skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You seem to be assuming the government doesn't hire skilled computer crackers or, as need be, the occasional mafioso.
On the topic of technology ruining human interaction: I recently read an idea worth trying. When you go out with friends for drinks, take everyones phone and stack them face down with yours on top. The rule is the first person to grab their phone pays the tab. I used to make fun of friends that were engrossed with their phones by acting like I was texting on an invisible phone. But, this works much better.
> We should give foreigners rights that Americans enjoy.

Uhhh no. I pay taxes and uphold my civic responsibilities (jury duty, selective service, etc.).

I earn those rights.

Unless those foreigners decide to become US citizens and take on the same responsibilities, no, those rights do not extend to them.
Speaking of friends and family...

Once upon a time a friend of mine did this for me on his FreeBSD box. My username at his domain.com worked pretty well, but I couldn't send big attachments (this was on his dinky little 400Mhz box with a massive 40Gb WD drive).

It's terribly inconvenient, but if plenty of other people begin to do that already, I'm sure some nifty startup will create tools to automate the tedious bits.

Add a site too, and you have something a bit like a "presence-in-a-box" package, if you will, that you can run over your home cable/DSL/FiOS connection.
> I am curios about this. Is there any nation which has a better record that the US?

The US is middle-of-the-pack compared to other industrialized nations at lots of other things like http://www.economist.com/media/pdf/QUALITY_OF_LIFE.pdf. I would be surprised to find fewer than 10 places with better privacy protections.
If I were a programmer that wanted to damage the reputation of my employer, I'd embed a key in its software that made it look like the software was sending all user data to the NSA. Any denial would meet "well, there's a secret law making you deny it". The perfect crime...
I don't know why you'd assume it's specific intel of that. Classified info is literally anything that would be a risk to national security if released in an uncontrolled fashion. The 3 different tiers of U.S. classification are literally just the 3 different levels of damage that would accrue to U.S. national security, nothing more.

So in the case of programs like this, if the hypothetical terr'ists know about it, that lets them know services to avoid, or communications methods to avoid, etc., which might enable them to form networks that the NSA would otherwise have been able to unravel before their next terrorist attack.

So it's not completely inconceivable that there's a valid reason to apply classification standards.

I happen to think that the importance of transparency is such that we need to at least have that public discussion about what types of records NSA would be storing, searching, and examining.

But at the same time the NSA has literally been doing this for decades, Congress has had classified hearings for longer, and the Republic has refused to fall. I don't know for sure about classified courts, but neither would that surprise me too much.
As you read the first paragraph, remember that the "Justice Department" is the executive branch.
I've been trying to transition into using startpage. Is duckduckgo better?
It just depends on how much they want it. China has built decent knock-offs for search engines, email, social network, etc. without much trouble. And as a bonus they've helped grow their software industry.
The blatant disregard for us shown by our government is really the worst part about all this. No way to make an informed decision about anything.

This whole "we know better than you" thing:

Well of course you do, you're spying on us and doing all sorts of other horrible things in secret and not telling us!
Hope to see European start ups, preferrably in Sweden, do that. They can start with some open source like AtMail or Wordpress and build.

Note that a .com domain places the company under US laws. There has been an example of a UK teenager with a UK hosted website be trialled in US for piracy, because of his .com domain. Probably same for .net, .org and probably .perso. So criteria:
- European company
- Ideally with a very minority of US funds
- Not .com, preferably .se or .de.

Who's up ;) ?
I just assumed they have been spying on everyone since at least the warrantless wiretapping thing from a decade ago, if not longer.
So your banking system has no way of giving money to an organization you want to support, and you're calling us "very cute"? That makes a lot of sense.
Assange: US rule of law suffering 'calamitous collapse'
This is different than Sedgewick's class but looks interesting.

Locking the class isn't Coursera-wide. I actually took the Algs part II class, but can't access the videos anymore, while other classes that have been over for much longer (e.g. the Scala course) are still available.

And some courses have video downloading disabled altogether for some reason, e.g. High-performance scientific computing.
> I've long thought that if there was one law you could pass that would fix the most about what's wrong in Washington today, it would be to require that representatives live in their districts full-time, and conduct congressional business electronically via web or videoconference.

The House was originally intended to have a very low ratio of population to representation. Had that ratio been maintained, gerrymandering would be almost impossible, and every neighborhood would have a fair shot at electing someone from their social and/or ethnic group. It would also raise the cost of buying Congress.
Greenwald of all people should just redact and spill it. He's under no legal bar toward publishing that material (OBVIOUSLY, as he's already published TS) and he can simply redact anything he's that worried about.

By Greenwald's own logic I shouldn't have to "just trust him" either, no? Be transparent, spill the beans! Or is there an ulterior motive?
Much of the lighting I do is very much direct lighting; softboxen and other play-it-safe modifiers have their place, but you couldn't emulate, say, Karsh's style with them. And the inverse-square law is your friend, not your enemy. Light is merely a tool to get the shadows in the right places.
Vanilla chess can be a hard sell at game nights. I'd recommend a variant: Bughouse. This is a lovely (and madcap) game that can be played with four people in teams of two.

It's played as two simultaneous games of chess, with one player on a team playing white on one board and the other player playing black on the other. The twist is that any piece captured by your partner can be placed on your own board instead of a normal move (with a few restrictions).

The games aren't synchronized, and you'll need two chess clocks (one for each board) to keep things cracking along. The clocks are usually set to blitz times (such as five minutes per player), and either player on a team running out of time results in a loss.

http://www.chessvariants.org/multiplayer.dir/tandem.html

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

Lots of fun, and should be good for a team event.
I make a lot of assumptions about government, but I at least have experience to back those up.
I encrypt some data with gpg -c before storing it online (offsite backups are useful after all). However I'm now contemplating whether my password is vulnerable to brute forcing. May need even more bits of entropy, while still being able to remember it in case the backup needs to be restored on a fresh system.
Those foreigners usually have those responsibilities in their own countries.

The same works the other way around.

Wouldn't it make sense to have reciprocity so it ends up being a game of citizen collaboration, rather than of competition (as in many other areas of international diplomacy and law)?
It was a fucking village, why wouldn't there be women and children there? Are you saying that they did not realize a village was a village?

Sometimes incompetence is as bad as malice.
Comparing all the governments in the world, and highlighting some pretty obvious ones like China, Russia, Iran, North Korea.. the fact that the FISA courts even exist, at all, for a country as steadily in the cross-hairs as the USA, is amazing. I would dare to say that you're more protected from government sponsored surveillance activities, inside the US, than anywhere else. And you don't even have to be a citizen. If folks bother to read DNI Clappers release.. and actually absorb it, really read it, you might recognize how far we actually are from that amazingly revealing and horrifying reddit post.
Gem install nsa_panel to add an NSA backdoor to your webapp
Million Dollar Illusion
I'm not entirely sure what I'd search for so I figure I might as well ask here. When a key won't fit in redis, does redis remove the least active key(s) to make room? And is there a way to persist the removed keys to disk to possibly be retrieved at a later date? That way the most active keys remain in memory while the least active keys are still available.
I've had providing comfort to distressed people blow up in my face twice before along with some quite unpleasant accusations. And I know of other people who've had similar experiences. An old scout master a few houses down from mine when I was growing up was accused of abusing this kid who thought very highly of him when he left the area he used to live in - the kid eventually admitting he'd just made it up. I think the kid thought of him as a kind of father figure and when he left viewed it as abandonment.

Helping upset people exposes you to risk. If their life is messed up to the degree that they're crying in public, there may well be a reason in terms of how those around them have tended to treat them, how they've learned to treat others, and how they manage their personal life.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying do or don't do it. But if you are going to do it spare a thought to your liabilities. In my experience upset people stand a massively above average chance of attacking you socially. Don't go (or talk!) anywhere alone with them, don't give them your name, don't touch them, don't tell them where you live. Try to avoid talking to children at all, that's a whole bucket of crap you don't want to mess with.

You only have to comfort the wrong person once to do incredibly damage to your social and professional life. Think very carefully before you involve yourself in anyone else's life.

Personally I don't do it for anyone I don't know well and consider to be fairly stable anymore, it's just not worth the risk to me.
Nope. It's a public key, which by design, is able to be shown publicly.
Many words, and no numbers.
This begs the question - what's out there that America fears so much as to carry attacks like this out?
ashleyblackmore, the initial news stories seemed to imply voluntary, wide-scale, direct access to Google's (and other's) data by the NSA. I genuinely thought that sounded wrong and against the bent of Google--both its execs and the rank and file employees. In the last few days, more recent stories have indicated that it's more like compelled, limited FISA requests, which all US companies are legally required to respond to. See Yahoo's recent post at http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/52491403007/setting-the-record-... which also points in this direction.

Compelled and limited is a very different story than voluntary, wide-scale, and direct. Do I like FISA? No, I think it sucks. FISA orders come with a gag order, and laws that compel secrecy like that should be struck down, in my opinion. But in recent days, you've heard the CEO of Google say that they haven't gotten the sort of broad requests that (say) Verizon got, and that Google can and does push back on requests that they consider too broad.

I think the proper response to this issue should be frustration with bad laws, and calling your Senator or Representative in Congress to tell them that.
Lately all these PR statements from the companies involved are so carefully structured that they can be interrpreted 2 clear ways.

1) Face Value. Don't look into the wording and just see that so many companies "accused," are not involved.

2) Semantics. Look at the wording for hidden meanings, possibility of a gag order, and these companies are (in reference to this article) involuntarily involved.

I think they are general so the person reading it will take it as they want. I posted a "what will you do now," post on here [0], because that's really what this comes down to. I agree with most that I've ALWAYS assumed we were all monitored, but as I've said many times....it's not what they know, it's what they can prove in court (that's why I'm thankful CISPA got blocked...it was kinda like legalizing what was already going on to be able to use what they know in court).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5842556
I actually wonder to what extent Facebook really planned Poke. The way it was always described, a small team built it over the course of a weekend- I can see it being a random project people decided to do that got launched without any major strategy behind it.
Parts of NSA's PRISM program declassified
Universal jurisdiction[1] is a fairly new concept, and there definitely precedents. The Nuremburg trials are notably the first major application of jurisdiction over a distinctly separate, foreign and sovereign nation.

Most things that qualify as precedents are predominantly rulings on genocide, crimes against humanity, extrajudicial executions, war crimes, torture and forced disappearances.

The impact of universal jurisdiction is not simple, in fact it flies in the face of Westphalian soverignty[2] in the sense that it destroys it utterly, potentially disrupting over four centuries of precedent and denying nations' inherent right to self-determination.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_jurisdiction

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_sovereignty
Derek, Congrats on the launch! Just curious why you decided to launch with 16 books instead of just one or two? This seems to run counter to the Lean Startup/MVP approach. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Thank you!
It's not based on a technology. It's based on this sort of idea of transient photography- compare it to Instagram where everyone carefully curates every photo and ensures it has the right filter, etc. etc.- people Snapchat photos of themselves making stupid faces to each other.

I'm not saying that makes it worth $1bn, but I think the criteria is different than you make out.
> Not nessasarilly. I suspect that in home wifi will continue to be common

Home WiFi has been widespread for at least a decade, and the UX for bypassing NAT is worse than ever. UPnP still comes disabled or broken, if at all.

You could build a better experience, but you will never, ever get Microsoft, Apple, Google, Cisco, or Belkin to cooperate, so we're still DOA- the curious need to learn a shitload of scary tech or buy new equipment.
Alada Venganza.
Check out http://www.doingbusiness.org/rankings

That IFC "Ease of Doing Business" index is quite well-researched. That has better information than my books, for direct comparisons like you're asking.
You won't do it. I'm not sure that's quite the same thing. I found that my social interactions improved greatly when I stopped going to the effort of making myself be open with people and started being vastly more selective in who was worth the time.
If you have 25mins to spare I would suggest watching the whole Middlebury Commencement speech from which this was adapted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgGzz3fKINA&feature=share
Here is the source:

https://www.eff.org/sites/default/files/filenode/doj_opposit...

I. This Court Does Not Have Jurisdiction Over This Motion
II. The Opinion at Issue Is Sealed Pursuant to This Court’s Rules
III. This Court Should Not Vacate the Seal on the Opinion
IV. The Fact That Movant May Be Unsuccessful in the District Court in Compelling the
Department of Justice to Release a Classified, Sealed FISC Opinion Does Not Mean
That Plaintiff Faces a “Catch-22”

The release is really sticky though, this part really caugh my attention:

>"Moreover, even if this Court had
jurisdiction over this Motion, it should deny it, rather than allow another court to determine
whether any portions of its opinion should be released under FOIA. Any such release would be
incomplete and quite possibly misleading to the public about the role of this Court and the issues
discussed in the opinion."
Regarding mapping, note I said I don't rely on point-A-to-B directions for local trips. For long trips where I am not familiar with my destination, I typically plug it into Google Maps (that might change now, though I know of no appropriate substitute) and study the route, comparing alternatives. I write my route, both ways, on a single piece of paper. By studying my route, I am aware of confusing interchanges and such ahead of time. If I think a turn will sneak up on me, I write down the preceding streets intersected. Often the act of writing my route down means I never have to refer to the paper on the trip, a nice perk. I always could call the place if I get a little lost.

On not using smartphones and being on this website ... I don't see the contradiction. I am a software developer, mainly working on sever-side software and some desktop development tools. The skills I claim to know (Erlang, JavaScript, Python, software design in the large ...) I know very well. No conveniences or lack thereof are going to change that. I don't really develop for mobile, except incidentally. My computing happens at a desktop or on a laptop, and I don't feel my experience or knowledge are limited, except in the mobile sphere. Even if all consumer computing were to move to mobile, there would still be lots of server-side software to be programmed.

There's a whole lot of computing that happens outside of desktops, mobile devices, and networked services. I know little about firmware development and manufacturing software as well, for instance.

I noticed you suggest you wouldn't care for my code ... it's true that best software I've written has not been open source, and I have a nasty habit of pulling down any project I am not very proud of. Peruse at your leisure: https://github.com/oinksoft
Short answer: No.

Long answer: No, because this community was designed by influential people, attracts even more influential people of similar interests and professional savvy, and is maintained (despite some users' thoughts to the contrary) much more efficiently than most other forums. The only well known forum that's more strict and efficient in terms of staying on topic and not devolving into trolling would be Stack Exchange.

Tell you what, why don't you strike out on your own and make a new community? You can make a splinter group like programmers.stackexchange did with Stack Overflow. You can even make it clear in your guidelines that the only things you can discuss are:

• algorithms and data structures

• languages and frameworks

• technology news involving at least one startup

• weekend projects designed and deployed by users

• news in any of the hard sciences

You can also make it clear that

• politics

• techish things but really more like politics

• blog posts not including code

will be vigorously flagged and shot down. Try it?
The point that drove it home is that businesses aren't in t business of "creating jobs." We're in it to make money. I hire when it hurts. I don't hire when I have an excess of cash.

If tax rates were higher I'd hire people, buy office space or equipment. Anything to keep me from having to just gift it to the idjits in Washington.
The story of the Emperor's New Clothes is not a story about a naked emperor. He was naked all along. Everyone could see he was naked. Yet nobody spoke of it.

It is about how one unsophisticated, unvested, powerless person pointed out the fact that everyone up to that point had been ignoring. From then on, nobody could ignore it. That is what we are experiencing now.
Exactly. I was looking at the time every ten minutes, waiting for the lameness to end.
Vine surpasses Instagram in total daily shares on Twitter
Far more than a decade ago.

I mean Jesus, you kids act like the government has been slowly and monotonically eroding privacy rights since 1789. :)

Go read about the Church Committee

Go read about HUAC.

Go read about when we locked up the Nisei.

And I'm not saying any of this to justify anything that's happening today. What I am saying is that IT'S BEEN MUCH WORSE BEFORE, and we STILL FIXED IT ANYWAYS.

This isn't a ratchet-and-pawl fixture. Don't like something in the government? Go fix it! But stop acting like it's already been set in stone, or that everyone in government is the enemy of the people advancing some Illuminati conspiracy. By and large they're trying to do the right thing for the nation, who have interests far beyond what Greenwald or Michael Moore or Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh feels is important on any given day.
I completely agree. Our constitution represents the best thinking (at the time it was written, and it's if it still applies) of the best set of rules by which to treat people fairly.

Unfortunately, there are people that venerate the constitution that ignore its precursor document which states that we believe all men are created equal.

If all men are created equal, then they should be treated as such, unless we want to repeat the "some are more equal than others" line.
>>>> But if the Communist Party's goal in the abstract of overthrow of our government at some indefinite point in the future makes them illegal

Membership in CPUSA per se is not illegal. However, membership in this organisation may very well make the member unfit for employment both in the eyes of the government and in the eyes of his peers. Membership in Stormfront or KKK today in not illegal either, but I think you'd want to know if somebody in the government was a member.

>>>> Drawing a line between the CP and the NRA is surprisingly difficult.

Not difficult at all. NRA never been controlled by a totalitarian state led by the homicidal dictator, never performed mass massacres, never advocated totalitarian restrictions of human rights, never facilitated transfer of top secret defense information to the hands of the enemy. How hard is that?

>>>> My question to you is whether you think the Supreme Court got it wrong in Yates v. United States

No, I think they were absolutely right - people have the right to proclaim any crazy stuff they want, as long as it is not organizing and facilitating actual violence, it is protected by the 1st amendment. However, that does not mean advocating these crazy things would not have consequences for those people beyond governmental prosecution (or rather absence of it) for the speech. If you are advocating crazy stuff, be prepared that people would not want to associate with you or hire you.

>>>> After all the "cold dead hands" mantra is a threat to rebel if sufficient gun control laws are enforced.

If "sufficient control laws" - i.e. laws that violate the US Constitution and human rights - are being enforced, what one has left to do? Flee, submit or fight. It has nothing to do, however, with communist actions - they weren't some Tea Party activists going too far. Only use they had for the constitution was when it protected them personally, but if they ever succeeded, all constitution right were to be abolished immediately - look at any communist state.
This doesn't try to game the front page, does it? Does it operate as a network outside of Hacker News, or do you "upvote for upvote" to get notice on your Show HN link?