skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In 2001, 3000 people died from terrorism. In 2010, 600,000 people died from heart disease, 575,000 from cancer, 120,000 from accidents, 50,000 from the flu and 38,000 from suicide.

If 3000 people died each year from terrorism, would it be worth not giving up the freedoms we have? That would still be a very small number compared to the flu, which no one I know has a fear of getting because they think they'll die.

My point is, that where we draw the line is in the wrong place because of our irrational reaction to terrorism and its actual risk of death.
For me too.. well, sometimes it resolves, sometimes it doesn't. There seems to be an issue with .io globally: https://twitter.com/dnsimple/status/342991722365734912
lol, yup
I hope the US tries to stand up to China. The US has been long over due for a good hard smack down, and it would be beautiful to watch China give it to them.
> Second: that kind of thinking could be a nice way to "motivate" the creation of alternative products out side of the us of a.

> Third: but how realistic are such endeavors in today's world?

It is entirely possible to develop a product outside of the US of A. And it does indeed happen.

Geez!
I highly doubt anything will happen to Greenwald. He's too high profile, and this case is too high profile. They got away with prosecuting leakers because they were obscure.
The only possible outcome of such behavior is a worsening situation. How is that defensible?

Nothing risked, nothing gained.
I just hope he comes back to the Lady Teldra plot sometime soon. The last few books have left me hanging for almost as long as I can bear.
Wow - I guess I missed the news that MSFT is not selling these in DVD format anymore [1]. I hate that. As a customer, it's a catch 22 of convenience and inconvenience. The "pro" is that I can download it anywhere, anytime. The "con" is that there's a lot more work on my part now. Download speeds aside, I still have to (a) learn (and remember) how to download it, (b) find where it was downloaded to, and (c) remember to back it up/copy to another location because my "privilege" to download it only is for one year (typically). Oh sure, to you and I those are trivial tasks but to our parents and grandparents, those are far from trivial tasks. I suppose MSFT is saying, "IT departments are the ones who should be installing this, not regular folk."

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/29/3927866/office-2013-pricin...
Your argument fails when it's noted that famous "Social Welfare" 501(c)(4) organizations include the NRA's lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action, and the new version of Obama's Organizing for America, Organizing for Action. Perhaps ironically, the latter's first major action was to campaign for gun control after Newtown.

In other words, the parameters of 501(c)(4) organizations were already well established, and being primarily "political" (when you think about it, a rather vaguely broad term) is just fine, you're focusing too much on the words of art "social welfare" vs. what they mean in practice.

Even Obamacon (con as in "conservative") Peggy Nonan has woken up and realized the implications of this (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732441260457851...):

"What does it mean when half the country—literally half the country—understands that the revenue-gathering arm of its federal government is politically corrupt, sees them as targets, and will shoot at them if they try to raise their heads? That is the kind of thing that can kill a country, letting half its citizens believe that they no longer have full political rights."

Do you really think that's OK?
Those work, thanks. I'm on Linux using xfce4-terminal at the moment. There's probably a way to get the color codes to work, but I don't know it.
Mark Cuban's criticism may interest you:
http://blogmaverick.com/2012/09/21/what-business-is-wall-str...;

TLDR: ... their stated value add of liquidity does not compensate the US and World Economy nearly enough for the risk of collapse they introduce into the system.
Babar - A little language with Speech Acts
github.io also down for me
Nope: Our sites (fine.io, fry.io) are up
The best approach is to keep profiles/accounts on all of those services and use them periodically to create a "clean" trail. Meanwhile, if you need any actual privacy, find alternate/private channels.

Considering the enormous amount of data being collected and the relative ease of setting up a clean trail, this kind of spying makes it even easier for low/moderate-suspicion individuals to achieve secure communications.

For high suspicion individuals, this kind of surveillance makes it easy to create disinformation that appears to be real intel.

The workflow required to leave a realistic "clean" trail while simultaneously engaging in secure communication could be designed into a purpose-built linux distro.
I'm glad I'm not crazy.

$ host www.filepicker.io
www.filepicker.io is an alias for anycast.filepicker.io.
anycast.filepicker.io has address 174.129.254.207
Host anycast.filepicker.io not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
Host anycast.filepicker.io not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

$ host filepicker.io
Host filepicker.io not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
Is PRISM run by Palantir?
I didn't mean to imply that it was a solution to the problem. Just pointing out the problem seen long before today by many - for most of us here, this issue is not new. It's been discussed and debated for years. There's just now concrete proof that is irrefutable.

I'm more excited about these recent revelations than shocked and appalled, because now it is finally a national conversation with real outrage behind it. I've been waiting for this for years. Being called crazy, paranoid, anti-American, etc for years for voicing concerns about this has led me to a position of vindication on some level; however small or petty that may be.
It would appear that fry.io is actually down. That's the one hosted with nic.io. This is why I wanted to move away from them. They are really incompetent.
Well, they've learned well from Germany and are getting a better infrastructure in place before they begin, and a stronger military.
right, we already use an IRC server over VPN. Definitely the best for chat and logs I agree!
I can't access fine.io or fry.io. I can access nic.io, stanford.io and www.filepicker.io (Note the www) so far.
Deleting FB alone might not be a solution, but it's a part of it.

Out of these, I only have a gmail account. No personal data in it is real. I never email anyone I know in person from that account, nor I give it to anybody who knows me.

I think I'm on the safe side.

I operate similarly with my phone and basically everything else.
I have a .io with nic.io, and it seems to be ok right now
Tell the reporter to mail you at Mailinator or Lockbin.com and retrieve their messages by connecting with TOR.
Oh really? Fine.IO works perfect here. That's certainly annoying.
What's the matter, do you have something to hide?
many thanks! It may well be the one.
Oh, correct! Must be Ghostry as I use it as well.
You're right in that emulating the NES "good-enough" for most games is no big feat, in terms of power, but you are wrong in saying that it's because the platform is "old". There are old systems that are much trickier to emulate simply because software takes advantage of every corner case in the hardware design, using cycle perfect timing to exploit unexpected behavior in the chipset. The C64 is the perfect example, still having a pretty vibrant demoscene, coming up with new tricks that break emulators every year. Then, to get a reasonable level of accuracy, you need to emulate everything per cycle, complete with a bunch of analog hardware (simply emulating the SID sound chip is quite a heavy task) and registers bound to pins simply left floating.
You should always be skeptical, but you must always keep in mind that conspiracies do happen all the time [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler#Allegations_of_t...
Anthony from DNSimple here. I'll pass along what I know so far: some of nic.io's name servers appear to be no longer delegating .io domains out to authoritative name servers. Some of their name servers are still delegating properly, but some are not.

This issue also affects .sh and .ac TLDs I believe since they are the same registry. If I find out anything new I'll post on Twitter in the @dnsimple account and here.
>I’ve never seen a single story dominate the front page this convincingly.

When Aaron Swartz died, I remember being really surprised that the whole page was on that single topic. For some naive reason, I thought some variety of topics was an immutable law and could not disappear so quickly. I then checked reddit for comparison and I believe there was a single article about Swartz on the front page.
How to avoid NSA spying
Dude....it's the inet.

People say dumb shit all the time.

Just downvote it and move on. No need to get heated about it.
The problem with Facebook is not that government has access to it -- at least, that's not a problem unique to FB (Gmail, as one commenter says, is probably worse in terms of raw access to personal details). The problem with Facebook is that it is personal details specifically organized into a dossier-like format. It's one thing for the NSA, for instance, to be able to tap into the hose of undifferentiated data streaming through the network. It's quite another thing for that data to be specifically organized for the purposes of quickly discovering key information about somebody, such as their social network, their political interests, their latest photos, etc. all indexed and searchable. Think about the cost of taking Gmail's data and turning it into something useable by intelligence organizations -- work that FB "empowers" us to do for them!

What we need are tools that allow us to connect in ways that are difficult not only to detect but also to make sense of (not necessarily encryption, but an ad-hoc format that can't be easily parsed and aggregated). We need the ability to use the network for our own particular, peculiar interests rather than having to fit our interactions into some other authority's template for their interests. The idea that social networking never occurred before Friendster, FB, MySpace is ridiculous -- it just happened more informally before.

I'd like to see a return to this informal mode of using TCP/IP, where the internet itself is the social network rather than merely a transport layer for some centralized system. This may make it harder for everyday people to benefit, but it also means they learn how to drive before they use the roads. Social networking's hyped-up promise has always been to passively connect people, but the promise of the internet has always been to allow people to actively connect (or not connect). Once we have a broader suite of tools for this latter purpose, we'll see people reject centralized dossier services like FB.
That would explain why it's not consistent globally. I have an odd example here from my location:
https://gist.github.com/MiniCodeMonkey/5729249
I don't dispute the trash count. I dispute the problem. Its ugly; so don't look at it. Other than that, what is the problem?

Its 1/4 metal (including an entire semi-trailer container! in the video) - I've seen metal used for artificial reefs all over the world. So this 'trash' metal is inferior in some way? In the videos animals seemed to cluster around the trash, often attaching themselves to it or even living in it.

They say in the article that the plastic can last for decades. Good! Shelter for fish spawn, housing for crustaceans, permanent and cheap - heck, it was free.
Personally, I chose option 2. Much easier for me. Martyrs and activists do tend to win in the end, but they tend to be dead before victory is achieved.
Is it possible to move away with them? I mean, aren't they finally responsible for delegating all .io domains to the correct nameservers?
ASK NH: For a startup, how many competitors is too many?
For my B2C startup idea, which I will only be able to launch in about 6 months with an MVP, I have about 10-11 direct competitors right now, one of them has even been bought by Facebook already. I don't exactly want to make it huge and sell to Facebook for millions of dollars, I just want a lifestyle business.

I believe that my startup will be better in some ways than some of them, e.g. I will definitely have a better backend algorithm, since I design Machine Learning algorithms for a living, and I will have about three features, which these startups have individually, but none of them have all of them on one platform (I am not even sure if this is an advantage, but I like minimalism, so I will try not to make it too clustered and will be introducing them one after the other, not at once, and they are all related to each other).

On the other hand, I am not the best designer, so until I start having a revenue, the design will not be as nice as some of these VC backed startups, and of course, I won't have as much press as them, so I will have to do my own marketing and advertising.

I know that having competitors is not always a disadvantage, but this is scary for a few reasons, 1.) I didn't know Facebook had bought one of these startups, so I am sure they have plans to enter this area 2.) 10-11 competitors seems a bit too many 3.) I really love this idea, and I just want to keep on building it, but I am scared that it is going to fail due to these reasons, so I am finding it vey hard to be motivated right now, I am still at a phase where I could just quit this, before I put too much work into it for no reason and venture on to a new idea.

So, what do you think? Am I doomed to fail?
There is a game of chess going on and the NY Times just played an interesting move. It wrote a story that appears to flatter Greenwald but in fact gives the reader the lexicon to dismiss/ignore him.

Clearly if the NYT wanted to be doing investigative journalism to challenge government overreach, it would be.
Most, if not all of these documents were constructed/finalized in 2005-2009. The latest I saw was a 2012 document.

Don't mean to point out the obvious, but the GIG (Global Information Grid) is more than underway.
Works fine for me!
I can't help but wonder how such a system can be practically implemented. I cannot imagine that engineers at companies like Google, Apple, MS etc, the ones working on stuff like Gmail, YouTube, iOS, would co-operate with such unethical practices.

But it has been proved again and again that authority trumps conscious.
I skimmed those docs and my eyes started to glaze over at all the government-ese in them. Most of those documents seem to be high level proposals for things like PRISM and some of the other programs that we more or less already know exist in some form or another, but it's unclear whether they're just proposing the creation of such networks, or whether they're documenting what already exists. There's also a lot of "System A must conform to Standard B Sub-Section C unless interaction with System D Sub-Section F (See Req E)" type gibberish all over the documents so it's really hard to understand exactly what any particular piece of it is describing.

Aside from that the only other thing I see is a list of what appear to be boilerplate redaction requests for a list of NSA spies posted on cryptome, with ironically most of the information redacted. Mildly interesting in that they'd be so transparent as to use near identical wording on what should be apparently unrelated requests, but otherwise not particularly notable.

Can someone with a higher pain threshold for bureaucracy please try to go more in depth on some of these and let us know if there's any meat to any of these documents, or is this all sound and fury signifying nothing.
Oracle Vows Better Java Security
Exactly.

ls example in zsh:

alias ls="ls -lph1 --color=always"

function ls {
/bin/ls $@ | colout [regex] colours
}

This will pass all arguments after "ls" to the /bin/ls command. This also means you can keep your existing aliases clean and tidy for common params.

Remember to use the full path (or /usr/bin/env maybe) so that you don't create a recursive call to your function ;)

This doesn't deal with the situation of being unable to get the return value of the original command, but depending on your needs, this may not be an issue.

(edited for spacing)
The 10 Best Alternatives to Dropbox
I think that's very cynical.

The mere fact that there are so many stories about it on the front-page and that the stories are getting so many votes & comments is a good enough proxy about the 'informed' populus.

Obama probably did not get much sleep last night - and he prollly won't get much sleep this weekend.

As much as I like him and supported his candidacy twice - this is an impeachable offense.

I doubt the pressure will subside easily though.
Suck's NETMOGULS
Waste of time. No one cares about your vote anymore. If you really care, find like minded people and go into politics yourself. You'll have to start local, then move to state, but even the state level can begin to have an effect. I suspect their may be enough people to make actual change, but so far they waste time by doing online petitions, sending emails to politicians or voting.

If you want to change the US at this point you're going to have to do what the founding father's did: become the government you want.
technically or morally?
What the #&$% Automatically censoring words in TeX by grawlixes / obscenicons
I would now consider paying for services that offer real private email, social networking and file sharing / cloud backups, where none of those services were controlled by an US controlled entity and where the NSA couldn't snoop around in my private life. However boring my private life is, it is still mine.

I wonder if anyone else would part with cold hard cash though, or is it just me? There maybe a niche there.
My farmer.io domain is down also!
Foxconn inks agreement to develop Mozilla OS devices
I thought it was as I transferred fine.io over to someone else because I found out nic.io were storing passwords in plain text. Sadly, it seems not. It's quite frustrating to know your business is essentially at the mercy of people that don't know what they are doing.
This story should be a case study for virality in a niche community. It was 100% political (i.e. as captivating and informative as a car crash) and yet...it captured the attention of hackers the world over, apparently.

As someone who spent a number of years exposed to the world of spying during my time in Special Operations, it was clear that there was nothing new here. It was the same story replayed in a new format...a format that caught the attention of those who know what lies behind computer code. To me, that is what makes this entire thing ridiculous. The very people who know the technicalities behind hacking, the internet and all things to do with computing fell right into spreading a story that was dominated by fluff, lack of specificity and conspiracy theories.

I'll let you in on a secret...the coders who work for the NSA are not any different than the rest of the coding community. We did use Google...I mean we searched for people's name just like millions of other people do every single day. It's called open source information. Yet, apparently when the government uses it everyone wants to believe that it is a grave violation of our rights. What about a white supremacist group using it to track down a gay rights leader's physical address and harassing him? Is that not far worse? Shouldn't we be more worried about that?

I had thought that Wikileaks revealing the State Department reports and leaking reports from Aghanistan and Iraq would have convinced people that the government does not know significantly more than the rest of us. The way this story took over HN showed otherwise. Clearly, conspiracy theories still sell. They are urban myths. They have enough detail to stick in our minds but lack the specificity that would really answer the question: is this even realistically feasible or portrayed in a rational manner?

Unfortunately, I spent yesterday feeling as though there was nothing worth reading on HN. Every story was the same tired generalizations of the NSA. I learned nothing yesterday. Sad.
This story won't reach the front page. It's not mainstream enough.
In the previous century governments killed upwards of a quarter billion of their own people; I'm unaware of any even vaguely comparable mass murders by corporations.
At the very least, the documents lay out in uncertain terms the stated goals for GIG and NetOps.

That's good information to have. As this story develops and more information comes to light, it is handy to be able to compare what we know, with what we know they want to achieve.
From Folger's to Starbucks to Blossom? Tech and coffee's "third wave"
What happened to Linux?
Bradley Manning leaks classified information after learning that he was going to get kicked out of the military for being gay. Greenwald publishes this article after basically getting kicked out of the country for being gay. Anyone starting to see a pattern here?
Converser.io is up. Looks to be a subsection of the domains.
We found out the PATRIOT Act was really used for drug enforcement[1] so I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same with NSLs.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/patriot-ac...
It is not possible to move away from them. nic.io is the registry for .io domains, so you can't move to anyone else. They also act as a registrar for their own TLD, so you could move to another registrar, but ultimately they're responsible for .io delegation.
That was one hell of a dramatic video. When the visual interface guy walks in I thought he'd be packing.
Mozilla Firefox Redesign May No Longer Be A “Browser”
Seems even weirder than that. A domain can work for some people and not for others.
Indeed, http://www.icb.co.uk seems to be responsible for all those TLDs.
Obama: No warrantless wiretaps if you elect me (2008)
They have 7 name servers, 5 are broken and returning NXDOMAIN for all domains.

Working:

b.nic.io.
ns1.communitydns.net.

Not working:

a.nic.io.
a.ns13.net.
b.nic.ac.
b.ns13.net.
ns3.icb.co.uk.
Go watch his speech from December 15th 2005

That Obama and this Obama are like alternate dark universes.
My domain is down as well - words.io.

Good thing it's just some crappy side project.
The dark side of homeownership
If Dropbox is handed a National Security Letter (NSL), unless they want to go to Federal prison their people have no choice but to lie about it.

Look at some of the discussions where these companies' carefully worded denials are parsed, they aren't really denying it. E.g. "back doors" aren't an issue when a NSL is used to come through the front door.
On the other hand, there are relatively few governments worldwide that I would trust more (or distrust less, I guess) than that of the US to abuse this kind of information. The US isn't perfect, but a lot of places out there are worse.
Who are the people designing NSA software? It seems like this technology should make Google's "big data" techniques seem like amateur hour. Are these guys the cream of the crop or what?
I bet they're not even going to seed back. Bastards.
Yes! My site (robert.io) is down and I've been chasing my tail trying to figure out what's wrong. It's refreshing to see that I'm not the only one.
ok, now it's not
Kinect to Add Vision Capability to a Robot
> that argument can be used to defend the logic of any illogical act

You can find historical examples of torture working for the goal of acquiring information. For instance, the battle of Algiers is well-documented. Any asymmetrical conflict has involved torture.

Obviously, any perceived benefit on the ground is counterbalanced by the loss of moral high ground, worsened perception by the local population and occasionally, international condemnation.
My preferences: http://i.imgur.com/UtxK6LZ.png (source in my github/dotfiles; this is suitable mostly for linear history without merges). Displays 10 items by default, for more, I write explicitly from command line.