skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They could get more... they explicitly excluded the content of the communication.

Telephony metadata does not include the substantive contant of any communication or the name, address, or financial information of a subscriber.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/veri...
Chicken chicken, chicken chicken chicken chicken. Chicken chicken chicken[1].

Chicken chicken chicken {C(n)} chicken chicken. Chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken.

____

Chicken chicken

chicken
AFAIK, Amdocs processes most of the carriers billing, aka metadata.
Many of Amdocs systems are based in Israel. So, does NSA need court ruling to get metadata from an Israeli company? Seems like it might be another convenient way to go around the constitution.
"And it never helps to get a boost from partner."
Love this. Couple of suggestions:

- Please add folder support.

- I'm sure the text look beautiful on Macs, but it's not easy to read my feeds with that grey-ish text on Windows. Can't you make the text a bit bolder or darker?

- It's obvious you spend a lot of time working on this so I'd hate to see it closing because you couldn't afford to pay for your servers. I don't think asking for a donation is a good idea. Make it something like a $1-2/monthly subscription with a full month free trial. That way you may lose some customers, but your servers wouldn't be as busy as it appears to be now and you'd have a -sorta- fixed income and wouldn't worry about the future.

- An instapaper support would be great.

- I agree with other people here. That red looks beautiful but it's distracting when you're reading. Maybe tone it down a bit, or let us choose the color/background etc? Tha'd be a killer feature.

Best of luck!
Remember All Those Passwords? No Need
From OP's description, I see the same situation and agree with these observations.

Toxic is the right word - my personal experience is that hanging around to try and untangle/learn from the environment makes me super unhappy, and unmotivated.
sidenote, but kind of alarmed by the number of anon accounts getting created for posts like the OPs.

We could have one anon account for submitting anon posts, whereby upon request, a one time access password would be generated.
Thats the same building that Twitter HQ was in for years... and with the library of congress archiving all tweets - you think all this BS is unrelated?
Unless you are building something for hackers, HN feedback is generally just noise. You might be able to get some legit usability feedback. But for the most part, you're just going to get a bunch of people fixating on one or two likely irrelevant issues (like what programming language you used, what database, if you are integrated with Facebook/Twitter/Instagram, your choice of font color.) There is a tendency for HN commenters to spout opinions that can be readily rejected with real data, I'm surprised more authors do not present their work with a list of common criticisms and data to counteract them.

Really, the best thing you can get from HN is probably refining your skill at being able to separate useful criticism from non-useful. And a thick skin and confidence in your idea and execution, which is a pre-requisite for being able to digest constructive criticism and perceive who are just being Comic Book Guy haters.
Http://analpounder.com/enthusiastic-college-cum-dump/
The U.S. Constitution was written, not because people trusted their government to do the right thing back then, but because they did not trust the government. The current political atmosphere, where the government is considered trustworthy until proven otherwise, is a result of Reconstruction and the two world wars that followed. Before that, it was a very real possibility that the newly founded United States might soon devolve into the kind of tyranny that the Founding Fathers perceived British rule to be. The Constitution was an attempt to prevent this from happening. By default, the government could not be trusted; and trust was only granted reluctantly when the government could demonstrate that it was doing the right thing. That's why so many clauses of the Constitution are concerned with what the government can't do. The government was never supposed to enjoy as much blind trust as it does today.
Accidental Rewilding: How humanitarian disasters are good for nature
"Confirmed". Welcome to.. 2002?
(Not to lessen the impact of the post, but, this is old news)
America sucks more every day. This really is a pathetic joke -- warrantless, covert surveillance of EVERY call made in the country. I predict the level of outrage won't match the scale of this crime, though.
That's what made the quote jump out at me. The movie itself was quite unremarkable. Seemed like saturday morning fare writ large to me. I wasn't really paying attention and then I heard that line float by... "Wait. What now?"
Not with the wrong connotation that the words hack and hacker have these days.
Checks and balances are functioning perfectly. Congress voted for Patriot Act §215, President Bush signed it into law, President Obama and his congress reauthorized it, and the courts did not overturn it. The law has sat on the books, very publicly, for more than a decade, and has offered myriad opportunities for citizens to debate and challenge (an example: [1]). The broader issue of NSA dragnets is probably one of the top 20 political issues in the US, making regular headlines since 2005 (if you include foreign dragnets, 1995 [2] or earlier).

Checks and balances aren't broken. This is democracy in action.

[1] http://www.aclu.org/free-speech-national-security-technology...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Controversy
Glenn Greenwald also commented on the article in a reply to a comment requesting "the other side" view :

GlennGreenwald:

@strangemartin > Can't help feeling I'm only getting one side of the story here.

There's probably another court order that I've decided to hide from you that reads: "About that last order: just kidding. The government is only entitled to get the phone records of people about whom it has presented evidence of wrongdoing".
So, as with so many other things, start working to change the cultural narrative that it may inculcate commitments in the People to

(A) update their expectations of security to be in line with reality--namely that bad things happen and will happen, are unpredictable, and often unavoidable;

(2) increase their valuation of basic rights and liberties as provided in the Constitution and its amendments, as well as an expectation of vociferous resistance to any encroachments and weakening of said rights and liberties in light of (A) by any person;

(D) regularly invoke a zero-tolerance policy when elected or appointed political leaders trespass against (2).
The first batch is still scheduled to ship fall 2013, I believe. The second batch is the one shipping 2014.

Per https://twitter.com/thalmic/status/339752687694405632
According to the EU parliament ECHELON was going on for a while. Monitoring of citizen phone calls was happening since at least the '90s. And that was the content of the calls, not just the addressing data.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON)
> "you are unwilling or unable to budge... in that regard you are a fundamentalist."

In Christianity, "Fundamentalist" refers specifically to a Protestant/Evangelical movement that was named for a series of essays published before and during WWI, which outline certain specific doctrinal positions. The movement arose largely in response to opposing beliefs which themselves date to the mid-late 1800s. Being "unwilling to budge" might make someone a literalist or a dogmatist, but being a Fundamentalist is more specific.

Among Americans who call themselves Christian, few are anything close to true Fundamentalists [0]. Most are hybrids whose beliefs have been assembled in bits and pieces from pastors, books, etc. which includes some fundamentalist-inspired ideas, some ideas that resemble fundamentalist ideas but are actually much older, and some ideas that are completely opposite of fundamentalist ideas. People whose beliefs are mostly Fundamentalist are a very small subset of Christianity, both globally and in the US.

[0] note that "no true Scotsman" is only a fallacy if one is using inappropriate criteria to determine group inclusion/exclusion. It's not a fallacy to point out that James Doohan wasn't really Scottish.
Now that's what I call obfuscation.
Blog spam. The original is here: http://www.behance.net/gallery/Google-Visual-Assets-Guidelin...
What I have always loved about the original spec is (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616):

10.4.3 402 Payment Required
This code is reserved for future use.

Reminds that you that the idea, and the problem, of accepting payments on the web was right there at the start.

cf. Andreessen: "We should have built payments in the browser."(http://mashable.com/2012/05/01/marc-andreessen-browser-payme...)
How I Added $2,000 To My Salary In Eight Minutes
I must confess to giggling at the authors examples of 'signal':

> "Lots of signal. Lots of friends becoming parents.

> Getting engaged. Couples falling in love. Babies. [...]

> Friends and acquaintances off on adventures. Beautiful

> mountain photos [...] Family outings. [...] orphanage

> a good friend of mine runs in Nepal. [...] updates on

> the dog back home on the east coast"

All that stuff sounds like the expected output of a random human condition generator. Knowing those things wouldn't change my life at all. I trust that that kind of stuff is happening all on its own without having to take any of my attention.

Different strokes for different folks, I suppose. However, I suspect he may be missing the mark because the audience he's addressing with his "just use hide!" may well be like me and find all that stuff inane. 'Use hide to reveal the signal under the noise' doesn't work when there is no signal.
Well, it's not a surprise, but at least now there is a solid evidence. What can the public do about it though?
Well, it's a good thing FBI is asking for web services wiretapping backdoors, then!

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/05/fbi-seeks-internet-...
The NSA will have dirt on everyone.
A simple explanation would be extra scrutiny for the answer paper evaluators when marks go beyond 80. That might determine the difference between getting home/hotel at 5:00 P.M or sitting with the supervisor, painstakingly cross checking every answer. Picking answer paper evaluators are like picking people for jury duty in US. Its a lottery system for teachers across the board(In this case across India) and once you get selected, its mandatory to show up at the central evaluation center. The evaluations last something like 10-15 days.
Take a look at your technology with an engineer's eye. If it can be done, they probably will. If it can be done easily they probably already are. You may as well just assume this is always the case.

In the current political climate, why in the world wouldn't they?
"Don't anyone of them care or see what they are doing or what they are enabling?"

Perhaps they're afraid of prosecution (or worse). After all, they would know more than anyone exactly what the government is capable of...
this particular leaked document only applies to Verizon Business Network Services.

they will request the same data from other providers in other FISA court applications. there is nothing in the request that makes it specific to Verizon Business. The legal justification used applies to all providers.
Are they planning to have their own warehouse in India?
I'm extremely confused. Were these designs contracted by Google? If not, why does the article imply they were?
> In addition to that, we are being thrown onto the Agile train with hope that it will save us.

I can hear the higher-level discussion in my head: "We don't have a plan, we don't have clear requirements, and we have no process ... that means we're already agile, right?" "Let me look at my checklist, Jeff. Yes, it seems we are in fact agile."
Stripe (YC S10) Adds New Merchant Features
Anecdote it may be, but I'm glad to hear that. I know both sides of that coin myself.
I give this maybe 2-3 months before the whistleblower behind this is being prosecuted by the Obama administration for "harming national security and putting people's lives in danger, and/or espionage".
I think the hacking claims are just fine. Hacking doesn't just mean making use of some XSRF or XSS exploit. Hacking means to make software behave in a way it was not intended to behave. It means to spot mistakes in software in some ingenuous fashion. The author (http://deedy.quora.com/Hacking-into-the-Indian-Education-Sys...) has done just that. He had to look into the source code, figure what format of the request was, figure the block ranges for the student and school codes and parse out the html results.
Ask HN: has Twitter RSS / Atom search been cut?
No search seems to return results, e.g.
https://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=twitter%20developers
Here http://getaddr.bitnodes.io
I really don't understand the anti-facebook nature of HN users, personally I think it's a fantastic product, it perfectly fulfills my use case.

I'm 20 years old, I feel that's somehow relevant before I give my long list of anecdotes.

When I woke up this morning, I checked my feed, 3 notifications! The first (ranked by importance of course) was that one of my cousins was pregnant. She lives in Spain, I'm the only member of my family in the UK, how would I otherwise have found out? Snail mail? Pah! Takes too long and my address isn't always static for longer than a few months. Phone? Really? Do you know how much international calls cost when you aren't on a Silly Valley wage?! E-Mail? ... Do people actually still do the whole E-Mail thing? And isn't E-Mail completely broken anyway?

The second was a party event my friend was throwing and had invited me too this weekend, it took one click and now I know all about it, I accepted and left a message.

So in 30 seconds on one application, I've discovered my cousin is going to have a baby, congratulated her and let her know that I "like" this outcome, told my friend I'm cool to hang out this weekend and asked him if he wants to go halves on a Pizza Saturday.

Last night I used it to talk over video with my grandma who's been ill recently (and also coincidentally lives abroad) because she doesn't know what a Skoop (Skype) is and MSN no longer exists, but Facebook is still here, she's already on it and she uses it frequently.

After this I checked up on my company feed to look at photos of my co-workers birthday party and the comments on the photo I took (and uploaded in seconds to the internet after applying filters to make him prettier) of him opening his presents.

I literally just got out of bed and I have a message already from my girlfriend (who's out of texts) asking me what we're doing tonight, I've told her it's a surprise and send her a photo to give her a clue.

Anyway...

The point of this is that while you may detest Facebook for whatever privacy issues you may have (and lets face it, other companies such as our beloved Google are often much, much worse) it is a fantastic application making it easier than ever to connect to the people who I actually care about (for the record, I only keep 40 friends on there), if perhaps a little out of your particular use case.
Americans won't so much as lift their head away from Candycrush to bat an eyelash about it.

If there were enough give-a-shit left in America, I don't think things would have gotten so bad to begin with. It's a broken, battered, unemployed, bankrupt, bitter nation being drown by a behemoth $6.3 trillion government system that nothing could possibly contain or restrain. The NSA has a budget the size of the economy of half the nations on earth.

Far easier to go back to playing Candycrush than try to do anything about the MASSIVE mess that is America.
Wow. That is the hardest I've laughed this week.

I loved the part where he referred to the slides to help answer a question.
I would say ~90% of the stat recorders for our iOS app are coaches who use the tools to scout players or help review strengths and weaknesses of their players, so we are not as worried about incorrect stats. Anybody can record stats for any player, but the owner of the player profile must approve the stat line before it becomes public, so that prevents others from purposefully harming another players stats. Ultimately, the correctness of the stat line falls upon the player (or owner of the player profile), so they put their integrity on the line when updating or accepting their stat lines.
These are in use... by Google. Additionally, every single icon on G+ follows the same trends
they're openly flouting privacy laws and our constitutional rights -- that's sort of the same thing.
When the Boston Marathon was bombed, I did a graph search on friends in Boston and checked to see if anyone I knew had been hurt.

Do I care deeply about those people? Maybe not enough to text or call each and every one of them (cellphone network failure notwithstanding) but enough to see if they had posted, "I'm OK. Thanks for checking."

That's more than I can say about any other social network.
Google will launch Google web designer tool
Has anyone used Pin.net.au for payments?
I'm looking at payment gateways and Pin looks good and is currently on special, does anyone here have experience with them that could give feedback?
> E-Mail? ... Do people actually still do the whole E-Mail thing? And isn't E-Mail completely broken anyway?

It's so funny when people are critical of FB critics (I do not consider myself to be a critic of FB, even though my post garnered a lot of debate), but then go on to criticize email.

Specifically, what's funny is that email is used to transfer magnitudes more information than FB on a daily basis. So, um... yes? Email is still around. And people use it. And it's not broken, per se. It's a sort of analogy with Spotify and radio.. "omg is FM still around? lol!! what noobs"
Because website is a service and an installable app is a product.

You expect a coffee shop's camera to track you, but you sure as hell don't expect your moka pot do that. Moreover, if it were doing that, you would've not bought it in the first place.
And he was politically assassinated... All my friends' parents and my own often talk about Jimmy Carter as a man who just didn't have what it takes to be a President. Bang up job they did on him.
Of course. You should also be fighting it with every fiber in your body. Generations behind you gave their lives for rights like these, and the current generation seems to be giving them away because they are too busy chatting with friends on Facebook to care about it.

And if you don't fight it now peacefully, you'll be fighting it in the streets in a bloody revolution, in a decade or two.
Interestingly, while Google Scholar has indexed the paper (from another site), it's actually only ranked number 2 for the query "chicken chicken chicken: chicken chicken":

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=chicken+chicken+chicken%...
Who needs a 4th amendment right? What has to be done to get the Gov to stop doing whatever it likes whenever it wants? I'm really losing faith in this country.
It's my understanding that at least some legal cases on the subject are hobbled by a lack of official evidence that such surveillance is under way. ("You can't prove that we're doing it, because all the documents are secret. The court thinks so too. Come back when you have proof.")

Assuming that this document is real, perhaps it may provide sufficient leverage to force into the light whatever hides in the shadows. At least some of those who might authorize such a program will be earnest in intent; we would be wise to carefully consider their justification.
Buried the lead: "Transit integrates tightly with local cities that offer real-time data from GPS-enabled trains and buses. That integration is now easy, but the legal work sometimes is not. And the legal challenges that some cities have had with Google have opened doors for Transit. In one case — I cannot reveal the name, but it is a top-five global city in terms of population — the city has broken off negotiations with Google and approached Transit for an exclusive." (paragraph 12)
Thanks for the information, with your link and the ones others have posted, I've been able to get a better idea of how it works.

Regarding benchmarking, my recommendation would be to present other workloads as well; if what you say is true, you have nothing to fear, and rough parity with B-trees in your worst case scenarios would only make your argument stronger (it would definitely impress me more if it was included).

My point is that developers who are worried about index algorithm performance don't normally believe in free lunches, and your current benchmarks seem to be slightly cherry picked. Some of the wording is also a bit of a hard sell (and it sounds like your algorithm is good enough to stand on its own legs, so it's unnecessary). This will put off a lot of the more skeptical developers immediately.
Haha I think I understood the implicit rationale. Just trying to call it out in a politically correct fashion.
Why short stories can be nice
This guy (Sean) really knows how to write if you ask me
do they use Netezza or Greenplum for this sort of thing?
Post title:
"How tiny commuting app Transit is beating Google Maps"

From the article:
"Ultimately, Vermette knows, a tiny commuter’s app that focuses on buses and trains is not going to beat the massive, well-funded, and multifunction Google Maps — in downloads, users, and time spent in app."

???
> Claiming that they are not interchangeable based on the difference between pass-by-reference and copy-on-write is just silly.

Actually I gave one more reason.
I suggest every software developer take a course or two on cryptography and make privacy integral in the products you develop.
I appreciate your making the effort to help. Unfortunately, as you suspected, it's not an option on OSX.
Which section of the §215 authorizes this activity?
It seems you already decided to seek greener pastures and your main concern is what to do until you find something else.

What I have done the couple times I found myself wanting to move on was to inform my supervisor up front. I ask if it is ok for me to seek new challenges elsewhere.

This way there is no need to hide from them you are actively pursuing another job and once you get a new offer, they are not surprised when you give the 2 weeks notice.

Now, needless to say that until you find something else, be professional. Show up on time, with a smile and perform to the best of your abilities.
You can use EasyPost for that as well. Everything from rates, address verification, to buying the labels
I don't see any way to fight it now. What are your suggestions?

If we were to have a revolution here, even in a decade or two, we'd probably end up with something much worse than what we have now.
The document that Greenwald presented, which is the only document of its kind so far, makes it clear that when it says "Verizon" it means "Verizon Business Network Services".

Sure: by whatever insane reasoning the government came up with to issue this order, they could probably issue orders for any other subsidiary of any other telecom, and I would not be surprised at all if they've done so many many times for many different time frames, but we don't have the definitive proof yet. Obama could come out tomorrow and say "we were just doing this for VBNS" and there's nothing anyone could say to refute him until another separate document is leaked.

If you want to go by some sort of Laws of Authoritarian Fluid Dynamics and say "if this order exists, there must be similar orders because if the government has the internal secret legal justification to do something for one company it would for all" then sure, there are orders for ever carrier.
isn't what he has done exactly what the "AT&T Hacker" who's now put into jail for years has done back in 2010?
What is your suggestion for "doing something?" I can't help that most Americans are wrongly educated about thinks like civil rights.