skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I don't see how he can demand that other people in power behave transparently when he refuses to be transparent about how he uses his own power.

You don't know how he uses his power?

Here is how it works: People anonymously send him information, and he releases it.

> I don't think that Assange has much credibility on this issue.

As I see it, he has more credibility than most on the issue. It's one he has being fighting for all of his adult life, and what he and his sources have risked their lives for.
He's working through OCRing over 7 million of these documents. He could use some help doing so, so contacting him would be great.
Are you trying frame things to make Palestine out to be a non-issue?
Lobster today is viewed as a delicacy, but was once reviled
Here's a Safari extension for blocking Bitcoin articles. You can easily modify it to block your keywords of choice. There's also a link in there to a similar Chrome extension.

https://github.com/aaronbrethorst/NoBitcoin
They do some worthwhile things, but they steal from us to pay for it. Do you like computers? What if I stole $10000 off you, kept $9000 for myself, then bought you a $1000 computer and threatened to shoot anyone else who tries to by a computer for you? That would be worthwhile, right? Without me, you wouldn't have a computer. This is ridiculous, obviously, but it is exactly what the government is doing with all the "services" it provides.

Government services are not "natural monopolies" they are GOVERNMENT monopolies; enforced with violence. There is no such thing as a natural monopoly.
You could build a fairly universal application for flashing DD-WRT or a similar firmware on an available router, and supply updates for new routers or flashing mechanisms through a web service.

Another concern is standalone routers becoming less and less common as ISPs supply routers.
No offense but I already assume that any information that would run across e.g. Iran or China is intercepted and extracted for absolutely everything it's worth.

Mostly I avoid the issue by not visiting Weibo, etc., but I realize that's not very helpful for those not in the U.S. since there's really only the one Facebook, Google, etc.

Perhaps this kind of thing would lead to either increased federation of website (e.g. there's be a U.S. Google and a E.U. Google and swapping amongst them would not be completely frictionless).

Either that or reciprocal agreements between different nations to increase the privacy rights of their citizens (in fact I thought these already existed). But I don't see a solution that involves not having all these nations intelligence agencies simply skipping out on the collection of intelligence part.
I don't think tu quoque is a valid criticism here. He can be a hypocrite and still be right.
Is anyone else really bothered that Daniel Domscheit-Berg deleted it as well as all the other things he did to Wikileaks when he left the project?
They don't just give people military hardware and let them go nuts. Employees have to attack the targets they are ordered to.
This article is a copy/paste of Nick Hanauer's November 2011 Bloomberg article with a few lines of text before and after added. Here is the original:
http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-01/raise-taxes-on-t...
A protection racket is when the people you pay will actually injure you if you don't pay them.

There are many non-racket variants of this, including an actor or famous athlete hiring a bodyguard.
Related: Technological Requirements for Terraforming Mars (http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~mfogg/zubrin.htm)

The author, Robert Zubrin, also developed the Mars-mission plan Elon Musk seems to be following. (Zubrin's book also paints a fascinating picture of what's wrong with NASA: http://www.amazon.com/The-Case-Mars-Settle-Planet/dp/0684835...)

Quotes from the Terraforming paper:

"drastic modification of Martian conditions ... using 21st century technology."

"Humans... would require breathing gear, but pressure suits would be unnecessary"

"Average temperatures could be above the freezing point of water for significant regions during portions of the year, enabling the growth of plant life in the open."
I don't quite get that "security blanket" comment. If the phone is a useful tool for solving a problem, why not use it? Are we supposed to use old techniques just because the new ones aren't strictly necessary?

My experience in that regard has been pretty much the opposite. People are still stuck in a pre-smartphone mindset where you have to give people directions instead of an address, where you have to remember the locations of businesses you haven't visited in a long time instead of looking them up, where you have to guess about traffic conditions instead of just checking, etc.

It amuses me to no end when a crowd of techies get into a discussion about driving directions these days. No longer necessary!
Great post. I think that there is a distinction to be drawn here, though.

Nuremberg essentially applied penalties for rights violations to people of a foreign, sovereign nation.

The proposal in the GP comment is for new rights–not new responsibilities–to be granted to people of a foreign, sovereign nation.

So I appreciate the background you have provided, and I want to springboard from there to draw a distinction, and to see if there is any precedent for something even more similar.
Okay, I'll humour you and assume he's totally a rapist on the run. Yes, and? How is this relevant to adults talking about something that affects billions of people?
https://github.com/SilentCircle
(Not the original commenter.) I'm a fan of interactive maps and use them much more than paper maps, but I've been rediscovering an appreciation for traditional fold-up maps lately, especially when traveling.

A few reasons, some of which only apply in some situations:

1. When traveling in Europe without data-roaming, I printed out some maps ahead of time to navigate. I sort of liked the experience; compared to doing point-to-point routing on demand, it was more of a lay-of-the-land thing where I studied the map to get a feel for how things fit together, where I should be heading, and how I could recognize where I was. It felt like I got an idea of the area faster, whereas when routing is always available it's like when you're following someone else who's navigating: you don't really learn how things fit together because you're just following them.

2. Having done that, I found that, while sometimes unwieldy, a traditional fold-out map is typically much better designed than the collection of one-page views I printed off of Google Maps. For one thing, a good one will have some useful insets, visible landmarks both marked on the map and in an index, and much more reliable printing of street names (if you print out a map from Google Maps, the names of streets will infuriatingly often be left off, depending on the zoom level and density).

3. The online maps' data quality is often worse than a paper map for an area. A few weeks ago I was using a Google Maps map to navigate in Crete, and the "road" I thought I would be taking dead-ended and turned into a footpath with a gate, resulting in an inconvenient 5-point turn and detour. The transition from road to footpath wasn't marked on Google maps, which showed the whole thing as a thru road. A paper map of Crete I switched to did not have this mistake. Sometimes—in areas with many editors—OpenStreetMaps is better in this regard, especially if you want to find footpaths or stairs, which Google Maps often omits. But in Crete the OSM data was not good either.

4. I find it easier to discuss locations with other people by pointing to a paper map than by us both looking at a smartphone screen. Admittedly, the larger screen of a tablet might solve this problem.
USA government is now a giant roach colony, and they scurry at the smell of gas. I weep for the people who died in all those wars just to make sure these are the bastards that survived and thwarted "tyranny". My feeling is that one side felt the war was over and the other kept trying their best to ensure eventual defeat of their enemies.
But we do what we do because of who we are

So you are telling me that the "decadence" of modern Western society simply FORCED the USA to support the Shah, Mubarak, Ben Ali, the dictators of Bahrain etc etc etc down through history?

Like the Western world couldn't possibly have beer and miniskirts without installing dictators in or invading other countries?

Also, have you heard of crude oil? Just curious.
This is differential work factor cryptography rather than differential cryptanalysis. Differential work factor cryptography is design crypto systems are easier for one party to attack.

http://www.purecommerce.com/dictionary/ecommerce/differentia...
If you want actual email (smtp), the only way to guarantee end-to-end encryption, is to encrypt and decrypt on the client (the email sender/reader). There's no real way to make a secure web service for this (As the story with hushmail.com shows).

The difficulty with both S/MIME and GnuPG is key/trust-management - an unsolved problem. With S/MIME you can set up certificates internally with e.g: Active Directory. With GnuPG you could perhaps set up/recommend all users to trust a "central" keypair, and use that keypair to sign all user keys.

I'd say eg: Thunderbird with a plugin for GnuPG is about as easy as things are going to get -- without some user education (wrt trust) -- you won't actually get any security anyway.
HTML5 Web Worker
Eh, I'll say this much, the design really does scream "GOVERNMENT PRESENTATION" all over it.

Even the issues about the slight differences between WaPo and Guardian variants of the slides are easy to explain with different versions of Microsoft Office (or even using LibreOffice to try to open).
Printing Out Barbies and Ford Cylinders
Late entrant and it's now #2. The market has spoken :)
While most of your examples do suggest assholery of one kind or another, I am not so sure about the liver (note, not kidney) transplant. If you were a billionaire and you needed a liver to survive, wouldn't you pay whatever it cost to get that liver ?

Maybe the world is a bad place and money shouldn't enter the equation at all, but resisting the temptation to take advantage of your wealth in this situation is not an asshole/not asshole test. It's more like a saint/not saint test.
Like father, like son. Don't expect Rand to actually get legislation passed.
"In a rare public filing in the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the Justice Department today urged continued secrecy for a 2011 FISC opinion that found the National Security Agency's surveillance under the FISA Amendments Act to be unconstitutional. Significantly, the surveillance at issue was carried out under the same controversial legal authority that underlies the NSA’s recently-revealed PRISM program." [1]

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/government-says-secret...
Will do, thanks.
Genuinely appreciate you.
Uh, Glenn has said even more stupid stuff IMO in the context of the Pfc. Manning case so it wouldn't surprise me one bit.

In fact I'd argue that Glenn's reputation is based more on being a "civil liberties watchdog" and far far less on actually being right in his reporting. So in that regard he's simply padding his rep even further.
No, I never work in Germany.
Kim Dotcom: 'We need a Google alternative'
Ask HN: Review my startup, Peer-to-Peer Postal www.p2ppostal.com
www.p2ppostal.com

Peer-to-Peer Postal was one of the companies participating in the StartX MentorLabs program this past spring. (MentorLabs is a new part of StartX, for teams that are not quite ready for StartX but hopefully will become so with a little bit of help)

It is now open for alpha testing, and I was hoping that I could get feedback from this crowd.

The one question I get most: How do we know the drivers won’t just run off with people’s stuff?

It’s a tricky hurdle to pass early on, because as a new company we can’t shell out for a huge insurance policy. I’m hoping to stay uninvolved in the transactions, much like Craigslist, and it will be up to the users to check out the counterparty’s Facebook profile, read their reviews, or just choose someone with whom they have friends in common.

I would appreciate feedback regarding the UI, and ideas about building a culture of trust, getting off the ground, and reaching our target market.

Thanks!

Elaine
maratd's idea is that in order to not be violated by a government, one must pay that government. The people you pay will violate you if you don't pay them. It is a textbook protection racket.

Of course it is not accurate to state that the government is running a protection racket because his initial premise from which that follows is stunningly idiotic in the first place. Rights are not given in return for tax money, not even in America. Non-taxpaying non-citizens enjoy basic protection under the law if they happen to be physically located in America; they don't have to "buy" that.

That "physically located" qualification is what needs to be changed. "They don't pay taxes to us" is not an excuse.
First, existence proof. Do you think that al qaeda under Osama bin Laden didn't have the money, means, and motivation to have done something like that? If you think that, you should look into the situation at the time, Osama was from one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia, had a network that extended around the world, etc, etc, etc.

Now why did he opt for planes over mass destruction? I don't have a window into his mind, but I can make some reasonable guesses.

First, he was looking for great visuals, and he got that. Killing 100k people with anthrax would have done more damage, but would not have the visuals of seeing an airplane disappear into a building and explode out the other end.

The second has to be concern for the US response. He took out high priority targets that struck at the heart of American power without undue casualties. He got multiple wars, and a worldwide manhunt for anyone in his network. If he had inflicted hundreds of thousands of casualties, do you think that the USA would have held back on all out war? (Potentially including nukes, a draft, etc.)

A third is that the USA has been proactively identifying ways in which he could actually acquire those things, and blocking them. For instance look at the efforts we took to help secure Russian nuclear materials.
Want To Be A Guild Wars 2 Shoutcaster? - MMO Strategy Guides
Good post.

But it misses (or more precisely underemphasizes) an even greater point, I believe -- the chilling effect of surveillance. There are things you don't do because they MIGHT be used against you. Worrying about that -- even stopping to makethat calculation -- is a tragic reduction of liberty and happiness.
http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX116557

Getting the private key is as easy as having a smart person inside the company that works for both the company and the gov.

Then you just have to sit on a router and read the traffic. Relatively simple for a gov agency.

There are 2 ways to be safe:
1) You do not use any technology.
2) You are honest in everything you do.

The second one is probably the easiest.
Instantly find friends, family, coworkers or anyone with a smart phone.
>Microeconomic models that assume the marginal productivity of a worker can be calculated in advance are drastically at odds with the reality I see

Micro theory is very general, and almost tautological. For example, you can re-interpret "marginal value" to mean "marginal expected value conditional on what the employer knows about you" and then everything you said fits neatly into the usual framework again.

Hence my comment below about the market deciding what a worker's marginal value is. Micro theory makes no claims that the "true economic" (and unobservable) marginal value of a worker is equal to their marginal value measured by some accounting system. Hence why micro theory is to a large extent irrefutable and makes few predictions about the world: if people eat big macs, we assume that increases their utility more than eating kale, and if the market doesn't pay a worker well, we assume that person contributes little marginal value.

Corporations do certainly help spread risk, that just happens to fall slightly outside of the usual micro framework.
Sure, there's no problem with you and I agreeing to disagree. I'm of the opinion that the mind operates like a sort of muscle, and that you can be in or out of shape for a particular thing, mentally. As the mapping example goes, any convenience I might gain from turn-by-turn directions, delivered on demand, does not outweigh the tremendous benefit I receive by thinking about where I am going, figuring out cardinal directions by the sun, and other things like that. The latter will seriously save you when you lose reception, phone is out of battery, you're in a place where online maps are out of date, etc. It's a real, applied skill.

So, what you see as a simple task I see as more of a practice, a way of living. This is just how I am about most things, being something of a perfectionist. And that's fine!
I'm not sure what Glenn said in regards to the Manning case, but wouldn't that be different because in this instance Glenn is the person who broke the story and has the source? He's casually mentioned on Twitter and in his articles that there's more information coming out. So I reckon we will see.
Most people point to the reduction in the top marginal rate as the primary mechanism by which the progressive income tax has been weakened and has contributed to income inequality. Others will say this is all bunk and capital gains becoming a primary compensation mechanism is what has caused the destabilizing imbalance.

There is another thing we've been doing, though - Reagan in 1986 dramatically reduced the boundary of the top tax bracket versus its trajectory in the rest of the 20th century, to 5% of what it had been. Until then, you could reasonably argue about trashing the millionaire's extra yacht so that the $200k-ionaire could succeed. Later politicians raised it somewhat, but never to levels approaching the 50's - 70's. We appear to have tied it all together in order to mobilize the high-skill working people & entrepreneurs to defend the truly rich from having to contribute a larger share.
Did you seriously just tell me to keep my focus on the topic at hand while simultaneously throwing in a dig by calling me a child?

Also I'm not sure if you've been paying attention (I have, and have been talking about it, a lot), but the scope has been scaled significantly farther back from "billions of people" over the past couple of days, by all the companies and the NSA themselves, into the FISA courts that we've already known about that don't affect "billions of people".
I doubt even 200,000 people have ever donated to the EFF over its entire lifetime from 1990 to today.
If you think OBL would have been thrilled with a peaceful, democratic, Islamic world with all the freedoms and associated "decadence" we see in the West, just so long as the U.S. had never interfered there, I don't think you are seeing the whole picture.

Obviously the U.S. record in the Middle East is not spotless. But it's not as if we haven't been a force for good there on more than one occasion. The Suez Crisis comes to mind immediately, as does Desert Shield/Storm. Our record there isn't better or worse than our record in, say, Central and South America, yet for some reason, Nicaraguans and Chileans aren't blowing themselves up in Times Square.
I wasn't saying they should skip intelligence collection, please re-read my comment above. The intelligence agencies exist and are needed for a reason, and they should collect/process information etc - that is their job, isn't it?. No-one is disagreeing with that. However, they should do it via proper legal channels, and do it with valid reason - not just collect all information on everyone en-masse. And the laws governing these should be transparent.
OK, I can buy that. However, I have to ask, why use a map? Wouldn't it be better practice to ditch that as well?
The simplest and most direct springboard would be "There is no taxation without representation" however that is a whole different (and more volatile) debate.

The UN Human Rights Council[1] would probably be the highest authority to appeal to, considering they have enshrined many rights as natural human rights that are inviolable and universally applicable -- for example freedom of association and assembly, freedom of expression, freedom of belief, Women's rights, and so forth. Many nations don't recognize these rights (and quite a few don't recognize the UN's authority) and the UN's ability to enforce respect of these rights is quite non-existent, but it's a good place to start.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Human_Rights_Cou...
3 Tips that improved my jogging and how they will make me a better developer
(Too late to edit post)

You can also achieve glitch-free focus-follows mouse using active input grabs. You don't even need to continuously grab them; you need only grab for the first event of each sequence of keyboard / mouse events.
Tech worker here. I discarded my smartphone in favor of a brick dumbphone. I have a car GPS unit that I use sometimes, and I also use Google Maps, but I am starting to use paper maps quite frequently. Both for the backcountry, and driving around in the backcountry.

Personally, I am trying to be selective about the technology I employ, based on what I get out of it. Vacuums? Check. Digital cameras? Check. Smartphones? Not sold on it, and I had one for a few years.

There's more of us than you think, and we don't appreciate the jab at the quality of our work.
I can't speak for you (I'm immersed in a bunch of "privilege" already), but the actual concrete effect on my civil liberties, even since 9/11, has been exactly zero.

Remember we oppose tools such as these based on what the government might be able to do with them to abuse their citizens, just like we field militaries based on what other nations might be able to do.

So far your Salafi army example applies in reverse as well: The U.S. government hasn't been running around actually repressing the citizenry. Certainly we should take measures to ensure they can't, but as long as we're worrying about what people might do then I don't see why it's shameful to worry about what Islamists might do as well.
True, but it's also not a war crime.
No "e" in the name? Check.

Yup. Meets all the qualifications for a Yahoo! purchase.
Indeed. Consider someone is planning on going to an Occupy Wall Street protest. Say that the government is monitoring that persons emails and finds that the person wrote to a fellow protester: "man, fuck corporations, I can't wait to try and bring them down on xday." Now the people reading that private email decide that this message constitutes enough of a threat to act on. They send the police over to that guy's place on the day of the protest and have the police detain him for the rest of the day. They let him go once the protests wind down without incident.

Now I don't think anyone actually committed a crime in that scenario, but it is easy to see how such powers could be used to seriously hinder the democratic process.
By all three branches, do you mean:

1. A handful of the most senior (see also: most gerrymandered) members of the intelligence committee informed of this.

2. A secret ruling from a secret FISA court.

3. Obama.
Even Scandinavian Americans act like this.

It's not politeness it's a culturally ingrained pathological aversion to interacting with strangers.
I'm not surprised you don't want to argue it if your source is that revisionist diatribe. According to the article it's certain that Aisha went on to be an incredible stateswoman but equivalent sources that say she was 9 when [she and] Mohammed consummated their marriage can't be trusted?

Also it cunningly ignores Mohammed's [other] documented rapes - like Saffiyah - and breaking of the rules he'd laid down (taking more than 4 wives, taking the wife of his [adopted] son). Such records paint a pretty consistent picture.