skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does gov't have anything to hide?

I have access to plenty of proprietary data. Is it wrong that i want to keep that data private? Why would I want people in gov't to have insider information?
> There is no such thing as a legal obligation to lie. You can be under a legal obligation to not disclose it, or to not talk about it, yes, but to lie about it? No, absolutely not.

That is the logic behind the idea of a warrant canary, but my understanding is that they have never actually been tested.

The frequency with which rsync.net representatives bring up their warrant canary in community conversations (such as those on HN) suggests to me that their canary is still legitimately alive (one would expect them to be less proud of it, where it coerced), but do we really know that is the case? The very nature of these things prevents us from saying things like that with certainty.

For a time, until USA PATRIOT Act was amended, these letters were allowed to forbid you from consulting a lawyer about the letter. So if the letter included demands that it was not allowed to include (perhaps: "Lie."), how would you even know that those demands were not allowed? For that matter, if you received a letter today that said this amendment to the Act was not relevant in this particular circumstance and you were not allowed to consult a lawyer, what would you do? Call their bluff?
GNUnet is IME the only one whose performance actually is decent.
it's back up now I believe.
Well, i've seen people avoid visiting USA thanks to airport security (and US airports in general). Insane visa requirements don't help either.

In the age of internet it's actually easier to stop physically moving around.
Mobile/responsive web development tips
>You can say you are not in a legal position to comment on the issue: for a company with scores of lawyers, it's easy enough to hint that you are bound by gag order.

But hinting that you're bound by a gag order shouldn't be permitted by the gag order since that would compromise its effectiveness -- certainly a risk averse corporation could imagine a prosecutor arguing as much.

>None of the big tech companies have an incentive to cover up: for them wiretapping both an extra cost and a continuous PR nightmare.

As I understand it the government compensates them for the inconvenience.
"So the government is spying on me. So what?"

http://pastebin.com/7SRmFpFH
"Japan's radiation disaster toll: none dead, none sick"

http://www.theage.com.au/comment/japans-radiation-disaster-t...

Contrast this with "The dam failures killed an estimated 171,000 people" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure
I was curious about this Iroquois influence on the form of U.S. government, so I read Wikipedia. It turns out to be a pleasing story of recent invention.[1]

Perhaps we can say that the prominence of the Iroquois confederacy (where, although the tribes themselves had hereditary leadership, the way the tribes were confederated was vaguely democratic[2]), was used as a persuasive anchor in favor of the colonists' confederation - Ben Franklin urging: "It would be a very strange thing, if six Nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a Scheme for such a Union … and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a Dozen English Colonies."

Some excerpts:

Rakove writes, "The voluminous records we have for the constitutional debates of the late 1780s contain no significant references to the Iroquois" and notes that there are ample European precedents to the democratic institutions of the United States.[57]

Tooker concluded that the documents cited indicate that groups of Iroquois and white settlers realized the advantages of a confederation, but she thinks there is little evidence to support the idea that 18th century colonists were knowledgeable regarding the Iroquois system of governance.

Tooker concludes, "...there is virtually no evidence that the framers borrowed from the Iroquois." She thinks the myth resulted from exaggerations and misunderstandings of a claim made by the Iroquois linguist and ethnographer J.N.B. Hewitt after his death in 1937.[60]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois_Confederacy#Influence_...

[2] (from wikipedia) No Iroquois treaty was binding unless it was ratified by 75% of the male voters and 75% of the mothers of the nation.[46] In revising Council laws and customs, a consent of two-thirds of the mothers was required.[46] The need for a double supermajority to make major changes made the Confederacy a de facto consensus government.[47]

[57] http://hnn.us/articles/12974.html

[60] Tooker E (1990). "The United States Constitution and the Iroquois League"
Actually, the history is more interesting - it was intended to prototype command-and-control communications between ships in a fleet. If all of your nodes are communicating through one central server, presumably that's your flagship and the thing you should blow up. If all nodes look homogeneous, you can't determine via signals intercepts what you should be targeting.
And? Can you show that oil/coal/gas powered plants heat less water per kWh electricity produced?
Stopped watching when he started complaining about taxes while showing pictures of executions.
The page refuses to scroll on an iPhone.
A look at trampolines in JavaScript
Obama's Data Harvesting Program and PRISM
Sweden male train drivers wear skirts after shorts row
Game Prototypes
New Leaked Documents Reveal NSA Datamining Program Called "Boundless Informant"
I like Retroshare.

http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/
Enough about the NSA, already
Are there any tech blogs that aren't currently flooded with NSA foolishness?
This is the paste:
-----------------------------------

Let's perform an experiment.

Let's smoke out the mole. Let's have Verizon user start sending suspicious messages to each other. Let's have Google users start googling for bomb making skills. Let's have users of Facebook start to associate and interact with extreme right-wing groups. Let's see who is passing data around.

An added benefit: the US won the Cold War not through combat, but attrition: they successfully bled the USSR's treasury threw an arms race. Today, it probably costs the NSA millions of dollars to investigate every suspicious individual, so we can wear the NSA out by acting suspicious.
Related

There is a concept in machine learning called a poison attack (analogous to an SQL injection attack). It involves purposefully sending a ML algorithm incorrect data, so 1) it's inference about you will be wrong, and 2) it biases it's learning by training itself on wrong data. Just FYI
My understanding (though I'm not an expert) is that the way the JavaScript spec is written, you first try to parse a line as is, and if you encounter a parsing error in trying to do that and the line doesn't have a semicolon, then you insert a semicolon and you try again. The end result is that it's a bit different then semicolons being optional; they are instead inserted automatically to try to recover from parse errors.
Maybe. Hey, why don't we ask someone with first hand knowledge?

...
WebRTC http://www.webrtc.org/

While currently only available in-browser (Chrome and Firefox Nightly), it is actually a C++ Library and you can build native apps as well.
No. As a curious ironic symmetry, now Icelandic Pirate's Bay server is more secure than anything in the USA. Their Pirate party political success, and ordering the CIA to leave suggests it is a good safe haven candidate and sends the world an important message of hope.
Earthquakes aside there are so many different types of nuclear reactor both in the way they operate and the fuel used people seem to lump them all together in one hysterical pile.

The Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan used plutonium from what I have read is unique compared to other plants. Canadian CANDU plants use natural uranium and the way they're constructed is far safer than other types of reactors. Two extremes of fuel used and plant design yet it seems some people see no difference. Of course in any discussion about reactors these days LFTR (thorium) reactors are mentioned too, even safer than uranium/plutonium reactors.

People are entitled to their opinion but it seems the vocal anti-science crowd wins. I'm all for closing bad nuclear power plants but all nuclear plants "just because" they use nuclear fuel?

It would be great if we all lived in sunny countries where solar panels and giant battery packs could supply our power but that's not the situation. I like solar but it's not suitable yet in my opinion due to the storage issues and efficiency of the panels, maybe graphene will solve that soon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fuel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor
CCTV is in a public place. No European person would expect that their private Skype calls, GMails and Dropbox files are being stored by the NSA. Clearly the US government knows the logging is unfair as it does not include its own citizens [1]

[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/06/07/transcript-what-oba...
How To Actually Win A Fist Fight
supercaps need waaaaay more energy density before they are going displace batteries.....there is a lot of published research into battery/supercapacitor hybrids, the benefit is primarily seen in short transient charge/discharge moments

In a car the use case would be driving with a lot of hills or a ton of start/stop (urban city) driving

Once you get out on the highway where there are long transients discharge moments, you won't see much benefit from the supercapacitors. Depending on the circuit topology it could also be a drain on the overall efficiency of the circuit.

Also, supercapacitors are very expensive....plus you need the high efficiency power converter ($$) between the two to manage the different power sources
> As I understand it the government compensates them for the inconvenience.

I wonder how that works. If stories about pervasive US surveillance of a burgeoning tech startup cause their european market to be DOA, how could that startup be correctly compensated?
Do you think that maybe it's an extremely important issue for people who live in the tech space, and that is why it is dominating the discourse right now?
That's nice but what about garbage collection. Doesn't this extension prevent views/models from being cleaned up? Or does it use weak references of some kind?
This is the BBC; they are usually very careful about what they print.

Having said that, it does seem odd. They present a (if true) very newsworthy note about Twitter in a two-liner at the bottom of the article.

Would be good to hear more on this.
The implication that the powerpoint slides were concocted by China in order to discredit and weaken US internet based companies is absolutely ridiculous.

It puts any conspiracies I've heard involving the US government to shame. You may not like the Chinese governments, but you need to look at the facts here: the slides were released by the Western media, the US has not denied their legitimacy or the existence of PRISM, and there is zero evidence for Chinese involvement.
Google says the government has 'no access' to servers
Explain that to the mothers of the 5,000 children that have died of starvation in their mother's arms in the last 5 hours since this was posted.

Maybe if you down vote this post enough, the problem will go away?
Not surprising. This is an incredibly opaque administration that's prosecuted more whistleblowers under the espionage act than every other administration combined.

The contrast between campaign Obama and president Obama is staggering. One would not be too far off the mark in calling him a liar, as simply an objective observation. I say this as someone who campaigned for him in 2008, which I now regret immensely.
There aren't a lot of idled hydro, wind, or solar plants. Most of the idle plants are coal, with a small number of natural gas (higher construction cost per kw of capacity, previously more expensive fuel, but now natural gas is cheaper than the mitigated costs of coal, so they run gas and idle coal).

So, you'd be adding coal to the operating mix. The dirtiest plants are the ones which were idled, too.

In the 5 year timeframe, you could argue for building more natural gas, solar, wind, etc. to replace the nuclear, but as far as I can tell, wind and solar and being done as fast as they can, and the coal to gas transition is also happening.

There also isn't "one grid"; it's basically 3, and it's not like it has infinite capacity everywhere. Putting a bunch of wind in the Midwest or Texas doesn't really help California.
At one point there was an anonymous mail relay that would inject random suspicious text ("The cook needs more semtex") into all messages. Wish I could remember the name.
The international reactions to Fukushima seem about as absurd as pulling every commuter car off the road because the Pinto was a terrible design.
When your company is a lynchpin of information sharing, you'll get a knock on the door from the gov't -- not just in America, anywhere. That's why this matters.
Blogspot has a really great UI, love the way the hide the scrollbar underneath a widget /sarcasm.
That's one columnist's opinion, and it seems like he's just trumpeting the W.H.O.'s story. I don't think it's safe to call this book closed. There are other opinions, and facts.

http://www.allgov.com/usa/ca/news/california-and-the-nation/...
Most of those articles are missing one important point.

"I have nothing to hide because I don't do anything wrong."

What does "wrong" mean in this context? Against the law.

So - how many torts or crimes are there on the books? How may ways of interpreting them are there - both already writted down and possible in the future? Are they interpreted by flawless machines or emotional humans? Etc. etc.
I believe they indicate for sure that the atmospheric pressure on Mars used to be greater. Below a certain pressure, liquid water simply can't exist, and the existing atmosphere is below that point.
The EU (and Germany in particular) have data protection laws ... so, yeah: I fear the NSA the most.
Cheers :) Yes, I was definitely inspired by Bloom, I used to listen to it a lot while working.

The original JS version (http://matt-diamond.com/drone.html ) has some control over the parameters, I was going for something a bit more minimal.

About the CPU usage, yes it's doing a lot of processing, or better to say, it's doing a few simple calculations very often. On my machine (Macbook Pro) it tops out at about 55%. Performance is on my todo list as it should be possible to leave it running for long periods without draining your battery. I'm sure there's plenty of room for optimisation.
We can't ask the person who supplied said info since they are anonymous, but you can ask Zuck or Larry since they've personally said the allegations are totally false, so there is that.
Discretion is good in the short term and bad in the long term. It's something that ideally would almost never be needed.
Ask HN: Name for our startup at Startup Weekend
What do think is the best name for a crowdfunded popup restaurants?

popchef.com
popvenue.com
wanderingchef.com
subletchef.com
sublettable.com
ephemeralchef.com
kettle.com
Fixed link: http://retroshare.sourceforge.net
The collapse of journalism? Isn't this week's news some of the best journalism of recent times?!

There are plenty examples of poor journalism, but I personally feel more encouraged that there is decent investigative and brave journalism going on after this week.
The links you're posting are broken, ending with "&#x2F;".
I wonder how far in the future we'll have to wait before people like Glenn Greenwald become potential drone strike targets...
The parent poster should have been more specific. The reason lawsuits have largely be stymied has been the claim of state secrets (whether or not everyone in the room knew the program existed, the executive branch argued that details would reveal things that would be detrimental to the state) and because no one who sued could prove they had standing to sue because no one knew who was actually being monitored.

So, yes, we knew section 215, FISA, etc existed, but no one has been able to (yet) successfully challenge them fully because any legal basis for challenging has been (in many cases actively) kept secret.
To be fair, those people are exclusively Americans.

Not all Americans think of America as a "beacon of democracy", but pretty much anyone who does is themselves American. Also, rectangles are not squares, though squares are rectangles.
I've read the transformer problem is one that California utilities are already addressing, as in as few as one or two charging at night could blow out a neighborhood transformer.

Do a search such as https://www.google.com/search?q=electric+vehicles+california...; that eventually got me to the article I remember reading, appropriately published in IEEE's Spectrum http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/advanced-cars/speed-bump...:

"Speed Bumps Ahead for Electric-Vehicle Charging

"Plugging in cars, even overnight, will strain local grids and could boost pollution

"Turning on two or three Level 2 chargers could burn out the street-level transformers that are the distribution grid's weakest link. Most utilities employ undersized transformers, which are designed to cool overnight. Without time to cool, sustained excess current will eventually cook a transformer's copper windings, causing a short and blacking out the local loads it serves."

Note that the usual suspects have made it impossible to run one of California's two nuclear power plants: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5846188
New XSS Bypass on Google Chrome filter
Raspberry Pi gets easier to use with Noobs software
He says it's not integrated:

PRISM is not an undisclosed collection or data mining program. It is an internal government computer system used to facilitate the government’s statutorily authorized collection of foreign intelligence information from electronic communication service providers under court supervision

http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Facts%20on%20the%20Collec...
couldn't agree more...
This article was written in 2005. I've read Friedman's columns since, and they haven't gotten any better.

Look at this [1] piece in the Columbia Journalism Review about Friedman's ramblings two years ago about a "radical centrist president".

Friedman lost a lot of credibility when he advocated for the Iraq War.

[1]: http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/tom_friedman_still_wrong.ph...
I saw that option, but I figured wearing a t-shirt around would add greater value for them.
Emacs used to do it. See: www.catb.org/jargon/html/N/NSA-line-eater.html
Criticism accepted.

Now, could you suggest better language?
I can't understand how you can be happy using ~84,000,000 clock cycles to solve that.

Logic programming is a wonderful tool to know about, and armed with that knowledge you can adapt your programming style to the problem in question. http://norvig.com/sudoku.html
Why? There is certainly enough interesting tech involved even if we overlook the "insignificant" stuff like spying and fishing for information in a way that can make a trawling flotilla proud.
Shades of the old USENET trend of including "NSA Food" lines in signatures. I never saw the point since it would so easily be ignored.

Sample USENET post from December, 1987 with an "NSA Food" line in the signature (and a related joke line):
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/comp.sys....

Discussion of "NSA food" lines from April, 1987:
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/news.misc...
Speed up Xcode debugging by using sounds
The whole time they're talking about a car that does 200 miles on a charge. The cheaper Model S does not do this.

Personally, I don't think a 200-mile range is necessary. I'd rather have a 100-mile range and be able to recharge in 15 minutes.
The US was never a beacon of democracy. That's not a desirable goal.

It was a Constitutional Republic.
Right now there's no cost-effective technology to create safe energy - just that some are worse than others http://www.energyjustice.net/coal
Quite the read. One part in particular struck me as highly significant to our current situation with PRISM.

"With this tech in place, the government doesn't have to put you in jail. They can do something more sinister. They can just email you a sexy picture you took with a girlfriend. Or they can email you a note saying that they can prove your dad is cheating on his taxes. Or they can threaten to get your dad fired."

With increased surveillance, the government won't have to necessarily prosecute or penalize dissidents, they can merely intimidate them extralegally. It's unlikely in the near future that we will see intelligence gathered from PRISM used in domestic courts, but it's not improbable that this collected information could be used to blackmail individuals into compliance. Think J. Edgar Hoover's secret cache of incriminating files (on such dignitaries as JFK and Eleanor Roosevelt) extended to the general public.
Not really. The emphasis in freenet is on crypto and anonymous distribution / plausible deniability, not moving huge amounts of data. What parent says is that content gets easier to reach with more nodes compared to average FN content, not that it will (likely ever) be faster to download than with BT or similar.
The whole argument is premised on the idea that the laws are all moral and just and government is some noble protector, watching over us. The reality is that the government is a monopolistic protection racquet and I pretty much want to hide everything from them. Surveillance is a mechanism by which they control their subjects.

The more they know about me the more they can steal off me and the more liable I am to be attacked for disobeying one of their edicts. If I want to do something that the government arbitrarily decides it "wrong", then I've got something to hide.

So yeah, I have everything to hide from a criminal gang.
The EFF's view on exploit sales and forced disclosure is questionable at best.

https://lists.immunityinc.com/pipermail/dailydave/2012-Augus...
it's merely formalizing the truth that because they can't vote, the government is not accountable to noncitizens. Do you seriously think that the European Union treats everyone within its borders equally? If that were the case, why are there the banlieues of Paris? Why does Italy treat african boat people so poorly? Why are there stateless individuals of Turkish descent in Germany?
> The European Court of Human Rights has established that the right to remain silent under police questioning and the privilege against self-incrimination applies.

Interesting. But the details of that certainly differ from country to country, at least judging from the reaction to James Duane's "Don't Talk To Police" video. For instance, in the UK, if you refuse to answer police questions, statements you make in favor of your innocence can be thrown out because you didn't mention them to the police under questioning. So the "right to remain silent under police questioning" is much weaker in the UK.

> All over Europe elections are held at least every 4th or 5th year and governments are regularly overthrown

We have elections every other year, so I'm curious why that's considered a point of difference between Europe and the US. The issue is whether the electoral system can effect real change or whether it's fixed by the rich and powerful, e.g. by owning a large chunk of the country's media and continuing to run those and other private businesses while serving as Prime Minister.
Yes, that is right. So use the tzinfo on systems where it exists, and restrict the more complex implementations of the same interface to systems where it does not (Windows).