skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, for real. We're not talking about sneaking a few files out on a thumb drive, here. We're suggesting petabytes of data being sent out over Google's networks without Google noticing. Meh.
>>how can anyone say that "Well, this country has truly fallen into a shithole" when, for about a hundred years, we were OK with enslaving an entire race of people, and justified it out of desire for economic stability?

Well, looking at the number of prisoners we have, and the atrocious way we treat them, I don't think that part has changed very much, except in scale.
Say the NSA really is reading all of our emails, and that that's happening because of 9/11. That would be an enormous setback for civil liberties. But it wouldn't be indicative of a terminal condition; our country has weathered worse, and what's important (over the long term) is that our compass points towards liberty and that we keep struggling to go where it points us.
That's it in a nutshell.

Every time we see another consumer web startup which relies on advertising or mining user data, we see yet another nail in the coffin in freedom and privacy for users. But, that's okay, because we're totally killing it, and that bridge round is coming any time now to keep us in our expensive lofts and designer foods.

Way to go, folks. Hope it was worth selling out the rest of your fucking race.
Don't forget about IP addresses and all of the data about what websites you're viewing thanks to their widgets.
"Direct Access" is the defining phrase of the NSA Scandal
I believe he's saying the America you believe to be lost never existed.
indeed, very similar like a government script ...
Speaking of precedent, something something something Barbary Pirates something.
If Lisp is So Great
However never before has there been such tremendous propaganda effort designed to conceal from public view policies that have been considered morally abhorrent for decades.
This was a "they're out to get us" kind of conspiracy.

The NSA sought to expand its own power in secret though quasi-legal means with the help of a few powerful men in government and a lot of scared people in corporations. The conspiracy used leverage to force cooperation by companies. You don't have to be evil in order to do evil by cooperating with a conspiracy, even (especially!) one run by the government.

All that is required for evil to triumph is that good men - or good companies - do nothing.

If for something to be "a conspiracy" you require that EVERYBODY who helps the effort be consciously furthering the actual goals of the conspiracy, you've defined conspiracy in such a way that it is unlikely one could ever exist. In any actual plausible conspiracy there will always be unwitting dupes. There will always be people who've managed to convince themselves that they personally are doing good or that the organization is good even if the effects it produces don't turn out that way.
If you live in California, the irony of calling it "unprecedented empire expansion" would be quite thick.
Hedge funds in cahoots with the NSA could for example predict currency/stock prices with all the extra information. Powerful businessmen/politicians could use it to blackmail others into getting their way using the private info. You can sorta trust the good intentioned nerds over at google to not abuse the private info - but faceless people over NSA is a different matter.
> Lately, I've come to realize that the September 11 attacks actually destroyed America.

I'm not so sure about that. As I learned in another thread, for example, that NSA had been requesting phone records of __BEFORE__ Sept. 11:

Former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, convicted of insider trading in April 2007, alleged in appeal documents that the NSA requested that Qwest participate in its wiretapping program __more than six months before September 11, 2001__. Nacchio recalls the meeting as occurring on February 27, 2001. Nacchio further claims that the NSA cancelled a lucrative contract with Qwest as a result of Qwest's refusal to participate in the wiretapping program

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwest#Refusal_for_NSA_spying for more.
Are you fucking kidding me? No, that's not within 100 miles of the truth.
The data offered by my old local video place, though, was pretty minor, and they were small enough that honestly I don't think anyone higher than the local police in the food chain cared.

If you can get Netflix, it suddenly justifies the effort to mine that data and weave it into a larger tapestry.
counterexample?
Since Lincoln, we've been heading towards a more powerful, authoritarian, and centralized government. (many people would point to FDR, but an FDR is inevitable once you have a Lincoln).

Since limited government lasted in America for less than 100 years, I assume it was an unstable state. I don't mourn its passing, it was inevitable. Instead I think of how to make better places to live, and technology to fight the authoritarians.
I'm going to with "Entire Vietnam War" on that. No, wait: how about the Sandinista war, which was so well concealed nobody even fucking knew it happened.

You think terrorists drove us mad with fear, try actually reading some of the history of the 20th century and imagine what we would have done, in an era before our modern feeling of entitlement to privacy and to open dissent, when our enemy was vast, spectacularly well-armed, beat us into space, and had nuclear missiles pointed in our face.

The compass points towards liberty, but sometimes we walk east, or west, or, during the Kennedy and Nixon and Reagan administrations, fucking south.
>>I don't want arbitrary or harmful laws enforced in the name of counter-terrorism anymore than you do, but don't act as though 3000 lives lost in a direct attack on our soil are insignificant by any measure.

Frankly, I would argue that the 3,000 lives lost in the attacks pale in comparison to the total number of casualties that occurred during the Iraq War. You can look at the numbers yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
It strikes me as intellectual laziness to dismiss a story out of hand because someone you don't know (Betteridge) has pontificated about headlines at some point.

Look at microsoft's massive track record for doing this, Google the keywords "evangelism is war" and form your own opinion.
Lossless encoding is important for text, especially sub-pixel antialiased test.
Espionage efforts are one thing, but when people are jailed for "inciting rebellion" for the "crime" of distributing the writings of Karl Marx, the undeniable fact that there were lots of spies here (as we had lots of spies there) falls so far short of justifying the sorts of abuses that went on.

The government argued that the Communist Party USA had no right to spread political ideas in the US, and targetted lawyers who dared to defend them.

Whatever the extent of Soviet spying in the US (and it would have been extensive for obvious reasons, as with the other side), the McCarthy era was an assault on the foundations of democracy in this country. If you want to justify that because the threat is real, I suppose we should just give up on this whole Constitutional Rights thing....
Perfect forward secrecy only works if identities can be verified. If impostor certs for Google.com exist, you can't be sure you're talking with Google.com
Fair point. However the public actually dissented due to Vietnam, which indicates that the propaganda effort was unsuccessful. In today's world, consent has been effectively manufactured.
Keep in mind that for all practical purposes, prisoners are in a position of involuntary servitude for the private gain of others (what is perhaps the simplest definition of slavery one can construct).
If it never existed, then it can't be true that our country's moral compass has been aligned toward civil liberties, unless we still haven't achieved that ideal after two centuries of struggle.

I don't have a specific position that I'm defending. I'm trying to learn some more historical perspective, and to understand your political philosophy in general.
tptacek is arguing that we need to take a longview in addressing political and societal issues. You're arguing that nope, America is irrevocably fucked like it's never been fucked before since your existence on Earth.

You may actually be right, depending on when you were born. If you were born in the 80s, then things weren't too bad (unless you were a homosexual or other estranged group, of course). I think tptacek is reasonable to counter that, a decade or two earlier, things were noticeably worse than they were now. That's not to say that he's justifying what's going on now with "well, this is fine, because Vietnam was way worse".

You know who else thinks that the current period of time is absolutely the scariest, most dangerous time in American history? The kind of politicians who enact the laws that you are opposing.
Very well said. And here is that description of scale [1]:

As of 2009 "The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world."

"The United States' incarceration rate is, according to 2009 figures, 743 persons imprisoned per 100,000 (as of 2009). The United States has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's incarcerated population."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_Sta...
Wayland/Mesa clients can use EGL to get a full GL context, it's just another attribute when creating the context (like how you select between GL ES1 and GL ES2).
Twas. Ever. Thus. They protested Vietnam, and sometimes the National Guard mowed them down with assault rifles.

The notion that protesters ended the Vietnam war is also ahistorical, a fiction designed to flatter the boomers.
I'm going to do some lisp, this is exciting:

By Googling, as well emacs lisp, I just now found a regex engine for common lisp:

CL-PPCRE - Portable Perl-compatible regular expressions for Common Lisp

Abstract
CL-PPCRE is a portable regular expression library for Common Lisp which has the following features:
It is compatible with Perl.
It is pretty fast.
It is portable between ANSI-compliant Common Lisp implementations.
It is thread-safe.
In addition to specifying regular expressions as strings like in Perl you can also use S-expressions.
It comes with a BSD-style license so you can basically do with it whatever you want.
CL-PPCRE has been used successfully in various applications like BioBike, clutu, LoGS, CafeSpot, Eboy, or The Regex Coach.

http://weitz.de/cl-ppcre
Input validation Hack using CSS
OK, pretty much with you so far. Now I'm trying to show that the choice of whom to have sex with is not at all the same thing as the non-choice of whom to be attracted to. Even gay people have the choice not to have sex with people of the same gender, exactly the same way straight people have the choice not to have sex with people of the opposite gender.
Well, yes. This is like saying you're screwed if you pull a perfect bank heist and then spraypaint on the wall "My name is jrdn and I robbed this bank. My social security number is 123-45-6789 and I live at 123 Elm St."

Tor should still do a just fine job of protecting your anonymity if you don't, you know, shout out who you are.
Ignore all the bad; just do something good today, guys
Temple Run: Brave on Windows Phone 8
That's more like Cairo though. I don't think Apple have any public documentation on how the window server part of their platforms works.
This is the important bit:

Google, Microsoft and Twitter publish transparency reports detailing government requests for information, but these reports do not include FISA requests because they are not allowed to acknowledge them.

Yet since tech companies’ cooperation with the government was revealed Thursday, tech executives have been performing a familiar dance, expressing outrage at the extent of the government’s power to access personal data and calling for more transparency, while at the same time heaping praise upon the president as he visited Silicon Valley.

So Larry Page and Zuckerberg are just deceiving the public because they are ignoring FISA requests.

I'm so outraged right now.
60 years is the blink of an eye in world historical terms. An eyeblink. 60 years ago, the color of your skin determined where on the bus you had to sit.

In that contest, 20 years is the single beat of a heart. 20 years ago, the media was entirely controlled by a handful of corporations, and you had no means whatsoever of telling an audience as large as the one you have now that you think America died on 9/11.

Say you want to make the NSA drama especially bad for Obama, and assert that the worst of their snooping is just a couple years old. A couple years. Just a few neurons have fired in that interval. Maybe wait for a few more before we rush to judgement at a world historical scale.
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
FWIW I don't foresee any significant protest or dissent over the surveillance state.
What the world doesn't need is this continuing holy war from a particularly small but sadly vocal minority of the Linux community. You really don't help the cause. I find it particularly irononic of you to accuse someone of spreading "BSD FUD" on a thread about FreeBSD. I'll 'cite' you an example of real 'FUD'; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5839565
Frankly, I would argue that the 2,400 lives lost at Pearl Harbor pale in comparison to the total number of casualties that occurred during the war in the Pacific.

Events like 9/11 have a significance beyond a raw casualty count, and you know that as well as I do. I'm not even sure what your point is. If you think OBL's goal was to inconvenience people at airports, you've left reality far, far behind.
ratpoison > shortcat
This basically sounds like Dropbox for Feds. Probably more secure than either Dropbox or the Feds, though.

DIRECT ACCESS ZOMG :P
Yup, Bellman Ford is the algorithm we had in mind for this puzzle. It's similar to Dijkstra's algorithm, but deals with negative costs as well.

(I work at Priceonomics)
What is that color scheme? It's pretty great.
My bad.

Your tone is inappropriate, however - a link is shallow; when we get into discussion, we learn things.
Heh, did you get out of the wrong side of bed today? I don't spend all day reading HN comments - sorry if my knowledge of responses to Matt Cutts' posts isn't as comprehensive and magnificent as your own. When I posted this, nobody else had said anything.
Not just immoral/unethical jobs either - but sometimes other jobs which some classes of people consider "less desirable". It's the social network guys these days, but back in the late '90's I learnt more about large-scale highly-available and secure web development from people working in the porn industry than anywhere else. (I remember a long and fascinating/educational series of conversations with Sudicide Girls tech people at the Open Source Convention in San Diego back in 2000 or 2001.)
All three branches of government appear to have overwhelmingly agreed on the new monitoring schemes. We're walking west by northwest; not south. I agree, though, we need to turn northward.
You don't start at the top. Barriers really are incredibly low but that's not to say its realistic to expect to land enterprise clients on day 1. The key is o build a sustainable business and work your way up while creating that track record. I think we've gotten way too used to these overnight success stories about startups (which aren't really true a lot of the time).

I hate to use this example because its a bit cliche but Google entered late into a field of established players and won. Microsoft beat IBM (this one applies only to the PC, I know IBM is still a force to be reckoned with). Stripe, Balanced, and Square are able to compete with PayPal for accepting payments. I know these arent all enterprise-specific but I didn't take the parent's comment to be about enterprise only.
Systematically using private companies to spy on foreigners and further the state's security regime. Hmm, sounds like what the U.S. was recently castigating China and Huawei for.
A firespotting idea that came to be
Yes, the second slide from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-...; sounds more like this http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/us/16nsa.html doesn't it?

> Officials would not discuss details of the overcollection problem because it involves classified intelligence-gathering techniques. But the issue appears focused in part on technical problems in the N.S.A.’s ability at times to distinguish between communications inside the United States and those overseas as it uses its access to American telecommunications companies’ fiber-optic lines and its own spy satellites to intercept millions of calls and e-mail messages.

Maybe the second slide in the WaPo selection refers to the wiretapping operations, the third and later ones reproduced by WaPo refer to the "FISA API" operations involving Google, MS, Facebook etc. and the transition between the two topics is in the omitted slides between 2 and 3.
I don't know what to say here. I agree that our prison-industrial complex is reprehensible. And I was born too many years after slavery to say that a society that enslaved a race, legally, is conclusively worse than a society with harsh sentencing laws. But...I dunno, I'll just reaffirm tptacek's assertion that we should strive to be less ahistorical when assessing the current status quo.
> All of this is beyond Osama bin Laden's wildest dreams

Just putting this all in a bit of perspective:

This is some character that, after those two buildings were hit by planes and three buildings collapsed into dust, we were shown a picture of and told he did it. He released a few Tupac-style mixtapes, we fought a few wars to go get this guy and his friends, and then we were told ten years later we finally got him and his body was dumped somewhere in the ocean. But we're still fighting those wars.
DRI2 (+GLX) is probably the most important of those. AFAIK, it's what almost everything uses for drawing, and does not work over network at all.

Uhh, isn't the entire point of GLX/AIGLX network transparency? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIGLX
This is silly and trying to tie it into the recent NSA revelations is disingenuous. SDES:

(a) will not be enabled by default; the developer would have to enable it explicitly?* ;

(b) is mainly intended for compatibility with existing SIP systems rather than new applications, and

(c) is no worse against an attack with even a slight level of detectability, where the server can do whatever kind of interception it wants by modifying the page JavaScript. (The exception is browser extensions.)

* I am not sure if this is actually true; the SDES draft's statement that users of SDES "can be informed of the necessary precautions" suggests that it is, but the problems draft suggests a downgrade attack, and both are somewhat confusing. I would try to figure it out for myself, but WebRTC is one of the most complicated standards I have ever even begun to understand. In any case, if it's possible for a webapp to end up using SDES without explicitly enabling it, that is a bug and should be fixed. There would probably be more productive ways to go about this than posting on HN about the NSA taking over WebRTC.
It's relevant because if homosexuality is not a choice, we can prune off an entire subtree of reasoning which (although I disagree with it) could be used to argue that homosexuality should be regulated.

You're certainly correct that it's wrong to persecute anyone for making a choice that does not affect others. However, people who believe homosexuality and gay marriage is wrong tend to also believe that it somehow does affect them in an indirect way - that it means fewer children will be raised in a good home, or that it contributes to a decline in civilized society or something. Remember that we also regulate other things that affect us in indirect ways, eg. hard drug use and sales, prostitution, etc. so it is not out of the question to regulate a choice that has indirect negative effects on society. Now we could (and I have) argued with such people until the cows came home about whether or not this is truly the case, but if we establish that it is not a choice, we can sidestep this argument entirely.

Because if it's not a choice, it's a physical trait, like race or height. And we have established pretty well as a nation that we definitely cannot legally regulate people's behavior based on their physical traits, even if it does affect us. For example, think of the Americans with Disabilities Act - having to put in wheelchair ramps directly affects the owner of the building negatively (she has to pay for the ramps). However, we don't question this law because being physically disabled isn't a choice.

TL;DR I agree with you that even if it were a choice, it is not one that affects me and therefore cannot be regulated. But if we can get more people to understand that it is not a choice, we can skip the entire debate about whether or not it's a choice that affects others and just treat each other equally under the law.
Are you talking about Verzion? I would consider that a different case than the SV companies.
Too add to what you are saying, here is the section 1 of the 13th amendment:

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

Slavery is straight up legal in America if you first secure a conviction. Anyone who pretends to themselves that we are not still openly using slave labor is absolutely delusional.
Yeah, I find it very hard to believe that a large internet company would send internal traffic in an unprotected way.
Designer creates cooking tools/app inspired by her brother with ASD
Several of the largest telephone carriers in the United States knowingly and voluntarily assisted the National Security Agency in illegally spying, the online companies I feel have more too lose if they took that kind of mindless attitude. Online companies monetize user data so consumers may lose faith in the companies ability to protect their data from government if they have "direct access". Online firms adopted a aggressive, pro-privacy legal theories. The problem isn't about direct access, the friendly benefits the intelligence community gets with current structuring of federal law is what needs to be changed for more respect to privacy in our society.
Missing from this cynical legal response, is the outrage towards the government for spying on all our private communications [ both legally and illegally ]

Google could have used their platform to campaign for better laws : a 'free speech + question mark' logo on their home page outlining their concerns would have been consistent with 'Dont be Evil'.. but they didn't even do that.

A not-just-non-evil-but-actively-good Google should have said to the Government : "No, you may not have any access to our customers data - you need to physically raid our buildings with a warrant to prise that from our stewardship. You need to hold us as a company in contempt of court."

How much better is the US than China ? : how can there be a democracy without both free speech and a right to private conversation ?
Read "The Servile State" by Hilaire Belloc for where this is leading ;-)

For lower classes, prison (and prison servitude) is becoming the safety net.
At least this would be a good explanation on why we ended up with the obviously sub-optimal duopoly in internet access/providers.
That is not the case according to the article. I understand how you could believe this is happening but specifically with the SV companies we have no evidence of it and even the Washington Post is backing down from some of their boldest claims (e.g. NSA had direct access).
And if you don't believe this or think its hyperbole, just remember that it's precisely why the 13th amendment contains the phrase "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted"