skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Just Sayin' !
We are comparing cost of land, not cost of building stuff on the land.
I'm not sure that's as strong a denial as it first appears. There article alleges there was a court order for the request. Here's a copy of the document Verizon allegedly received: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/veri...
>>If the people in office get voted out, they leave

This is dangerous that after they and someone replaces them the story repeats like a record player in a lop, only with louder volume. (I wish I could think of a better analogy)
Just more sources for you, since that myth needs to die.

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/u-s-officials-re...

The US officially claims that there was little to no actual harm caused by the leaks.
Awesome, it's a code camp with actual camping!

On a related note, does anyone know if it would even be possible to do something like this in the USA (short of buying a few hundred acres with a lake on it)?
Thank You for Data-Mining - WSJ defends the NSA
Totally. I felt like this post made the Zoho executive team seem very immature.
Don't underestimate the difficulty in making something not just work, but work well, and for millions of people.
Duda.
I love how people in this thread are modding you down for this. None of this is news to me, you and many like us. Yet here we are, top 10 stories on HN, more comments than I have ever seen all about some new NSA leak. Apparently people on HN are far less informed about the world we live in than I previously thought. Go figure.
Meh. Many well-established companies in a lick of trouble run negative P/E ratios for years...as in, the firm is losing money. There may be arguments for or against a given share price, but anything coming strictly from very high P/E values basically shifts the discussion to "what's the forward P/E?"

And of course small companies (and startups) lose money all the time, and that's expected while they're gaining momentum.

Firms that have very high P/Es (OpenTable and LinkedIn also come to mind) somehow have convinced investors that it's rational for them to spend every scrap of money on growth on a relatively massive scale, as so that the "P" part of the equation approaches zero. It seems then the discussion shifts to what the 'forward' P/E is, aka a prediction about the future where growth has stalled and the business is established and printing money without an obvious place to allocate it sensibly...like Google, or Apple. The theory then being it'd go to dividends, but that doesn't seem to be what has happened, because the business tries to justify holding onto the capital just in case it's needed to grow even more.

FWIW...I don't know anything about this stuff and plow just about everything into Vanguard. I have no interest in beating the market, I just want to track "the economy" so I can meet my needs when I can't work anymore. So, grains of salt and all that, but when I think about what a hyperbolic plot does it always mystifies me why people care so much about P/E when either term is close to zero.
I'm trying to find something that does:

* OTR
* Works on iOS & Android
* Is Free
* Works well (doesn't crash)
* Does push notifications

Hopefully cryptocat will be that soon.
FBI & DOJ obsessed w/arresting men who uncovered infamous Steubenville rape.
Why are our Federal tax dollars going towards the harassment of citizens in their quest to uncover who hacked the websites of the Steubenville high school rapists?<p>This is another example of the sick and misguided priorities of our government's justice system.
"... was broadly securing tens of thousands of Americans’ phone records ..."

make that millions?
I linked to a relevant time stamp which has a graph and presumably "some numbers".
One-time-pads and carrier pigeons then!

Seriously, I don't really care how people take their privacy into their own hands (as long as they don't harm anyone), but this ridiculous theme of "you have nothing to hide and/or [insert bit of data] isn't really private anyway" is starting to become a real bore.

BTW... I understand the shortcomings of OTPs (and pigeons; I live in New York), but I don't see why it's not used more often. I mean secure distribution of pads is starting to look like the least vulnerable link in the chain at this point.

Besides, generating an OTP is fairly trivial.

http://eksith.wordpress.com/2011/12/26/cryptographically-sec...
The protocol itself is highly obfuscated, but from my understanding of what has been published it works something like this: (lots of disclaimers here that nobody outside of Microsoft/Skype really knows for sure)

When logging in an RSA public/private key pair is generated and the public key is sent up to the server. The username to public key mapping is seeded to supernodes and inserted into the global address book.

A calling party looks up the username on a supernode and receives the public key of the answerer as well as some magic to help them establish a direct connection even if both are behind NAT.

The caller generates a single use AES256 key for the session, encrypts it N times where N is the number of other parties on the call plus a number of built-in "observer" certificates. These encrypted keys are all sent over the wire to the other parties, whom are each able to decrypt 1 of the N encrypted payloads.

Each party encrypts traffic to the others using the session specific AES key.

If you are a government agency with a private key that matches one of the observer public keys (Russia, China, and India have openly claimed to have these), and you are able to record the setup for the call, you are effectively another party in the group chat and have access to the session key.
Maybe they are legally prohibited from acknowledging the existence of this program?
So you'd be more likely to believe them if they were verbose? Most of them are fairly direct denials. That's not to say that they're necessarily true, but they don't seem like especially weasely statements.
Nah, check out data warehouses. This data is really limited in details (anything more than from and to telephone numbers, and start and stop times?), and can be shoved into a data warehouse without any analysis as that word is generally understood.

Of course it gets indexed, but that's automatic and mindless.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_t...
Intelligence Chief Blasts NSA Document Leaks
If you read the Assange-Schmidt transcript, you will recall a section wherein Assange calls it unwise to encrypt your email, presumably because you stick out like a sore thumb. It's like telling anyone monitoring the network, "Hey! Look at me!"
Some context please? This is big news and it is not inappropriate to have multiple perspectives on the same story.
they are awfully specific about what they don't do.

"direct access"...
Authority is the ability to execute on that authority and the USA has plenty of execution ability.

In practice, it's how extradition works for non-citizens who never set foot inside the USA, or bank account freezes for people who don't live in the USA.
no, but I can find the flaw in your analogy.
Of course he is. That is all he does is politic. Why should we be surprised. What's surprising is anyone is stupid enough to still give him money.
And all lawyers do is translate legal language into common tongue (speaking from experience) I looked up the law regarding my lawsuit and pointed out to my lawyer what he should say and he did so. The judge took it and I won my case. However, the judge would not have done so without my lawyer making a lengthy speech. The point being. We are the only one's who know how to put boxes on a page, so we get paid for it.
How old's your partner, I've known two people who escaped from East Germany and one from Romania. I asked them all about what it was like living there & how they escaped because of course I'm an asshole American and all I got was the thousand yard stare. When the Berlin Wall fell there were hundreds of divorces because they found out their spouses were spying on them. Bugging people's homes was routine. If you said anything against the government you were shipped off or executed. In the case of the Romanian guy I've never seen that kind of look on a man's face. In all three cases I feel terrible for even asking, and I won't be doing it again. Datamining your worthless Facebook page does not compare to what they went through.
Wow. Demanded? Weakening rhetorical position?

It's like you think comments are some sort of game where you can win or lose. I think I'll just let readers read my comments and opt out of this silly game you want to play.
He said Computer Science fundamentals, not programming fundamentals. If you don't know the difference between Computer Science and programming, maybe you should learn some Computer Science yourself.
No longer 404ing
Well, I mean, the scenario you're describing where a leader becomes a tyrant and is deposed of by their successor is basically a totalitarian dictatorship.

I think that's a bit of a (very large) stretch. I think the "President" and the military are separate enough in this country that we don't run a huge risk of "THE GOVERNMENT" (ie, a "leader" and militia to empower them) could or would act as a cohesive force against the US.

Usually when you see this, you see fractioned militia that support the next successor or what not.
Better or completely different than Google, or any third party email provider?
> How can I do better in technical interviews where they ask me CS questions? What have other people done in this situation?

Go to a good University.
U.S. Government: Reports About PRISM Contain “Numerous Inaccuracies”
Why the Tumblr Deal Is a Disaster for Entrepreneurs
Do you have any more information about how viable this would be? It's a threat I hadn't considered before.
Wonder if they are ever subpoenaed in court to testify about it, if they lie they commit perjury if they tell they truth they break the rules of the NSL.

At the same time the govt probably does want them to cooperate, and doesn't want it to be a completely adversarial situation. I can see them buttering these companies up and offering "talking points" on how to specifically dodge these kind of questions. For example Dept. of State have media training, they set up adversarial training situations with fake role playing journalists asking "tough" questions then train employees to dodge them successfully. Very useful.

Same here I can see maybe PR spokespeople are urged maybe to say "we are not spying" because maybe the word "spying" has a specific meaning and given some technicality what they are doing is not "spying", stuff like that. Kind of like NSA has been saying they are not looking at everyone's emails. Well they are not people doing that, it all gets archived and stored probably based on some pattern. So they can clearly and proudly say they are not "reading" our information.
I see your point but I am so tempted to assume that they are not just storing it in some flat dump but trying to extract some sort of higher order representation of the data as they are processing it into the warehouse. You could argue that surfacing trends is technically not "querying".
You've both diagnosed me with autism and insinuated it could land me in jail if left untreated? You're lovely.

I'll ask you again. What's so wrong with calmly asking someone in an elevator for coffee? I remember these discussions after Rebecca Watson publicly complained about it—the vast majority of people felt she was vastly overreacting. So it's definitely not an "established societal norm".

Despite their rhetoric, radical feminists love infantilizing women. They treat women as fragile, triggerable, sensitive creatures who won't feel safe unless they're handled with kid gloves.
> this program only cost $20M a year? If that's the price of eternal security, I'd say we got a pretty goddamn good deal.

This line of thought is similar to another comment on HN stating that "we should be grateful to Google".

- Oh, they take only $20M? We should be grateful for that. Let them do whatever it takes to "protect our freedom".

I'm very surprised to see this kind of reasoning on the hacker's forum.
Keith Alexander, NSA Chief, once blamed his late arrival at a Washington event to a DDoS (distributed denial of service) hacking attack on city street lights.... Wow.
What are the most technically hip companies in NYC?
What is hip? For VC, it's git or hg. Never svn or (hurk) some commercial relic.

What is hip? On the JVM, it's Scala or Clojure or maybe a friend. And only the minimum Java needed to make that fly.

What is hip? It's C++ in just the spots where it's absolutely necessary. Not everywhere because it's the default hammer.

What is hip? On the front end, it's standards, sometimes even if it's just whatever Chrome does. It's never Flash.

What is hip? On the back end, it's Linux all the way. (Okay, BSDs are old school but passably cool.)

What is hip? For databases, SQL, NoSQL, it's all cool, as long as it's not proprietary.

What is hip? It's plain text, markdown, markup, even PDFs. But never Word.

What is hip? It's writing code like you really care about the reader. Code that's art. Code with style. Code that looks like it came from The Book.

What is hip? Hip is delight when someone shows you a better way than what you knew.

What is hip? Hipness is.
>> Euler's brilliant mathematical mind replaced the real variable x with ix

Is there any proof that the equation remains true when x -> ix transformation is made? OK, I know there is formal proof for this; can someone explain please? :-)
Once Evernote got hacked that dropped any chance of ever using them again for me.
I believe you're right. I just think it's a piss-poor way to drive business.
"Lostutter said he went to answer his door when around a dozen FBI Swat Team agents jumped out of a truck and pointed assault riddles at his head."

Eye have a spelling chequer ;)
I guarantee free markets care about this, but yeah. You knew that.
You're right that one is distinct and specifically says that they only release individual customer data.

Since weasel wording is pretty prevalent on this topic I would note that they could still run NSA algorithms on the dataset and return the individuals that are "hits".
As a NYC entrepreneur I am excited to see how the money is spread around. This is a Billion dollars! Much of it will go back on the table as investments instead of staying in Yahoo's bank account.
Oh NSLs, I'll be on my death bed with a six page rant about how much I hate you someday. (Old debate topic)

I'm not sure that PRISM==NSLs but I'm sure you're absolutely right that PRISM involves a gag.

Besides, these are largely non-statements by these companies. "No direct access" != "No access", etc.
Binney wrote worked on ThinThread which was a competitor to Trailblazer which is reportedly the software behind Stellar Wind. None of the public information that I've seen says he had any role in the deployment of Trailblazer.

The fact that a program has the capability to process certain information does not have any bering on whether or not the information is actually capable of being collected and delivered to the program.

I guess it depends on how broadly one defines "all the Internet traffic they can get their hands on". I'm saying they can't get their hands on that much, and what they can, based on the reported locations of other intercept rooms, could be legitimately foreign traffic at points where foreign providers peer.

So far as tapping any significant portion of US internet traffic goes, a large portion of the entities on this list: ftp://ftp.arin.net/info/asn.txt would have to be in on it.
I was quite upset that the author seems to think people have a right to deceitful behavior and that society should support secrecy. In fact, the hiding of information and duplicit behavior always aims to benefit the actor at the expense of everyone else (rather than being win win.) This is the definition of anti-social!

If everybody had perfect transparency, it'd happily give up my privacy, because it would benefit society (you, me, us all) tremendously!
> Yes, it's rather telling that each denial used the exact same "direct access" terminology.

Yap, it seems as if they got a set of "talking points". They can use certain words and phrases and still given some technicality get away with telling "truth" while effectively also telling lies.

Some say how NSL (national security letters) are pretty draconian and imply personal liability for disclosure. And that is true perhaps but at the same time these agencies do want to get some cooperation and are perhaps willing to "help out" their co-conspirators so PR departments I imagine get a cheat-sheet -- "use these phrases as responses".
How do they convince all of them to stay and deal with the bureaucracy vs going to somewhere like google and having tons of benefits and likely double or triple the salary? Or starting their own company doing whatever they find interesting?
Democratic Senator defends domestic phone/Internet spying, claims 7+ years of it
Because when you want to buy a laptop what's the first thing you do?
Obama's administration said that this isn't anything brand new and that we should not worry about it, but he also said that he would not sign extensions of the PATRIOT act either.. which allowed a lot of this...
Why is it so difficult to find information about Zoho's management team? 1600 employees and I can't find the name of a single person on their website.

EDIT: why downvote this? I'm truly curious. I was a happy customer until not long ago, Zoho's products are great, I just never understood why they don't have a Team/Management page. Unless I'm missing it somehow?
thats just good marketing / social engineering :]
There was of course that one amusing Onion article about some US intelligence agency making its own social network so that everyone would just voluntarily give up all their information.
How to Downgrade Windows 8 for Free
The Hipster Hacker would know https://twitter.com/hipsterhacker
Just callin' it like I see it. Your choice to react constructively or defensively.
Okay, NSA, so how about some transparency to clear up these supposed "inaccuracies"? Nobody believes you if you just deny something without providing evidence to back it up.
> Congress passing retroactive telecom immunity.

A very telling fact was that Obama was one of those voting for it as well. That told me at least who Obama was. I was never fooled by his hope and change rhetoric, that one action said all I wanted to know before he even started running for pres.

Here is Sen Obama's 2008 reason for flip flopping on the issue:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/20/obama-backs-bill-gi...

---
"Under this compromise legislation, an important tool in the fight against terrorism will continue, but the President's illegal program of warrantless surveillance will be over. It restores FISA and existing criminal wiretap statutes as the exclusive means to conduct surveillance - making it clear that the President cannot circumvent the law and disregard the civil liberties of the American people.
---
North Colorado May be the 51st State
Could not post this story for couple of Days, mailed to PG, thanks for unblocking/banning :)
try this link: http://phys.org/news184573059.html

(PhysOrg.com) -- The Greek philosopher Aristotle once said "there is no great genius without a mixture of madness," and now there is some scientific evidence that there is a link between mania and high IQ and creativity, since a study of over 700,000 subjects showed those who scored the highest grades were almost four times more likely to develop bipolar disorder in their adult lives than those scoring average grades.
Right. Their argument is invalid because if some hypothetical future even happens, you predict that their attitude would change.
Rob Walling - the Growth Hacker TV interview on marketing SAAS apps
Ask HN: How do you become a better developer?
There's a million resources (both on HN and the rest of the web) on how to learn to code. How does take the next step and become a better developer?
>This is an argument against censorship rather than one in support of privacy.

Let's not forget that they've been attempting to keep the existence of this program a secret.

>This seems a rather inappropriate aphorism, since most people here would very much like to deny the NSA access to information about their phone usage.

Aren't the people supposed to be the masters of the government?

>It's not so much you vs. the government as you vs. a large number of your fellow citizens that simply don't share your beliefs about privacy, and who choose to elect law-and-order types more often than civil-liberties types.

So our job is to convince those people of their error by espousing evidence in support of our view. Malicious governments kill drastically more innocent people than malicious individuals or small groups; excessive government power is more dangerous than terrorism. The amount of money we spend on anti-terrorism measures is drastically out of proportion to the actual threat and those resources could be better spent on more serious issues, terrorism hype is financially supported in enormous amounts by defense contractors and other parties with a significant pecuniary interest in continued government waste, etc.
steven.truong [at] gmail

thanks
>Politicians are so bad at making reassuring statements in cases like these that I wonder why they even try?

Wow, you're being nice to him. Was his first thought: "Oh something everyone seems to hate? Better tell them we've been doing it for AGES. That'll help, right?"

But my big question is: "Oh, you say 'the phone-data program has `worked to prevent` terrorist attacks.' Please, tell me more. With extensive details."
So you wanna be a founder?
They're definitely doing the fiber portion, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
No fair, you had Linus guiding you. Debian on MBPr might be as challenging. I'm up for it.
If someone had worked on such a thing, they probably wouldn't want to share it, permanently, publicly, even if it's not a well-kept secret. Posting about it only invites criticism and judgement.
"Wonder if they are ever subpoenaed in court to testify about it, if they lie they commit perjury if they tell they truth they break the rules of the NSL."

That would only come into play if they're partly immunized and compelled to testify, in the Congress or a grand jury; otherwise they could plead the 5th.
Hacker News has been blocking Google for several days except for one crawler IP address. I think crawlers are especially hard on HN because they often request older pages that aren't in the cache.

This isn't new; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3277661 for example. I think HN is blocking most crawlers; Bing returns HN at #7 for a search for [hacker news] for example.
Wikileaks has two audiences: the people that agree with its editorial voice and the people that are interested in the raw data.

The former are not going to be easily dissuaded from taking Wikileaks seriously because of loyalty (perhaps misguided), nor will the latter because you cannot discredit raw data (except for denying its provenance).

Furthermore, by providing the raw data, scientific journalist give other organizations a chance to provide alternative context and/or analysis.
I'm not familiar with the case at all but it seems that what that guy/anonymous/knightsec did was kind of good. It helped uncover the truth and identify more perpetrator of this terrible crime.
I'm really sad for that poor girl :/
Harper's magazine gave a detailed and amusing guide on "Electing to Leave" the US after Bush's reelection. It covers everything from emigrating to Canada to founding your own micronation.

I finally found a copy here: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1103-29.htm