skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to Explain Why NSA Situation is Important?
In expressing my utter shock at the revelation that the NSA has secretly been accessing user data from the top tech companies, the response I've received from people who don't work in the tech industry is either a shrug or a "why are you surprised?"

Given this, how do you explain to the average citizen why the NSA surveillance is an important issue that they should not simply ignore? What example would you use? What is the "elevator pitch" that gets people to understand the implications?
Of course, you could say that it's a bit ironic for a CA community to be on Google, especially after yesterday's (shocking) revelations. But sharing this to remind people that there are communities who really focus specifically on crypto / data-privacy and related issues. Some of these HN discussions would maybe be better served if moved somewhere like that.. and some HN'ers might choose now as a good time to dive into the crypto-anarchist world, or at least dip their toes in the water.
That logic is nice, but when you have the resources Palantir will have available to them, they can afford to train people themselves if need be. Then they don't need knowledge, skills, or abilities, merely talent.

That's how the military does it after all, even in very technically demanding occupations.
> We are not domain experts; we are problem solving experts

Eeek!
Will Obama change California schedule to discuss NSA surveillance?
Selective enforcement has got to go. It's an infringement on all of our rights as human beings. Get rid of selective enforcement, and you get rid of ridiculous laws?
Do you know how often an Electoral College delegate changes his vote? It's extremely rare. Most of them are bound and even the unbound ones nearly always vote as directed. Personally, I've always like the idea of the Electoral College because voting for a president is a complex issue that usually comes down to the talking points on television. Electing a delegate from my own community to take on the challenge researching the candidates for me is a much more manageable task, like electing a representative to vote on laws.

But your missing broader picture. This is not just about the presidential election. You also have a senator, a representative, a state representative, at state governor, a mayor, a sheriff, a town council leader, a school board leader, (maybe not all at once,) for whom you can vote. Too much power is concentrated in the presidency and this is a result people neglecting the importance of other elected offices, most of which have more of a direct influence on your life anyway.

Even beyond that, if you believe that your vote is so worthless that you may as well not cast it, that's a sign that you should get more involved in politics, not less. It's not hard to join your local party chapter and to start making changes as an 'insider.'
Gitmo is part of our military - as Commander in Chief, Obama can close Gitmo with a telephone call.

To prove this assertion - President Bush opened up Gitmo based on his role as Commander in Chief and didn't need to involve Congress.
You didn't understand the question.
It could still be regarded as a failure even if it is not a breach (and I hold no position on whether it is or isn't a breach).

Electronic communications were clearly not considered by the authors of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (understandably) but they were clearly trying trying to impose limits on the power of the state and I think the idea that the government should be allowed to track all of everyone's associations would have been abhorrent but that is the practical effect of the monitoring that has been revealed.
well managed company? What he described is very nearly rent seeking. If a company is never innovating and always simply copying what everyone else does then that means that, 1) they will always be cheaper than their competitors and 2) if they ever completely win their market they will be stuck with the last iteration because they can't afford to innovate.

People like to say a race for the bottom is good for consumers but it isn't. A race for the bottom is only good for people playing arbitrage games who know to get out before the bottom is reached.
There are some things you can do to protect yourself against these kinds of problem. About 92% of DNS resolvers honour the TTL setting for the NS records from the leaf-node child-zones (e.g. the NS records you control as the owner of a domain). If your domain is reasonably popular, then that caching can help you outlast a problem with your TLDs name-servers. 2 days is a pretty common number for a cache lifetime.

Unfortunately for the 8% of resolvers that honour the TTL in the parent domain, you have less control. In this case for .io, the parent-zone NS ttls are just one hour;

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
nic.io.	3600	IN	NS	ns1.communitydns.net.
nic.io.	3600	IN	NS	b.nic.ac.
nic.io.	3600	IN	NS	a.nic.io.
nic.io.	3600	IN	NS	b.nic.sh.
nic.io.	3600	IN	NS	ns4.nic.io.
nic.io.	3600	IN	NS	dns01.cdns.net.
nic.io.	3600	IN	NS	b.nic.io.

which I think is relatively short by TLD standards.

Another important thing to consider is that the TLD you choose for your domain itself isn't the only TLD that your domain resolution may depend upon. Resolution also depends on all of the domains of your nameservers resolving too. Route 53 assigns every hosted zone 4 nameservers from 4 different TLDs, e.g.;

example.info.	172800 IN	NS ns-1834.awsdns-37.co.uk.
example.info.	172800 IN	NS	ns-22.awsdns-02.com.
example.info.	172800 IN	NS	ns-912.awsdns-50.net.
example.info.	172800 IN	NS	ns-1233.awsdns-26.org.

So that if any one of those TLDs has a problem it does not cause a resolution failure for your zone. Some other providers do this too, and it's also something you could set up yourself.

Full-disclosure: Route 53 engineer here.
Just keep in mind who abused the Palantir.
finally a topic comes up on HN that I'm an expert in, and yet I'm legally unable to talk about it.

... crap.
I liked it until I thought about it later. But while I was watching it I really really enjoyed it.

Afterwards, I thought about it as a story and it didn't make much sense.

I'm also still trying to figure out how Kirk is a captain of a star ship right out of the academy in a way that is plausible and doesn't require an actual antigravity machine to suspend my disbelief.
growing up, i liked startrek as vision of the future

i can't follow this kind of fetishising of an outdated vision
Thank you to everyone at FreeBSD (and some folks behind the scenes at IXSystems) that made this happen.

A lot of people really appreciate seeing the 8 branch extended in its lifecycle like this, and it marks a subtle, but important culture change in FreeBSD development.
Sure. It could be argued that "general case" is a bit more restricted than that for actual useful software in the wild, but that would still break any program with a JIT.

Sadly, emulation seems to be the way to go.
Try your weed dealer next time.
you can setup custom domains on google w/o the business account(using google apps standard) for free, albeit for only one user, (https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/domain)
:D

Another one: http://snowpool.org/tgescg

Disclaimer: It's a fork of a game I made.
That was probably just a temporary blip caused by the NSA installing their beam splitter and/or backdoor code.
Laws of Physics Say Quantum Cryptography Is Unhackable. It's Not
Sweet, I guess

HackerNews = infowars
True. The author is smart, and I would like to believe that he knew that reified unboxed collections would solve the space problem, but possibly be even worse than Java in time, since there is no JIT to inline repeated virtual calls to the same target. I can't guarantee that he did. ;p
8 Top User Experience Agencies from UX Awards NYC
NGPKBAK PDFEEJG JLCDOJF NYMKCON ICMDIPP MCKHIEB ECGKDEH PJOMEC
Popularize simple crypto intrigue, sew crinkled retro sepia chaff:

AIGYKGF ELPACLI FIHKCFC JMBHHKG BBDKALI JAFGJCL BFNPEIB KBEOPIK
HKLNPAN PNHFFYF KIKPGOJ LIANKFC EIDOPMA GGBBFMH BKDFHGB AMJMEFP
NKBOIAD KKHCBAA AOLEKKD YIBCLJG IFNPBBO DGPECNF OKBLPKG PCLKAJH
NPLNFIM FNLDHHL PGPLHID NIMHDGF ABYIAEN LCELGDI LEGPKPB GFLDMLN
EHIGDFK CKNCEJF HGEEOLF NDLGGIH IIPBOHP LAMJYHP GLDOPED KIDDENF
NCJECAI JPPPOPM MENHHPC PNOIPJD GHGLDBP DPOINNC AHMKEHY JLJNDKF
CDMJAAA CBFAFOL PGFFIKC CCCPNIE CGBHKIE PEBCIAG DMOOEFC CHFFBNN
MYPGNPG IAIJFIN PIFEHNE IEPNKLN GEPGFNA EDLHANO BAMAECK ANLBEIJ
PDHLPGD ALNYJAI AHMCBOF KEBIFDI MDDCKCN NFFOLAG AJFHFPM EGBADPC
GNPNJNM JELFOIE KMANJYN KLAEACJ OJFFPLM DFECENC MAPGPJK KPFHICB
DDGALCM FHCAIIB APDBHCH EPLMOLA YENOLPM BBHKPLP EFGDOOP AJCKJJE
NGLNKJH KMALFOJ CNOADMF BALIGKH JCLNNEM LJYNBCJ HANCHGG CNCMKIO
DAINGKO ANIFKOP FIAPLKG OHCGKBF HMMEEJJ NINFFKI PHOPYEG CFIDDJA
KGNOINB HAPJJFF HPNHONL BLOPOFN CLODEGG ONKHAIN OIGMMLL CMKPFOY
FHFBNGA EEODMHH PDEBEHJ MPLAIFC HNGDNAK HEEKLIN JKOOPND OEBPLAB
NNHNFHK IYDJNBG DDIGCKO BJMNBEO BCGMIAH MLGOPCC DDOEMLJ GMJOIBL

http://www.fourmilab.ch/codegroup/

http://www.fourmilab.ch/codegroup/codegroup.zip
Entry level programmers will continue to have things taught in university - seemingly more Java than anything. Changing the scope of your comment to mean "entry level programmers" and not just "entry level people:" the kind of person with very cursory HTML knowledge is different than the kind of person with a little knowledge of Ruby. HTML is a mundane system of syntax, approachable by even a marketing major at a party school. Being able to write a little Ruby is a far different beast as it requires some ability to handle logic and referential extrapolation - even if most Ruby coders can't seem to 'hello world' without installing a few gems.
President Obama's PRISM Response: Deal With It
They're trying to change the conversation to be about the leak rather than their activities. At this point people should be discussing what can be done to restore the checks and balances that prevented this kind of abuse. America needs to send a strong message to it's leaders that it does not consider itself at "war" and it's well past time to remove any temporary measures that were justified on the back of 911.
I never thought I'd end up pitching something I worked on in a Hacker News thread, but here it goes anyway:

I actually just finished building an MVP of a product business with a friend that we're launching later today: https://www.burnerphone.us

Essentially, we sell these pre-paid disposable cell phone kits that 'expire' after 30 days of usage (and come with unlimited talk and text, nationwide US coverage).

We actually built the thing with security in mind, specifically because of the incredible amount of information that's now gathered not only by phone companies, but by the government as well. Want to make a phone call that won't be personally associated with you, from telephone company phone records? If so -- you really need to use a separate device (a Burner Phone).

Anyhow, sorry for the plug in this thread, but thought it could lead to an interesting converstation.
> Call him crazy now, but in 2023 you'll look back at what he said now, and you'll see how it's all right

You don't have to wait until 2023. The linked posting has a copyright date of 2001, and the wording of the last few paragraphs implies it was written late in 2001 a few months after 9/11.

And in the middle, is this sentence:

"What I am worried about is massive surveillance of all aspects of life: of our phone calls, of our email, and of our physical movements."

Which we have all now learned over the last few days is actually what has been happening, for far longer than anyone realized.

So you only have to look at this article with what we know today, to realize how correct his warnings actually were/are.
How hilarious is this? They think that having every piece of information about you they can get their grubby little hands on is okay... but they don't think that you should be able to get your hands on all their information? Seems a touch hypocritical...
Not to vote is a free choice, but with this you exclude yourself from the democratic process. You become a bystander and then indeed have no right to complain.
Not entirely accurate. When you say "free thinkers", I think you're mainly referring to some civil libertarians or some sort. But in communist countries they used to get people to spy on each other and report their friends and neighbors to the secret police if they said anything bad at all against the government or "the party".

So everyone was under constant surveillance, not just by the government, because they didn't have those kinds of resources, but by everyone around them, too.
Raytheon RIOT Demo
Concern grows over GCHQ Prism spying allegations
500: "A HUMAN HAS BEEN PAGED"

I hope not. The poor pager will run out of batteries after a flood of HN users.
1) Once you're successful you have to get the .com/.net/etc anyway. There's a lot of ambiguouty when you say "go to my site, de.lici.o.us" (which was probably the dumbest one ever), but even saying "referly" makes me think "referly.com" more than "refer.ly". If you're going to get the gccTLD, you absolutely must have sitenameio.com too. So, it doesn't really save you from "decent domain not available" -- prefixing with "get" or "my" in .com isn't any worse.

2) ccTLD has a defined meaning -- it's the country. I don't hate ccTLDs; e.g. Amazon.co.uk makes a lot of sense for the UK site of Amazon. But when people

3) They expose you to additional risk. The US can largely shut down most things, but .ly means you're exposed to Libya (JFC! an internet business voluntarily deciding to be exposed to Libya?)

4) If you really want something other than .com, you could use another TLD. Generally they all tend to be scams (I'm not aware of many .info or .biz domain names which are anything but scams, although I guess a few single-purpose/serving sites are in .info)

In fairness, IO is actually the least objectionable of all the gccTLDs, since "IO" is a pretty bogus ISO code in terms of representing a country.

ccTLDs make sense when you want to "fly the flag" of that country, too -- wikileaks.is or wikileaks.ch makes sense. All the gccTLDs have policies which are strictly worse than .com though.

And 2-letter domains (which are mostly ccTLDs) do make sense for link shorteners, particularly temporary/transient ones.
Sue them? Did they sign a legally binding contract with terms guaranteeing the closure of Gitmo and a moratorium on domestic spying? Did this contract provide for immediate impeachment on breach of terms?

Sorry pal, but "promises" are worth the paper they're written on. It's simply your fault for being credulous. This game's been going on for hundreds of years.
How  To Shake Up Agency Search #Startup
Radical right wing groups like the Tea Party are a National Security threat and it is perfectly legal to spy on these extremist groups without consulting the Judicial Branch because some members of the Judicial Branch are known to sympathise with these extremist groups.
The message he spreads is one that likely would not be well received with any delivery. People hate bad news.
Show HN: onewaybits.com - my go at xkcd 949
Onewaybits lets you transfer small files (<50mb) quickly and easily. Upload a file, snag the generated URL, and download on another computer (or wherever). The catch is that you only get to download it one time. Also, the file becomes unavailable after 24 hours (3 days for registered users).

This is my side side project. Figured some people may be interested in it. It isn't totally done (no project ever is), but it is functional on the most basic levels and it has already been useful to me quite a number of times.

You can register via the "mybits" button on the bottom. If you register you get a prettified URL which looks something like: onewaybits.com/u/[your username]/ and that will list all files you have uploaded and designated as public.

I collect email only for the purposes of sending a password reset link so feel free to enter a fake one if you don't trust the site but still want to try it out.

URL: http://www.onewaybits.com/

Cheers.
Be careful with moral judgements like that. You basically work in an industry that exists due to it's role in preparing for nuclear war.
That is a very narrow-minded attitude. Not all apps have to scale and not all parts of an app have to scale. It may not make sense or be worthwhile to spend the effort to make a long running request shorter if it's used infrequently or by a small number of users or if the system as a whole does not require a high level of concurrency. Not every company is Google.
I'm sure he'd prefer not to.
I had a lot of fun watching this. It is true to the original spirit of the series. I look forward to the next episode.
> "In other news, the NSA is considering sponsoring the creation of a prime time television series featuring a secret machine that spies on what everyone in the country is doing or saying, and the machine is portrayed as the protagonist."

I'd watch that.
Ask HN: How do you balace work, family and personal interests?
I guess the problem is that I'm new to all of this (recently married and recently moved to the US to work for a large corporation), but I can't seem to be able to balance those three factors in my life. I always have to pick two. From blog posts and comments here on HN, there seems to be a lot of people that are able to manage working a lot, having a family (with kids) and also working on personal interests such as studying things and working on side projects. I wonder how those people are able to do it :)
it's a stronger link than the article supposes
deAMDify - mix AMD and Node modules with browserify
For the youngsters among you, this is in fact a very old design discipline which was used to organise what were called books. Unlike books, which were bound collections of fixed size pages (done for compactness and strength), this is an emulation of what used to be called a scroll, a much older form of organising text which was abandoned as impractical as soon as we figured out book binding.

So Microsoft are emulating an archaic and impractical form of information presentation and calling it modern, how typically Microsoftian. Unless of course, this is a rare example of Americans using the word 'irony' correctly, in which case, bravo!
So everyone who started visiting Hacker News 352 days ago shouldn't get to see this on HN?
Ray Ozzie on NSA spying: We got what we asked for. Now it’s time to wake up.
> You are free to disagree that privacy in some meaningful sense is not a human right

I don't disagree that privacy in some meaningful sense is a human right. I disagree that a "privacy" right that is broad enough to encompass information about me collected by a private company based on my voluntary use of its service (i.e. phone call records) rises to the level of human right. To me, that's instead a matter of balancing of competing interests to be handled through the democratic process. When I think of privacy being a "human right" I'm thinking more of the government not invading the sanctity of your home, not how it can access information you already freely share with others.
While I agree with the broader point, the number of lives lost is a really poor metric. I don't know why so many people tout it as if it is supposed to prove something. It is one quantifiable measure, sure, but it is a pretty bad one.
Of course there's a link.

Palantir basically allows for analysis across federated data sources. It's a data fusion platform along the lines of other C4ISR programs.

One of those federated sources is now SNA (Social Network Analysis) and/or other Internet sources.

One way for Facebook to share information the gov't requests is through this: https://www.facebook.com/safety/groups/law/guidelines&#x2F;

This next part is speculation, but if you were servicing many of these requests, wouldn't you just create an API to help you out? You aren't getting paid (much? Note: "Cost Reimbursement" section in above link) to help them out.
But how do you get rid of selective enforcement? If for no other reasons than limited resources, prosecutors have to decide who they'll pursue and how hard.

Disbarring a prosecutor from ever holding elective office is about the only thing I have been able to think of, and it's not hardly enough.

Get rid of the ridiculous laws is more like it. Perhaps our Founders had a point when they were trying to create a limited government? Gerry Ford's best ever quote puts it in the modern context, "A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have." (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gerald_Ford#Address_to_Congress...)
> officials would be so afraid of a revolution

... that they would set up a security apparatus to prevent one from ever happening.
I think it might be a joke. We're going to need more evidence.
One way to see that a democracy doesn't work is to look at the rate of voters.... if it is really low, I would say that it fails.
This is pretty cool. One thing that had me confused was the legend at the bottom of the search result, eg: US - U. The colour of the circle is different for each one. Is it random, or does the colour signify something?

And like Krish mentioned, it would be good to have the examples you mentioned in your reply shown in light gray as a hint text in the search box. It can clear when the user clicks on the box or starts typing.
>Not that it excuses any of it but they really don't try to hide it.

Exactly. I had a chat with a recruiter a couple years ago and he was upfront about contracts with government agencies and data mining. But sure, someone internet gumshoe totally _cracked the case_ by going to Palantir's official website and clicking 'What we do' ( https://www.palantir.com/what-we-do&#x2F; )
Suspend and resume are basic features, by power management I mean idle and active power management, optimizing the race to zero, reclocking...
Wagging tail of a comet close to the Sun enables mapping of solar magnetic field
>the feeling of purpose and patriotism is something no valley company can really match

That doesn't make it sound like these are smart people to me. Being easily manipulated by bullshit is usually for the simple.
Isn't there a site that tracks politicians' promises and what has been done while in the office? It'd be a great tool to weed out the fraud.

Words get easily forgotten in a couple of years. This would make them count.
Well, technically, if it's cellphones, then Obama is using Warrantless Wirelesstaps... so he's all good!
There was a lot of pressure to attended college immediately after I finished high school. I was not in the right frame of mind and it was never my goal to attend school. I knew since before high school what I wanted to do.

I thought I could stomach it for the first year, it got worse the second year, and finally in the third I was mentally suffering so bad I couldn't do it anymore. The combination of guilt and stress was not good.
> How did we fall so far?

Fall? You'd have to give the same instructions to a Soviet activist in the Cold War days here.
Which is also why Palantir folks don't talk about what they do.
An East German Knight Rider... I'll watch it if it has Hasselhoff.
GREAT idea! I ordered 5 of these with my credit card...
It's possible for someone to be visionary about some things and nuts about others.

Stallman seems to be right about the government's actions after 2001. That doesn't automatically mean he's right about the way I should or shouldn't run my business.
Because of all the stupid stuff in it?

http://io9.com/star-trek-into-darkness-the-spoiler-faq-50892...
The new (and nastier) ageism
AngularJS - basics to dependency injection
It's just the html served for the real 500 page. The HTTP response code is 200. Real internal server errors do trigger a page though.
Likable people succeed in roles that put them in front of people? What a dystopian nightmare!