skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do I host a static website on Google App Engine?
I've been trying to run my website off of google app engine, but can't get it working properly. I can get the index page to show up, but I can't seem to manage to get the other pages to work such as about, contact, etc. I've gone through the documentation, googling it to no avail. Does anyone know a proper way to host a static website using google app engine?
I don't remember just where
I got 'gumment', but I did
spend a lot of time in Tennessee!

But, I stand corrected and more
highly polished before the
more sensitive HN audience and
will use 'government' (cough,
cough, upchuck).

But we should always keep in
mind who's paying the bills:
They are supposed to be working
for us.
Well, these denials were just proven to be false by a statement issued by James Clapper, the US Director of National Intelligence. The statement confirms the existence and active use of the program, though he insists that the data is only used for targeting non-US persons. Here is his statement:

"The Guardian and The Washington Post articles refer to collection of communications pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. They contain numerous inaccuracies.

Section 702 is a provision of FISA that is designed to facilitate the acquisition of foreign intelligence information concerning non-U.S. persons located outside the United States. It cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, any other U.S. person, or anyone located within the United States.

Activities authorized by Section 702 are subject to oversight by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the Executive Branch, and Congress. They involve extensive procedures, specifically approved by the court, to ensure that only non-U.S. persons outside the U.S. are targeted, and that minimize the acquisition, retention and dissemination of incidentally acquired information about U.S. persons.

Section 702 was recently reauthorized by Congress after extensive hearings and debate.

Information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable foreign intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats.

The unauthorized disclosure of information about this important and entirely legal program is reprehensible and risks important protections for the security of Americans."

In any event, each of these denials were just refuted by the man in charge of the program. So much for trusting anything any of these companies say ever again.
That's not my reading - the previous two sentences discuss their compulsory responses to legally binding orders and subpoenas, and claim that such responses only ever relate to specific accounts.
It doesn't matter. If you use their services, you are under the watch of Big Brother. Now I have to go untangle the mess that is my integration with Google. VPS in Argentina here I come!
Yes, never, because a completely unaccountable corporatocracy is not a suitable replacement. Social democrats like myself believe in the power of a transparent, strong, supportive, accountable and fundamentally democratic state and are not going to give up fighting for it.

This isn't an argument to blow up the state in favour of an alternative which has proven itself often to be worse than the state in matters of privacy and libterty, it's a call to increase the public pressure for reform.
Were their only options really "comply or go to jail"? I feel like they should have done more.
Discussing programs like this publicly will have an impact on the behavior of our adversaries and make it more difficult for us to understand their intentions.

Tough. Work harder.

Surveillance programs like this one are consistently subject to safeguards that are designed to strike the appropriate balance between national security interests and civil liberties and privacy concerns

Words, words, words, words... blah, blah, blah, Fluffy.

YOU, Mr. Clapper and your agency, are accountable to US, you know, the "We The People" bit? And when you operate in the shadows, hidden away behind a wall of secrecy and classified information, you are breaking the bond between "your behavior" and "our ability to police that behavior". And that just is not acceptable. And don't give me this bullshit about Congress performing oversight. I trust Congress as far as I can throw it, and there's not a soul serving there that I voted for or that I consider to represent me. And I know a lot of other Americans feel the same way.

You spooks just need to learn to deal with the fact that we demand you operate in daylight, not in darkness, in the open, not behind a veil... WE are your Panopticon guards.

This is a free and open society, and we don't do shadow governments, Stasi like special police, and all that totalitarian bullshit. You assholes got caught doing something you shouldn't be doing, and if the people of this country have a shred of backbone left, you're going to be held accountable for it.
Good luck finding someone who is willing to risk his own reputation and livelihood, including hireability (after he and the company have the shit sued out of them by their shareholders, including institutional investors), as well as the livelihood of his employees.
Pronounced "deny."
Here's a Devil's Advocate position (not necessarily my personal beliefs, so please don't downvote based on disagreement. Just rip it to shreds instead!):

The fear of losing privacy to the government is based on the fear that this increased surveillance will be used by the government to smother dissent. This is a valid fear, but has the government yet used surveillance to smother dissent? If you can find a solid example of this, I'd like to see one (and for all I know, there could be many, I'm genuinely interested).

Until the government has been caught using surveillance to stifle dissent, it seems like increased surveillance only serves to reduce crime. Of course, there are illegal things that, in my opinion, should be legal, but this is a reason to petition the government for change, not break the law... perhaps a reduced ability to break pointless laws would galvanize the population into large-scale activism?

Fear of government surveillance is entirely fear of smothered dissent. We must make sure our fears of the latter are logically sound before we fear the former.

EDIT: Because I love arguing with myself, I'll point out that it's possible some wrongly illegal activities may be embarrassing for some individuals, and they would be hesitant to openly campaign for them. It still feels weird to argue for privacy on the grounds that people have a right to get away with certain things, hmm...

EDIT 2: 15 minutes and already COINTELPRO negated the argument. Good counter, thanks.

EDIT 3: Really appreciate that I seem to have gotten at least one upvote. I get really dismayed when politely-expressed unpopular opinions are downvoted, because I feel the best way to move the dialogue forward is to engage with opposing views, not hide them (even if your level of engagement is comprehensive refutation, that's still useful).
Would Steve Jobs Pass Your Interview?
Yes. They coerce agreement from the company you work for, that is covered by national security laws. They can arrest you for almost anything under the banner of national security. That's not an exaggeration. Now, you might get off eventually, but they can royally destroy your life with a flick of their power.
this sounds about right.
Most likely: the name "PRISM" is made up (or was never revealed to tech companies), and so when you ask any of the tech companies involved, they're like "Huh? What?"
Where can I find more about these straightforward routes?
I know from personal conversations, but I found a public article citing the same: http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2006-08-06/news/0608060158_...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeGD7r6s-zU
Petitions are easy. Its just a simple statement of your belief; but when they get big enough, we call them something else: ballots.
A (VERY) small view of government spyware, in realtime
As a project of mine, I've created a live DNS log of all traffic coming out of my home network, along with all IP mappings within my network that make the queries. This log shows, using just DNS information, how much information can be gained about somebody through just raw DNS data.
http://idwnetcloudcomputing.com/public/DNSLog.txt
Ask HN: anyone have experience with coding test sites?
We are trying to work out which coding test site to use.

Here's some of the services I have found so far.

https://www.prometric.com/
http://brainbench.com/
http://www.topcoder.com/
http://codility.com/

I'd value any personal experience of using these.

What factors would make one better than another?

thanks
I understand. But the world would be totally different and much better if people didn't cave in like this.
I think your comment is a great example of the smugness that I see too commonly in this bubble. You're basically saying, "we're so smart here in the valley, and that's why we're paid more." Your comment has nothing to do with what I was talking about.
About as likely to happen as the Texas secession.
Damage to perceived 'rights' is OK, as long as it is done efficiently.

What do you mean?
When NSLs have been challenged in court, the government has withdrawn
President Obama Visiting Silicon Valley Tonight
Comet Lovejoy flies into Sun to reveal solar secrets
There's two things here: a lie by omission if they are receiving the data via other agencies; and he's also saying that every other agency is spying on the American people. Someone might want to look into that last part, because I'm fine for taking the flashlight off of the NSA if every other agency is participating in this activity.

Sen. Feinstein, are you there?
How do you report a FB page admin deceased?
Nice find.

This paper seems to suggest that a possible counter attack is to create bogus edges and adjacencies--thus fucking with the utility of a (sparse) adjacency matrix or attempts at having useful window sizes for BFS or the like.

I suspect, though, that any sort of attempt at that would somehow be thwarted and just cause more pain on the attempting party.
Or, the NSA story reinforces why limited government is important.
Very few people don't cave when you put a gun to their head (NSA information demands like this require the direct supporting threat of violence as an or-else).
Thanks a lot for all the feedback, it's most appreciated.
- My logic was the tldr version would satisfy the busy ppl who didn't want to reach the whole thing
- I guess I agree about the scheduling (could have made this simpler), though I basically said 'anytime next week'.
- I've signed up for whatever I could find on meetup.com but are there any other particularly good events you can recommend?
- the 'evangelist' part of the pitch was probably a bad idea on my part and certainly not very clear. A lot of startups like to hire SIB alumni so I was just saying I could help bring awareness of a particular startup to SIB
- on the last point I think you also may have misinterpreted what I wrote. I am not looking for a startup job (I already had a senior management role at a good startup...left it to begin the journey of building something on my own).

anyways, thanks again for all the thoughtful points!
Actually, it isn't. Ambiguity in existing laws is exactly what has allowed the NSA to do what they've been doing.
Yes, absolute political suicide. That Obama guy will never be elected to any office ever again!

Oh, wait..
Wow. He's not even a good liar. You can see all sorts of soothing behavior and micro-expressions.

Contrast that to his direct confident demeanor when he's telling evasive truths.

Clapper is the Director of National Intelligence
Could you double hash passwords? First with bcrypt for actual security, and then a second time with SHA256 as a bureaucratic measure?
I agree you Sridhar, that you guys have taken a pretty solid approach. I've been fan of zoho for a long time but unfortunately dont really use any of your products right now. I used to use them few years back but somehow lost interest in zoho offerings, dont remember why. I do also think that the blog post is quite bitter. It reflects frustration more than it shows your strength... any case, wish you best of luck and I hope you guys concentrate on each vertical product with more focus, may be with a separate marketing tactic and domain.
There's a lot of good advice in this thread, and I would suggest studying much of this for your own edification. Cultivate curiosity!

That being said, the software industry has a bit of a fetish for giving these problems in interviews, even though they're rarely used in your job, and there's little evidence that performance on these problems is the best way to evaluate candidates.

If you want to be a smart-ass after the interview, study up on Bayes' Law, and lecture your interviewer about it. I.e., p(good programmer|pass interview puzzles) != p(pass interview puzzles|good programmer). If you hire someone because they did well on these problems, you later have data on how well they do at the company. However, you will lack data on how well someone does at the company if they don't do well on the problems (it could be they do just as well), so you have no evidence it's good at classifying candidates.

In particular, while I think interview problems are reasonably correlated with talent, I'm not convinced that they're a higher quality source of information than things like whiteboard exercises, real coding exercises, and code samples. It's also biased by things like recency (was your algorithms class last year?) and cramming (be sure to go through Cracking the Coding Interview exercises).
On my cell phone (hi NSA!), so I can't give a full rebuttal, but start with COINTELPRO:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
Certainly not at face value.
Instead, have to take what they say as
a starting point, a lead,
but one from possibly a quite
well informed source. Of course,
we can't really trust the source,
even if they are well informed.

But, heck, all we will get from the
NSA and their Utah computers are
leads that are just starting points.

As I recall, one of the US three
letter acronyms, well before
the Boston Marathon,
actually did
look into the two Boston
loser, wacko nutjobs and
then mostly dropped the effort.
Looks like we needed just better
police work.

Maybe this time the Russians
actually tried to help.
Good. Then Tchaikovsky's
music isn't the only good
thing from Russia! Maybe
next time the Russians will
try to fool us; they will
accumulate a track record,
and in time we will see.
Seems the link has changed:
http://theweek.com/article/index/245311/sources-nsa-sucks-in...
> I can believe the NSA has some of the best cryptoanalysts, but our best front-end hackers as well (do they have their own Meteor.js)?

Ozone Widget Framework developed by the NSA https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4960506

The hacker-movie-esque visuals don't hurt http://ozoneplatform.org/
| put in long hours and do very good work

And in addition, you have to have the mental fortitude for this kind of career. Despite not being "well-known" there is an intense amount of competition from a group of the most ambitious people in the world. Being able to compete at that level is insanely hard, much harder than than being a software engineer.

I have had the fortune in my life to attempt both careers. I went to a top-tier undergrad, and got a job as an associate consultant at a strategy firm directly out of college. And guess what? It was terrible. Working every day from 9am-2am 6 days a week, no time for friends, family, hobbies, fun of any kind. After a few years of that life, I went right back to doing software engineering. Would I be richer now had I stayed in it? Probably. But happier? no.

I think it's important to remember in the end that very very few people in the world do work that matters, whether they make "something" or not. I think about this a lot while listening to stories about 14 year old Bangladeshi factory workers making $3 a month to support their families and being padlocked inside factories that are on fire so our clothes are cheaper.

We are all very lucky to be born into a country that gives us the opportunity to do comfortable jobs and complain about them freely. Use work to make enough money do the things you care about outside of work, and for god sakes, travel.
How does this, in their response, not confirm the PRISM info in at least some way? Or am I meant to take this as "any confidential info is potentially dangerous"? And even then, are they admitting this is authentic confidential info?

>The unauthorized disclosure of a top secret U.S. court document threatens potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation.

>The article omits key information regarding how a classified intelligence collection program is used to prevent terrorist attacks and the numerous safeguards that protect privacy and civil liberties.

And that's exactly the transparency we're interested in. Help establish a bit of trust, because right now I trust the least trustworthy person I know more than the NSA.

And their last defense is FISA/FISC and they're still pretending that only applies to foreign nationals? Or is "only meant to be used on... foreign nationals"?
Wevorce tries to make divorce less painful
You're assuming a degree of intellectual and ethical consistency which I am extremely reluctant to ascribe to a sitting legislator.
I shewd EFF's link to an English major. He responded, "Come now, they've been spying on us for years."

The big news is that in rationalizing it we will develop a schism across the class line. Many of us are so poor, unlike the ranks of the increasing elite, that we'd gladly sell our privacy for coin to eat.

Build the money machine faster. How else are we to build gittip for the homeless without anonymous coin ?
Author of Patriot Act "Extremely Disturbed" by "Overbroad Interpretation" [pdf]
> Why does the NSA want so much information?

> Since the program is secret, it’s hard to say for sure. But the NSA is probably using a software technique called data mining to look for patterns that could be a sign of terrorist activity.

Mr. Lee is assuming a whole lot. I don't trust journalism that tries to steer me into thinking the government is just watching out for us, especially when they've just been caught spying on us.
This is a ridiculous post hoc justification.
Most get recruited right out of college, many people take the job on strong recommendation from an advisor or professor. The perks aren't on Google scale, but the pay is better than you'd expect and the feeling of purpose and patriotism is something no valley company can really match.

Once you are on the inside, you have daily interactions with technology that is 10 years ahead of anything on the outside, which is really hard to walk away from. Not to mention you probably married someone else with a clearance along the way.

If you do want to leave... all your accomplishments, achievements, and awards are locked up in an ISR (internal staffing resume), and you end up sending potential employers a half page CV listing something stupid like "Senior Computer Operator, Defense Department, Ft. Meade" that no recruiter is smart enough to parse.
One last thing, I enjoy these puzzles more than most, but I find it curious that an industry as data-driven as computing has never systematically evaluated its hiring procedures.

I suspect it's because only the largest companies could risk running two types of interviews, one with puzzles and one without, hiring equally from both, and then look at the data later. Even there, though they could absorb the hit, if they're wrong, they'll have made a bunch of low-quality hires...
The guy probably hasn't had to worry about such things for decades. He's an operations bureaucrat, and probably someone above him decided they could afford to burn him if the shit hit the fan (and by this point, they probably already knew some shit was heading toward the fan).
Take it to the courts.

The only way the NSA/FBI/Obama administration are actually going to give up any hard evidence is if compelled to.

The EFF is certainly attempting to do just that: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/confirmed-nsa-spying-m...
> I still get nuclear physics in "Nuclear Physics" article, amn't I?

Not at the same level of quality, because they also won't be deleting the nonsense crank pseudo-science version of "Nuclear Physics" which would confuse you terribly. Deleting crap is one of the best ways to make the project as a whole useful.
> everyone who calls themselves a programmer should own a copy

I use mathematica regularly, but do not have quite as strong an opinion as that.

Would you mind sharing your top three reasons or there about?
Your point is fair. Anytime we criticize a competitor, we risk being perceived as bitter, which is why I rarely post about Salesforce at all. However, I made an exception here because I felt customers should be educated that they aren't just making product choices, they are also making business model and organizational philosophy choices. My conviction is that our approach would result in a better outcome for customers in the long term. Of course, I can be wrong, and the only real proof is execution. Yes, we are focused squarely on execution - which is why I only post once in 6 months or so.
> Delete the garbage

Which is still deletionism.
> It only takes a couple of cranks to keep the biases in

The journal Nature disagrees.
Such a long, weak argument deserves only one retort: because they have no moral right to take or erode my life or liberty.

There's no convoluted justification you could ever come up with to rationally argue otherwise.
Jobs was an elitist, knows-better-than-you prick. AFAICT he was fine with this kind of "trust us" nanny state bullshit. Apple does the same "we'll decide for you" stuff by policy as a matter of course.

We can assume that Cook, who appeared behind Obama during The State of the Union, is probably on the same page. Highly powerful people know they can't fight the tide; and truly, why should they? The normal rules could never apply to them.
Wouldn't PRISM mean these data request reports are completely fabricated?
One way of interpreting his comments: We suck up all the data and then apply filters to remove domestic information. Although the NSA has access to information on the American people, it does not specifically target Americans and discards purely domestic information. As such, it is not "spying on the American people" so much as inflicting collateral damage on the privacy of the American people.

To a certain extent, this is understandable. The NSA may not trust Verizon's judgment on who a foreign national is. And the nature of a more specific request may reveal classified information -- e.g. if the NSA asked for "all calls to Libya" just prior to the bombing campaign, that may have revealed something was up.

That's not to say any of this is justified, or that the attempts to filter out domestic information are effective. Apparently, you have to be 49% foreign or less to be filtered out, whatever that means (http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/bombsh...).

But it's the explanation I would give if I were him.