skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> retroactive immunity,

Fuck everything about that. _That_ was what revealed Obama as a wolf in sheep's clothing. He voted for retroactive immunity of telecom companies spying on Americans. That is all I needed to know about him. Not saying Romney was better. But vis-a-vis the propaganda, the fans, the ass kissing, change, hope, etc etc it was even more so disgusting.

Seeing Obama's track record compared to what people believed he was is a very sad "I told you so" for many of my friends and relatives. Yes I know he didn't promise to be open about this and he can't _create_ legislation but I am talking about the qualities people saw in him.
I think "as you type" means different things to an intelligence officer and a programmer. The intelligence officer probably means "real time" (no need for a judge/approval/etc). A Google Wave like interface is probably not in the backend, but if the FISA route took weeks and the new kit takes seconds I could see "literally as you type" being a description that fits.
Np. Would love to hear about your travels. Feel free to ping me for more ideas/details. I've traveled pretty extensively in Central America and Southeast Asia, and a bit in Europe.
Al Jazeera English is an excellent source of world news, but their focus really is not on the US, unlike most domestic news outlets. One would therefore normally suspect that they would be less likely to break major US news, but in reality I think most of us would expect the opposite.
This is quite the amateur legal opinion - the GPS case is not really relevant to FISA

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillan...
$20M a year, what a bargain!
FOIA the PRISM tech stack
The $20M is probably not a full number--that might be the portion of it that gets credited to the program while other major costs (storage!) are already covered somewhere else.
Only insofar as it is the hallmark of government.
> "Everyone should just calm down and understand this isn't anything that is brand new,'' said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.), who added that the phone-data program has "worked to prevent'' terrorist attacks.

Politicians are so bad at making reassuring statements in cases like these that I wonder why they even try?

Also, I wonder if someone at the agency/intelligence committees would kindly point out what this great data net was doing when two young and very Internet-active men decided to blow up the Boston Marathon and were only caught through (video at the scene) surveillance tapes?
I can also confirm receiving the email (but I really need to tidy up my mail filters, I actually read about the hack here first).

Nice email, one improvement would be to host the wiki behind a proper https-site -- especially since we already know the attack appears somewhat sophisticated, and that the attackers gained control over servers on the Hetzner network. Now, the faq doesn't contain anything obviously bad (email your credit card info to... etc) -- but one small thing that could be improved.

Other than that I appreciate how Hetzner have handled this so far.
Google provides portals for law enforcement to search their data given the proper clearance/warrants. This is what the Chinese were rumored to hack into with the Aurora stuff.

These communications people are playing word games. These companies turn over and give access to whatever they are legally required to.
The statements released by the companies (especially Apple and Facebook) are similar enough that they may be crafted talking points supplied by the government.
Vesper Lynd is a pun: "West Berlin", spoken with an accent.
I've worked with many startups to help them build a culture of data-driven decision making and I'll say from my experience that you don't need massive data to run highly valuable A/B tests. Also, with proper segmentation techniques, you can run many tests in parallel.
I've known people who lived off in the woods for a while, and thought they were fine. Of course maybe that says something about me.
I mean, I guess I see what you're saying, but obviously at least a handful of people at each of the member companies knew. I believe those are the people the parent comment is talking about.
This seems to ignore that the same government has put together and continues to manage the world's most advanced military.
If They Are Watching, Should You Watch Too?
Read more carefully -- they're talking about the administration, not the person.

There's no reason that this diminishes their credibility on, say, health care reform. It's a totally different set of people, and a fundamentally different agenda.
By comparison, what have we learned from the leaks of the diplomatic cables that was worth people getting arrested by dictatorial regimes or getting killed?

Historians will argue that one for decades. However I've seen it claimed and argued by knowledgeable people that learning what the US thought about their local dictatorships was a major contributing factor that made the Arab Spring possible. Contributing to the freeing of over 100 million people from dictatorship is a pretty good counterbalance to the ways in which some dictatorships have been able to abuse the information released.

See http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/wikihistory-did-l... for information on how wikileaks contributed to starting the Arab Spring.
They might be stolen.
> doublespeak. Knowingly stating the exact opposite of what is true as fact

I don't think so. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublespeak

> The only way it would be more obviously doublespeak is to say "Spying is privacy".

That's where it would begin to be doublespeak, at least as far as I understand it.

Regardless of wether it's doublespeak, it surely is a Big Lie: Nobody spies more on American citizens than American intelligence agencies. Let's just assume that as fact. Now,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Lie : "a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously."

To say "We’re the only ones not spying on the American people" when nobody else does it more, that's oh so very clearly a Big Lie to me.
How the hell does that work? How do they claim to have authority over you once you are no longer a citizen?
> and are told do it for the sake of the country

Or for the sake of advertisers. And they usually don't need to be told.
Poll: What Mode of Communication is Safe from Government Snooping?
Running a remailer or Tor node, or somehow deploying crypto (opportunistic crypto if you can't do anything better) is a lot more useful than donating to the EFF, at this point.
Children and depression
Everything but actually bringing it to public attention.
Fair enough. My experience is more on A/B testing high trafficked paid lead gen pages, and I understand you can still make conclusions with less data (doesn't need to be massive). But I do agree with the author of the original post that it can be easy to worry about all these different A/B tests that aren't that illuminating in the grand scheme of things when you haven't even got a solid product.
Moving is not copying
Very interesting read. I especially like the following quote:

I figured if I couldn’t explain something clearly in documentation, nobody was ever going to understand it, and it probably wasn’t designed right. And once something was in the documentation, we knew both what to implement, and why we were doing it.

I think this a great practice to follow. I often find it very helpful to write documentation before writing code. I find I end up with a better designed system this way, and as an added bonus it has great documentation too.
https://github.com/deaddrop/deaddropdocs/
Digital Ocean under DDOS
This Is How You Lose Her
Yes. IMHO, information usually gets less and less accurate (though briefer and simpler) the further it travels from the source.
“Most fallacies are like that - they're heuristics which work most of the time. For example, if you see people running in terror in one direction, and you join them, you've committed the bandwagon fallacy, but you're probably right. If you refuse to invest in someone's business because they've been convicted of fraud, that's ad hominem, but you're probably right.”

http://chariotofreaction.blogspot.com/2012/11/slippery-slope...
I don't think it is an easy thing to rebel in effective means… We americans like to cite the revolutionary war but forgetting that less than 1% of the population did any fighting [0], and even then there was massive outside nation state influence (ex: France.) Kinda similar to whats going on in syria now [1]… and other places in the past and present.

But I do agree with the literation of it being like living hand to mouth, but I think it goes far beyond being a political sense. Mortgages, paychecks, car loans, insurance, student loans, dead end jobs, that gadget we just have to have, endless media d̶i̶s̶t̶r̶a̶c̶t̶i̶o̶n̶s̶ entertainment, the food we eat… when do we, as a society (people from all backgrounds, sadly not all of us are invited to BBG 2013 and Google Zeitgeist in Watford) really give ourselves the time to think or push the boundaries outside current constructs to forge something transcendent?

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EiSymRrKI4

[1]: http://www.cfr.org/qatar/tiny-qatars-big-plans-may-change-mi...
Mathematica is absolutely incredible and everyone who calls themselves a programmer should own a copy, learn how to use it, and internalize its philosophy.

However, I too find his self-aggrandizing intolerable.

Sentences like "Looking back at its documentation, SMP was quite an impressive system, especially given that I was only 20 years old when I started designing it." Just make me dislike him. Was his age really necessary there? He already mentioned his age a few paragraphs up in a sentence that was far less objectionable.
It's impossible to have a meaningful conversation if you intentionally view anyone else's opinions in the worst possible light. You may have a valid interpretation of what I said, but it's clearly not the interpretation I intended to convey.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
How does Elon Musk's Hyperloop work?
To be fair, Assange advocates what he calls “scientific journalism”[1] in which the editorialized piece is presented along with the raw and unedited primary source(s)†.

He also acknowledges that Wikileaks is an “activist organization” that uses “transparency as its method”[2].

I do not necessarily agree with the editorial voice of Wikileaks but the style of journalism that it promotes is obviously a Good Thing.

[1] http://goo.gl/GGJWz

[2] http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2010/04/logan-symposium-explor...

† Redaction to protect the life and/or livelihood is an exception.

EDIT: I meant “kind of journalism” rather than “style of journalism”.
> I think it's interesting to ask why these programs are so widely hated.

They're not widely hated. I just polled my family: wife, mom, dad, and infant. None of them care. I don't really either, though I guess all else being equal I'd prefer it if they didn't collect this information. Anecdotal, I know, but I'd hazard a guess its representative.
Also, I don't get why they replaced 'This stunning use of the act' with 'Stunning use of the act'. The new line doesn't make sense, who called for that edit?
Remember that British Antiterrorism laws were used to sieze assets of Icelandic banks after the meltdown of that country. I joked that the British were worried about a new Viking Age when that happened.
Documents: U.S. mining data from 9 leading Internet firms
Besides security the "value" is primarily distribution and media attention which depends on branding and is difficult to create.

Neither victim alleges rape.

And I'm not sure how, in the same breath, you manage to implicitly criticize what is happening to Manning and Assange trying to avoid the same fate.
One reason for this edit may be that Drudge's link to the story reads "NYT: He has lost all credibility..."

This is just below a link reading "Fournier: Obama's Police State..."

[Note, I support everyone highlighting this issue, even Drudge. There's been far too little concern with the fear of terrorism being used to justify the erosion of our civil liberties, first by Republicans under Bush, and now by Democrats under Obama.]
I can't find where I thought read that, so I'm probably wrong.
> A big early decision was what language SMP should be written in. Macsyma was written in LISP, and lots of people said LISP was the only possibility. But a young physics graduate student named Rob Pike convinced me that C was the “language of the future”, and the right choice. (Rob went on to do all sorts of things, like invent the Go language.) And so it was that early in 1980, the first lines of C code for SMP were written.

So Wolfram appears to be saying that C, the "language of the future", was much better than that old Lispy stuff he had been using. But then he goes on to admit that he spent lots of time reinventing features that are obvious in Lisp:

>It got even weirder when one started dealing with multi-argument functions. It was quite nice that one could define a matrix with m:{{a,b},{c,d}}, then m[1] would be {a,b}, and either m[1,1] or m[1][1] would be a. But what if one had a function with several arguments? Would f[x, y] be the same as f[x][y]? Well, sometimes one wanted it that way, and sometimes not. So I had to come up with a property (“attribute” in Mathematica)—that I called Tier—to say for every function which way it should work. (Today more people might have heard of “currying”, but in those days this kind of distinction was really obscure.)

Really obscure? To who? C programmers?
> By comparison, what have we learned from the leaks of the diplomatic cables that was worth people getting arrested by dictatorial regimes or getting killed?

Who was arrested or killed?
First HN Meetup in Nagoya, Japan - Sat June 22
My partner grew up in East Germany and has told me of the Stasi and their activities. I note that the GP wrote 'we have a government surveillance program that literally surpasses the level of the Stasi' - emphasis mine, and I think this is a fair statement.

Also, on a meta-point, every time I see someone start their post off with the word 'Bullshit' on HN - and I see it quite often, like it's some sort of HN meme - I always think: gee, that post would have lost nothing from the exclusion of that first word and probably would have been a little more in service of promoting civil discourse.
Xbox One: Details on Connectivity, Licensing and Privacy Features
Official response meaning "We have reviewed the petition and have decided that our surveillance is not overbroad and will continue unchanged."
Bullet points:

* "Because every Xbox One owner has a broadband connection."
I don't know who cleared this line, but that's silly

* You can play any one of your games from any Xbox One w/o a disc.

* Digital downloads are available the day of release.

* You have to connect at least once every 24 hours or you can no longer play games (or one hour if you are logged in somewhere else).

* It appears families have linked accounts tied to a home Xbox One that up to ten people can access, giving them the ability to use any of your games anywhere they sign in.
I have no idea how they are going to deal with abuse of this feature, or really how it'll work in practice.

* Publishers have the say as to whether you can trade-in games. Trade-in retailers have to be part of the approved system. Microsoft charges no fees.

* You can give games to friends if they have been on your friends list for 30 days. Games can only be given once.
Not clear if giving once means that the recipient cannot then send it on, or just if you can only give one person a copy of it.

* There are no rentals or loans right now, but Microsoft is looking into potentially adding the feature.

* The Kinect can be turned off at will, when the power is off it is only listening for the "Xbox On" command, and you can make it so that it never listens for that. Some games do require it to be on.
The Paradox of Tolerance is an interesting problem.
Wow people still run Slowaris?
My ethical concerns about what the NSA's doing aside, this is still a democracy, and there are established channels which the NSA is, by law, required to go through in order to do things like this. They're called FISC courts, and FISA warrants are what they're supposed to acquire before spying on American citizens. We have that requirement for very good reasons, and it should neither be treated lightly nor circumvented at will by the Administration or any of its agencies.

We're a democracy dammit, or have you forgotten what that actually means?
Well, maybe. Do you have servers with a secure boot environment?

Also, if the attackers are able to attack your servers in a similar fashion (gaining access without reboot) -- they have full access to the already decrypted disks (well virtual devices).

As for other comments on automating booting -- as eg cryptsetup allows entering the encryption key via ssh -- automating that shouldn't be too hard.

I still think that it mostly defends against someone stealing/cloning the physical disks though.
Maybe not 'lightweight', but I'll throw it out there: how about the MS Express editions (all free)?

http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/products/visual-st...

More details here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/bb308754.aspx
and
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/default.aspx
> Electronic calculators arrived on the scene when I was 12

He must have struggled to not write this as "Electronic calculators arrived on the scene because I was 12"

That said, hooray for Wolfram and Mathematica :)
Really looking forward to it! Hopefully it'll be easiest for patio11 to get to than Tokyo
Larry Harris, who you recommend, is advocating periodic clearing auctions (non-continuous trading).
My name is Lloyd, Mong Lloyd.
People fail to understand PRISM, companies don't have to GIVE data, they can give security keys which allow data to be intercepted.
I am beginning to wonder if this might be a hoax. Could this have really gone for years without leaking from any of these companies? Engineers tend to be pretty freedom-minded . . . and the slides . . . they don't look real. I guess we'll see soon enough. (Edit: I am speaking only about PRISM. The phone record thing seems pretty cut and dry.)
Yes...maybe I reacted too strongly to the often misused "literally."

But even real-time interception would not (seemingly) be that valuable to analysts. Assuming that suspects aren't dumb enough to use their own personal accounts and to talk of their plans explicitly, it seems analysts would want the historical aggregate of which alias accounts talked to which other alias accounts.

Hell, Facebook can already figure out if you're connected to someone even if you've never directly interacted on the service...if the allegations are true, I wonder how much of the requested data comes with pre-baked network-calculated goodness?
well, obviously if they are prosecuting the guy for growing pot based on these methods they must just know the money is somehow going to terrorists!

ducks
Does 'backdoor' necessarily mean 'pull' as opposed to 'push?'
Very interesting post but I'm having trouble with one thing. pipeline(5) returns 5. When I try to follow that path, I get to this: reduce(function(l,r) { return r(l); }, seed, funs) with seed=5 and funs=[] (an empty array). How does that reduction evaluate to 5? In other words, what is "r(l)" when l=5 and r=the first member of an empty array?
From the caliber of engineers I talked to, I can't imagine them bringing storage in house without some major churn. It is a sea of fresh CS grads with no real world operational experience.
Lose the DB
Half-remembered unsourced negative gossip is what great HN commentary is made of these days?
You actually caught me doing what I complain about the media doing: trying to provide a balanced viewpoint where the facts lean solidly to one side. You're absolutely right -- Google's actions in initially promoting Android were not against the carriers and the nature of the OS meant that unscrupulous handset manufacturers could be (can be) bad actors in the ecosystem as well.
But doesn't mention the front door.
I wonder if Americans will ever have their own BStU.

I fear that may never happen. It is easier to destroy encryption keys than it is to shred paper documents.
It's more complex than that. Alito suggested that factors included the amount of tracking, so tracking a car for a day would be different than tracking it for a month or a year.

So the 5 justices might differ between whether a warrant would be required for "show me all records of where this cell was for the last year" and "show me where this cell was during the day that such-and-such of a crime was committed."

I don't think there is any question that the scope and length reaches to a point where Alito's concerns or Sotomayors would be major factors though. These are huge, dragnet surveillance programs of the sort that I think worried at least 5 justices (and may have worried all of them). Collecting CDRs on all Americans on a daily and ongoing basis along with cell site location info is more intrusive than tracking a car for a few months.
I wish there were more opportunities in the discount business because I love these types of cultures and companies. Seems to be a saturated sector, though.
removed. mirror?
This is not true of Microsoft's statement.
Which Aurora stuff? The Aurora Co shootings? Or the aurora spy plane?
The point of subsidiarity though is that it puts central authorities in the position of midwifery for having such a world emerge rather than in the position of architecting, designing, and building it.
I've never read such a bitter blog post from a company blog.
DNI Statement on Recent Unauthorized Disclosures of Classified Information
Simple Markdown guideline tutorial
Zero-downtime Internet process migration in same host
Google tried to resist FBI requests for data, but the FBI took it anyway
OpenSUSE's YaST is being rewritten in Ruby
Do you think the NSA has gotten all the internet giants to bow down but somehow failed to get root certificates? SSL is not going to keep you out of this sort of surveillance.
I've always wondered how a government agency would reliably set up cameras in everyone's home 1984 style. I find it hilarious that we may just go down to Best Buy and install in our own homes.
Facebook, Google deny they gave feds direct access to their servers
Marvel Heroes Early Access Compensation Coming - MMO Strategy Guides
just deploying every time your tests pass is not continuous deployment. using it in production will only lead to pain down the line.

to do it properly you need some or all of the following:

a) to be able to deploy to only a fraction of your servers, and expose new version to fraction of your users
b) detect performance degradation
c) detect increase in error rates
d) detect decrease in traffic, user engagement etc.

and of course, auto-revert in case any detected problem.

somehow I doubt they actually do that.
Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo deny giving NSA, FBI 'direct access' to servers
Posted because it's offensive?
Sure but the big difference today is the internet. Good luck trying to hire an Oppenheimer today and setting up Los Alamos in secret.

Take a look at successful teams that already work with "big data" like at Wolfram Alpha or IBM's Watson. It is not at all easy to build such teams today. There aren't enough PhD's around, unless you are outsourcing to China. And then to step it up a level to Google's requirements we enter personal chefs and segway territory. I cant find the quote but Eric Schmidt has said multiple time what is hampering progress is not the lack of cash or infrastructure but talent.

More than the privacy issues I have to wonder about the waste. Cause getting the data and the infrastructure to handle it is the "easy" part. Extracting actionable intelligence I doubt highly they will succeed. Will turn into a big cash sink, that no one will talk about as the costs need to be justified...until they cant be.