skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was faced with a choice: I could interject myself into her life, or I could respect the boundaries between us. Intervening might make her feel worse, or be inappropriate. But then, it might ease her pain, or be helpful in some straightforward logistical way.

Ease the author's discomfort, more like. If you need to think about whether to approach a distressed person, chances are that your subconscious is telling you to leave them the hell alone.
I'm interested. I sent an email.
Boolasync: async boolean logic in Javascript
How is it different? If you don't care enough about it to even want to do something then that sounds like the definition of 'ok with it'. Even if you theoretically dislike it.

(If you do in fact want to do something then pick the 'too difficult' option.)
You could search for it with DuckDuckGo, a search engine that doesn't track.
Wow bet Yahoos glad they took a little longer than Facebook and Google to 'set the record straight'.

This statement definitely carries much higher conviction language that related statements, interesting to note the absence of Marissa Mayer from the statements. I would guess that it just gives a little more PR distance in case things blow up further.
The folks at the Iris group were very much like that. Around the same period, the project that would become Lotus Quickplace and the iNotes web client was codenamed "Shimmer", after an old Saturday Night Live fake ad for a do-everything product that was both "a floor wax and a dessert topping".
Just use boxcryptor inside dropbox
Derek, I like how you announced it only after actually doing it. This is much different than saying you're going to do it, which sounds obvious, but there is a big difference.
Should I be worried about looking at this.
These companies are making themselves look really bad to anyone paying attention. Nobody is reporting that they joined a program to volunteer illegal access to user data, so these assurances are canards. What is being reported is that the NSA has been running a secret program to legally collect user data from these companies. If these companies want my respect, they need to admit that these reports are true, declare their opinion against the practice, and state their position on legal reform to make such practices illegal.
I applaud the attempt, but after reading the text of the bill, will this do anything? They obtained a court order authorizing this. Wouldn't it be better to make it illegal to issue broad warrants for large numbers of people and instead require one warrant per person?
Actually the logic is quite sound.

A dollar spent on the mars rover is a dollar not spent on poverty reduction. I do think that in the long run, spending on science and tech in general does prevent poverty, but it's not clear that the mars rover does so.

It's very hard for people to face that in our global economy, it's very easy to save lives at very low (relative) cost and yet people and Western government choose not to by spending money on other things. But it's the truth.

The cartoon you linked to is not logical. If I want to advocate spending on a particular thing, I have to at least be willing to hear counter-arguments so that I can actually convince people to spend money on it.
I've seen exactly what she describes with respect to Python.

Building large systems in Python requires a lot of discipline becuase it is so easy to violate sound engineering practices in this language. People come out of school without an understanding of how to build large systems and just throw code in until the thing becomes a large sphagetti mess. That is something that I think is unique to our field. I don't see civil engineers ignoring all engineering practices in stuff they build after they come out of school. You don't see them build bridges out of unsuitable materials or in unsound ways because it's "easier". It's not perceived that anyone with or without any knowledge can throw a few pieces of metal together and build a bridge...
I'm a little surprised that there are so many people here changing behaviors. While I certainly didn't know the details, I thought it was common knowledge among tech people that they had the capability and certainly the will to do so. I mean, the EP report on ECHELON was before 9/11!

Personally, I'm going to do what I've been doing. I run my email, RSS reader and other services on EU hosted VPSs, my online data storage service is a Raspberry Pi in my house (with encrypted backups offsite), but I still use Google Search†, Youtube and etc.

I also think the idea that we in the EU are much better is wishful thinking. We're all living in Amerika, and that applies to Internet spying as well. I think the CIA unlawful detentions and plane transfers[1] shows well how the American TLAs can just do whatever they want without any real consequences.

† Yes, even logged in. I think the idea that you're any safer because you clicked the log out button is incompatible with understanding how the web works.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_site
I'd assumed that moving back to NZ might be a solution, sadly that seems to not be the case. Fortunately it's a nice place to be anyway.

It seems like the only option is to live in a country that's so insignificant that no-one cares about it, and whose government is too incompetent to implement something like this :-)
I'm struggling to make sense of all this. On the one hand, the denials from the companies in question are becoming more and more genuine and convincing - on the other, the NSA PowerPoint did leak which very clearly states the companies' involvement and no one's thus far denied its validity.

Who's lying?
I'll add most of these as issues that we'll get to work on next :) Very awesome idea with the overlay on _Code_ view, I love it

>- I don't think / is a good name for the default channel.

Not sure if I can do much about this one -- that's simply the default route. I wanted to make it super easy to create a channel, so anything in the URL slug becomes the name of the channel. Visiting http://chat.echoplex.us/hackernews would make you join the channel named "/hackernews".

> - Why can't I see the user list in the Code and Draw views?

A pretty big UI deficiency atm, still working out the better way to present all the data

> - Sync Missed is a confusing label for a button. It appears to add N lines from the server chat log to the client chat log, so consider calling it something more descriptive (like Get Old Logs).

Indeed, it's set to sync 10 at a time to prevent flooding the client. However, maybe a smarter idea would be to sync in an infinite scroll fashion as well
Maybe we already did?
And they make a big song and dance about every request having judge approval and being overseen by the court, we already know that they just rubber stamp the collection of 'everything' and gag the companies not to talk about it.
What's wrong with these people, don't they watch homeland?
A 1% Tells the Truth About Job Creation
Thanks! It was SO tempting!

But keeping my mouth shut about it helped me slog through it and get it done, instead of basking in advance glory. It's too easy to slack off, if you've already felt the warm fuzzy joy from people's compliments on starting something. I didn't want to feel any of that until it was done.

More on that thought process, here:

http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_keep_your_goals_to_you...
See also "Why Johnny Can't Encrypt: A Usability Study of PGP 5.0", Whitten et al http://www.gaudior.net/alma/johnny.pdf

and its followup, "Why Johnny Still Can't Encrypt: Evaluating the Usability of Email Encryption Software", Sheng et al http://cups.cs.cmu.edu/soups/2006/posters/sheng-poster_abstr...
'waterphone' -- your comment history appears benign and helpful, I think you deserve to know you've been hellbanned. The automated filter on HN will hide your comments from most users. It is a waste of your time to comment if this is not fixed.

(reply to invisible comment): You're welcome!
The NSA is not only instrusive to the point of ridiculous, it's also, as typical of large government organizations, obscenely wasteful of taxpayer resources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trailblazer_Project
I've been working on a Dropbox-style system that does client-side encryption and runs in my own AWS account for a while now. It's almost ready for beta. Recent events help validate the effort for me.
I don't think that Glenn Greenwald would stake his reputation on just a PowerPoint. He claims on Twitter that he has "highly detailed technical NSA materials on how they eavesdrop". [1] Though I'm not sure if that is a reference to the telecom spying or Internet spying.

[1] https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/343470800784982016
What kind of mad world do we live in where a graduate from one of the top universities in the world agrees to take a first job hawking ad space for a fad-of-the-year mobile app?
I don't know if I count as a highly-qualified professional, however I find writing essential to my organisation skills, efficiency and integral to the ideas & value I bring to a team. As for how often, without a doubt several pages every day.

I found this in University where I combined CS with a minor in English. I was told by the administration that I was the first person to choose that combination in the history of the University. I thought that was strange - language, syntax & communication at the core of both subjects, right?

When writing my weekly paper on the latest assigned text I would always start with paper, while my classmates would always start with a blank page in a word processor.

They often complained of lack of creativity or 'writers block' - where I suggested they were going wrong is that they were expecting their ideas to come in an ordered fashion - when they never do. You have a great idea for a closing statement and you're going to hold it in mind until you're ready to type it?!

For me, paper allows me to gain clearer focus. Handwriting can flow effortlessly between text & sketches. I bullet point out every idea that comes to mind. Now I have improved focus as I'm no longer using brain power keeping those ideas at the forefront of my mind. I then review the bullet points and start to identify which ones naturally follow on from the one before, which are on the same topic & which are conflicting ideas. From that process I derive new ideas. Gaps in my thinking become obvious as I start to assemble an order.

This is all impossible within the confines of a .txt file.

This method later helped me in exams where for the first 15 minutes I wouldn't even touch the question paper. I would just write down everything that I was worried I would forget on the first page of my answer book. Formulas, dates, names, mnemonics, quotes etc. I would then read through the questions and refer back to my first page as needed. It felt almost too easy, like I had taken the answers in there with me. At the end I'd just cross that first page out and write DRAFT at the top.

These techniques have followed through into my work. Presentations to executives, important technical documents with step-by-step user guides, e-mail updates explaining progress, apps, websites, even blog posts - all start on paper and are only moved to digital when it's time to put live and share.

For me - paper is the planning tool, printed word is the presentation method.
I think people (including me) have been surprised by the scope of it rather than that it's happening.
Nice. Interested readers may also want to check out Higgs: https://github.com/maximecb/Higgs
>a lot of you older guys have trouble understanding...

Maybe when you're 30 you will be able to form a complete sentence.
a search engine that doesn't track

Yeah, I register that fact in the same bag as "Saddam was planning to use WMDs" and "software patents are encouraging innovation".
Thanks. I noticed, and it's been happening off and on, but prior to today, comments I was making were eventually being unhidden after a few hours. Not so today, it seems.
There was no wheel to reinvent here, the tzinfo data files could have been installed on Windows. They didn't reinvent a wheel, they built a jalopy when there was a perfectly usable high speed rail going to their destination already available.

Really, the tzinfo files could have been distributed with Java, and then linux packages could have removed them and symlinked the paths where java expects them to where they are actually installed.
Probably neither. It is just my guess, but it seems like the NSA slides overstate how much access they have (after all, this is a $20MM project) and the journalists took them at their word/pushed the sensational angle. The tech companies are understating how much they work with the government. No one is strictly lying, but their various interests are conflicting.
New Homepage for Dropbox
Awesome. First noticed that Chrome was blocking XSS attempts a week ago. It seems that if Chrome want's to move in the direction of ignoring specs and standards for security means, they are headed down the lines of IE.
If you're picking both, the only addition of this new option is a 'told you so' attitude. It's unrelated to a poll about what you're doing and why. I don't see any reason for this new option to exist.
'rayiner, 'gruseom, and 'carbocation are basically my entry points into HN every day. (Rayiner is a lawyer by day; 'carbocation a med student/researcher).
You know what bothers me about this? Look how this event and everyone like it is surrounded by newspeak. We were uncertain. Unfortunate casualties. Inconclusive intelligence. Imminent threat. American interests. It's all bullshit. The US government can't even tell themselves the truth let alone anyone else. They are drinking the kool-aid through a firehose.
That's my hypothesis for why logic-programming's popularity faded somewhat from its initial promise. When it was new, it was one of the few widely available ways of doing declarative programming, and contrasted strongly with procedural programming. But in the years since, lots of other declarative approaches have chipped away at the monopoly of logic programming proper over declarative approaches to programming.

I wrote a bit about that here: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/prolog_lost_steam.html
Well, I'd probably expect transparency to at least come in two forms:

1. Broad annual reports containing the number of individuals were investigated, or whose 'file' was pulled, and the number of investigations that resulted in some sort of prosecution. Basically, give me the figures that show me the efficiency of the NSA investigations. This would help combat just broad pulling of records without specific cause and purpose. You could go so far as to say that after passing certain thresholds of efficiency, their actions would be audited. Note that I realize this is not ever likely to happen, but just trying to give an example of how increased transparency could be done.

2. Individual notification. This is obviously much more difficult because they wouldn't want to tip off a legitimate threat to the fact they are under investigation. But the general alternative is not acceptable either. The government can't just investigate people and invade their privacy without good reason. So some how, individuals need to know.

The checks and balances of Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches is an effective mode of government, but there is a second 'check': the one by the people. If I don't know my rights are being violated, how can I hold the government responsible?

So, yes, some form of individual notification is necessary. Maybe the notification happens after the investigation is finished. Maybe I'm notified a year late. But one way or another, I have a right to face my accuser.

Those are my thoughts on it anyhow.
That's because you need to build the money train yourself if you want to have one, even if it's guaranteed to fall off a cliff in the long run (like Snapchat).
So what is the truth? This happened on purpose?
I have a shared hosting account for $5 per month. It's great for email, web hosting, personal files etc. plus I get to own my data and only share what I want.
Potentially no one is lying, because even if the information in the slides were 100% accurate, they could describe a wide range of possible programs and implementations, many of which are also 100% inline with the companies' claims.

For example, if PRISM is really just an internal NSA tool for interfacing, searching, storing etc information procured from these providers from different means (such as NSLs or FISA warrants), then obviously no company joined it. It's an internal tool! The idea of 'adding' just becomes ensuring normalization of data and other such 'mundane' things.

Note I say, 'for example'. Because amongst all the yelling about, we still don't actually know what the fuck PRISM actually is, and arguments just revolve around how charitable/cynical you are about the parties involved.
Good points by the OP.

I've railed about similar things. Most notably, VPNs are a UX disaster. And that is a shame because the fundamental technology behind VPNs would be a prerequisite to a model that I describe as "PAO" [1] wherein I host my own omnipresent applications and data. The failure of VPNs to deliver a user experience that casual users can manage is one of the many contributors to the rise of the traditional cloud. I contend that regular people would be perfectly fine buying and replacing hard drives in a home disk array if the experience were straight-forward (it's anything but). Similarly, regular people would be fine buying Internet connectivity with high upload speed if this was part of ensuring secure, (nearly) everywhere access to their data. Regular people would be fine joining a federated backup cartel with friends and family if it were easy to set up.

The savvy can do many of these things with today's mediocre UX, but the tremendous amount of money to be made by solving the problem using proprietary centralized servers explains why R&D has been directed toward the cloud as opposed to self-hosted application servers.

Diving into minutia for a moment, in light of this week's news, I also recently ranted that it's a real shame that GPG suffers from one of the worst user experiences across all modern software. PGP from 10 to 15 years ago was a better user experience than GPG in 2013. The Thunderbird+GPG interface is absolutely horrific and even when I know I should encrypt a particular communication, when faced with the reality of getting my recipient configured with GPG, I flinch at the certain pain and suffering. I concede, "well, it's probably not needed anyway--who is likely to be listening?"

[1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao
What are my options if I want to use my own email service on my own domain? Currently, I use Google's app services for the email on my domain.
Are you sure they don't hate the "decadence" of modern Western society?
Have you considered spideroak or jungledisk?

The biggest worry with such a setup would be losing the key.

There are a couple of options for client side encryption cloud services, but so far I've struggled to find one that I can run headless on a lightweight debian on arm that does full folder syncing (rather than one way) with remote servers efficiently.
>I'm just waiting for the news to come out in the next few decades that the CIA/NSA have been rigging election results in the US.

They don't rig elections in the way you think they do. People vote, the votes get counted. They rig elections by gerrymandering the districts. The result is a large number of single party districts whose members therefore serve forever, since there is no primary for an incumbent's party and the district is drawn so that the opposing party has no chance. Then you throw in the seniority rules that give the most important committee assignments to the people who have been in Washington the longest (i.e. the ones with gerrymandered districts), and have the national party throw a few million bucks behind the primary campaign of "their" candidate whenever one of those incumbents retires, and you have the respective major parties' national committees acting as the kingmaker whenever the outcomes in the few remaining swing districts shift the majority their way.

The failure of the whole thing is that people don't care about meta. Lessig said this in one of this talks. It isn't that his issue (i.e. campaign finance) is more important than your issue whatever it may be, it's that fixing Democracy is a prerequisite to fixing anything else. But people want jobs and low taxes and whatever else that directly affects their lives, they don't care about things like Congressional district lines. The trouble is Congressional district lines and committee assignments and campaign finance are the primary determinants of what policies are adopted in Washington, so if you want politicians to do the right thing first you have to fix the way we elect politicians.
Migrating to guice
Why would they need to rig elections in a one-party system. They win, whoever wins.
This was not a leak. It was a dare.
Disregard this, i'm just curious

http://www.example.com

http://www.example.com/

http://www.example.com//
Frankly, in my opinion, while EU-based companies with their privacy laws may have some high ground to stand on, of the others, the common web startup with, say, the .ly domain name certainly invites at least as much worry as anything else hosted in the US.

At least, hopefully, this debacle would cause some realistic assessment of the situation with regards to privacy, legality, and data retention instead of, for example, purposefully routing data through third-world totalitarian regimes just because their TLDs sound cool. (I know how DNS works; and it doesn't matter that your servers are elsewhere.)
How accurate was he down to individual districts though? I think most of our elections are rigged on a higher level than an individual agency's actions but there have been close elections where a few well thought out placements of CIA rigging ops could have (or maybe did :)) changed the outcome of major elections.
Has this story been verified by anyone else with a copy of Notes? This sort of thing would be a good homework assignment in a CS class.
In fact, you can pay Oracle to support old versions of JRE, and 1.4 was updated under paid support until Feb of this year.
"I'm going to try to use services from non-US companies hosted outside the US.
"

I am curios about this. Is there any nation which has a better record that the US?

As far as I know, the US seems to be doing this for preventing cataclysmic events like dirty nukes, but other nations seem to be doing it for almost anything.
The rest of that discussion thread is fairly interesting as well: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vl/tag/declarative

Fwiw, answer-set programming is a logic-programming language with a Prolog-derived syntax that has only a declarative reading, and no procedural reading.