skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Given all the contortions that politicians have to make just to get through the day, it wouldn't surprise me that Obama truly believes what he said back in 2007, but once he got into power he got an education on what the CIA/NSA is doing and he realized that either he can try to live up to these values and likely cause wildly unpredictable outcomes (some positive, some negative), or he can let it continue, given there were enough plausibly compelling reasons, despite the potential for abuse. thus - status quo reigns. truly change we can believe in, and a good example of how power corrupts. the military-industrial complex has a life of its own. thank you eisenhower.
Re:

"...I've nothing to hide".

"... I find it hard to care."

...

"...I hate math."

RESPONSE:

A name defines, sets boundaries, your name and your privacy; defines you exclusive of everything and everybody else. Without privacy, you have no skin, you are not interesting, you are insignificant.

"The cypherpunks credo is 'privacy through technology, not legislation.' The law of the land can be changed by the next administration. The Laws of mathematics are more rigid."
No it isn't. An iPhone and BMW cost the same thing in fly-over states that they cost in nice places. Maybe in a fly-over you're keeping 20% of your salary rather than 10% in the valley but the difference in salary probably means you still end up with more money in the valley.
The link between the U.S. government's program codenamed PRISM and Palantir's internal software called Prism is completely coincidental. If you take a look at their site, you will learn that Metropolis is Palantir's alias for their finance product[1]. This is obvious just looking at the page in question as it [2] describes how to add Timeseries data. Timeseries data is usually composed of information about stocks or derivatives.

I don't dispute that Palantir deals with much of the nation's intelligence, but attempting to draw a link between two pieces of software that happen to be named the same seems like pretty bad reporting to me. Even if there is a disclaimer at the top of the page.

Full Disclosure: I'm an ex-Palantir employee.

[1] http://www.palantir.com/platforms/#metropolis

[2] https://docs.palantir.com/metropolisdev/prism-overview.html#...
Apple, please solve the biggest fear for iOS developers
> Wouldn't giving servers the ability to tar package cachable static files so that all those files came down in one request improve the user experience further?

I suspect not all that much. You'd trade request overhead for untar overhead.
I'm feeling extremely impotent at this point to cause any meaningful change on this issue. It seems like the deck is stacked. We have the ACLU and the EFF but it increasingly seems like a war that can't be won. We're being slowly inured to total surveillance and it doesn't seem like there's any way to turn back the clock. It seems like the furor will die down over this particular issue even though it seems obvious to me that there's almost certainly more odious levels of data collection than what the government was currently caught doing. Is there ANY solution or is this the new reality?
I wrote a little bit about this on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4844502

In short:

1) Term rewriting systems are a beautiful and powerful model of computation that a lot of people know nothing about.

2) The "everything is data" philosophy is life changing. This same philosophy can be seen in the Clojure community (there are more than a few Mathematica-isms that Rich has admitted being influenced by). Mathematica goes further to say that all data is expressions, which is really a subpoint of #1, but I think that data is the more fundamental important idea than expressions. Even though expressions have extremely wide applicability.

3) Having some mastery over the basics of Mathematica is like having a bunch of secret programming super powers. One time, I came across an exceedingly complex if/and/or/else clusterfuck and reduced it to a trivial truth table in only a few minutes of fiddling with Mathematica. There are lots of cases where experimenting in Mathematica was just a much faster way to understanding and solving a problem prior to implementation.
Most expensive military. If other countries were willing/able to throw that kind of money at military they'd have something at least that advanced.
#ironic
Awesome 404!

If you don't have time to make a game, then you can always RickRoll ur users... totally kidding :)
Somewhat off-topic, but to defend gcc against clang, here is a modern version of gcc with the correct warning option:

$ gcc-4.8 -std=gnu99 -Wall -o test test.c
test.c: In function 'main':
test.c:6:5: warning: suggest parentheses around comparison in operand of '&' [-Wparentheses]
if (foo & 0x80 == 0x80) {
^

gcc 4.9 will have colored diagnostics, too.

Cool project, though.
Guys, guys. Listen. They both start with a 'P'. We've cracked it. It's them. We can all unclench now.
Better time drop downs for ranges: jQuery Time Autocomplete
Logic dictates making the best choice over not choosing.
One of the most visible Palantir employees is Michael Lopp (aka Rands), ex-Apple and Borland engineering manager and now a director at Palantir.

Lopp is pretty visible, writing a blog (http://www.randsinrepose.com), publishing a few books, and speaking at numerous conferences.

But you're right, it seems Palantir takes a lot of it's culture from Apple as opposed to Google.
First thing that came to my mind was http://cryptome.org
Oh now that is a hilarious quote. Mark fucking Zuckerberg talking about other people lacking integrity!
Game of Thrones Lifesize Replica Iron Throne for $24,000 + $1,821 s&h
Hello, I'm a vaccination denier :)

I don't deny the science behind the vaccines, but the motives of the people who ultimately control the process. The same people have taken away the average person privacy IMHO will as easily take away say his capability to produce children. But I guess it's easier to close your eyes and keep imagining that the elite has the same moral as yours and would never do horrible things.
Back Up Route53 To S3
I love that even if the display is in 12 hours, I can type in a 24 hour value and it'll understand and format it correctly.
Whats wrong with preparing for nuclear war, especially if preparation is an effective deterrent to actual nuclear war. Ensuring a credible second strike ability is probably one of the more rational ethical actions someone can take outside of pacifism.

Of course creating a credible second strike ability is so easy ( merely hide x weapons with delivery systems controlled by PALs ) that it has been a solved problem from the 1960s.
We don’t have much time. The generation that grew up outside the Net is the last generation that can fix it without force.

http://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-t...
> How is this different than saying "if you want privacy don't share over the postal system" or "if you want privacy don't share over the phone"?

Posting something on a website is vastly different than direct person to person communication over the phone or mailing something. Phone calls and snail mail are transient things, the post office and phone company don't keep copies of your conversations and mail for later investigation whereas posting something on a website is communicating through a third party who stores everything in a database for later display, it's not transient, you'd be a fool to post something you want to remain private on Facebook, or any internet website. Phones and mail also enjoy legal protection that the Internet doesn't and Facebook isn't a carrier of transient information, it's a database that stores things possibly forever. They are nothing alike.
Thy also have a motto of "Do no evil". Just because they say something doesn't mean it's true.
> Electronic communications were clearly not considered by the authors of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights

But they did have communications and publications, yet they didn't put anything in the Constitution suggesting you have a right to privacy with regards to those things. And it's not like bank records, insurance records, etc, didn't exist back then. In the founder's day, the police could have asked a barkeep for his records to see when you came and went. Why is it suddenly so "abhorrent" when the government asks AT&T for the same sort of information (i.e. not your information, but information AT&T keeps about you)?

The issue here is that all of these data sources are third parties.
Books have been under DRM since the early days of "e-Books" on CD-ROM. It just wasn't called DRM back then.
This discussion revolves a lot around printer watermarking documents. It seems that it mostly concern color printers. Here is an advisory by the EFF which tested quite a few of them
https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d...
Errr, this sounds great as long as you limit your use to only one phone call or text message. Not long after that traffic analysis (what's enabled by capture of what sounds like the vast majority of the nation's telephone metadata as we gather is happening) will connect you to those you phone, making the apparent gains illusory.
They've been trying to legalize it as much as possible, so they can use all that data in Court. The same has been happening in US, too. That's why FBI wanted to legalize these backdoors.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/05/fbi-seeks-internet-...
We're currently adding in BitCoin / PayPal support right now -- nothing is perfect, but this is sort of a MVP.

After payment is accepted, we wipe our database columns with any user information as well, basically making it as hard as possible to identify users.
A Ruby guy goes to Erlang Factory Lite
That made me laugh, I didn't even think of the fact that you needed to use a credit card. I suppose you could get a prepaid card.
Nothing, by itself. Hopefully angry non-voting citizens will reach out politically by other means.
Wiretapping: The Onion already nailed it
Which cuts in favor of my point: Sweden had its own motivations for prosecuting Assagne.
What does any of this have to do with "hacker news"?
>But no. Free software is not business-oriented. He's a nut because of his privacy advocation; he must have something to hide. Let's just ignore him, and start startups and get everyone to accept our vendor lock-in and remain blissfully unaware how we're harming everyone.

Could you please expand on this?
The CIA's venture arm invested in Facebook and the political pressure is probably far greater than any pressure that small owners could generate (Thiel/In-q-tel owned a few percent by the time of the ipo)
I dont understand why more United States citizens aren't voting for the underdogs. In the last election, it was possible for the greens to "win" . If you want to protest, instead of not voting, vote for the least likely to win. It makes a statistical analysis of the "protest votes" possible.. Under some (eg, normal curves) statistical models, you assume that the non-sampled closely resemble the sampled (with some level of confidence). By not voting you're basically saying "dont worry, I am very much like the 'norm'" . By voting for the underdog you're helping to elucidate the fact that you are not represented by the main parties.
From Dictatorship to Democracy [pdf]
It should be illegal to have gag orders at this level. "We're going to abuse our power and make it illegal for you to tell anyone". Imagine if they make a law that they can just rape people and it's illegal to tell anyone.
Breaking News:

HN user 'mindcrime' calls Intelligence Chief "Reprehensible"
NSA's PRISM spy program, mining data from nine biggest Internet companies
Is Big Data turning government into 'Big Brother'?
And I know lots of older people who vote for what I consider stupid reasons, they vote for who there church tells them to, or because they are being lied to or can't understand how taxes work.

But certainly the most enthusiastic voters to me are the young ones. They are the ones who would actually protest, and put themselves in danger for what they really believe in.
I amused myself with a grumpy cat 404 http://heyes-jones.com/404
That's a very open statement, and I wish modern politicians were as accomodating to questions like that.
This doesn't seem all that different from what Google is doing with Google Now, except Yandex doesn't actually know when my flight is, so it can't serve up the card UI (or island UI) proactively, but has to rely on a search term.

The appointment booking thing got me a bit puzzled though - this requires pretty deep integration with whatever practice management software the doctor is using. The only workaround I can think of, is that they are relying on their Yandex Calendar service to power it. If so, not the best experience for vendors, and potentially a problem for consumers, as the two systems can be grossly out of sync.

Service booking in general is not as simply as it sounds - as a consumer, you have no idea if your appointment should be for 10 mins, 2 hours, something in between. Typically, a sort of inference is required on the part of the system to figure it out, usually, by asking person booking the appointment some questions. Such mappings are very tedious and industry/locale specific.
I don't know how common add-ons were in the NES era, but they were very common for the SNES (which was very similar to the NES power wise).

Games stopped embedding hardware when they went to discs. There is no way to put a parallel processor into a DVD.
yeah, I was going to say this as well. sometimes they ask for a phone number, and sometimes they don't.

I wonder what triggers it, maybe if a lot of different Google Accounts log in from that single IP, it assumes it's some open coffeeshop wifi or similar?
That's not how Palantir works. Palantir is a platform, if it were part of Prism the government would still be the one collecting and storing the data. They may have had a hand in setting the system up so that it integrates with that data but at the end of the day it would be no different than the government using IBM's or Oracle's big data tools.
Wow, this looks like a really cool plugin.
Disclaimer: I may have written it.
Pluggable LevelDB Interface Alternatives for Node.js
The government has to work within the law. This might not sound right, but they do. The current furore is more to do with how they interpret the law, and what the law is. So, two things you can do:

* Support organisations who can work within the law and know it better than you do, like the EFF and ORG

* Get involved at a more local level with those who make the law - your congressional representatives and their staff

It's a big world, and a big country, and you might not be able to affect the executive directly (after all that's what's doing the thing that's making us feel uncomfortable now), but the reason there are three branches of government is to limit the executive, and as individuals we can do that by using the law (that's what the EFF does), and by influencing the law, through your representatives.
Your Burnerphone is an interesting idea, but how does it compare to buying a prepaid wireless phone from a brick and morter store with cash?

Can your phones be recycled? What carrier are you using?
Well, very few members of HN community actually uses Sina Weibo, but we're aware of it, aren't we?
Obama Calls Surveillance Programs Legal and Limited
A conversation with Alexander Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies (2009)
Karp's vision for Palantir before he started it: "[The company] would do two things -- it would allow humans to find needles in hay stacks. Make the date intellegible to you and me, and by doing that would allow us to find bad people trying to destroy our society. And could be used to protect civil liberties, by making the data sets transparent, so that it's very clear what the government is doing and how they're doing, which is a particular passion of our company."
Sam Harris has impugned his character on twitter and his blog.

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/dear-fellow-liberal2
What I like is that people don't know what surveillance means. it's a french word, and being french myself, I happen to know that it means to oversee, to control, as in work, or to monitor, as in a medical patient. I think people think of surveillance as simply passive, but in French, it has an active component, to rectify wrong events. To me, NSA surveillance means NSA monitoring for the purpose of control.
riiight, he was forced to blockade the CSA after they seceded...
They have a really strong college recruiting organization, which seems to be how they hire most of their people, so glassdoor probably isn't as representative.

For the "FDE" positions, it's much closer to being onsite support/tech/contractor. I assure you Palantir is less shitty to interview for/work for than virtually any "traditional defense contractor", which is their comparison (I've never interviewed at Palantir, but know a lot of people there, including their recruiters, and have worked for the alternatives.)

This is all independent of their "mission". (I support national security but not unlimited monitoring of US citizens; It's annoying that stuff like PRISM deters good people from working for government, lowering our capability to respond, and thus hurting national security...)
Obama: If you can’t trust government, we’re going to have some problems
I was under the impression that the Constitution explicitly granted the federal government certain powers, and the 10th amendment clarified that if a power wasn't granted to the fed in the Constitution, it was because the power was retained by the states and the people. So the Constitution wouldn't need to grant the people a right to privacy. It was implicit, and even further emphasized by the 4th amendment.
I'd go further than that. A bunch of people are expressing surprise/outrage that a bunch of companies that spy on for profit you at the service of the advertising industry are sharing the fruits of that spying with the government for national security.
Pretend that you're the one hiring. You have two applicants that are very capable technically and both have the right attitude. The only difference is that one has a degree and the other does not. Now, who would you choose?
Show HN: frontail – tail -F output in browser
Seriously, there's a lot of FUD on this thread. Right now it's anecdotal evidence at best that there is a relationship there at all. But most people here seem to be talking about it as if it's already proven fact. Come on HN.
The law doesn't care what the average person thinks nor does reality. It's the persons responsibility to maintain his own privacy by not posting private information on a public website. If you post something on the Internet, it's going to get out there; people should know this by now and if they don't it's their own damn fault.
One less victim of what? Torture, or the thing torture is preventing? Anyway, the answer is trivial: you'd decide the same way you decide anything else with a marginal cost and a marginal benefit. If the country has to torture one person for a day to save a thousand people fifty quality-adjusted life-years each, it seems like an obvious win. OTOH, if it's five million people for one QALR, we've wasted far more years in torture than we've saved, and we'd have drawn the line somewhere lower.
So, since the government is indeed collecting an enormous amount of data -- it definitely makes it 'harder' to stay truly anonymous -- but this is a much more anonymous solution than anything else as you are making it as difficult as possible:

- New phone numbers.
- Different cell signal piggyback depending on where you're located.
- 30 day cell tower location tracking / SMS storage / phone call storage -- so in the worst case scenario you've got 30 days of conversation / messages stored.

If an entity wanted to track YOU, they'd have to do voice analysis of every call in the country / region, look for specific writing patterns / keywords in your sms messages, and then try to match things up (this would be really difficult, even with lots of information to go from).

Anyhow, it's definitely not a perfect solution, but one that really helps protect privacy.
The more government-ese, the higher the chance that it goes over-budget or never gets completed / never does what it was supposed to / is working but not usable in real world. I like that kind of text in things that should be never completed. I hope they also contract out each piece of it to a different country and lowest bidder.
Right, because the people in today USA are completely different then the people in East Germany 25 years ago. Information today is literally the ultimate power. "Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely"
You imply that HUGE SWATHS of what the Federal Government are unconstitutional, and that's complete bunk.

If you disagree, figure out a way to get a court case, or write to your representatives or try to become one. That's how it works.
Asteroid to Fly Within Moon's Orbit Tomorrow: Watch It Live Today
Also possibly of interest:

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt
Getting rid of the laws is the obvious move. If smoking pot is a felony, and 30% of the population has done it, then the law that makes smoking pot a felony is obviously a bad law.

A simple way to decide if a law is bad or not is to look at how many people break it each year. Any law that's broken by more than 1% of the population each year should be removed from the books.
The one without a degree has more to prove, and thus will work harder.

The one with a degree will feel some amount of entitlement - "I have a degree! Companies will want to hire me!" and thus will not work as hard.
This isn't true at all, Obama has been extremely effective at getting whatever he wants done. Lots of presidents in recent memory have made sweeping changes in how the government operates. He has enormous and specific powers relevant to most of the things he promised (and the things he didn't promise but his voters imagined he did), he just doesn't actually want to do them so he doesn't.
Meridian acquired for $26 million all cash
"they also have access to our communications" is too ambiguous for a discussion like this, it helps no one.
Update the Fourth Amendement for the 21st Century.
Expand the Fourth Amendment to specifically include DNA, documents, email, business records, .etc and to ensure that citizens can freely move within and exit/reenter the United States. Warrants must be public.
Although I do agree that today's events show that Stallman is right to be that much worried, I have to point out that his argument against face recognition is a weak one. Computer vision is superior to human in many aspects, and this is why the situation we 're facing is very complex.
How to Live in San Francisco on
As some one who's just interviewed with them for a "Forward Deployed SE, Government" internship position, I did ask what's up with the government in the title and what kind of work I'd do for them. They informed me that the word referred to one of the two products I'll be working on (Gotham over Metropolis) and that Gotham used to be called "Government", something that you can see on Wikipedia as well.

Now I'm not saying Gotham isn't used by gov't, I just wanted to explain what the word actually stood for.
Your vote is your mandate.

If you so choose not to give your mandate to anyone, that is up to you.

It is the only political power I have, and even though the statement is ignored or interpreted as apathy, the statement that you don't believe in any of those arseholes is just as valid as the statement that you do.

I, personally, cannot stand the "then vote for the least worst because at least the other guy won't get in" argument either. To me that's the root of the terrible politics we have in the UK and the US now.
> "He's saying don't be so naive to play in the hands of a system designed to deflect from taking real action to fix the erosion of civil liberties."

Conveniently, he is saying that every time somebody merely mentions a name.
A generic "how to find us" page