skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FWIW, here's the press conference referred to, and here's the question:

> Q Mr. President, could you please react to the reports of secret government surveillance of phones and Internet? And can you also assure Americans that the government -- your government doesn't have some massive secret database of all their personal online information and activities?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes. When I came into this office, I made two commitments that are more important than any commitment I made: Number one, to keep the American people safe; and number two, to uphold the Constitution. And that includes what I consider to be a constitutional right to privacy and an observance of civil liberties.

Now, the programs that have been discussed over the last couple days in the press are secret in the sense that they're classified. But they're not secret in the sense that when it comes to telephone calls, every member of Congress has been briefed on this program. With respect to all these programs, the relevant intelligence committees are fully briefed on these programs. These are programs that have been authorized by broad bipartisan majorities repeatedly since 2006.

I'm not arguing against you, I'm saying that his statement is vague, and that it could just be a broad assertion of the executive powers. It doesn't matter whether the program is called PRISM or SUPERPATRIOT or what (in the president's reasoning), such surveillance measures have been legally approved and are regulated, if the government chooses to undertake such measures in the name of security. This is not the same as acknowledging that PRISM exists (which would put Google/Facebook's claims to the test).
It's usually snappier, because the client has some insight in what it's displaying and so it can accelerate stuff here and there; it also allows for root-less mode, where individual remote windows appear as normal windows to the local OS, rather than being forced to live in a monolithic "remote desktop" window. VNC is basically like a movie player: the local OS doesn't really know what the movie is displaying (in conceptual terms), and it cannot interoperate with it in any meaningful way.

The problem with the X approach is that client and server both do a lot of duplicated work ("oh, you're drawing a window, lemme put a nice border on it for you!" "Er, actually I was going to draw a different border, sorry." "Oh, ok, fine, I'll do what you say") and use "standards" protocols that have been hacked to death over the last 20+ years. It's very inefficient (although somehow it still feels faster than VNC in many cases, don't ask me why) and very hard for developers working on graphic subsystems (toolkits, window managers etc).
I really seems quite strange that the statement from both facebook and google CEO's are almost exactly same thing.
If i didn't know better, i would say same person wrote them.
Those who would stop this cannot: their whole lives are also part of the surveillance state. Politicians,generals, senators, prime ministers and CEO's all: their dirty laundry and skeletons in the closet that they thought were secret are no longer.

No one of power will fight this because they are afraid of becoming its target.
Direct link to defense fund donation page: https://www.wepay.com/donations/deric-lostutter--ky-anonymou...
> We will continue fighting aggressively to keep your information safe and secure.

Is it only me, or is Mark implying that agreeing on every government request to provide data would make your information unsafe and insecure?
I guess the question is: should governments have the same access as "social media platform sysops"?

I would be surprised if they didn't.
Like since Aaron Schwartz or that other hacker that was convicted for a ludicrous sentence.
Let me be more clear. The part that requires competence is everything up to the leak. Given the scope, keeping this quiet is no small task. It isn't just keeping the people who know about this from talking. It is also preventing other people from finding out. Depending the way they theoretically got this data, that could stretch from keeping this hidden directly in the code base at Facebook to hiding huge amounts of traffic emanating from Facebook's data centers. Remember a lot of these tech companies helped recognize and locate likely Chinese sponsored government hackers in the past. If someone is doing something they aren't supposed to, a lot of people are going to find out about it.

The part that requires incompetence is everything that has happened today. The NSA's job is intelligence. They are the experts in connecting dots, reading between the lines, seeing how random events might be a sign of something bigger, and whatever other cliches you want to throw in here. Yet they are an organization that doesn't know that having people reading from nearly identical scripts will make people think they are reading from nearly identically scripts?
"direct"
What about the date where "PRISM collection began" for Google, given as 1/14/09? What is that about?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-...;
>Even if the gov tries to arrest them for leaking classified information, they'd be near-impossible to convict following the inevitable massive public outcry.

It's not about arresting them. It's about harassing them and their businesses -- which the government can very easily do.

Also, who said those kind of CEOs are champions of public freedom? Google? Microsoft? Facebook? Because they're techies they're supposed to be "on our side"?

Not to mention it's very easy for the government to pamper them, and make them feel very patriotic and whatever for contributing to this cause for the safety of the US, etc etc.
Have you had any issues with eventual consistency? Does this need to be run on US-west or EU for read-after-write consistency?
jlgreco:

| vegans, no matter how polite they are, rarely find a
| receptive audience

This is what I was responding to with that comment.
What, specifically, did iX Systems do?
Dwellable founder gets résumé from developer who claims he created Dwellable
A few more that might not be on that list: http://pineapple.io/resources/tagged/angular-js
Ask HN: Programming Advice.
I am a 19 year old student and all the jobs I have held at startups have been BD/Marketing/Sales. I have always been interested in programming and have taught myself HTML/CSS and the barebones of Javascript. In the recent months, I have also started to pick up Ruby on Rails and although building small apps is fun, I really want to work on interesting problems.

I feel like being able to work with existing code with a team of people will allow me to learn the most. I really want to solve interesting problems with Javascript and Ruby on Rails. So what should I do?
I'm not impressed. Most press releases have only a handful of paragraphs. I'd believe it was common to go over the topics of "What We're Talking About, What We Deny, What We Affirm, and How It Could Be Better."

It may look impressive that they all say they don't allow "direct access to servers", but it's hardly surprising, since the original Guardian headline[1] was "Top-secret Prism program claims direct access to servers of firms including Google, Apple and Facebook". If they didn't say that exactly, you'd be suspicious.

It may look impressive that they all say they "haven't heard of PRISM," but this is really quite a natural thing to say if it's true, and someone accuses you of being involved in the program.

Moreover, aside from the "direct access" thing, the phrases they all use are actually different. "We have not heard of PRISM" in one case, "We have never heard of PRISM" in another, "We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday," in a third, and so forth. You don't have any case for funny business based on similar wording (because it isn't), and the case for contamination based on similar content would be a whole lot more impressive if that content weren't something common and expected.

On the whole, I think the similarities have plausible mundane explanations. Admittedly, I am no student of accidental plagiarism. I don't have an academic opinion on how similar or dissimilar we should expect the statements to be when ten people try to say the same thing in response to the same accusation. But that is just my point: if you want to persuade me of something so preposterous as that all of these people are following a script, you're going to have to do more than wave your hands and say, "Look, there are similarities."

Please. That's the stuff of superstition. If you want to convince me the probability of this occurring at random is low, you're going to have to do some math.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-n...
Aha. Thank you for citing a source on this one. I still wonder though, if your involvement has been directly leaked, whether you are able to confirm the existence of it. I suppose it wouldn't be a course of action any lawyer recommends.
Can someone explain Twilio in relation with open federated protocols (something I care about)?
Looks cool, I'll have to test it out. Should reduce the amount of tab/shift+tab I have to do right now.

That said, the video screencast doesn't show up in firefox sans flash player. Not a huge deal but thought you might want to know.
It obviously conveyed the author's meaning. Not sure what more you look for in a word.
Oops. can't edit- in case it's not obvious - that should be 'obvious that it's not a choice'.
Crowdfunding and taxes: What you need to know
Statement of Microsoft Corporation on Customer Privacy
"we do however give them a data dump every minute"
The fact is, when you sign an agreement with the government like this you are given a 30+ page contract. Some items ALWAYS in the contract are:

1. If you are asked about it, you will deny it, and LIE about it. They actually tell you to lie.
2. If you break the contract you will be destroyed, and everyone you know will be destroyed.

Ask a senior member of the military how this stuff works.
Of course. But it can't be turtles all the way down - at some level, the overlay traffic will be a TCP segment or UDP packet, sent from one node running overlay network to another node running overlay network. If both nodes in the overlay network are behind the two "cone" NAPTs like this:

A --- |> --- <| --- B

then getting from "A" to "B" is not easy. And the "cones" may be of varying degree of aggressiveness when it comes to filtering [1]. You can not guarantee that you can always establish connectivity between the two, even in a presence of the third party - with the addresses being more and more precious, the SPs will move from full-cone to more restricted NAPTs.

Besides these hurdles, moving large volumes of traffic atop overlays is not very optimal - I heard anecdotes that when Tor is abused in this manner, it is quite slow. Skype (and I guess probably Tor as well) uses supernodes that are not behind the NAPT to establish the communication. As there is less and less places for it.

So, the quality of communication over overlay degrades more and more.

Meanwhile, the bigger players will just place the caches close to eyeballs or directly peer with the eyeball providers. [2]

So, I think Lee's scenario is quite plausible.

Pretty much the only things keeping holding IPv4 in my home network are the client device bugs [3] and Skype. The web works quite well on DNS64.

I think the economics will take care of things. There are users on IPv6. A few clever interns last year made a website [4] that aggregates various IPv6-related stats. Take a look at the situation with users e.g. in Germany, Belgium, Switzerland. Yes, it is still not a whole lot but it is growing - and these three give the impression of how it might happen - sometimes steady, sometimes the switch will just turn on.

I am very curious to hear some VC chime in on this matter - what do they think about the prospects of business growth in the situation of the constrained address space and uneven competition. It is not the case today because ARIN still has numbers. Give it a couple of years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_address_translation
[2] http://blogs.broughturner.com/2009/04/googles-peering-and-ca...
[3] https://ripe66.ripe.net/archives/video/1196&#x2F;
[4] http://6lab.cisco.com&#x2F;
PGP has existed for how long? The real problem here is "teaching," others.

While I do agree even the lowest cryptography or 'security through obscurity', would benefit alot of people...the real issue becomes ease of use and the user experience.

>teach them to wash their hands. And for similar reasons

lol, nice
"Direct Access" Is The Defining Phrase Of The NSA Scandal
I still use and love last.fm. There's definitely a cult following out there if you know where to look.

Also, as per the lament of the author of this post, Soundcloud can totally scrobble: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/soundcloud-scrobbl...
Where are the protests against the Surveillance State?
The front page of HN is dominated by the US government's violation of basic civil liberties, but I've yet to see anything physical.

I've never been to a protest - I've been content to hack away up until now - but this is too much. Is there anyone organizing a demonstration? If not... how could this not be something worth taking to the streets for.
Another possibility would be that PR works in fairly formulistic way. It might not be an exact science, but if asked to comment on such a subject, and you were innocent, I'm sure the following would be what you say:

> I have no idea what you're talking about.
> We only give access when absolutely necessary within the confines of the law.
> We're on our customers side.

Now some of the terms such as "direct access" are errily familiar, I'll give you that but the message being conveyed and the order it's formed woudn't be enough to suprised me on it's own and the guys working PR for these orgs are probably pretty inbred. Still, it is interesting.
Officials: NSA mistakenly intercepted emails, phone calls of innocent Americans.
Can someone just tell what the final deal is? I'm quite annoyed by conflicting reports from the media, Internet firms and the US government. Also, please stop playing with words. It doesn't matter if the program is named PRISM or Hexagon. What matters is the access powers to otherwise private data by governments.
FB is riddled with ex-government employees.
This is an engineering calculation, it may not be guaranteed based on who they're working with and which standard they use.
'Direct access' is the common phrasing in all PRISM denials
What Humans Will Look Like in 100,000 Years
"was assaulted by"

was raped by

FTFY. Let's not mince words here. This was not merely assault (which can describe something as mild as a punch or a shove). This was rape, committed by multiple parties, followed by degradation on camera for others to see. And, the girl was so drunk/drugged that she probably should have been seen by a doctor...instead the people around her took it as an opportunity to prey upon her.
Remember to close all the USB ports and the disable the CD-ROM! Isolation can be possible only to get a legacy embedded system controller inside a black box, but as soon as you need to transfer information you are in a problem.
You should really read the article.
Ask HN: Should I report a security vulnerability?
Will browsing through my attendance on my schools registration system, I started playing with the URL so I could see the data I wanted, through doing this I noticed so major SQL injection vulnerabilities that gave me the ability to alter the data and view other students.

Given the cases of this backfiring on the person who reports it; what should I do?
Atomic Bomb Fallout Helps Solve Brain Mystery
Conditional comments have nothing to do with .NET devleopment.
To follow up even the Supreme Court ruled in 1928 that a wiretap did not constitute a search under the 4th Amendment so there was no need for a warrant.

Wiretaps themselves became illegal and the information from them inadmissible under the 1934 Communications Act. This didn't really stop wiretaps. Instead they were used as a method of intelligence gathering to go and find stuff that was admissible. Note that this was not a reflection on the Constitutionality of wiretaps, but instead the sense that they just weren't needed to convict criminals.

By the 1960's wiretaps were again brought to the Supreme Court and they outlined how a wiretap statue could pass Constitutional muster. The Katz case is where the "expectation of privacy" language was introduced. This resulted in wiretap statues passing in late the late 60s and that's basically what we had until the PATRIOT Act of 2001.

http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/li...
More likely would be that the NSA (or whoever) gave all the involved companies the same standard talking points, either in the past few hours/days or years ago when each company "joined" the program, and each company loosely paraphrased those same talking points. Having all the companies issue the same denial at the same time was probably not anticipated, so they didn't coordinate with each other to avoid sounding like they're all parroting the same talking points.

I think that explanation strikes an appropriate balance of competence and incompetence.
...but why? In my experience, using H.264 to encode screen captures gives you extremely high quality video for reasonable CPU and network expenditures. Is the last 1% of video quality really worth it?

For a demo, you can try using FFmpeg + x264 using the x11grab input. It's very easy to adjust the amount of CPU used (by changing the preset) and the bandwidth (by changing the CRF, or by setting the bit rate).
Thorium Energy Alliance
"If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data we don’t participate in it."

-priceless. Of course they wouldn't participate in such a thing voluntarily, can you imagine how expensive that would be...
Relevant http://i.huffpost.com/gen/249171/STEVE-JOBS-MARK-ZUCKERBERG-...
This could be how PRISM actually works
Common obstacles when working with Quantified Self APIs
Bill Binney has already stated that the NSA does not even need to break online encryption in most cases, since they already have the key(s) in the first place.
> Given the scope, keeping this quiet is no small task.

Rumors of widespread data collection -- even specifically by the NSA -- from many of the providers at issue have surfaced many times, what was new recently is the same (or substantially similar) bits of documentary evidence substantiating and connecting those rumors.

So, to all appearances, it may not really have been "kept quiet" up until the recent leak, it was just that the information that got out before wasn't as well-supported and therefore hard to dismiss.
Sure, but in a country of 300 million there will always be people who can make that argument about a constitution that forms any system of government. "Oh no, this government sucks and the constitution either authorized it or failed to prevent it from happening, ergo the constitution also sucks!"
http://boingboing.net/2012/12/13/literacy-privilege-or-why-g...
For all I know, Obama traded advocating higher taxes for getting Obamacare through.

A short list of partial evidence for what I said about Obama: Blocking the keystone pipeline, his foreign policy, Obamacare, attending a church for many years where the evil of America was explicitly preached, involvement with Bill Ayers, his explicit pragmatism (i.e., denial of any valid principles), his election being the first day he was proud of America (according to his wife).

Anyway, the "egalitarian-nihilist" label needs much broader observations and analysis to validate than any list I could give you. But that's some stuff I have a problem with.

> the comment was very Randian, in the sense that it is Rand-like.

That's simply untrue. Rand said that nihilism and egalitarianism are bad (among many other things). But we simply do not know if she would apply those labels to Obama. As an Objectivist, I can tell you that there are some things where her applying her philosophy is more straightforward if you understand it, but this is not one of them.

(The reason it is tricky is because Obama doesn't come out and say what he believes, and chances are, he doesn't have any specific opinion on these kinds of abstractions. So we have to infer what's going on in his mind from what he says and does.)
Not a real port, but I made an HDL as a Python DSL and coded most of the hardware exercises with it. The majority of the work went into emulating their test script interpreter.

Regular Javascript should be plenty fast except for full system simulation with no custom component simulators.

https://github.com/darius/logsim
On the flip side, hundreds of people got NSLs and effectively kept them a secret for years before it came out.
Perl/Perl6 as well.
Why Metadata Matters
I would actually love to know the true percentage of resumes falsified by programmers today? Surely plenty of other people are lying about education or relevant work experience just to get past an HR filter (not that you can justify it easily).
Wouldn't Occam's Razor instead suggest that since the Page statement was much earlier that Zuckerberg or whoever wrote this (probably not Mark) just copied the style of Page's statement semi-intentionally? They'd have almost certainly have read it.
My issue with Wayland is that it risks being another KDE 4.0 (or another PulseAudio): the hype-machine was started too early in its development cycle and this is creating expectations that are then frustrated in practice. If you're trying to switch people en masse from such an entrenched technology, you must have a killer app ready from day 1. Is there an app that directly benefits from Wayland so much that it will entice people to switch?

I understand this sort of strategy is difficult in the OSS world, where development is mostly done in the open, but there's a difference between developing and evangelising.
I must've missed the charging part.

Right now, I've implemented maybe 10% of the features I want to add. I'll be adding licensing soon, but given that most people probably wouldn't pay for features that's not there, I'm probably going to start at $12, then bump it whenever I ship a major feature. Early adopters will end up saving a bit.

The licensing will be cheaper when it's in beta too.
The cynic in me wonders if at that point there'll be any users still using vanilla Gnome in order to be affected by the switch...
It's not difficult to keep something quiet when the consequences are that you violate national security and go to prison.

Senator Wyden has openly talked about how he wanted to say something about these programs, and even now he can't reveal details of what's going on because it would violate national security and he'd probably be put in prison or at the least removed from Congress.

The overall fact that the NSA has been reading our email, tracking us on Facebook, tapping our phones, etc. has not been kept quiet. Exact details are far more difficult to come by, even now those are classified. The IRS was talking about their right to read our email four years ago. The IRS has no known infrastructure to pull that off, it's clear they were talking about NSA or FBI programs.

As someone else noted, the government is very frequently both competent and incompetent when performing tasks or running programs. There's nothing unusual about that, you see it throughout the government bureaucracy. Sometimes they pull off impressive feats that you only read about decades later, and other times they're Nixon trying to cover up Watergate.
I'll pass the kudos on :) I'm glad you like the name
It's not as unlikely as you'd think.

Even in the U.S. we used to routinely have to put in slop factors to account for contractors that would routinely deliver gear in excess of spec. It wasn't until the most recent SSN class that they were able to finally hold the line against the contractors and sub-contractors... but at least the design itself would have weighed what was expected.
Maybe they just copied each other's language?