demands up quite a lot very soon.
It is a theorem about the properties of all possible voting systems with preference rankings. The basic idea is there are a few desirable properties for any such voting system, but that it is mathematically impossible for any voting system to satisfy all of them.
It's not Wikipedia, but http://tech.mit.edu/V123/N8/8voting.8n.html may be more intelligible (especially regarding the particular desireable conditions that Arrow's theorem says are mutually incompatible). There's also http://dev.whydomath.org/node/voting/Arrow's_Impossibility_T..., which includes some intuition-building exercises.
Why exactly do you stick with Windows? Hardware?
I believe you mean "How to write good".
> Actually, DOOM isn't pure 3D at all.

I played this awesome "pure 3D" FPS the other day.

It was called Laser Tag and it rocked.
Introducing Projector
Great article, moves well from problem spotting, to a systematic way of identifying the culprits, then explains why it's happening, then explains the fix (with potential caveats). Simple way of putting it but lacking in so many technical blogs.

The only disappointing thing is that chrome dev tools can't plug in to every browser engine! :)
This is far and away the most helpful response I've gotten, thank you.

Will digest, edit, and probably hit you up with another question or two.

Thanks again
It's a little disappointing to read an article about grassroots mapping efforts that doesn't mention OpenStreetMap even once.
There are a lot of people who believe there is something wrong with proprietary software. You don't have to agree with the FSF or their goals, but it does everyone a disservice to conflate the argument for software freedom with an argument against proprietary software. The FSF considers commercial use and distribution of software to be an important part of software freedom and does not consider licenses that forbid it to be free.

And if you think it is unethical to sell proprietary software and refuse to use it oneself, it is also perfectly reasonable to advocate that others follow the same course. A value position that one doesn't believe others should follow isn't a value, it's just a preference.
I assume they can see what uptake there is for features using analytics, but what comes to mind are native retweets and subtweets. Those are relatively new. They have also changed how blocking works multiple times based on feedback.
He probably broke the law. (I'm no legal expert)

But when I take a look at the general conduct of the US government both internal and external, and the insane chaos it is creating around the globe, it doesn't feel morally wrong to sabotage the US government in every conceivable way.

The US government tortures and executes people without trial. (even its own citizens in some cases) The president signs a kill list every week. And then there's various terrorist organizations that are seemingly run out of Washington. This is beyond anything I could have imagined 20 years ago. Not even in my wildest dreams. (or nightmares)
24 Crowdfunding Sites and How to Choose Yours
> (your own heroku with not a ton of work)

I've worked on Cloud Foundry, which is ostensibly a Heroku competitor.

The idea that you can replicate Heroku's full functionality "easily" is just silly.

Full-feature PaaSes do a lot of things, including a whole bunch of tedious nitty-gritty details.

We're well into the days of early maturity on PaaS products. You can install Cloud Foundry or OpenShift, or host on Heroku. Writing your own PaaS at this point is a bit like writing a custom operating system circa 1995. Unless you have a compelling reason to do so, you'd be utterly crazy to.
It's wrong to break into foreign computers and spy on people. If China did it to you would not think, "oh china, you rascally superpower". You would be scared shitless and would contact the FBI. It's state sponsored terrorism.

It's also, technically, an act of war.
To be frank: bull. A problem that can always be solved algorithmically is "trivial", in the mathematical sense, but since the mind is algorithmic, you can't just say, "Well, clever tricks, not algorithms." A mathematician's mind works somehow.
Having troubles staying up with 3 day sale happening now
And what if voters say OK to these issues (which they basically have)?
I've always liked the tactic of requiring the applicant to follow some sort of instruction. Something like, "begin your cover letter with 'My favorite flavor of ice cream is <insert your favorite flavor>.'" Once they've followed your instructions, they've earned the right to be informed of all changes in the application lifecycle. This will allow you to ignore a surprisingly large number of applicants who couldn't be bothered to read and comprehend the instructions but gives any well-meaning applicant the respect they deserve.

I also like questions like the above because it lets you know something about your new hire. I've used the question I listed above before, and then followed up by having a pint of their favorite flavor for them and their new team at the end of their first day. For a few bucks per hire, it's neat positive experience that let's the new hire share something, albeit superficial, that they wouldn't normally share until much later.
Also, in case anyone is interested, I open-sourced the backend restful interface for administering Mumble servers in which this project is built off of.

https://github.com/alfg/murmur-rest

Still needs work and more documentation, but it's very minimal.
I'm all for investing my own money, but investing the IRS' money seems really risky. I still owe that money to them, even if the market goes down. You could theoretically do some fancy tax lost harvesting, I suppose, but I would want to be very sure of my math.
> Anything a normal person would assume is private should be treated that way.

Fine, just don't complain when it turns out that your expectation of what is normal doesn't match up with the population.