skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Then I think you completely missed the point of his anecdote.
Palantir did develop a database to store scraped data from social media sites. According to Chamber of Commerce meetings, data was uploaded to it from HBGary and Berico.
Right, so lets just keep on holding no one accountable. That's worked great so far.
I think considering the question of "is it a choice?" relevant is almost as bad as believing homosexuality is somehow wrong either way.

Why should it matter? Was I born a programmer or did I choose to become one? I was born physically (to satisfy the gender-sensitive) male. I was born human. I was born with blue eyes.

Beyond the physically obvious, if you're OK with persecuting people for a choice that does not affect you (e.g. "that guy is a blue-eyed human, and that's fine, but he CHOSE to be a PROGRAMMER, and that's just wrong!"), then you are making things worse.

"It's not a choice" doesn't make it more or less right or wrong. It's how people are. The failure to accept that (or at least ignore and tolerate it) is the problem, and it will not be answered by "well it's genetic."

[edit: Full disclosure: This post was made while listening to Queen, but I didn't CHOOSE to do that, the restaurant did that to me; please judge appropriately.]
Fast Tech 25: Fastest growing tech companies
Nice. A link to the file and project of each example would be great for usage context.

What is it scraping? Is it just Github projects with language "Clojure"?
A little bit of both I guess? It's become standard enough that most web developers (at least most I know) have an account and use it for a few things here and there, it's dirt cheap and widely available, and it's just text files we're storing, so nothing more heavy weight is needed. It does also offer versioning, which I believe we may add a feature to take advantage of for rolling back configuration changes in a coherent way if something goes wrong or to recreate a problem locally on a certain date, but don't think we've started even planning that yet (pull requests welcome!)
'Under The Liner' Helps Film Crews Find Work
I am positive that you have the facts about George W. Bush's military record wrong.

The real story there is that all of the pertinent facts, with evidence, appeared in the BBC. Greg Palast was responsible for a lot of it. When CBS wanted to report on the story, they were given all of that, then went and did their own digging.

In the process of digging they were given a perfect memo that they ran with without authenticating properly. The memo turned out to be too good to be true, and was a forgery. The result is that everyone was left believing that the whole thing was based on a forgery.

But it wasn't. All of the key facts were uncovered earlier by the BBC and the planted forgery was merely a clever way to discredit the story. After Dan Rather painfully took a public fall over it, the issue became radioactive for all US media organizations.

See http://www.gregpalast.com/dan-crashes-bush-flies-high&#x2F; for Greg Palast's view on what happened to Dan Rather.
Just because some ideas about the government that have been decried as 'crazy conspiracy theories' have turned out to be true doesn't mean that all 'crazy conspiracy theories' are all of the sudden validated and/or more plausible.
In 24, Jack only uses a phone once and then smashes it. How anonymous is a phone I've been using for a whole month?
Three letters: IRS. Whether it was a "couple of rogue employees" or 88+ given specific orders from their boss(es), the same thing can (and some day will) happen at the NSA.
The technology you refer to has not changed since 1975.

It is a stretch to call this smarthome technology considering the ban on incandescent bulbs, which completely eliminate X10s ability to dim or fade bulbs (because you are using CFL, and if you use a x10 dimmer on a CFL, you can burn down a house), and writing any sort of logic based on whether the device is on or off is not possible.

Now Insteon supports bi-directional communication and you can determine state, but you are looking at $45 per outlet or switch versus the $8 X10 stuff.

So, yeah, still out of most people's price range, unless you want to settle for over 30 year old technology.
Keep your Alans on, it's just a 404 page.
Hi David .. we are education search engine .. you could search the way you do in google .. yes , you can search for degree programs and universities for now .. we are cooking a lot of stuffs behinds studenture to make it more informative.. Kindly leave your feedback & ur email id in the feedback form (in home page) to keep you posted as we deliver new features .
It went out of its way to tie itself to Wrath of Khan, which only served to constantly remind me how much worse Into Darkness is as a movie than Wrath of Khan.
That's what I'm wondering, how is this any different than going to a local store and paying cash for a burner Net10 phone? You can get them for $15 and they include enough minutes for most people to get through a month, and if you don't use a CC or store loyalty card there is no way for anyone to tie the phone to you.
Obama Administration Releases Nation’s Phone Records To Public (The Onion)
People gotta feed their families man.
Why the media is ignoring Nate Silver by praising Nate Silver
The more purchases they can tie to the event, the more information they have and the more chances to track you down. You can slip up at any point- for example, say you buy the printer at Best Buy, and they figure out based on the S/N which Best Buy and what day the sale was made. You can't turn off security cameras in Best Buy.

The fewer transactions, the better.
Salesforce's Oracle database dependence: Can it open source its way out?
Does it have cool special features like a microphone that ca be turned on (preferably even when the phone is off) and used as a room bug? My current phone has this and I'd really miss living without it.
I'm not talking about Fox News, I'm talking about opposition from within Congress and from the general public. Look outside your bubble; there are a lot of people that heartily approve of Guantanamo and would like to go farther down that route. Congress has persistently declined to allocate funds for housing any Guantanmo prisoners on the mainland, and the way the government operates, Obama can't just appropriate the money from some other part of the budget.
A vegan that is explaining to you how easy their lifestyle is can hardly be said to be bringing you bad news. On the other hand a vegan that is calmly/politely/diplomatically explaining their point of view on the ethics of eating meat could be said to be bringing bad news, and I expect you will find that vegans are 'heard' far less often when they discuss that topic. I certainly tune them out and start getting annoyed when they go down that route, no matter how diplomatically they do it.

The bizarre dual nature of patriotism and politics in the US makes it even worse for anyone looking to bring Stallman's message to the public. Telling people that "the system is not flawless and world would be wonderful if only 'those other jerks' stopped trying to subvert the system" is somewhere between "eating a hotdog is like eating your child" and "cows should be able to vote in elections". People have too much emotional stake in that system being the right system. Many of them have literally killed for it, or known people who were killed for it. They've lost sons, daughters, fathers and grandfathers who were fighting for it. They put people currently fighting for it on a pedestal of unconditional support. They have romantic notions of people before them fighting and dying for it.

Maybe there is somebody out there charismatic enough to convince the general population to consider fundamental flaws with the system itself, but I don't think that such a person has really been seen in politics for many many years.

Well, you can take a shortcut if you appeal to stronger allegiances than faith in American democracy... but those shortcuts drive us in the wrong direction.
Not being an employee of the NSA, he also can't confirm that Palantir Finance hasn't been repurposed to conceal the existence of space aliens captured from Area 51. What's your point?

Palantir denies it, and then one of the developers on the original project, a YC partner, comments on HN that the Palantir project had nothing to do with surveillance. Your response then demands that he prove a negative.
This seems a bit like saying that maybe the NSA is using Angry Birds as their surveillance system without Rovio's knowledge. The creators of Angry Birds would probably be aware if their software were an NSA-grade surveillance system rather than a cartoon physics game.
Or typewriter.
Those are all consequences of illegality, not of the trade itself.
You can provide avenues for followups without compromising anonymity. This is one of the things dead drops are for.
Samsung Galaxy S4 Google Edition is real
NSA helped with Windows 7 development (2009)
Like we did for the previous leakers who were targeted? You can't have a revolution when no one is going to take arms up with you. It's smarter to just get out before they close the gates. Are you really willing to die for this when there are nicer places to live?
Misogyny and the Marketing Chick
There's more data in the blog post: http://blog.cloudflare.com/ipv6-day-usage-attacks-rise
Business and the Inner Game
There was also the transition between implementations (e.g. Xfree86, X.org, etc).
Who knows what to believe anymore. Hopefully encryption will become the norm for everyone so that parity can be regained.

RMS seems less crazy than he used to. His radical views seem to be quite rational. We need free software and privacy to have freedom.
I'm so annoyed. I've heard "tig is amazing" so I go to github... hmm, no screenshots or examples. Oh, there's a homepage. Compile instructions but also no screenshots or examples.

"Tig is a git repository browser that additionally can act as a pager for output from various git commands."

It happens all over github. Even UI projects fall prey to this problem, which is especially egregious. I want to grab these project owners by the shoulders, shake them, and yell DON'T YOU WANT ME TO USE YOUR PROJECT? THEN SHOW ME WTF IT DOES!!
Associates of Alexander Karp and Peter Thiel from Bilderberg meetings.
I've been following their repos for awhile now https://github.com/palantir what exactly is SYSMON anyway! monitoring tools indeed.
How to handle errors like a professional
Yes. The answer to this scandal is not making it technically harder for the government to get our information. I would compare it to DRM/piracy issue. Most of us on HN would agree that creating new, more onerous, and more difficult to crack DRM is not the answer to piracy. You instead convince pirates that it is more ethical, easier, or less risky to purchase something than pirate it.

The general citizen is not going to win a spy game against the NSA. Our only hope of preventing something like this from happening again is to put legal penalties and precautions in place to make sure that the government does not overstep its bounds. Using burner phones isn't going to accomplish anything.
>It's pretty clear the government is very loosely using these NSL's now

Now? It's never been any other way. I wonder if they ever intended anything else.
Yes, I read that somewhere as well. It is still a bad tactic.

At first you would want to encrypt the information.
Then you would like to have some method of transfer that does not stick out and could hide the intent to transfer encrypted data. Perhaps with the help of some steganography tool. And you would make sure that nobody identifies you in the process by using tools like Tor.
This "I hope they don't notice" method is just gambling.
> Examples please. I would like to read more.

Ohio v. Thomas, 173 U.S. 276 (1898).

> Plus, I wasn't suggesting that we create laws that penalize federal officials for how they perform official duties.

You specifically proposed making them liable for breach of contract under state law if their official acts while in office did not comport with statements made prior to their election. Which is, exactly, punishing them for how they perform official duties.

> I wasn't suggesting that we prosecute them for how they do their job but prosecute them for false claims made to help them achieve that job.

If you abandoned your suggested contract model and instead wanted to make false campaign claims themselves actionable (rather than punishing for future actions that don't comport with campaign claims under a contract theory), I'm pretty sure that the First Amendment would be the problem -- the Constitutional bar for punishing acts of speech, particularly political speech, is very high, and there's almost no way that something trying to regulate based statements of the speakers future political intentions is ever going to meet it.

> Their actions in office would be evidence to a crime, not the crime itself.

Oh, and you want this to be a crime, now, not a civil offense (like breach of contract would be)? That makes it even less likely to be viable.
Sam, you say "I don’t worry about the NSA having my call records". I wonder if you would be OK posting your phone records for the last 5 years online, so anyone can see them. Who you called, who called you, how long you talked. What if this was mandatory?
While I would agree that sexual preference is not a choice, I think people are sometimes too eager to make the connection that because something's not a choice, it must be genetic or there from birth.

Many people have odd sexual fetishes (ranging from mildly odd to somewhat terrifying). Most would probably agree those fetishes aren't choices, but I've never heard the argument made that those sources of sexual arousal are somehow innate.

Given the prevalence of identical twins where only one is gay, it seems clear that, at the very least, sexual orientation is determined by a variety of factors. I'm not sure what is the point of conducting a poll that asks people off the street which they think is the dominant factor...
People make too much of the name. If you were involved with a top-secret government surveillance project, would you ever mention the name outside of the NSA, even to companies you're partnering with? It's likely that until now nobody outside of the NSA had ever heard of "PRISM", which is why you get these blanket denials from the tech companies supposedly involved. To them, it's "The government is coming to us with requests for data on our users", not "Help work with us on this top-secret project named PRISM".
I can't do anything to Washington. But if enough of us can make e.g. Google bleed cash they can do something.
"These are national security assets: evidence gathered
here will never be used in a drug case, or a tax evasion
case."

The evidence gathered doesn't need to be used in a drug case directly in order to provide value. The information being collected is sufficiently broad and inclusive to give law enforcement more than enough leads they would not have already had. The discovery process required to determine if such a system were misappropriated for anything more than these national security concerns would be overly burdensome for any defendant in a court of law, especially when said defendants are spending every penny on just trying to remain free.
Full Disclosure: I'm ex-Palantir Government Dev

Ok guys. Let's use Occam's Razor for a second. What's more likely?

1) A company that purposefully goes around blackmailing people to make deals, uses underhanded tactics, and spies on the people, yet is able to hire amazingly talented (and opinionated supporters of the EFF) engineers from Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT.

Or

2)a company that builds a data analytics platform that is useful to a lot of people and honestly believes they're helping the world by finding missing children, tracking terrorism, and fighting fraud.

Although this article is just ludicrous. All because I think up the same domain name as someone else doesn't mean I hacked into their computer and stole their code.
In George Carlin's fantasy world:

Me: I don't want cancer in either testicle.

Dr: Congratulations. You are no longer at risk of cancer.

Seriously, if this were a real conversation and given that I'm going to get cancer (per first line), I'd pick one testicle and then have them remove it.

Meanwhile, you'd 'choose' not to get cancer and get it anyway, but without any control whatsoever.
David Foster Wallace: "Are some things still worth dying for?"
AdMob founder joins Sequoia Capital
If I wrote a screenplay, then Palantir is exactly the name I would give the evil Mega Corp (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MegaCorp).
Brent Simmons, Dave Wiskus, and John Gruber talk about their new app, Vesper
> the police could have asked a barkeep for his records

Asked. Asked. And he could have said "come back with a warrant".

You continue to ignore the distinctions between:

* A party voluntarily cooperating with law enforcement.

* A party being coerced to cooperate with law enforcement by court order.

* A party being coerced to cooperate with law enforcement because law enforcement officers say so.

You keep insisting the government has a right to access any information someone reveals to a third party without a warrant, even if that third party did not intend to and does not wish to reveal it.

What precedent exists for this? If there is any at all (and this will be the third time I've asked you for it), does any of it pre-date 2001?
Don't forget that its highly durable. When was the last time S3 was down?
> By your method of interpretation, this clause gives Congress the right to exercise legislative jurisdiction over D.C., but not the right to build the city.

No, it doesn't. Legislative jurisdiction over the territory itself includes the ability to build the city.

> You're comparing a power that's mentioned twice in the Constitution

The phrase is mentioned twice, but neither is a grant of power (one is a statement of the overall purpose of the Constitution, the other is expressly a limitation on the scope of another grant of power.)

There is no mention of "common defense" as a power anywhere in the Constitution.
Don't get me wrong, you're definitely fighting a losing battle. Even (especially!) those who have utilized violence for their supposedly revolutionary goals are fighting a losing battle, and I'm suggesting foregoing violence.

But I completely disagree that the way to change things is from within. When has that ever actually worked? Sure, governments get overthrown from within, but that just results in another government (that may be better, but which also may be worse), and it doesn't change the attitude of the people toward the very concept of government, which in my opinion is the problem. Governments don't get smaller and more respecting of civil liberties. The United States is arguably the most valiant and educated attempt at creating a small and unobtrusive government, and in a very short period it has grown into arguably one of the largest governments ever to grace the Earth.

I think the only hope for lasting change is for the attitude of society toward government to change, and I do think that education and counter-economics are the best ways to show people that the roles that are supposedly only accomplishable by government in fact don't require government at all. That said, the likelihood of any measurable change happening in my lifetime is low, but I suppose that's just part of the human condition.
> How comfortable did you feel with AES when you were done with the project? Could you try to put into a sentence or two what you (i) didn't know about using AES before you did the project, and (ii) knew at the end of the project?

Frankly, I didn't know much about AES (or encryption in general) before I started working on the project. My only direct encounter with encryption was ROT13 in IRC channels. I felt that without doing at least some "difficult" task myself, the application would be a lot more easy, and nothing new in it for me to learn. So I read how AES works, and created a small implementation myself.

Afterwards, I had a bit more understanding of all the moving parts of AES. Gained a huge appreciation for the algorithm and security in general. Now that I think about it, I guess you don't really have to implement it yourself in order to understand it, but I did it anyway, because, well, I felt like it.

It was just a toy project tbh. I certainly don't consider myself an expert on the algorithm, and will still trust tried and tested library implementations over my own. But now I know what's going on under the hood.
Probably not as easy as resisting paying proper taxes...
You really don't need a lawyer to understand the difference between a wiretap and collecting telephone metadata.
Just looking at the disk activity of reads, inspecting the memory dumps from these periods, and picking out what I can via a hex editor as far as what the "inspection" appears to be looking for via checksums derived from file blocks, which appear to be tied to images and videos. I'm assuming that this is domestic and not foreign, which I certainly could be wrong about. I'm also assuming they're looking for kiddie fiddlers, which I doubt someone like China would be all that interested in, but maybe the PRC is for blackmail purposes.

A lot of this stuff is sort of ephemeral and I don't have any credentials to really convince anyone. That's why I would post this, maybe someone else knows more than me. Like I said, take this as anecdotal and perhaps incorrect... You'll notice a lot of assumptions by me.
The question of weather or not one is born gay has not yet been completely resolved. There is not a 100% concordance rate between identical twins, indicating that it is not completely genetic; however, the concordance rate is greater than between non-identical twins. What probably happens is that, like almost all animal (including human) behaviors, there is genetic components, but environmental factors play a huge part.

The question of weather or not being gay is a choice is a significantly different question, as we do not choice are upbringing. If I recall research I did about a year ago, starting at about 7 (again, I am going off of memory, but I am pretty confident the age is far prebusenent), researchers have found significant corralations between behavior and the eventual sexual orientation of the child.

The other problem with using the 'not a choice' argument is that it (ought to be) completely irrelevant. People can argue that sociopaths, pedophiles, ETC are not a choice. This does not mean we allow their actions, because we still believe they are harmful. The reason that homosexuality stopped being considered a disease was that there was no correlation found between homosexuality and negative symptoms. Irrespective of if one made a choice, was born gay, or became gay through some other mechanism is irrelevent, because being gay is not a problem.
But this post is more than a decade old.
According to Chamber of Commerce meetings, Palantir developed and stored scraped data from social media sites. Berico and HBGary uploaded data to this database.
According to this comment by a self-proclaimed lawyer (in training?), the law does care what the average person thinks:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5833747

If people don't know something by now it's equally the fault of the services they use for not educating them about the real implications of what they do online.
Would it be considered theft of services?