skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have to wonder how many software engineers will be needed in 20 years if all programmers become much more efficient?

The trend so far has been that when you improve programmer productivity, you increase the value of what we do, which increases the number of things that we can be useful for. This increases demand.
They build that feature into their desktop OS (FileVault), I don't see why it couldn't be an option for their sync service. It shouldn't be the default, but it should absolutely be an option.
Its good to hear from another single founder. I'm at a stage now where I have a product running and I'm looking to grow and/or seek VC help.

What puts me off is the fact that they are less interested if you do not have a co-founder. But surely I should be in a good position if my site is already monetizing itself??? It means that my business model is working.

@infogaufire, how did you manage accounting and marketing? Did you delegate that too?
Why stop at Google? Here's Facebook too:

http://www.facebook.com/help/214376678584711
Until you can overcome the R and D machines and convince the 20% of people who vote stupidly to do something different other than pull the straight party lever nothing will ever change. You can also forget about civil war or something like that as they have nailed before you even think about it.
There are many kinds of freedom.

If a proprietary tool lets me get my work done faster than a free tool would, then using the free tool takes away some of one kind of freedom--namely the freedom to spend my time doing things I want to do instead of things I have to do to pay the bills.
I would have voted for that guy (except for "FISA works!", but enh). I'd even be ok with ditching the 22nd if we could get that guy as President. I wonder what happened -- was it all a cynical ploy, or was there some secret (real or fake) information about how without wholesale monitoring we'd all instantly be destroyed, or what.
According to the timeline in the presentation, Apple was the last to cave. It happened after Steve Jobs' died.
Verizon Breaks Silence on Top-Secret Surveillance of Its Customers
PATRIOT gets used for drug, child porn, etc. crimes all the time.
Sir your pants are on fire.
"Although signing the declaration makes it impossible for a third party to produce arbitrary declarations, it does not prevent them from using force to coerce rsync.net to produce false declarations."

That's kind of the point. They say, "Keep sending those updates. Otherwise you will go to federal prison." You say, "OK."
They will in time. HN has been hit with links to new stories as each denies the 'direct access to their servers.' First came Google, then Apple, now Facebook.

Regardless, they are purposefully missing the point. The average citizen isn't upset by the means of the private information sharing, but that it is going on in the first place. It is that 'providing only information required by law' sounds limiting, but if the law makes clever use of language to access a huge amount of data then that phrase doesn't mean anything.
Why is Google being singled out? atleast they are among the ones denieing this report: http://marketingland.com/google-apple-facebook-deny-nsa-pris...

And why are you omitting Apple from the title while listing Google twice (YouTube)? and what the hell is "msn" and "y"?
fair call re status of the hormesis theory.
what I get from this is that the LNT theory holds more sway; regulators choose precautionary adherance to ALARA. Let's not ignore the obvious fact that there is a powerful industry tugging in the other direction ...
Apple was pretty late (Oct 2012) and I wonder if Jobs was a hold up, it's a full year after his death (Oct 2011). Google, sadly, came on board very early (2009).
Where can you afford to live in the Bay Area?
bomb fertilizer 9/11

As a Kiwi it saddens me that the US and (and to some extent) NZ are descending into the style of government they proclaim to defend the world from.

If they are going to spy on their own citizens, why not protest by giving them something to spy on and hopefully increase their work load to something unmanageable.

I propose peppering every phone call, email comment etc with some choice trigger words of the day Al Queda.

Perhaps some hacker could come up with a plugin to do it automatically for us?

C4 semtex
>>Warren Buffet has predicted a major nuclear terrorist attack on an American city to be a "virtual certainty" given enough time.

Everything is a certainty given enough time.

In addition, Mr. Buffet may be a great investor, but what exactly how much would he know about terrorists or nuclear weapons? Probably as much as you and I.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determining_the_number_of_clust...

It's "tough luck" because the algorithms determining the number of clusters aren't magical. As with all machine learning, the results reflect the assumptions built into the algorithm.
From what I've seen, Obama is pretty peeved about the IRS thing. Mainly because it spent a lot of political capital he needed for other projects... like this one.
totally agree. I always thought the government was doing this but now its front of me, its a whole new shitty feeling.
I was under the same impression. I tried digging up some old news on the subject, to see where I got the impression from, but Google is only returning results from this latest news cycle.

Wasn't there a number of news stories in the past about the NSA collecting data from telecom companies and such. How is this time different?

EDIT: Found this, from May 2006: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-ns...
Exactly. Everybody can obviously read these companies' very carefully worded denials for themselves and see that there's enough wiggle room to drive a bus through.
It is not black and white. Both models have their flaws.

By and large most reporters of The New York Times towed the line before the Iraq invasion and the Wall Street melt down. When you get called into a room by very important people, and are told do it for the sake of the country, few people are going to push back. That's where overly paranoid folk like Assange have a role to play. They force the system to reevaluate the status quo.
Why isn't the title of this HN post "The Starbucks Theory"? The author doesn't mention their age at any point in the blog post, so I fail to see why it is in the title.
"@infogaufire, how did you manage accounting and marketing? Did you delegate that too?"

I would love to hear about this too. One of my other biggest challenges, as a tech guy, has been figuring out how to go about all the non-tech stuff.
Stopped clocks, once a day, etc. ;)

In all seriousness, though: civil liberties are one of the very few areas where libertarians and liberals (I presume "statist" was meant to be a jibe) can agree. Liberals were in fact among the groups pissed off about the PATRIOT Act, FISA, et al, during the Bush years.

By this point, nearly a decade later, I'd resigned myself to the fact that nobody cared. I can't decide if I'm pleasantly or unpleasantly surprised that this is finally getting more attention.
Wow. Really good read. Thanks!
If he had access to documents showing the extent of this program he should have read them into the Congressional Record, like Mike Gravel did with the Pentagon Papers.
When Germany introduced their ubiquitous wiretap law, they saw the actually cost of introducing such law. The most notable change in peoples behavior was that hot-lines, priests and lawyers started to see fewer phone calls as people reacted to the surveillance. To this then can be concluded that some cases of children being sexually abused, and domestic violence, will continue as a direct result of people being too afraid to use hot-lines or calling the local priest/lawyer for advice.

> It's important to remember that we still have a functioning democracy. If you -- Hacker News reader -- decided to run for congress tomorrow, you might not win, but you won't be killed, sabotaged, or secretly blocked.

To the contrarily, rival political individuals can map, with the help of ubiquitous wiretap, which people are a threat to their power. From that they can redirect police "focus" to either crack down on such threat directly, or any support group they might have. Political figures are commonly the second largest requester for domestic intel, only second to the secret police.
(note/edit: I've made an error of conflation between the recently reported massive phone record sweep-up and PRISM, which according to the WP, simply allows analysts to trace (essentially) the totality of someone's online interactions, though not everyone at once. So really, things don't seem that much different than last week when it was well known that the government has discretion to warrantlessly tap us. Still, $20M a year is a pretty good price for a government contract)

Isn't it kind of surprising that the leak for this came from a career intelligence officer and not one of the many tech-utopia idealists who work at these kinds of startups? Not necessarily someone at the executive level, but one of the scores of employees required to assess, review, and implement the alleged backdoor? It's not just a matter of ethics, but just that you'd think someone must be idealistic/reckless enough to leak it from the companies' side

Edit: Also, as has been pointed out elsewhere...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. The shitstack that is the government's stimulus contracts database alone cost $18M to build (http://www.propublica.org/article/stimulus-transparency-watc...). And what percentage of a fighter jet's paint job does $20M cover?

I'd say it's possible that the government is unconstitutionally intruding on our privacy but also doing it in a bumbling way (which also has its downsides).
Does the NSA really need to have an agreed upon backdoor to have the ability to access the information they seek?
Most business ideas will work eventually, if given enough time. Good ideas, on the other hand, tend to get traction quickly.

For me, I test a lot of ideas. Most of the stuff I do takes minimal time and resources so that if it fails, it doesn't hurt too bad. I'm always testing.
Poll: Do you still have a landline?
Very simple poll, I'm looking to see how much of the Hacker News community uses land lines or has made the jump to cellular only. If you have a particular reason why, state that.
Yes, I have a landline and cellphone.
Yes, I have a landline and no cellphone.
No, I have no landline, just a cellphone.
No, I have no phone whatsoever.
NSA: "Look, I know that this was illegal, and we were not supposed to be doing this, but you have just got to look at the data. Just look at all the crazy terrorists out there. They've been organizing over FB, keeping their data on Dropbox and Drive and talking over skype. Here's our proof! You MUST make this activity legal... the FREEDOM of the US depends on it!!"

Congress: "ok"

---

But we are not fooling anyone. There is not a single worthy human being in congress. Every single last one of them is a corporate shill and they are all opportunistic criminals.
> I firmly feel there's nothing wrong with asking someone in an elevator whether they'd like to get coffee.

Please ask a psychologist to be screened for Antisocial Personality Disorder and/or Autism.
New York Times silently edits its "lost all credibility" line
Well, you know what they say: failure is an orphan. Warrantless wiretapping has been going on for however many years, and now he's got a problem with it? OK, bro, whatever you say.
I laughed at how incredibly shifty the General is when he "answers."
Leon Panetta leaked classified info to the makers of Zero Dark Thirty, and there were no repercussions (hell, he even got promoted to Secretary of Defense). I really doubt there would have been repercussions if Udall had leaked this information. While I'm glad that Udall is fighting for civil liberties, this doesn't exactly seem like material fit for an updated version of Profiles in Courage.
Marketplace Fairness Act 101
When a junior developer screws something up, I accept responsibility and apologize to the client.

It's my fault.

There is no authority without responsibility.

If you don't like that, don't accept the job.

[FWIW I didn't like Bush either]
Dianne Feinstein vents ire over 'avalanche of leaks'
I'm not censoring you, I'm answering you.
Understanding Technology is like a Battle
Thanks! I think you got it!
At a very minimum - this guy needs to be tried for perjury and removed from his post.

And millions of americans should sign a petition to have this happen.
He probably has an agenda against Google. It's very common on HN. HN hates Google, but loves Apple and Facebook.
This is so cool. Someone should set up a startup house that is a giant log cabin in the middle of some remote forest (but with a fiber connection of course). I would totally pay to be there.
To be honest I'm still catching up on a lot of the details with these stories, but it's this comment that made me wonder if there is a bit of hyperbole going around. Companies make leaks all the time on the most mundane things (hell Apple can barely contain the new iPhone that is usually coming out.) I'm hesitant to believe all the conspiracy theories going around that the companies willingly did this, or that it's as easy as it sounds.
The Berkeley Software Distribution, first released in 1978, was a very important early open-source project. The second version, released in 1979, included the vi editor. When Sun Microsystems formed, they incorporated BSD into their OS, SunOS. In fact, people on the internet have asserted that the TCP/IP stack for most operating systems, including the first stack incorporated into Linux and into Windows 95, was copied from BSD's stack. Since sharing source code is an effective way to increase the chances that two different systems will be able to interoperate on the internet, this TCP/IP stack from BSD (whose creation was funded by the US government) probably materially sped up the growth of the internet.

The original BSD license, which is quite close to the BSD license used by many open-source project today, was created because the owners of BSD (the University of California) believed BSD had to be placed in the public domain because its creation was funded by the US government, and the US government is prohibited by law from copyrighting its creations. Actually, they did not release it into the public domain, but the license they chose is very close to "public domain" in that the restrictions it imposes are very light.

Before 1993, most of the software used for communication on the internet was either explicitly open source (i.e., under the GPL or the BSD license) or "informal open-source", meaning that it did not come with formal license terms, but its source code was available, and it was widely believed that it was unlikely that anyone would try to stop you if you modified it or redistributed it.
Facebook's new data warehouse query tool: Presto
Microsoft: We won’t charge a used-game fee, but third parties can
BLARNEY is data-mining from IP metadata collected at Internet backbones, which is obviously a far broader net than backdoors at a few specific services.
This is proper advice and if you're in a position to adhere to it, do.

However, most of the time, you are more likely in a position where you try to convince somebody (who contracts you to do something for him) to adhere to it. My pet peeve is signup forms[0]. Trying to convince people that their product is the thing to obsess about seems straight forward. But that's also their most sensitive spot, psychologically. So most likely, they're projecting all of their efforts around precisely that part and any attempt to change that is met with incredible resistance.

I have yet to see a case where the words "we're loosing business, because" is followed by "people don't need or want what we offer". In fact, if I were to check, I'm pretty sure that in every single instance of "loosing business, because" a quick glance at the site in question would result in thinking "well, because who would want that?".

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3809186

From that comment: "If your website gives out free gourmet food and massages, you can literally require people to fill out ten page forms and ask for confirmation via standard mail - your signup form will still convert users like crazy. At the opposite end of that scale, there are forms like the recent April Fools joke 'Google Nigeria' - the simplest possible form: Enter your Credit Card details and be done."
Facebook's response is the quintessential non-denial denial. Deny doing something you weren't actually accused of doing, but that sounds enough like it, so that you don't have to deny doing the thing you actually did.
Block mode selects don't know whether to wrap lines or not; most half-decent terminals keep track of whether wrapping was due to carriage return or hitting the last column.

I do this all the time to e.g. select deleted files from a git status command so I can xclip paste the selection out through awk to xargs git rm (or rather, use some scripts which simplify the above). Similarly for rspec / cucumber test results to extract out the failures for use with $(<failures.txt) on repeated runs as I fix broken tests. I have a script that analyzes ruby stack traces, which I copy from the crashed session. All sorts of ad-hoc clickery, I rely on word wrap being detected consistently.
Show HN: Mixpanel Query Tool - SQL(ish) for Mixpanel
I have a landline just so I can have broadband (cable is not available where I am). But I do not plug a phone into the socket.

I also have a cellphone.
genetic algorithms are just randomized hill climbing with the added assumption that variables "physically" next to each other in your data structure are correlated.
> Yes, of course. He's a mixed race. I don't know why people call him the first black president - he's exactly half and half, with equal claim to either race.

You have just shown that social construction of race is not the same as your biological base. If most of the population agrees "he is black and not white" and biology says otherwise, then the social construct is unmoored from biology.

I don't think one has to go as far as a one drop rule, though that was a construction that has existed in some parts of the country at some times (as have other tests, like the brown paper bag test). Things are more nuanced today and it would be more accurate to say he is black because:

1. He claims to be black, and

2. Society recognizes his claim as legitimate.

Since these are organic social constructs, they don't need hard, strict, articulable rules any more than English grammar does (I suppose someone, probably me (note the case shift contrary to formal grammars), will have to point the reader to actual articles by linguists on this topic).
Microsoft details Xbox One used games, “always online,” and privacy policies
FBI has been using National Security Letters for drug cases. In fact, I believe 80-90% of NSL's were used in drug cases. I remember seeing a leak a while ago.
It really bothers me to see how the FSF has hijacked the term freedom and redefined it to mean compatible with a very specific set of software licenses while selling it as if they were liberating the Scots from the English monarchy.
On Spying, A Deficit Of Trust
Where can one look up the actual legal definition for any given word?

Legislation often includes a section dedicated to definitions, commonly the first or last clause in a subsection of the US code. The holdings of court cases are also a significant source of information (but you have to distinguish between the holding, which is highly technical and narrow, and the dicta which is the long and often wide-ranging explanations of what the holding means that makes up the bulk of a judicial opinion, but which do not themselves have the force of law).

Have you heard the claim that your name in all caps is different than your name as you would write it? What is your opinion on that claim?

Complete garbage. I don't want to spend time or energy digging up all the references for you, but you can safely assume that anyone advancing that argument is a crazy trying to get out of paying income taxes (similar arguments include claims that having a certain kind of flag in the courtroom nullifies the legal force of a judicial decision and that your social security card is actually a certificate of slavery). Almost all such arguments originate from a set of fringe Christian conspiracy theories informally known as Dominionism in which (among other things) the federal government is considered an invention of Satan designed to trick Christians out of their rightful place as rulers over the Promised Land. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Reconstructionism

Surprising or counter-intuititve legal arguments that lean heavily on 'natural law' often turn out to be grounded in religious belief as well.
I just got back from two weeks in Puerto Viejo. It's a nice area. All the establishments speak English and a few are fully owned by Americans. Half the time it didn't even feel like living in a foreign country. Though, if you walk on the street a few hours after sunset you will get held up at gunpoint. Don't take your phone or more than 5,000 with you in the evenings.

Beds are $8 to $10 per night in a hostel (La Ruka was great. Don't stay at rocking j's or hotel puerto viejo.) I had a reliable 2 Mbps-down wireless signal at La Ruka.

It was a great trip, but I'm enjoying being back in the land of air conditioning and large grocery stores.
I didn't think marijuana was such a big thing there? I was under the impression that it was mostly just a tourist thing rather than a real part of the local culture
In your experience, how quickly is "quickly"?
Try Tonido (http://www.tonido.com). It is not open source though.
>" These are what the government is worried about, and they're not going to risk revealing their methods for something lesser."

Well, thats a simplistic view of what the government is worried about.

The government is worried about the safety of THIER POSITION OF POWER - nothing less.

The information gathered will be used 100% to defend their position of power. The power of the system.

The peoples sentiment and the position of society as it pertains to not uprising against the leeching system of power that sits on top of the people is what they are after.

In more direct words; the military-industrial complex that profits from 99.99% of the worlds population will take every measure to make sure that you remain a consuming, productive asset to their vast wealth.
Your comment implies that Al-Jazeera is a poor source of news. Is there a reason you feel that way, other than their lack of reporting on Qatar?

I find that they have excellent coverage of Africa, Asia, and most of the Middle East.

(Sorry if that wasn't your intention)
New leak shows feds can access user accounts for Google, Facebook and more
Alright enough about the NSA
I agree that it is ridiculous and wrong that I am tracked without my consent to protect others in the United States, when I have presented no threat. That data may even prove to harm me OR protect me, in either case, clearly this has been going on for a long time and even more clearly EVERYONE suspected. I don't need to see 15 of the top 20 posts about it especially since it is essentially not even news worthy because everyone suspected/knew.

Also on a side note, I hope everyone realizes that in the 60's - 70's the CIA and KGB figured out how to listen in on people by pointing a laser at a window. Imagine how far they have come in 40-50 years and how the computing ability would make it likely that they could listen in on virtually anything they desired WITHOUT needing a warrant.