skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Marc Ambinder, the author, is known for having good sources in the security and defense communities. Government officials often work with him to communicate their perspectives anonymously. His article on "NSA sucks in data from 50 companies" [1] is worth reading as well.

At a first reading, this seems consistent with what's been reported and with the carefully-worded denials from tech companies. A few thoughts:

Under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, the NSA and the attorney general apply for an order allowing them to access a slice of the stuff that a company like Facebook keeps on its servers. Maybe this order is for all Facebook accounts opened up in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Maybe there are 50 of them.

As we saw with the Verizon case, the FISA court is willing to approve very broad collection. Could an order extend as far as all Facebook accounts opened up in all of Pakistan?

It is of course hard to view a Facebook account in isolation and not incidentally come into contact with an account that is owned by an American. I assume that a bunch of us have Pakistani Facebook friends. If the NSA is collecting on that account, and I were to initiate a Facebook chat, the NSA would suck up my chat. Supposedly, the PRISM system would flag this as an incidental overcollect and delete it from the analyst's workspace. Because the internet is a really complicated series of tubes, though, this doesn't always happen. And so the analyst must sometimes "physically" segregate the U.S. person's data.

This is the kind of overcollection that those of us fighting the FISA Amendments Act expressed concern about and were assured wouldn't happen. So now the goalposts have been moved, with the government arguing that it's okay to overcollect.

As Marc points out later in the article, they can also do initial analysis, and pass to the FBI. His example is in terms of a terrorist threat ... but suppose they found evidence of other crimes? Less than 1% of the Section 213 "sneak and peak" Patriot Act authorizations have been terrorism-related (most of them are drug-related) [2], so there's certainly plenty of precedence for using this kind of data for ordinary law enforcement.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5844972

[2] http://irregulartimes.com/index.php/archives/2012/02/06/unde...;
> they're still using Java 1.4, I find it very hard to think they're not being extremely lazy.

or they are running an app that they either don't have the source, or don't have the budget to update.
You can be assured that the partner nations of the UKUSA not only have access to these NSA programs, but probably also participate. And then what non-shady nations are you left with? Israel? Please.

This isn't just the US folks.
You posted this comment, word-for-word, in another thread, three minutes ago .. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5845339
So, it isn't supported on Windows? How is that not a deal-breaker for a runtime like Java?
GAO says “not so fast” on proposed secret Amazon-CIA cloud
Well it's certainly maintained a stable republic for far longer than the previous Articles of Confederation did, that's for sure.
Interesting, but I'm going to have to have a really huge job before I want to implement something like this rather than something like an array-of-arrays/list-of-lists or something like a DOM tree. That is, find a way to naively partition the text into intuitive chunks (newlines, spaces, tags, whatever as chunk boundaries).

Yes, I'm deliberately being contrarian, as the data structure takes a bit of work to comprehend, and even more work to understand the merge and split operations when you make updates. Not saying that I would never use it, just that the need better justify the effort. (not against going outside the out-of-the-box libraries to do things like tries or radix sort, for example, just want a justification to do the work)
It's supported, of course, just not provided by the OS.
>You can relocate to a different country, but it is up to them to allow you to enter and/or settle

so don't relocate to a different country
Am I the only programmer who doesn't like being economically exploited (in the formal microeconomic sense)? For me, it's demotivating to know I'm putting forth effort for which someone else is reaping huge value.

No, far from it.

Personally, I'm willing to take an "unfair" deal if I get something for it. If the risk reduction merits the lower expected value, then fine.

Increasingly, though, organizational life is becoming about a world in which the higher-ups play "heads, I win; tails, you lose". You still get the mediocre compensation, but not the risk reduction and career development and easier lifestyle that have, traditionally, made mediocre remuneration tolerable for 90% of the population. Now employment is, for most people, not about genuine risk reduction or career support, but just a shit deal they take because they have no leverage.
Just to be clear -- this doesn't mean we have eliminated Redis. It's still a very useful tool.
It strikes me that the organizations that can't update to the latest JRE are the really large enterprises still running IE6 and so on. I think one client we worked with was still stuck on Java 1.4. I imagine that's the target of this latest change.
Question for those in defense contracting: is there a style guide for writing such proposals and does one of its tips include: "Refer to 9/11 as often and as early as you can"?
I assure you it did not.
If you knew me IRL, you'd know that's not my MO (not shooting from the hip with a rant, though there was a point to it, sir)

Besides, like you said, there were other people to provide real insight into the issue. My post was just what it was, and you can downvote it accordingly...
All the Infrastructure a Tyrant Would Need
I'm not even sure you could find even 3 people who agree on absolutely every single minute detail of how best to form a government (oh, and whose opinions never diverge over time).

After all, if you could do that why would you even need to hold elections at all, if everyone always agreed there'd be practically no need to have decision makers anyways.
So Steve Jobs' reality distortion field should be able to have everlasting effect then? He was an asshole by all accounts in the workplace (I won't extend this comment to his personal life because on accounts, he seemed nice in his personal life). He was demanding, hard-driving, effective, and generally right. But he was an asshole. I don't think he gave a damn what people thought about his personality, because he could often say he was right. That doesn't change the fact that he was an asshole by all accounts in the workplace.
How to build a collaborative office space like Pixar and Google
The essay is totally worth reading: gives probably the best definition of privacy I've seen and covers a good amount of use cases. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/07/privacy_and_th...
So, you're basically an exchange, right? Are you operating in the US, and if so, do you have the appropriate MSB license? It seems like the US government is starting to crack down on Bitcoin exchanges that operate without a license, so what are you doing to assure your customers that you're not just going to get shut down?
Merely mentioning the fact that something is the case is very different from supporting it.
Get him a blue beanie.
If you like the idea of ropes, you might also be interested in a somewhat related paper by Charles Crowley called Data Structures for Text Sequences:

http://www.cs.unm.edu/~crowley/papers/sds.pdf

The material about the “piece table” method is particularly interesting IMHO.
Apparently Facebook is not using Cassandra much. For their messaging project they ended up with HBase instead of Cassandra [1]. I don't know if the system replaced the earlier Cassandra system, or complemented it.

[1] http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/1583884165/facebook-the-unde...
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/charter/pdf/text_en.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_Fundamental_Rights_o...

Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union

Article 8

Protection of personal data

1. Everyone has the right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her.

2. Such data must be processed fairly for specified purposes and on the basis of the consent of the
person concerned or some other legitimate basis laid down by law. Everyone has the right of access to
data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified.

3. Compliance with these rules shall be subject to control by an independent authority.
We are still a very serious user of Redis, and I agree with this. Redis works well as a persisted networked heap, which very different from a database. IMHO Redis would have to trade off a lot of it's value to become a "real database."
Yes, that's exactly why I mentioned that emails under the suspect's own custody would be protected.

As I understand the law at the time, if the phone company themselves had happened to record the conversation and voluntarily chose to divulge it to the government there would have been no crime, and the evidence would have been admissible.

The 4th Amendment applies to the government, not to third parties, and this is why the government has had to pass laws strengthening privacy protections, even after the Katz decision.
5 dead, 5 injured after California shooting rampage
Rate My Startup: Catalog.Do
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Old runtime == "extremely lazy"? Who's shooting from the hip now?
Anyone know the mechanics of what's involved with auditing and graphing CSS sizes with Graphite? What's instrumented and when is it logged?
I am not sure about this. For example Israel is probably in much bigger danger than the US and they certainly do some questionable things while trying to keep it safe. Yet it seems to me that they handle it way more reasonably. Maybe it's just because the US is bigger and better media target or maybe Israelis hide their secrets better... I don't know.

But if Americans - the whole nation - were a person I would think that person suffers from some kind of post-traumatic disorder after 9-11, hysterically seeking safety at all cost.
Feel free to ask any questions on CloudAPI.me - Scott
Can someone explain intuitively what this is?
> Pizza deliveries cannot wait 5 minutes or so. [...] You ever see a pizza delivery person take their time? Hell fucking no.

Before they move on, existing pizza delivery drivers delivering to an apartment have to: park the car, walk to the door, get buzzed in, wait for an elevator or climb the stairs, walk down the hall to find the right apartment, knock on the door, wait for someone to come to the door, drop off the pizza, walk back to the elevator/stairs, go back down to the ground floor, go back out to the street, get back in the car. In short, current pizza deliveries today often spend more than 5 minutes at each site just making a normal delivery. So yes, an automated truck that just stops at the curb at street level and expects the customer to pick up their pizza can afford to wait several minutes and still be ahead on time compared to the old system.

> You honestly fucking think they will spend thousands of dollars on a vehicle to equip with all this automated bullshit? The costs would be astronomical

Automated driverless delivery vehicles will ultimately cost less than vehicles that have drivers. You don't have to waste space on the driver area so the vehicle can be smaller and lighter or carry more cargo per unit size. They can skimp on safety equipment too - no need for seat belts and airbags or even an internal dash display. Fewer parts = more reliable. There's also the difficulty of hiring reliable people who can work exactly the shifts you need and the cost of paying them. It might be cheaper to hire people now but that won't always be the case.

So I do expect future companies that need to deliver stuff will want to buy or rent the use of a standard off-the-shelf driverless vehicle, possibly adding standardized accessories like a selective-opening side door. I don't expect they will make one themselves. They'll buy the finished version from some other company that specializes in making them. That way the R&D expense is spread across millions of customers and thousands of firms, not just one.

>This is the dumbest shit I have read on HN in a long fucking time....

You seem very angry. Is there something else upsetting you that you want to talk about?
Recurrent, 10$/m setup here. I'm a student so I can't afford to give more.

In Canada, I also give 10$/m to Open Media who fights for online rights and against the telecom monopoly. If you're Canadian, you should check them out:

https://openmedia.ca/donate

They did plenty of very effective things in the recent years, like pushing back the Usage-Based-Billing big-telco were trying to bring, which would have killed resellers that have better offerings.
Don't shoot the messenger. I'm just stating the wisdom of the ages (Western Civ.) I would say it means the dead can't defend themselves. The dead are retired from the game and resting in peace. I would also guess that it means you should take your fight to the living acolytes where your words might have more effect. Also, I don't see Jobs' reality distortion field having much influence anymore: Apple seems adrift.
Eric Schmidt: CNET gets it right on the NSA/Google issue
Excuse me? I am from a EU country which DOES have a constitution, and just like the US one, it is the most important document in the country, overruling any EU-law.
Liberty and Consent
One could argue that the Russians getting the bomb meant that no nukes were used in the Korean war.

As for WWII it wasn't Russian spies that allows the USSR's land grab, it was combination of rubbish negotiation and political wrangling within the allies.
This reads like pro-Obama propaganda. Why does Obama want to decrease public concern about war? I'd say he doesn't want a public debate about it. He doesn't want a public debate about PRISM/NSA either.
Ask: Would you write software Spy on users or censors users for a govt?
It's a pretty standard request for successful Internet companies these days. The US government wants to compel you to spy on your users/customers for them (http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/08/nsl-gag-order-lifted/ or http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/07/technology/security/nsa-data-prism/index.html) or the Chinese government wants you to censor your site or users to do business there (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google).<p>As hacker or engineer, if you were asked to implement these tools on behalf of your company, what would you do?<p>[This was originally intended as a poll but I don't appear to have enough karma to post]
So the key question is, if this part is true:

> Now, these accounts are being updated in real-time. So Facebook somehow creates a mirror of the slice of stuff that only the NSA can access. The selected/court-ordered accounts are updated in real-time on both the Facebook server and the mirrored server.

Does this "slice" contain material and accounts gathered only after the legal review that Facebook claims that it performs?

If so, then this story gels with what the NYT reported, that some organizations have built a secure framework to expedite the transmission of requested data...which makes sense, depending on the nature of the investigation...that is...if the NSA has requested data on a suspect on an ongoing case...then they'd probably want that datastore to be updated...in the same way that they want wiretaps to stay on the wire during the investigation.

Note: this is not to say that such surveillance is justified, but that this program makes sense with what Facebook and Google said yesterday and with the reports by the WaPo and the Guardian. Whether this is substantially worse than the other apparatuses we have in place, such as NSL, is also up for debate.
Email Senator Feinstein
But that's perfectly compatible with them being in PRISM. It seems PRISM is indeed not a backdoor or a means of direct access for the US Government, but is a conduit for FISA requests to be approved by Google's (and other firms') lawyers. They hadn't heard the term "PRISM" but that's because the US "intelligence community" hadn't used it to them when discussing the system.
Certainly the West should repair their relationship with others that have been affected by imperialist policies.

But that's not a panacea either. Islamist goals of introducing Sharia are incompatible with Western-style democracy so it may be possible to 'get along' but it won't be as simple as making nice on our side. Of course, we'll only 'get along' right up until the next citizen of a Western democracy draws an image of the Prophet Muhammad....

Likewise there remain nations with aggressive dreams of going above-and-beyond UN convention regarding resource rights, which is obviously incompatible with Western ideals.

There remain nations trapped under totalitarian governments strongly opposed to the West. However weak they might be we can't drop our guard completely.

So while I agree that the West has some apologies and amends to make I don't agree that would completely solve world peace, and I don't agree that all violence expressed against the West is "our fault".
I'd like to see a rope-variant of the 2-3 finger tree.

2-3 finger trees are immutable/persistent and support access to both ends in amortized constant time and logarithmic concatenation and splitting.

The complicating factor being that for flyweight values, like characters, the interior nodes of the tree would be prohibitive for one leaf per character. Surely there must be a variant of 2-3 finger trees that addresses this.
Suddenly, the rush to abandon private forums for "social media" seems, foolhardy doesn't it?

Of course discussion of specialized topics were spread out over a million places, but that was a million places - many of which were spread over different countries - someone would need to look (and get a warrant) to access data.

The down side to homogeneity is that it takes just one infection to bring down the lot.
William Binney talks about the military-industrial complex in this video from the last HOPE conference:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqN59beaFMI
Post Mortem: Minecraft Oakland
1.4 was released in 2002. If you haven't updated your code in over a DECADE, you are being incredibly lazy or incompetent.
To be clear, I wasn't shooting the messenger, only the messenger's message. You'll note I didn't do any shooting at you directly. :) And I think there is a lot to be gained from learning from dead people, both their positives and negatives. Whether or not they can defend themselves is of little consequence to me, as I think they can contribute many lessons to society from beyond the grave if society is allowed to examine their past lives.
Cloud Services can cure common cold now (2009)
You want to be authorized by a national government to conduct cyber-warfare activities on their behalf? I think these analogies are becoming a bit strained, U.S. Coast Guard handles law enforcement on the seas, not the Navy.
There will always be threats. That is not the problem. The problem is the Us vs Them attitude that causes overreaction to a relatively small number of deaths while larger dangers go unnoticed. You endure road accidents and gun deaths every day. Why do you think you can't endure Islamic terrorism?
I think this will largely fix itself over time. The reason is that the U.S. no longer needs the Middle East for oil. The price of oil has gone and stayed high enough that extraction from oil shale is now economical, and most of the majors are going that route. Which country has the largest oil shale reserves? The U.S, with total oil reserves roughly 3x greater than Saudi Arabia. We simply don't need the Middle East any more - I think that over the next couple years you'll see a complete U.S. pull-out from the region, and we'll leave them to their traditional customs and autocratic rulers.

Source: my sister's a petroleum geologist. When she was training in the mid-00s, all the attention was on light, sweet crude from Venezuela or Saudi Arabia. Now, virtually everything she does is fracking in Colorado or Wyoming, or work with the Athabasca tar sands.
This.

There are roughly 8 million people employed in science and technology in the U.S. Imagine if we each donated just $5 a month. While that's completely unrealistic to expect, what if we could average $1 a month for each of those workers?
It is a tree, where the leaves are substrings, and the nodes are the sum of the lengths of all the leaves under the node.

Thus, the root node has a value equal to the length of the string; it has two child nodes, with values equal to the lengths of the first and second 'half' of the string, and so on.
In SpiderMonkey, JavaScript strings turn into ropes based on some heuristics (if you append to them a lot, I think). This helps a few benchmarks.

So while you might think a JavaScript string is just a pointer + length, the implementation is actually significantly more complex: the engine will pick different implementations depending on how it thinks you're using it.
Name code not values
Why was strict parsing not chosen for HTML?
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I certainly can write a check for $5 (and have donated more than that), but the thing is, a $1m donation from a rich person does a lot more than my $5 - specifically, it does 200,000x more.

The widow's mite is, in the end, still just a mite.
Calling is believed to have a greater impact than emailing. It's a lot easier to ignore an email, which involves passive interaction, rather than a phone call which is much more direct.

It may not be that beneficial to contact someone who isn't your own representative, too. I'm not saying not to do it in this case, but if you do so, contact your own Senators and Representative as well.
Smoking Over 50
Smoking Over 50
You might be interested in this:

http://www.anchor.com.au/blog/2013/04/redis-rethought-exciti...;
Show HN: CMS_Admin - A Rails CMS for average humans
CMS_Admin is a simple CMS based on Active Admin and Devise. It also comes equipped with a responsive front end template.
Deployment Overlays: A new feature of the JBoss EAP 6.1
I think that's a very important point. It's not saying that X is better than Y, it's just for these particular use cases, one tool is better suited than the other tool because of which problems they were designed to tackle.

Awesome interview and kudos to whoever recommended the switch, that's a ton of savings you guys made!
I'm sorry but if that's what you're getting from my post then I cannot help you.

And yes if you examine the documents as much as my post you'd have seen that they are indeed based on little to no evidence.

By the way have you called your local rep yet?
Not if 200,000 people write it.
Or don't need to. A decade is not so long.
>It strikes me that the organizations that can't update to the latest JRE are the really large enterprises still running IE6 and so on.

Not necessarily. I know quite a few companies that have stabilized their code against a particular version and lack the manpower and/or the money to constantly upgrade and deal with the newly introduced bugs in newer versions. They usually do the upgrades on a schedule (eg. once a year or every 18 months).

For most major deployments changing to a new version of the JVM is a non-trivial task.

edit: added a life-cycle
Your title is really nasty and unrelated to your topic. Github's first hire was a minority.

You should change your title and repost.