skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think what his data shows is that out of 10,000 terrorists, it might help catch one.

Remember they've been doing this for more than a decade, and it still didn't help them with the Boston bombers. They even had the guy in custody before. Still didn't help. The abuse of surveillance power is not effective, even if it was legal/constitutional.
The other point i'm trying to really make is maybe hadoop does serve some purpose but there could be an easier/better approach for parallelism.

If we focused harder on reliability and another service "like hadoop" would probably be created but for non-cluster/multicpu. And doing some of the decently sized tasks we would have better, faster, and more reliable tools at hand.
Increased rewards for Google’s web vulnerability reward programme
Moar test <>'"/

http://google.com
That's like saying:

"I only claimed that 5 = 2 + 2, I never said anything about it being 4!"

Isn't that the conclusion to draw from HN being described as a cocktail party?
You use the "zero or more" * operator, which will match empty strings in front of the "%". But an empty string cannot be converted to a float. Just use the "at least one" operator: +. Also, the scale is 0,100 by default, you can omit it.

df -h | colout "([0-9]+)%" scale
Finally amazon sells kindle in China
What just happened to Hacker News?
What just happened to Hacker News?
Lazy load Disqus for best performance and leverage asset loading
Well, I won't read that version, I'll only read the "real" one.

Bonus points: journalists and common folk will stop pretending everything in wikipedia is true like they do now.
Ethiopia gets a new school - thanks to a XSS in Google+ [2012]
The president has the power to use his veto when needed. That he may be pressured not to do so or not is irrelevant. On a personal basis, Obama is clearly taking part in all this and is an accomplice.
I'm usually skeptical of conspiracies, but now I guess I have to be more open to the possibility of this kind of behaviour.

If they went to these lengths with tech companies can't we assume that surveillance in place within financial institutions is even worse than what we know it is? It could hint at another angle beyond having lots of money where Wall Street has leverage over Washington. I can imagine bank execs threatening leaks should things not go their way.
Show HN: A community for Swedish Startups
... all Cases, except Treason ...
As a foreigner, it's pretty disappointing that spying on us is considered fair game.

That said, it appears that any American who communicates with someone overseas also gets to join our special club.

This feels like a fairly large loophole. Does replying to this comment count?
A Closer Look at Generators Without Promises
It's a joke, all right:

http://www.dhs.gov/if-you-see-something-say-something-campai...
1. You are making a wrong assumption. Torture won't prevent terrorism. Instead, it'll just make the prisoner friends more aggressive and looking for revenge.

2. To me the problem with torture isn't that it's "bad"

Hmmm, have you tried losing an eye? That's should be quite bad.
Yes. With Bush you know what you get. He's transparent like clear water and you know the policies he wants to push for.

Obama passes for an idealist but actually acts like a Bush in disguise. That's way more despicable. That's called deceit and fraud.
No SSL/TLS, great job. Well, I assume AES crypto wouldn't bother them anyway. ;) Because it wouldn't be smart to make standard crypto which would blind them.
Just now I heard on NPR that China hacked several key military systems of United States. US government has already chickened on this issue.

Not just governments but any institution when starts hurting those who can not hit back, you know they are on decline.

If US interests are under threat from anyone then it is not Afghanistan or Iran or Syria but China. US government wont get anything by spying on US citizens but by standing upto China.
Silicon Valleys Leaders are Proven Liars
today's revelations from the post imply that either the prism story is a hoax or that yahoo, microsoft, google, facebook, and apple are lying.

even if these corporations are lying under compulsion we can now be certain they are morally capable of lying to us.

for those that think fear is a good reason to lie this shouldn't be a problem. for the rest of us it's a very large and definitive one.
Not to mention the President has substantial executive order powers, that are often very hard to overrule. If the President went to bat for privacy, openly and regularly explained to the US public why, and used his executive order powers to implement changes - well, let the Congress try to overrule that. Obama can then issue 500 executive orders the next morning, slicing the issue into countless separate pieces, let Congress choke on trying to overrule it all, and if they want to stop him at that point, then they can impeach him - and at least Obama would stand on principle, and he'd be the only President impeached for doing the right thing.

Obama could stop all of this. He does not want to.
This is isn't specific to Google, and I would go further and say that ISPs are a much juicier target than Google. ISPs have the raw access to all your traffic and wilt more easily when pressed by law enforcement (eg Carnivore).

I don't think there is an easy way to solve this. From law enforcement's perspective, big tech companies have already done the hard work of getting users' data; all they need is a warrant or a NSL or any other magic ticket. That is the problem we should solve.

Disclaimer: I work on Google Analytics.
How not to choose a new software development approach?
Things could go either way. Wikileaks just a hipster. It opposes for sake of opposing and it embarrass for the sake of embarrassment.

For all you know wikileaks might be assisted by China.
13 year old programming the Raspberry Pi
"I’m very struck by the number of different organisations that have been supporting Amy; Codecademy, Young Rewired State, the Raspberry Jams and Manchester Girl Geeks have all helped her on her journey. If you want to see more kids like Amy, there’s something you can do: support these organisations by volunteering or donating. We can’t expect schools to do it all for us; the wider engineering community has, we believe, a responsibility to give kids like Amy all the opportunities to learn she can get her crocodile clips on. The Raspberry Pi is all about putting opportunities in the way of kids, so they have a chance to discover, like Amy, something new that they can quickly become skilled at, and that they love doing."
Google Security: Increased rewards, up to $7.500 for XSS
Are n't many famous products (Android, Maps, Docs etc) of google are acquired rather than built?. What you think might work for you, may not work for others. Every organization have to figure out what will work best for their customers, by themselves.
Ugh. What does your comment add to the conversation. Half of it is a reiteration of my comment re efficacy. The other half is a willful misreading of what I meant when I said "bad". Its like you are so eager to get in there and disagree with me that you neither read my comment to the end nor stopped to think even for a second about whether your response was rational.
Being a spook is incompatible with who I am. If I were forced to be a spook, "drafted into spook-dom", I would do anything necessary to end the coercion. If necessary, I would throw myself under a bus. I believe this to be a principled response to coercion.

Actually on second thought, that is short-sighted. I would leak everything that I could, then I would throw myself under a bus.

If you are asking me what I think spooks, who are not me, should do in this situation, then I think I have answered that. They should either expect the criticism they will receive for their worthless PR spin responses, or they should respond in a way that would not cause such a reaction. I don't care if they think the later is not an option, or even if it actually is not an option. That is their problem, not mine.

Shitty position for a spook to be in? They don't have any other options? So fucking what. They made their bed. Criticism of what they said should not be tempered just because you think it is the only think they could say.
You Can Trade in Your Old iPhone Now That Apple Is So Scared of Samsung
Look at how EMC does it. Almost no software companies they bought have really flourished. Smarts, Infra, Voyence, nLayers, Configuresoft and Fastscale are to name just a few. All are on the way out, or are so ridiculously unsuccesful compared to when they were nimble and smaller.

If you get acquired by a monolith, then don't expect the acquisition to succeed. It will most likely fail.
"Such as telephone number and length of calls .... "

and of course IMEI - ie exactly which device you were using, where you were at the time etc..
Surely you've noticed by now that every time he ask Congress to help him close Guantanamo and allocate funds for keeping those prisoners on the mainland, giving them civilian trials and so forth, it generates a shitstorm of opposition?

The president has the sole power to go the media every single day and say "this is wrong".

'Obama holds America hostage.'

I typed the above as a tongue-in-cheek response to your argument, but then I did a search on it out of curiosity and got >35k results. I sympathize with your point, but as of last summer about 1 in 6 Americans still thinks Obama is a Muslim. Historically, Presidents back into issues rather than planting their feet on them, because political capital is not unlimited.

http://www.pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/Little-Voter-...

Last time Obama reauthorized the Patriot act (passed by a veto-proof supermajority, incidentally - 72-23 in the Senate and 250-153 in the House), Republicans complained about the fact that he used an autopen to sign it remotely:

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2011/06...

I don't mean it as a personal attack, but I think your expectations are a little unrealistic.
Your argument rests on a logical fallacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction

Just because the U.S government has not yet used surveillance to stifle dissent, doesn't mean they will never do it.

Also, if in the meantime civil liberties such as privacy are sacrificed, when the time comes that they DO use surveillance to stifle dissent, it may be much too late to turn the tide, as dissent would then be required to stop their stifling of dissent.
If the U.S. prosecutes Greenwald, then it's time to prepare for a revolution.
That's a bug I'm still trying to fix, but the argparse module made it somewhat difficult to find an elegant solution.

An easy workaround is to indicate a fake pattern argument:

colout -r x
I want to provide some perspective here, at the risk of being downvoted.

To compare what the US government is doing to a truly oppressive regime is insulting. People in the world today live in fear of physical harm from their own government. They aren't worried about phone call meta data or blanket call logging. They're worried about being taken by force with no trial, no ACLU or EFF to help them. Just gone.

Ai Weiwei served months in jail for art projects that were critical of the government. Can anyone imagine that happening here, in the country where flag burning is constitutionally protected? There are dozens of countries in the world today that have a near 100% conviction rate for political dissidents. Here in America confessed terrorists have the right to an attorney and god help the prosecution if there was any missed technicality during the arrest.

Don't dare be a girl trying to go to school in many middle eastern countries. Might get run over by a tank if you openly oppose the chinese government. Offend the king of saud with your actions and you'll be literally stoned to death in the street. And we're worried about phone call meta data?

I think a lot of this is ignorance about how modern counter terrorism works. The most effective tool we have is social network analysis. Find a terrorist and see who calls them, then see who calls those people and out and out. Look at the vertices and edges and dependency networks and we can learn a lot about complex organizations without risking any lives. It's understood that this is offensive to many people's privacy beliefs, but it's the best tool we have.

If you want to know why government agency's are engaging in this wildly unpopular behavior, here's the answer: On 9/11 a lot of people swore to god that it would never happen again. That might sound like a joke to people who never held up their hand and vowed protect and defend. People give their fucking lives to stop threats that you'll never know about. Question their methods all you want, they aren't going to listen.

Also: Save the slippery slope nonsense. There is a 0% chance of the US government becoming an oppressive regime, surveillance or not. Those things just don't happen in times of peace and prosperity. No country has ever gone from being an advanced democracy to being a tyrannical regime. Obama can't even pass a law without 37 votes to repeal.
US government collecting phone information from Verizon – the perils of big data
Or they could be mildly inconvenienced and get a warrant.
Rsyslog's first signature provider: why Guardtime?
They are all valid options, but I feel like it defeats the purpose to rely on and have to trust third party commercial services with your data.

Otherwise, you might aswell just provide a service like facebook, or whatever else you're trying to replace, and offer people to encrypt their files on upload, if they do not with them to be public.

But I might just have missed the idea :-)
How to Transition to Become a Business to Business Start-up
This interpretation may be incorrect, but my reading is that treason is one of the very few cases that allows the Executive Branch to take a Congressman into custody in the course of carrying out his duties, but the speech or debate clause is a separate provision.

IOW if I am a Congressperson and and (say) sell secrets to Iran, and the attorney-general obtains sufficient evidence to bring charges (testimony of two people etc.), I can be arrested while traveling to/from, or even while working in, the Capitol. But if I stand up during a debate and reveal information that would be useful to Iran without having had any actual traffic with the Iranian government or a representative, that's quite different.
A few quick notes:

1) They have and will be spying on citizens forever. Anybody who believes mission statements, officials, and that they "follow the law", is extremely naive.

2) More important than any terrorists to them, are dissident citizens. Not of the gun-totting, hillbilly mountain militia type. The kind that can effect political change to the system type, from Joe Hill and Mother Jones, to MLK and Malcom X, to Occupy Wall Street (if that thing ever got anywhere coherent). People making waves.
Great, so he's an accomplice. I don't think very many people actually dispute that. I certainly don't.

So fucking what?

What does identifying him as an accomplice to the surveillance actually do? Does it make the surveillance somehow magically stop? Does it delete all the data the NSA, CIA, FBI, and other TLAs have about you from their databases? Or does it just serve to stoke your righteous indignation over getting fooled by yet another politician?

When can we stop bickering over whose goddamned fault it is and start, you know, fixing it?
I also won't bother visiting the US anymore. Last time it was in 2009 and it was unpleasant enough, with absurd interviews before and after setting foot on US soil. Not happening again if I can help it.
Providing some context and clickable links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary

A warrant canary is a method used by an Internet service
provider to inform their customers that the provider has
not been served with a secret government subpoena. Such
subpoenas, including those covered under the USA Patriot
Act, provide criminal penalties for revealing the
existence of the warrant to any third party, including
the service provider's customers. A warrant canary may
be posted by the provider to inform customers of dates
that they haven't been served a secret subpoena. If the
canary has not been updated in the time period specified
by the host, customers are to assume that the host has
been served with such a subpoena. The intention is to
allow the provider to inform customers of the existence
of a subpoena passively, without violating any laws.

...

http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt

rsync.net Warrant Canary

Existing and proposed laws, especially as relate
to the US Patriot Act, etc., provide for secret
warrants, searches and seizures of data, such as
library records.

Some such laws provide for criminal penalties for
revealing the warrant, search or seizure, disallowing
the disclosure of events that would materially affect
the users of a service such as rsync.net.

rsync.net and its principals and employees will in
fact comply with such warrants and their provisions
for secrecy. rsync.net will also make available, weekly,
a "warrant canary" in the form of a cryptographically
signed message containing the following:

- a declaration that, up to that point, no warrants have
been served, nor have any searches or seizures taken
place

- a cut and paste headline from a major news source,
establishing date

Special note should be taken if these messages ever cease
being updated, or are removed from this page.

...

I found the caveat at the end of the second link interesting:

This scheme is not infallible. 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. ...
Show HN : 7 Minutes Workout app for iOS (weekend project)
Hacker News Gone Wrong
or Why we should probably name this American Hacker News
Well, I can confidently assume that the NSA has spied on me in the past, and I know exactly what dirt they have on me. I am just waiting to see if / when / how they use it.
An implementation of RFC 1149 - IP by avian carrier
It's become a huge news site and nothing more. There is basically no mention at all of any technology/programming on that page besides cruddy newspaper article type sites.

Maybe people should make a new hacker news much more focused on talking about programming/tech news only?
Which are, ironically enough, rather reliable despite their old age.
> People in the world today live in fear of physical harm from their own government. They aren't worried about phone call meta data or blanket call logging. They're worried about being taken by force with no trial, no ACLU or EFF to help them. Just gone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition
I can't help observing that de Gaulle's party actually increased its parliamentary majority to record levels in the election that took place in June 1968; it signalled the beginning of the end of De Gaulle's political career but institutionally the protests were a total bust.
Good. Our only hope is that one of this "just discovered today!" waves is big enough to affect actual change. Your initial statement only serves as a "shut up and move along". How do you imagine that helps anything?

It may be cool to say "I knew this already" but I'd rather be less cool and have something done about this.
Yeah but here's the thing. You run straight into two problems when that happens:

1. Are you going to be ordered to affirmatively lie about claims regarding your products? Is that protected by the first amendment?

2. Suppose you have a public case and win? Now everyone knows that canaries are protected and can be used to run around the gag orders. The question comes down to this: Who is more afraid of what? You of 5 years of prison or the government of losing this tool once and for all?
Yes, people will avoid you based on your race. People will marginalize you if you are not tall, or your voice is squeaky. This isn't just anecdote, it's been studied time and time again. [1]

Jewish people are well known for being shrewd in business, for example, and often claimed to be unfairly favoured. That you would use them for an example is ironic.

You should judge on merit, not the "story" behind it nor because the founders don't exhibit your idea of social "normal." Exploiting people with your attitude is a huge part of what is wrong with society today.

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2009/07/17/news/companies/tall_book_ari...;

http://www.amsciepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pr0.1987.60.3.843

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/10052978/Deep-voiced-chie...
If torture were useful and ethics don't exist, then why would you draw the line anywhere other than "one less victim"?
Isn't that something that the 37 Signals dudes recommend in their book and have been doing for years? you know ... "pick a fight" http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch02_Have_an_Enemy.php.

Sridhar isn't doing anything different, he's forcing people to pick a side, and guess what ... it usually works.
Can anyone imagine that happening here, in the country where flag burning is constitutionally protected?

Well, that feels sort of disingenuous. From the POV of a scheming politician in power, harmless gestures would certainly seem much less important than agents of your potential downfall communicating in ways that you can't penetrate. In most cases, those loudmouths are the devils you know.

I think a lot of this is ignorance about how modern counter terrorism works. The most effective tool we have is social network analysis. Find a terrorist and see who calls them, then see who calls those people and out and out. Look at the vertices and edges and dependencies networks and we can learn a lot about complex organizations without risking any lives.

I believe that's exactly happened half a year before 9/11. Then, someone thought, "what an interesting scenario, let's file it into our record system".

If you want to know why government agency's are engaging in this wildly unpopular behavior, here's the answer: On 9/11 a lot of people swore to god that it would never happen again.

OK, I'll bite: Didn't lousy healthcare kill more people in the US in the last decade (certainly, possibly even in a year) than 9/11 ever did? Do people swear to god that this must never happen again? I don't think so. It's the salami slicing effect, only with people. As long as it's not visible, nobody cares (or extremely few are actually bothered by it to any extent).

Ditto for people killed by burning all that coal.
Power to the people? What about fairness?

It'll be easy for bad customers to complain, and then we have an ebay-style situation where sellers have to unfairly make amends for nothing.

We need a way to rate the raters! That's the real problem.
If enough people want something they will find a way to make it happen, one way or another.

There are many possible ways to affect change. For example, since all the existing politicians are so awful, the best choice might be to simply become politicians ourselves. If enough people did that at the same time we would have a chance.

Obviously things like peaceful demonstrations are a waste of time, but there are active and effective things you can do that are completely legal.
He was actually given the Nobel Peace Prize for not being Bush - 100% subversion. I think it's not unfair to say that he's harmed American democracy more than Bush could have, by legitimizing every harmful thing Bush did.
> There is a 0% chance of the US government becoming an oppressive regime, surveillance or not. Those things just don't happen in times of peace and prosperity. No country has ever gone from being an advanced democracy to being a tyrannical regime.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Republic