skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Obviously it takes some extra cycles to perform ASI. Now, having said that I doubt any additional passes on the source are done to perform ASI. I suspect that if it is of any significance, they have folded it into another pass. And the code likely runs even if not all the semicolons are already in the right place, so it'd be a sunk cost in that regard.

Having said that, I'm, sure it's such a small amount of the compilation time to be pretty insignificant.

This is all however based on my professional experience writing parsers, and not on any specific knowledge of the workings of Javascript however.
Unclear. But I do know people who genuinely read 'The Onion' articles as fact.
Government likely to open criminal probe into NSA leaks
New version of GHCJS: haskell in the browser
Oh, but Obama says he welcomes the latter, even congratulates us for wanting to have one, "[...] it's a sign of maturity because probably five years ago, six years ago we might not have been having this debate." (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/06/07/obama_on_n...). Who could possibly complain?
Is PM run by Demand Media or medium.com now? There's no way this author knows what they're talking about.
"I think they `are` `a` `terrorist`." NSA is not happy with the grammar. :P
No evidence of NSA's "direct access" to tech companies
Agree. Loved Marc when he was with the Atlantic. He's as objective as they come.
How to Delete Your Creeper Facebook Search History
For Django apps, just create an admin staff user with permission only to see the User model. Better, make it read all models.

Maybe autoreply to any email from the NSA with credentials for an automatically just created NSA user.
Wickr, an app for shielding your messages from the government
The gulf between these slides and the issued denials and other theories represented by the likes of the NYT (an automated system to speedup compliance) is widening.

Could it be that the slides were made by a non-technical person who was over-selling this? "direct access" could mean "straight from the source".
How I named, shamed and jailed - Anas Aremeyaw Anas [TED]
The real question clamoring for a clear statement is far more complex:

Does any government, US or otherwise, their agents, representatives, contractors or NGO's have access, directly or indirectly, through any means, to <insert company name here> DATA, FILES, COMMUNICATIONS, LOGS or any other information having any relationship whatsoever to <insert company name here> users?

This could be, and probably should be, refined, IANAL.

The point is simple: We don't care about "direct access to servers". We care about access to data. And this can be provided through many channels, direct and indirect. It can even be provided via daily tape backup dumps. Of course, it can be provided to organizations peripherally working for or with a government yet not directly to a government agency. And, finally, it could be provided to another government that, in turn, can pipe it back to US governnment agencies or collaborators.

Anyone can say "The US government does not have direct access to our servers" while still feeding them a firehose of information through alternative means.
Hmm. Is this the data structure that's used in the "rope" libraries for Python symbol lookup etc?
You reminded me that Skype was an European company until it was bought by eBay. Now I'm depressed. On the other hand, maybe WebRTC will save the day. If only W3C would make it completely decentralized, and without having to depend on a central server.
From zero to half-a-billion: CEO Jeff Lawson writes the perfect story for Twilio
Elon Musk: "I am terminating the interview."
Orientating Yourself in iOS
So it does everything that Email and Usenet can do?
Link to the actual Guardian article referenced by the tweet:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-surveillance...
Derek Sivers: Wood Egg Startup Guides 2013 released. Hiring for 2014.
Yes, but I would do it in a way that screws some data so the info becomes less valuable and more difficult to analyze.
For example, if I were Dropbox I would mix some files for each user, so the user has not only some of their files but other random files, or the files of a completely different user.
Germany already exports a lot of data to the US. That includes banking data, flight plans and so forth. So that fear is mostly fake.

Hopefully the current developments provide a small chance of revoking those laws but I highly doubt it.

I agree on the cloud stuff though. Some companies even use it in advertising (your data stays here and is covered by our data protection laws)
Wait, I thought the NSA backdoor gem was named "active_record < 3.2.12"?
Yes, that is what I think. The slide is making a distinction between passive listening posts and direct collection from companies. "Collection directly from the servers" could simply be a nontechnical phrase that contrasts with wiretaps of telecommunications data.
"have access, directly or indirectly, through any means" is a not a useful basis for the question, because a regular search warrant certainly qualifies as that.
>which means that they will be releasing bombshell by bombshell, or that they think other revelations will be independently reported?

Presumably, the Guardian is in possession of the full 41 page powerpoint. They'll likely release pieces of it at a time. Nice to see they're waiting for everyone to trip all over themselves first. I can't wait to see how this plays out in the coming weeks.

Funny. When Wikileaks did the same thing people said it was inappropriate and editorializing and dishonest. It seems that the Guardian and Wikileaks strategies for maximizing impact are on the same frequency.
Xbox one policy is a lovely marriage proposal between big corporations
I agree. I give anything I make that is over the median income level in the US to charities or kickstarters, which is currently about 50% of my income. I just made 1% of that EFF. Maybe this is not desirable for most hackernews readers, but carving out a fixed percentage of your income is a good way to fund projects you care about.
Awesome project! Is being near Montreal necessary given that this is a software project? What about remote collaboration?
I wonder why the quality of posts has gone down so far this week.
Well, some (read: United Internet aka GMX, Web.de, 1&1…) providers offer a XMPP-based IM solution[0], but I have to admit that I never used it so far, preferring to host my own ejabberds.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMX_Multi_Messenger
Google's Chief Architect: "No, really, we never heard of PRISM."
I've been wary of Greenwald for quite some time as he's often let his politics get in the way of his logical reasoning. I think this Tweet is another example.

NSA says that they can use PRISM to get information directly from a company's servers. That's true, but it happens through an intermediary (the company itself). But even with the intermediary the data being sent did come directly from the company.

In other words intelligence agencies like NSA are concerned with the source of intel and in this case there's no middle man. Access to intel is also important to NSA and in this case there is a middle man. "Access to" and "provenance of" intel are separate concepts though and it does Greenwald little credit to allow himself to be confused by it.

Edit: If I was Greenwald I would clarify quickly as well as otherwise he's going to allow the National Intelligence community to turn the debate into technical sticking points that Greenwald is going to lose on, while at the same time turning the debate away from the transparency of these types of intelligence gathering schemes and whether they're necessary at all.
My Personal Fiction Writing Master Class
The number of people that would need to cooperate to keep the existence of this type of code secret is unfeasibly high. It's much more likely that the NSA simply has the companies' TLS keys and can intercept "secure" traffic. They then would have the technology to put in into a structured format and enable querying over the sniffed data.
I don't buy it, There is every single possibility that CNET was forced to write this article by someone from the top.

I'm not angry about my details leaking to governments, what I'm angry about is how manipulative the media is and how much stupid they assume we are.

I rather trust Mark Zuckerberg than CNET. Their tech reviews are mostly biased sponsored ads, why would I trust them with something serious like this?
I do wonder if the media panic over this will result in quickly passed laws with untended consequences that will damage companys like Google that rely on having huge amounts of personal data.
The screenshots in the documentation have IE browser with non-SSL URLs. Really shitty looking apps.
He is not an exchange, but a bank.
I wouldn't call it the collapse of journalism. Over time the big brands will learn how to wait out the initial twitter storm and then do what journalists are supposed to do. Either that or they will become irrelevant.
James Fallows weighs in on PRISM.
From the recent post:

> The slide, below, details different methods of data collection under the FISA Amendment Act of 2008 (which was renewed in December 2012). It clearly distinguishes Prism, which involves data collection from servers, as distinct from four different programs involving data collection from "fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past"...Essentially, the slide suggests that the NSA also collects some information under FAA702 from cable intercepts, but that process is distinct from Prism.

This specific paragraph seems like a non-sequitur...did the counter-argument that Google made rely on claim that the news reports conflated fiber optic tapping and PRISM? I thought the argument was:

1. The Guardian has slides claiming that the NSA has direct access to our servers

2. Those slides, according to Google, are wrong.
It's basic extrapolating-without-data is what it is. You have a theory, well, let's call it a hypothesis ("a person who reaches CEO level is someone who will not behave altruistically"). You even have a simple model which mostly agrees with the hypothesis (not completely, I'll note) and which relies on several more untested hypotheses. Both the hypothesis and the model predict certain things about the world. You can check! Are those predictions borne out in reality? (˙˙˙ʎʃʃɐǝɹ ʇoᴎ :ɹǝʍsu∀)
I've read 10% too, yes.

I don't think that's too much though. It's not just a tool to donate, they provide the infrastructure for an alternative model to earning a living online. Their approach replaces the incentive to create artificial scarcity by an incentive to share. I would love to live in a society that worked like this.

Try to put some credit on a flattr account and donate to a few projects you like, I think you will get a better feel of what I meant. : )
> You're mistaken. The victims of terrorism are not going to be ignored by their own government, nor should they.

No one said ignore the victims. The point is don't make everyone a victim by a cure worse than the attacks. 9-11 killed a few thousand. We've lost thousands by entering Iraq and Afghanistan.

We've spent a trillion dollars that if spent on heart disease treatment and research, or cancer research, or even just reducing the number of automobile related fatalities, would have saved more lives each year than we lost in 9-11.

> so I'd say your theory doesn't match up very well with events in the real world.

How can you say it doesn't match up? The terrorists changed US politics. They've made our country less free and they've drained us of a TRILLION dollars (1,000 Billion). Our country is turning into a hollywood caricature of the U.S.S.R circa 1985 -- secret police spying on citizens. These are self-inflicted wounds. We have shown there are huge rewards for terrorist action.
JavaWorld: JPA 2 | EntityManagers, Transactions and everything around it
The answer is "Yes" and has been since the Cold War.

I think the shocking part was that the NSA might have been able to essentially run grep themselves on a company's servers (though apparently it's not that simple), but that's not the question you're asking.
Oracle's files are based on the tzinfo files, and are just as vulnerable. If anything, more so because Oracle has a lot more money than the tzinfo maintainers.

No, this is about write-once-run-anywhere compatibility as the other responses say.

(Incidentally, it was a copyright claim, not a patent claim, but in this regard they work the same way.)
The point of the example was to show the duplication of efforts between X client and X server, which is actually in lots of places -- drawing borders, drawing backgrounds etc -- in a simple way. I'm not an X developer, I was just an unfortunate user of XFree86 and then Xorg, then I gave up and bought a Mac.
My grandparents were telling me that since I was in middle school. Even Ben Franklin had a quote about that: "Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead". Don't blame the weatherman for telling you that it's raining.
You've touched the web long before getting to a Google server.

National borders have always been special demarcations and so any crossing, physical or digital, is subject to special examination.

The nature of modern digital communication has blurred the borders somewhat and perhaps more significantly has made it easy to forget when your digital actions are transgressing those borders.

In the physical world we've accepted that there are border control stations on roads, at airports, and ports. Some of the surveillance mechanisms that have been in the press lately are the digital equivalent. Some seem to be much more than that.

It is going to take some serious public debate and some enlightened leadership to reign in our surveillance state and to come to a better public consensus regarding what privacy standards we want to embed in domestic and international law.
Hive - A Petabyte Scale Data Warehouse using Hadoop
ha ha =)) it's really funny
Cartoon Spying Controversy
"Collection directly from the servers" doesn't actually have to mean real time interception of data. It could mean "we send a National Security Letter, and when they comply, they send us the user's data in a TARBALL." That's application level data "directly from the servers" instead of upstream fiber packet traffic.

Greenwald pisses me off and I don't trust him. We know there are 41 slides. They are putting out 1 new slide per day it seems. Just release all of it and get it over with. This seems designed to maximize the Guardian's traffic by doling out the information piecemeal.

Today they released a slide (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-surveillance...) that shows NSA upstream fiber-interception (outside company datacenters) + PRISM, but again, it is vague as to what PRISM is.

If the slide definitely said "Data from internal datacenter taps or backdoors" it would be clear and inarguable. All that would need to be discussed is whether they did this with HUMINT moles, or whether the companies knowingly cooperated.

As it stands now, PRISM could be anything from "Google Takeout NSA Edition" that lets the NSA get a ZIP file of account data after it's been requested via a warrant/NSA, or it could be a hack into Google's servers that somehow allows them to slurp up and intercept data and it flows around the data center.

We don't know, but if Greenwald has other slides that clarify this, just release them, the speculation right now is irresponsible and based on lack of knowledge.
Ask HN: Do you use RSS feeds to read your news?
I am wondering what do you do about the fact that the comments etc. are not available through RSS feeds. Aren't the comments equally important part of the news itself?
Yes, but you're money is being spent elsewhere. I guess that's the main idea behind the original post.
Ah, yes, happens.
That would be pretty obvious given that it would cause your phone to ring every hour. Also, they could do the same regardless by just calling you.
Proxypy: Cross Domain Javascript Requests with Python
Couldn't "the companies" be unaware of direct access to user data, but individual employees could be NSA moles providing data access? What kind of privacy protection do companies like Google and Facebook have in place to keep user data secure from company employees?
The Tor client is also careful about picking nodes from a wide geopolitical range to minimise the chance of collaborating nodes in the circuit. If all three nodes are in the U.S., it might be easy for the government there to track the origin. But they'll likely have a much harder time if two of the nodes are in Russia and China.
> They're not allowed to spy on Americans...
> NSA is part of the Dept. of Defense, and there are lots of laws/rules/etc. that limit what it can do with US citizens.

Wrong. They limit what it can legally do. This really reminds me of Dr. Strangelove: "How could this happen (nuclear strike order)?" "Well, I don't want to jump to any conclusions before all the facts are in, but it appears that General Ripper exceeded his authority."

Sure they aren't allowed to do these things. But since no one is allowed to check up on them, they aren't prevented from doing those things.
Agreed. The reticence of the leaking reporters to release the entire powerpoint in an effort to control the debate is scary. The world is now primed to accept more documents titrated from the Guardian.

If the most powerful country in the world is getting trolled with one pdf and five powerpoint slides, this is a masterwork. It would appear that the phone tapping is real, or functionally real, based on the reaction of the Senate and the telecoms. The internet companies replies, especially Google's, are quite different. Simply causing FUD is sufficient to disrupt a lot of US companies' dominance in the internet market.

A lot of countries stand to benefit from a crippled United States position in internet architecture. One of them is holding an internet security summit with the President today. All of them have powerpoint, and many of them have active intelligence programs of their own.

Skepticism is warranted... The long term effects of this hubbub should act to strengthen privacy and security worldwide.
"designed to facilitate the acquisition of foreign intelligence information concerning"

Assuredly the U.K. and Israel say the same thing to their people.

Of course, never mind that all three countries swap information. Total surveillance is easily achieved. And it's all perfectly legal.
That doesn't explain why the Washington Post hasn't released their copy of the slides, though...those two outlets are competing on this story (it's nice to have two independent established outlets compete on a story of such national and specific importance, fwiw) and the WaPo could have the scoop. Maybe they're waiting for the Sunday edition?

My guess was that the source feared that one or all of the slides have some kind of identifying tag, if not as a meta-watermark but as something tell-tale in the content...and so had requested the Guardian and the Post to release as little as possible.
I think it's as simple as a misinterpretation of the technical intel-community jargon being used by NSA.

They're saying PRISM gets them access to Google/Facebook/etc.'s data with no other middleman. That's not always the case; when working with international partners NSA might obtain intel from other (foreign) intelligence agencies, or their HUMINT might report data that is itself hearsay.

So the source/provenance of data is very important for an intelligence agency. NSA is saying this (with PRISM) is the best case as far as the source of intel goes, there is no better primary source.

That still doesn't mean NSA has embedded backdoors or that the company doesn't control access to the data though. Data Access is a separate concept from Data Source in intel.

We can still say that having this kind of access to data is above the capabilities NSA needs to have (it certainly seems ripe for abuse) but it's sounding like the reality is not quite as sinister as Greenwald or WaPo had been led to believe.
This is not the PRISM/US-984XN. This is decision support system for DHS with same name.
http://github.com/inaka/edis is here now for that purpose
The Internship: Not the Movie
'may', 'tantalizing hope', 'perhaps'...

What about 'maybe not', 'doubtful', 'perhaps not'... is that any less scientific?

Imagine applying for a $1B grant to study the possibility of a designer? What would be more dramatic, discovering there was a creator, or finding some bacteria on mars? Not that the discovery of life on Mars or any other place for that matter would alter truth in the slightest.
Some people are saying that the new slide just revealed [1] using the phrase "direct collection" is somehow a smoking gun but it is clear that the context of the slide shows it is for a non-technical audience of analysts (i.e. you should use both) and is contrasting "direct" with passive collection.

Of course, it could be that Google and everyone else is just lying for no reason at all and people who have talked about PRISM to marc and others in the media are spreading disinformation but I doubt it.

1: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/343421926057861121
The drop box could be an NSA server and not a "Google server", depending on who manages the hardware.
I don't understand - was it not obvious from the get go?

The PPS lists various types of data the NSA gets from various companies. For some reason most commenters here chose to interpret this to mean the NSA has a direct pipe feeding it all of these companies data. The fact the PPS mentions it's a $20m program should inform that this is obviously not the case. Is it just a matter of wanting to believe the more outrageous version?
Have they really not released the entire powerpoint? If not, have they given a reason?
Interesting watching these guys react. Kinda tells us how serious this really is.
Occam's Razor is still good. Likewise for Hanlan's Razor (remember that Greenwald and WaPo both are drawing fairly specific conclusions from a couple of slides that are using jargon and not plain English).
You mean "no, no one here is smart enough"? If it's "no" answer to semicolon insertion affecting compilation speed your post could use some explaining.
If the norm was that everybody sent their snailmail on postcards, the ones in envelopes would be suspicious.
Cloud storage is likely something that could make a dent into the US market now. Surely they've got big players in Europe that would be happy to expand to a new customer base. Give me something that has Dropbox's cross-platform functionality, and throw in a fun tag line informing me that they _don't_ hand over my data to the NSA, and yeah, I'd happily make the switch. If only to feel .01% like I 'stuck it to the man.'
The NSA does not need direct access to the servers to monitor activity.

Strategically placed traffic monitoring at major ISPs is enough to build a pretty complete picture. I can imagine SSL traffic doesn't even pose much of a hurdle to a well funded project. You don't need the data in real time.
Basic Thompson NFA regex in AppleScript without character classes
Well let me ask you this, then: what do you recommend as a way to learn Mathematica? I feel like I should know more about it. My interest is less in the details of using the software and more in its computational model and its approach to language design. Any suggestions on what a natural approach would be?
Why would you expect that to be true in JavaScript any more than other semicolon-optional languages like Ruby and Python?

You just write your parser to accept both line endings (that meet certain conditions) and semicolons as statement terminators. Going through and literally inserting semicolons shouldn't be necessary.
Ironic that you would say silicon, since someone could theoretically put a backdoor in a chip and you would have no way of knowing it's in there.
It seems to be working there, though. Also for gay marriage which has become an inevitability.
Any plans on bringing WhisperCore back for the new Nexus family? I'm somewhat sad that it appears Twitter bought you out to stop making it