skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We're mostly in agreement. Government makes demand for money by requiring that debts payable to the government are only in that money.

If said rocks on the bottom of the sea were the only way to pay taxes, you bet they'd be considered valuable.

Without that primary demand, everything else is consumer whim. Perception only lasts so long but taxes are persistent.
Lose the db
> It has a well-known and respected editorial process that can weigh the consequences of a leak versus the potential value to the public.

It is neither well known nor respected. The process is not public and there is a great deal of self-censorship that has nothing to do with public safety. There were examples of this even in the publication of the Wikileaks cables.
If you don't have a connection to the world of physicists you may not realize how huge Mathematica is. I have a friend for whom it is the environment of choice for pretty much everything. Like, when he needs to do some image manipulation, he doesn't reach for ImageMagick, he does it in Mathematica. If he needed to set up a web server he'd probably do it in Mathematica too.

People say they can't stand Wolfram's lack of humility. Just get over it for your own benefit. People have flaws, that's life. If you get so enraged over his style that you can't listen to what he says, then you won't hear what he has to say which happens to be a lot of interesting things.
Many of the programs date to the Bush administration so it's probably not something that Republicans are too able to blow back on.
Agreed -- the post had a very bitter/almost jealous tone.

I'm not sure this writing would accomplish more than simply putting your head down and continuing to build the products you claimed are already much better.
Geeknote: Evernote command-line client; works w/ Vim, Emacs & syncs local dirs
Sentiments like this bring despots to power and further cultivate erosion of the democratic process.

I can only applaud to secret agencies for this fine job of creating a favorable public opinion on the matter that would had been deemed atrocious only a decade ago.
This is a travesty, wth!
You cited an irrelevant quote and are invoking the principle of charity to demand that anigbrowl give it a pass. It would be easier if you just admitted that the quote is about censorship and not privacy and move on. You're weakening your rhetorical position by defending something that's obviously wrong, and not central to your point.
Yeah. I see this article as an amazing validation of HFT to all the naysayers.
One other possibility comes to mind: aren't these companies currently challenging some NSLs in court? Or is my memory bad on that one?
> - Even if the value doesn't go up, eventually you'll pay off your mortgage and be able to live more cheaply. If you rent, you'll be paying rent (which will probably be steadily increasing) forever. If there's inflation, your fixed mortgage payment becomes smaller and smaller in real dollars over time. And while you're paying your mortgage, you get to deduct the interest from your taxes.

That's a bit misleading. The money you save by not paying off a mortgage should of course go to other investments. You can even put it into housing (just not into the house you live in, for the sake of argument).

> - In some areas, owning a home can give you access to better school districts.

American laws are strange.

> - Detached houses have more space and privacy than apartments. You're less likely to be disturbed by your neighbors, etc.

You can rent houses, too. And you can buy apartments, too.

> - A home that you own is yours to do with as you please. Want to put a pool in the backyard? Sure. Want to remodel the kitchen? Just call a contractor. Want to convert your garage to an office? That's OK. Want to rent out your house while you go on vacation? There's nobody you need to ask for approval.

Yes, that's an important benefit. On the other hand, if anything's broken or there's legal trouble, it's yours to fix, too. It's a bit like owning a business vs just working in one.
Great quote: "Discussing programs like this publicly will have an impact on the behavior of our adversaries and make it more difficult for us to understand their intentions."
A skillful polygraph interrogator (erm... i mean operator) will know and make sure to dig into that. Morality related questions would play a big part in the process.
At least as far as we know. We're in new territory here--this is a secret court with secret rulings so it's unknown what kind of orders have been issued. There may very well be one that requires denial. Or the NSA could be skipping a step and be making use of its backhaul fiber firehoses and a cache of certificates to decrypt SSL traffic. Hopefully we'll find out...
Samsung Galaxy S4 update enables moving apps to the microSD ...
"All the King's Men" by Robert Penn Warren.
Are you really playing Devil's Advocate when you argue a position because you actually believe in it?
> Political figures are commonly the second largest requester for domestic intel, only second to the secret police.

I would certainly be interested in seeing the evidence to back up this claim.
A walrus eats food. Obama eats food. Obama is
therefore a walrus.

Can you find the flaw in this logic?
Are you really conflating the challenge and compromises involved with being the leader of the free world to being a mid to senior level developer?
How do we know that we have a functioning democracy?

If I run for congress against a candidate strongly favored by this or a future administration, how do I know that my telephone call records aren't being leaked to the opposition?

Or worse, how do I know that the people running these programs aren't using a decade of collected data to influence vulnerable politicians? How do I know if someone in the NSA isn't blackmailing the President?

Who is watching the watchers? Some kangaroo secret court, who the intelligence community has had broad authority to ignore?
Obviously all conjecture here, but what came to mind for me is things like having a keyword filter on a bunch of accounts (whoever you're watching). The moment they Google for something you want to see you get an alert that it happened.
This got me thinking. Linux distros has usually been seen as a safe harbor for people. We now have proof that MS and Apple has been in bed with the governments for a long time, and but even before it wouldn't have been too wrong to think MS/Apple has some kind of back door.

Years ago, something called Ubuntu came up to spread linux to the masses. While it was hard to install and maintain a linux pc before, Ubuntu made it so that it was almost as simple as windows. I know this is a baseless conspiracy theory, but would it be too far fetched to think maybe Ubuntu was sponsored by the government to spread linux and lull the people into a false sense of security in their linux environment?
Oh, they could just calculate the average amount every person benefits from the mortgage interest rate deduction, and pay that out to everyone. More than half the people will be better off than before (because the median mortgage is smaller than the average mortgage).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora
> I have a lot more confidence in, say, The New York Times or The Guardian than Wikileaks

So do governments. It's much easier to deal with a newspaper :)
The point that the World Affairs Journal writer seems to be making is that it wasn't the content of the cables that was significant - everyone in Tunisia knew that the Ben Ali regime was corrupt - it was the fact that these cables came from an American source that was particularly humiliating.

I think that's a highly speculative argument. In many of these countries dissatisfaction with the government, social inequality and major unrest have been going on for decades. The kinds of issues that the writer talks about have been discussed very openly in the Arab world (take for example, the Egyptian book and film The Yacoubian Building). I think Wikileaks may have contributed to this milieu, but I don't think it was revelatory.
CAPS LOCK is OBNOXIOUS
Seriously... You'd think of all the billions of dollars that go into military training they'd be able to put up a few bucks to teach this guy how to lie a little more believably
It operates similarly to HBase but has built in security levels and easy extensibility for custom iterators and aggregators.

Failure I cannot speak to since I really only develop against a local cluster that I blow away often.
Let's just say the pipes are there and they have the desire to use them.
The difference was that there weren't better jobs for those people back then, and there was a real world war back then and we were kinda obviously the good guys.

People with the skills to do the data mining needed at this scale already have better jobs at Google or on Wall Street. Are they really going to take a pay cut, worse benefits and "government job" bureaucracy for the privilege of spying on their friends and family?

I have family in military intelligence and the situation they are in right now is their branch of the armed service thinks they are just going to send their officers of below average mathematical talent to big data boot camp and expect them to just pick this stuff up, as if it's the same thing as learning Russian or flying a drone. Although the I'm as disappointed as everyone in that so many in the government seem think domestic spying is the wave of the future, I'm skeptical that the real motivations are anything beyond business as usual defense sector pork.
Yep, we agree there, the advice of the author is spot on. I think too many startups, and large companies for that matter, think optimization is going to fix all the problems that are inherent in their product/business by just blindly slaping optimization vendor A's tags on the site and money just falls from the sky. Just doesn't happen like that.
Wasn't SV and Stanford etc. all major products of the growth of the DoD?
And this one http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Press/2013/Jun13/06-06st...?
Sen. Mark Udall cannot be held accountable. Look at how Bradley Manning is being treated for leaking classified documents.
That'a a blast from the past. WinerWatcher was awesome, and its subject's reaction to it damnably revealing.
The New York Times and other media organizations have an independent public editor whose job is to examine and explain how the paper has handled a particular issue and to provide criticism if they feel it is appropriate. They also publish letters to the editor and op-eds by people who disagree.

Again, I'm not saying that the New York Times is perfect, but its a lot better than Wikileaks.
Or you know, that there is such a thing as safe speeding, such as when overtaking or to avoid an accident, and creating a system which would require someone to slow down and become a traffic hazard in order to avoid a fine, is absurd, oddly draconian, and likely to increase accident rates?
Why not? You could make a snowhole to live in. I know someone who knits coding gloves, too. :)
Because the NSA may not want FB to know who exactly they're interested in.
Yes, it's rather telling that each denial used the exact same "direct access" terminology. It's not like this contingency wouldn't have been planned for - they all knew the gravity of their decision to enter into this. Those statements were likely provided to them by the Justice Department when they first came on board with PRISM in the event that the program ever came to light. A creative US Attorney likely concluded that this would be a legally defensible statement, even if it is wholly misleading.
Silicon Valley startups named 'most likely to succeed'
I would have been nice had they defended this before it happened.

You know, in public. Motherfuckers.
To explain, "melon" means "Apple" in Greek.

So you can either compare two different languages, or two different fruit but you can't do both at the same time ;-)
Why so much cries? As long as operators has all kind of logs anyway (location, calls, IP sessions) it is only matter of time that authorities will use it with this or that pretext.

In countries like Russia where police and intelligence services have unlimited power, every provider is obliged to collect and keep such logs for use of authorities.

The first thing that authorities around the globe are copying from each other is any kind of scam that gives them even an illusion of more "control" over the people. Why should it be different in US?)

And of course, such programs are great opportunities to allocate and "utilize" (read: steal) millions of government money.
U.S.-China cybersecurity meetings have Silicon Valley anxious
"Civil liberties should be as big of an issue (if not bigger) during elections as the economy."

I laughed, because I can't even bring myself to make statements like that anymore.
There's nothing insulting about having a mental illness. However, having such blatant disregard for others' feelings and established societal norms can land you in jail. While you may be incapable of empathy on your own, therapy can help you find ways to make the effects of empathy beneficial to you (usually by some form of quantification of results based on emulation of empathy).
For starters, here's a piece by a Guardian journalist who worked closely with WikiLeaks:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/02/why-i-had-to-lea...

> So I decided to grit my teeth and carry on. Dismay mounted, however, with the arrival of Israel Shamir, a self-styled Russian "peace campaigner" with a long history of antisemitic writing. Shamir was introduced to the team under the pseudonym Adam, and it was only several weeks after he had left – with a huge cache of unredacted cables – that most of us started to find out who he was.

> Press enquiries started to trickle in. A little research revealed his unsavoury history, but I was told Julian would be unwilling for WikiLeaks to publish anything critical of Shamir. Instead, shamefully, we put out a statement simply distancing WikiLeaks from him.

> There followed even more damning allegations. Shamir had been seen leaving the interior ministry of Belarus, an eastern European dictatorship.

> The next day, the country's dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, boasted he would start a Belarusian WikiLeaks showing the US was funding his political rivals.

> Scores of arrests of opposition activists followed the country's elections – but Shamir wrote a piece painting an idyllic picture of free, fair, elections in a happy country.

> Human rights groups demanded answers, amid fears that Belarus may have received material from the cables. No answers were supplied. Julian would not look into the matter.
Acts of war and nuclear disasters are excluded from insurance.
I guess this : http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/audio/video...
Not to detract from the concerns surrounding this program, or to defend Microsoft, but from the dates for Google, YouTube, and AOL one can see that Skype joined on February 6, not June 2.
That said, there are some problem domains where better optimization is the only way to differentiate. Eg, I'm a short span away from releasing version 0 of Wellposed's numerical linear algebra product/library, and this is a product where if your code isn't at least as fast and usable as the alternatives, no one cares.

Thankfully My code seems to be >10x faster on the problems that matter, and trending to be substantially more extensible and usable than alternatives.

If "optimization" of some sort isn't fundamental to your business, you don't have a real business or value prop for someone.
But Google bought Youtbe in 2006. What's the delay?
No I'm not, I clearly said "You can make a little bit better case for electronic market making." But if you think market making has no major latency component, you are living in the 70's.
I use Debian on a chromebook pixel. It looks fantastic.
The Patriot Act has been used in drug cases more than terrorism.

http://nymag.com/news/9-11/10th-anniversary/patriot-act/
http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/2013/052013-a.html is a rather interesting, recently published talk on the subject of scalability of Accumulo
Rules of Thumb
When Accumulo was developed in-house at the NSA it was called Cloudbase. When it became part of the Apache project it was renamed Accumulo.

I've worked with both HBase and Cloudbase/Accumulo. HBase tooling is more mature than Accumulo's but performance characteristics are about the same. The extension model for Accumulo - for custom iterators and aggregators - is pretty easy to get the hang of right away. (In fairness I never looked into extensibility for HBase.)

Both systems play well with Hadoop. Accumulo is a little bit more difficult to use with Oozie.

Accumulo's built in monitoring is decent.
I'm guessing because of this front page Fox News article: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/06/new-york-times-ed...
Email: PGP-encryped.
Browsing Traffic: Routed through Tor
Voice/Text: Encrypyed.
Other Sensitive Data: TrueCrypt Hidden Partition

Seeing your interrogator pull out a rubber hose,
and realize that none of that matters: Priceless

----

| think those who have power will relinquish
| it voluntarily

Yea. It was pretty crazy when the Secret Service sided with GW Bush and the Marines sided with Obama, and Bush made his last stand to retain the Presidency at the Oval Office. I don't look forward to when/if Obama is voted out of office...
When Winston Smith finds Goldstein's book, in that is written the principles of doublethink (The term doublespeak is not actually used in the book). The famous lines "Ignorance is Strength" etc. But the Ministry of Truth does not broadcast these to the people. The Ministry of Peace does not broadcast "War is peace". It broadcasts "We have always been at war with Eastasia." A big lie.

My point is it doesn't have to be the principles of doublespeak as outlined in Goldstein's book to be doublespeak. The Ministries application of the principles of doublespeak appear to the populace as a big lie.

"But it means also the ability to BELIEVE that black is white, and more, to KNOW that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as DOUBLETHINK." -- George Orwell
Most programmers are very much unlike you or I. Think about those legions of DoD/DoD contractor engineers that trust government implicitly and totally, and really don't give a shit about more "hacker"/"technologist" subjects.
I'm not sure what this is all about, but even though it is _my_ government, I feel like submitting this form would add me to some monitoring list.
Look at what happened to knight, it could have spilled out to the whole market and they would have had to roll back trades or something (I'm not blaming knight's thing on C++).
It appears in caps in the original book. So it's excusable here as it's a contextual quote.
Yup, this is it.
Think about the smartest people we have in the valley... whomever you want to arbitrarily put on that list.

Every single person I have dealt with at a three letter agency is that caliber of smart. They have entire buildings full of them. Sure you have tons of other mid-grade government paper pushers, but the sheer scale of smart people was overwhelming.

They have 10 Bram Cohen's to our one.
I decided to respond to this part of the thread to keep discussion in one place.

---

So your point is that since 2.9% of US population are not single-race (estimate of mixed race in the US [1]) the other 97% aren't either?

By the same token you could also say that there are no heterosexuals in the world since roughly 3% of people are gay.

I remember some Hispanic comedian who said in the 90s - "In the future everybody will look Filipino". He had a point - if humans spend a few thousand years mixing it up, the end result will look Brazilian of Filipino. But for now the majority of Earth population is of a specific definable race (which have many differences deeper than skin tone).

[1] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/27/mixed-race-amer...
The MacBook’s Most Underrated Feature
So the "new data" you're talking about is the fact that he got caught? Maybe the change he'll make as a result is more secrecy instead of less of this kind of program.
Good chances they are using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Accumulo
I may enroll in a different institution, I may apply to app academy, I may take more time off, I honestly don't know right now, but what I do know is that I am taking time off to better my skills.
We're genuinely interested in what you mean by this ...

Android devices are unix devices, and (I assume) either have ssh/scp/sftp/rsync in their userland or it can easily be placed there...

If I had a modern phone, which I do not[1], I would probably just load duplicity[2] on it ? But now that I think about it, in the same way that I have zero data on my laptop, I assume I would also have zero data on my phone ?

Please do elaborate.

[1] Motorola F3 ("MOTO FONE")

[2] http://duplicity.nongnu.org/
>Yea. It was pretty crazy when the Secret Service sided with GW Bush and the Marines sided with Obama, and Bush made his last stand to retain the Presidency at the Oval Office. I don't look forward to when/if Obama is voted out of office...

I feel stupid. What are you talking about? Or is this a joke scenario or something? Sorry if I'm being daft.
Apologies for being rude, I wasn't in the right frame of mind at the time.
Turning thoughts into software is what software engineers do every day. At every point along the technology trajectory technologists have created more and more powerful abstractions. When transistors where first created: print "Hello World" would have seemed a magical melding of the minds of machine and man, whereas today we can create customized eCommerce social networks with a few keystrokes.

However, as powerful as the tools get, you still have to tell the machine exactly what you want it to do. Depending on the tool, sometimes that is easy, sometimes that is hard. I feel like there should be a fundamental law of "ability to easily express" vs "flexibility of expression." I'm not sure how much machine learning can serve as our savior in this regard, even if we can eliminate "make an Amazon clone" posts on cheap-outsourced-developer.com by just using ML to classify it and spit out the boiler plate.

In order for something to be profitable it has to be customized, and when this happens the abstractions inevitably seem to break down. Based on this I think turning thoughts into software will happen around the same time thinking becomes mass-produced. How can you create, "eBay, but for car buying, with a twitter messaging component built for the Brazilian market" without first beating the Turing test as a sub-problem?
SoundHound is now available for BlackBerry 10
A depressing historical fact: The FISA Court that for the past decade has been warped into a protective shield for these sorts of operations was established in 1978 to prevent this from happening again. See: Project SHAMROCK, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_SHAMROCK.

There was a time when those in the Intelligence Community had this lesson burned into their brains.
I loved that politically incorrect blog post. It summarizes what a private company can say in contrast with a public company where each word is precisely crafted to handle the expectations.
The first rule of PRISM and NSLs is you DO NOT TALK about PRISM and NSLs.
The truth is that the ZOHO founder is right (acquisition price is a joke, Salesforce product is clunky, Salesforce multiple is crazy). And yet, clear market leaders in high growth markets command premium prices (Amazon has a crazy PE multiple for example). But ask Netflix or Apple. When you screw up one or two quarters, market reacts fast.