skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>So what do you think about pre-natal testing for gay gene?

First I have to say that I'm unaware of a "gay gene". It may exist, it may not. There are plenty of mechanisms that could lead to being born gay without a gay gene.

As one possibility, refer to:

>Temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD) is a type of environmental sex determination in which the temperatures experienced during embryonic development determine the sex of the offspring.[1] It is most prevalent and common among amniote vertebrates that are classified under the reptile class,

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature-dependent_sex_deter...

Sure, this doesn't pertain to humans but it would not be surprising to me that other non-gene influencers might cause someone to be gay before birth.

Having gotten that out of the way, I would be against any kind of testing for anything but the most critical gene defects. Anyone that thinks we should test for all gene defects should check out www.23andme.com. You'll discover (like I did) that the average person has several gene defects that can shorten their life and be passed on to their offspring. Trying to breed these out of humans would mean most people alive today wouldn't be alive today.
Collecting people's phone records, while objectionable, is not on the same moral plane as murdering them; and I've already explained at some length how Americans' telephony records are not considered to be private information for >30 years.

See, this is why I object to what Schneier is doing. He has you equating the confidentiality of phone records with human lives.
This feature looks a lot like DuckDuckGo Instant Answer. I think, there is no reason to be very paranoid about it. Googly sandbox is a completely different thing. Yandex does not really lock you to their apps and services, and (hopefully) does not collect your private info, they only give you a quick way to interact with other web sites.
I didn't know about those, they look very cool. Thanks for the link.
Since all mail has to be sorted to reach its destination, and there's little reason to expect that shipper and recipient data is given an expectation of privacy it probably does not even matter whether the company keeps records.

I suppose it is safe to assume that it would be unknown which SIM card is inside of the package, but having a list of recipients in a given area code and merely noticing when SIM cards came online in that area would be somewhat of a give away.

It seems like the phone would just encourage anyone performing surveillance that you are more likely to be communicating something they'd find interesting, and therefore they might spend more resources on looking at these customers.

I think it serves the public good when more people communicate in ways that can not be traced or listened in on, but I don't think it serves specific customers of this service if they have concerns about their own anonymity, and might be doing things like disclosing information about official corruption.
This is interesting. Thanks for playing along with me.

Can I ask another question? Now that you've implemented the algorithm, would you feel more comfortable employing AES encryption on a future project, or less comfortable?
"I believe the world is more dangerous than it used to be, and that as technology develops things generally get more dangerous."

I don't think this is true. A great book that discusses this is Stephen Pinker's "The Better Angels of our Nature," which essentially shows that we're living in the least violent, most peaceful era of human history. Fareed Zakaria's "The Post-American World" also discusses how we're currently in the most peaceful, economically prosperous time in world history. Despite the violence and unrest presented daily in news media, life is far better now than it used to be by almost any metric.

That's why I agree with the people referenced in Sam's second footnote, who believe "the amount of effort spent on the war on terror is disproportionate to the actual risk." As terrible as the September 11 attacks were, ten times as many people die in car accidents every year. David Foster Wallace's brief essay, "Just Asking," really hits this point [1].

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/11/just-ask...;
You say "I don’t worry about the NSA having my call records". The trouble is a lot of people are worried about it. Every despot in history has gotten away with oppression because of the silent majority who tolerates, or supports it in the name of some ostensible benefit they perceive to themselves.

Regarding the benefits, they are dubious at best. The probability of being harmed by a terrorist attack is vanishingly small; you are orders of magnitude more likely to die in a car accident, and more likely to die from being hit by lightening. For that risk, why should the rest of us tolerate being spied on, being groped at airports, and being told the state is free to act outside the bounds of judicial oversight (one of the bedrocks of common law)?

Not to mention, the US government does more to foster terrorism than to fight it. This is easier for non-Americans to understand, because they don't have the concept of exceptionalism baked into their head from childhood. Animosity toward America does not come from the success or freedom of her people (that's why people LOVE America), the animosity comes from imperialism and American troops stationed in parts of the world whose people take it as an extreme affront.

It's hard to produce any evidence regarding the NSA because it's so secretive and companies and individuals that are forced to deal with it are put under gag orders. That's why it's so amazing this information finally got out (thank god for whistleblowers who literally put their lives on the line to bring this awful behaviour into the daylight - I have no doubt that the leaker, if ever revealed, will have his or her life ruined by the justice department). But consider sister agencies like the FBI, which have a long history of abusing surveillance powers (http://www.aclu.org/free-speech/aclu-releases-report-fbi-cru...). It's very easy to find the history of abuses from various government agencies (for instance, the census bureau using its data to round up Japanese-americans into concentration camps in World War 2), so why should the onus be on those of us who oppose domestic spying to prove that the NSA isn't abusing its power?

Also, you say "I am delighted that we can all express our outrage online without fear of disappearing in the night—that’s pretty remarkable. I am happy that citizens can own guns (I have gone a little off the deep end as a prepper…). If all this stops, then it’d be time to worry."

This doesn't happen in one step. No society goes from freedom to Nazism overnight. The progress from freedom to oppression happens in a succession of baby steps, each of which are tolerated, or even supported.

You have mentioned your view is a minority opinion. Quite the contrary. You form the silent majority who assents to this sort of state behaviour. Your opinion is very closely aligned with the opinion of the power structure itself, and this baneful behaviour can only come about if the vast majority of people are essentially ok with it. The people complaining about it, although loud and visible, are a minority, who have long been accused of being "crackpots" or having a "penchant for conspiracy theories", to use your words.
FWIW, under both English and Scots law evidence gathered by such means cannot be used in a court of law; though, certainly, it can be used by police (and often has been in NI to great success) as a means to observe crimes being planned (where you don't have evidence to prosecute, typically for conspiracy to murder in the NI case) and then have police ready to act to thwart the crime (thus the number of IRA bombers caught on their bomb run, at police checkpoints set up at the last minute).
where have you been? It's been Orwell for real for a number of years now.
My ISP hasn't given me an IPv6 address so I can't play with it easily so it remains a mystery for me. I managed to get a tunnel up and running so I could test & configure the IPv6 address my server had available for years but I hadn't setup.

What needs to happen for IPv6 to take off? CloudFlare is doing a lot by allowing automatic IPv6 for many websites - it makes it very easy to get a foothold in IPv6.
That was my thought too. If i'm so concerned about security there is no way I'm going to trust a web site like this. Even if we give rdegges the benefit of the doubt and say he actually is, there's no way to know that 2 weeks from now the govt doesn't hijack / buy the site, OR that they don't just start tailing these guys on their trips to the post office. Great way to find people with a better-than-average likelyhood of being up to no good.
Retention is, like collection, IMO a lost battle.
> No, it doesn't. Legislative jurisdiction over the territory itself includes the ability to build the city.

No more or less than the power to tax for the purpose of providing for the common defense includes the power to actually provide for the common defense.
Strawman. What ever the NSA is collecting is not online and not available for just anyone to see.
Snapchat close to raising $100 million
I don't think the analogy to piracy is a good one. DRM is not theoretically possible. If someone can view media, they can copy it, end of story. You can make it harder, but it's always going to be with tricks, not solid theory.

Crypto, on the other hand, is theoretically possible, as far as I know. There may be holes in what's currently out there, but there's no reason in theory you can't end up with a crypto solution that the NSA can't crack. And I see no reason to think that you can't do this now. The idea that the NSA has cracked RSA or AES or whatever is just a little too out there IMO.
Thank you for posting this dshankar.

Is this an impromptu speech? Why is he mumbling so much?
Given your understanding of law, how would you make it for an individual to make false claims during an election campaign (either in speech or in writing) and hold them accountable for actually carrying out the promises and claims they made publicly.
Made up beings are not a greater authority either; rights are given by the consent of the society you live in. That is truly the only place they originate. You can debate endlessly about natural rights and natural law and God this or that, but the simple fact is you can do only what others allow you to get away with.
It's being downvoted because it's ignorant, a disgusting view point and doesn't contribute anything useful.
Anyone know how Palantir Tech chose their name? I just learned that palantir is the seeing stone used by Saruman from Lord of the Rings.
Pre-paid credit card bought with cash?
Nope. Admittedly, kind of a cheap shot. Especially the thugs part.

However, more broadly, I believe a lot of problem is the asymmetric abuse of rhetorical language by the clever silicon valley execs. Once you have the public using your terms, they're on your terms.

It's why the word "surveillance" is so critical to the discussion: People know what it means. "Analytics" and even "privacy" are euphemisms that keep average people uninformed or placated.

Fighting fire with fire, I'm simply trying to get some terminology inserted into the discussion that isn't from Palantir's website or the (PR) media.
The analogy has nothing to do with political thought, it's to demonstrate the flawed logic that not making a choice somehow deprives one of the right to hold an opinion. No need to get testy.
If Hitler hadn't killed 11 million people, most people alive today wouldn't be.

Returning to the original point. The question about pre-natal gene testing does not seem to be about actually doing it routinely.

Suppose that we devised a genetic test that can determine if a fertilized egg will grow into a gay adult if brought to maturity. If such a test works, it would mean that ones genes carries sufficient information to deterimine if one is gay. Wheater or not we actually use this on a given person does not change the fact that their genes are still sufficient.
IRC logfiles, mostly. You're seeing examples of code snippets typed into IRC from the last 4-5 years run in a sandbox under Clojure 1.5.1. I also ran it over the ClojureDocs s-expressions. There are a lot of examples missing (defn, def, etc. for instance) due to the fact that I didn't want to inadvertently run something evil, but FWIW there are over 30k examples of sequence functions, JVM interop, etc. In a previous comment I mentioned that my plan is to add the ability to submit, edit, bookmark, and rate examples.

RE: GitHub projects tagged "Clojure": I think exploring Codeq (https://github.com/Datomic/codeq) would be a cool way to go about doing that kind of thing.
Thoughts on Heroku's new website?
What are your thoughts?
>The question of weather or not one is born gay has not yet been completely resolved. There is not a 100% concordance rate between identical twins, indicating that it is not completely genetic

Being born gay doesn't necessarily mean it's genetic. As I stated in another comment, there are species that determine sex by the temperature experienced during embryonic development. If a pre-birth factor like temperature can control the sex of a lizard then it stands to reason that other pre-birth environmental factors could cause someone to be gay or straight in humans. Or it could be genes... as you said, nobody knows. But I am convinced that almost all (if not all) gay people are just gay; they don't choose to be gay at some point in their life.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature-dependent_sex_deter...

As for it "ought to be irrelevant" - of course it should be irrelevant. But it's not. Turing was sterilized for participating in deviant sexual intercourse which strongly implies the society of the day accused of him of choosing to be the way he was.
I was sold on Wayland in terms of technology a while ago. Where Wayland is losing people is when is it going to be ready to use? Sure, you can install Wayland now, but there are no applications that target it. Yes, XWayland is meant to solve this problem. But, XWayland is not ready yet (or is it?) and Wayland is still "just around the corner." That may be for legitimate reasons, but it's what the article really should address.
So basically you're just throwing a temper tantrum. It seems to me that your problem is with the way these organizations are constituted by law, but your reaction is to make moral criticisms of the individuals who work there and are trying to operate within the law.

I think in this case that there are strong arguments for changing the law, but it seems utterly pointless to blame people for following it when that is what they are sworn to do.
At most though, it would say that you bought a burner phone, not what the number was... so you still have some deniability.
This hilarious comment makes up for a lot of the NSA related garbage I've had the misfortune to read recently. Thanks!
I'm personally aware of Yandex because they have one of the most aggressive search crawlers on the entire internet, judging from our Apache logs.
Tip: you are not smarter then other buyers/renters. No offence but all the routes have been considered already. You always pay the price with time or money or lack of quality. Unless you work from home of course :).
That would make for a pretty poor choice of internal project name if that was the case.
I never chose to become a programmer, but I am not going to argue that I was born that way. During my development, through environmental factors that no one was specifically controlling to make me a programmer, I naturally grew into being a programmer with no one ever making that choice.
"We have a few clients who are sensitive to the Prism stuff"
Yes, a thousand times yes.

Whether it's a choice or not should be irrelevant. However, used as it is in the modern political context of "gay harassment issues", I believe we're actually doing a great disservice to the gay community by using "they didn't have the choice" as an excuse.

Maybe it's just me, but every time someone argues that we should accept gay people because they didn't have a choice, I can't stop myself thinking: "So if they had a choice, would it be okay to harass them? Would it be okay to ask them to change?". The problem is not that gay people can't _change_. The problem is that it's f*cking wrong to ask them to change. Even if they could _change_ (whatever people mean by that), it's absolutely nonsensical to ask them to.

As a society, we ask murderers to change, criminals, people generally harmful to others. But gays? Since when is it okay to criticize the choice of someone that affects nobody but this someone?

I like pizza. If that bothers anyone, should I just say: "There's nothing I can do about it, I was born this way?"
Exactly right. Not to mention code names are things like OCELOT ELECTRON not actually mnemonic phrases. One of the conditions of a top secret clearance is that even after your clearance expires you cannot reveal the name of anything.

I always expect that intelligence agency types resonant with the whole 'true names' meme in fantasy literature for that reason.
Do you have any plans of selling it abroad in the future?
How are you planning on proving that no records are kept? I'm currently engaged in a project that takes privacy very seriously and that also makes that very promise (amongst others). I would be very interested in hearing about your approach.
>Are we ok having our 'privacy' at the cost of security?

Yes!

>The sad reality of our world is that there are terrorists,

Not very many of them. Your chance of being injured by a terrorist are basically zero.

>and they need/use things like email/chat/online forums/regular phones for communication.

They can also use things like coffee shops to talk in. We better get mics in there to record every conversation!

>So the question is where do you draw the line on what is acceptable/not.

I draw the line on none of it is acceptable. We're fighting a practically non-existent enemy. The government abusing this power is a vastly bigger threat and has already been happening for years.

The US government is simply too corrupt to be trusted with anything that avoids strict checks and balances. Why do you imagine the founding fathers put that stuff in there in the first place?

> if you are evading tax and the government finds out, this data cannot be permissible as evidence in court and/or used to prosecute.

For now. But that data will be there forever and attitudes on such things may change. And before you scream "ex post facto" I say look at the case of the guy accessing open AT&T links. That wasn't illegal when he did it, it became a crime well after the fact.
in the meantime, there are many IPv6/IPv4 transition mechanisms to help fight this, like NAT64: https://github.com/NICMx/NAT64
Yes, the current voting system makes alternative candidates practically irrelevant. But I still think it's better to make a point and to vote for whom you prefer - it's your public statement. Voting for the "least of two evils" since "evil" is expected to win either way, sounds bad to me.
The timing of an attack tied to your identity can be really damaging.
Does anyone know how Wayland compares to Quartz used in OS X?
Great piece. I loved another blog post on the same author's page here: http://www.plainlystated.com/2012/01/opening-an-etsy-store-t...;
Well, devs can already consider themselves to be 1 in 1000. The quest is to be 1 in 100000 now.
I really can't summon the slightest hint of a reason why it even matters whether it's a choice.

I can barely grasp the fact that there are people who even friggin' care.
But not picking one doesn't preclude you from having it removed, so we both still have the same amount of control.
One good reason to use a different phone is geolocation data (determined from which cell towers you connect to) which is classified as "metadata" and potentially stored indefinitely. If your cell is turned on, your phone company knows where you are.
Out of curiosity, did you consult with attorneys before launch? I'm completely unqualified to answer the question, but I would think there's a possibility you could land yourself in a bit of a pickle if you shipped one that was later impounded in a law enforcement operation. It seems clear that you wouldn't have known it would be used illegally, but that wouldn't stop someone from ruining your month.

(Congrats, of course)
When compared to Chrome and Firefox, IE uses up to 18% less energy
Tech company chooses name from Lord of the Rings. More news at 11.
Mindcrime has already said much of what I would have, but ignoring FPTP has advantages as well, mainly, that it allows people actually vote their conscience, for better or worse.

I can't argue that it isn't 'throwing away' your vote, in the short term, but over the very long term, there needs to be some people throwing away their vote in order to encourage more to do so such that eventually the landscape changes.
Ask HN: What is the best resource for learning Ruby?
There seem to be a lot of options. I have started/tried but it isnt quite sticking for me yet. Would really really appreciate any advice.
You don't have a social security card or drivers license? You don't file taxes? You don't have to register anywhere because they don't need that. They update all that kind of information when you file taxes.
And, importantly, has ACL controls built in so it's easy to add/remove access to team members.
Organizing people isn't the only power you have beyond your vote, either. Issues are complex, and I feel like I couldn't reasonably vote FOR something I want without also voting against many things I want. I could spend countless hours tracking down the candidates who, on average, best served my personal interests and preferences, all so I could cast my one little vote...but that wouldn't make much sense for me. There are better ways to spend the time.

If you care about animal rights, you can spend that time volunteering or making more money to donate to DIRECTLY support the causes you care about. You can pay closer attention to the dollar votes you're casting (which can't be discounted as a means of political influence).

If you're bothered by GMOs and factory farming, you can help set up local gardens to reduce reliance on conventional produce. You can educate people around you so they understand why it's important to maintain the integrity of our food supply.

If you don't appreciate companies turning over your information to the government, you can (try to) find one that doesn't, and let the company you're leaving know why. You can donate to the EFF and similar organizations.

As much as people like to get emotional about voting, it's not terribly effective as a means of bringing about change - especially once you take into account that politicians often mislead people about their intentions or change them completely once they have more power.
Irony that you need to use a burner laptop to order your burner phone?