skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a Dreamcast owner I know that sometimes the life of a console exceeds expectations, Requiring constant connection is unfair to the user.
The Ultimate Guide to Effective Guest Blogging [Free Template]
Give it two or three presidencies, and it could very well be an actual thing that happens here. You don't have to disappear a lot of people, just enough to get the word out. Putin doesn't have to kill a lot of people with polonium-210, just one or two public cases does the trick.

The future looks obvious: don't fight the state, don't disagree with the state, or else. It's a fascism model, very similar to what Russia currently has (how ironic is that end result?!?). We have the widening rich / poor issue and oligarch class to go with it (which is very common under highly industrialized fascist nations).
He'll still be talking about it, that's for sure. As in "WTF Barry, how could you let this get out, you said no one would ever know!?!?!"
I don't know how effective it will be, but until something changes, I plan on very vocally being a one-issue voter. I will vote for, and donate to the campaigns of, anyone who will do something to rein in the surveillance monster, and I will make sure that my sitting representative and senators are aware of this.

Unfortunately, one of my senators is Dianne "It's called defending America" Feinstein, and she's got her job for another 5 years, so I'm not expecting much in her case.
Let me get this straight, when you receive an NSL from the FBI (executive branch) then you are not allowed by law to contest it in court (because of the gag order) without fearing repercussions for violating the gag order by revealing the NSL to the executive branch? Where are the checks and balances??
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I'm not asking you to feel sorry for them; I'm just asking what you would do if you had their job. Saying you wouldn't take that job is beside the point; they literally don't have the option of explaining themselves fully. The number of people who are empowered to declassify information is very small in comparison to the number of people who are empowered or mandated to classify it.
Or Bitmessage, that provides not only encryption but also secrecy and deniability.

https://bitmessage.org/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_dTotavJZ8
I think because the majority of HN users are American and brought up believing in the eternal goodness of their nation and political leaders.

HNs from Eastern Europe, the Middle East of even parts of Asia however like me (and you?) are probably not surprised because we're raised to believe that the government is always listening in on everything and inherently corrupt.

I could be mistaken though.
If you see something, say something.

That's funny. That's the slogan they have plastered all over New York's subway system.
Earlier this year I was talking to a European friend presently living in China, who is pretty passionate about human rights issues, privacy policies, freedom, and so on. He said he wouldn't ever set on American soil, because he couldn't be arsed going through the mess of immigration policies and aggressive surveillance and all that. I remember I there and then called him up on it: that's not so, China is way more of a police state than America. I remember he replied something to the effect of "The difference is, the Chinese people pretty much know about it -- it's an open secret, and they're fine with it, they've accepted it -- Americans aren't even aware what's happening to them". That was that, but I thought still America is better: unlike in China where if you have any hopes of making it big as a company you pretty much need to play buddy-buddy with the government and accept that the gov't will exercise some control where it suits them. Turns out I'm wrong here too, seeing as Verizon, Facebook, Google, Dropbox play buddy-buddy with the gov't here as well.

This raises an interesting question: to make it big as a company, and not yield to whatever gov't requests ask of you, is it possible to for a company to survive here in America?
Isn't that the reason they seized Dotcom's assets? They had no legal basis for that.
I'm not sure what my emotional reluctance to be harmed has to do with whether this (in the hypothetical world I've constructed) is a net boon for society.
> If the government has a broader voluntary national security program

Why was the word voluntary in there?
Since you're streaming the input dataset you may want to explore the option of mmap()ing the files and using cudaHostRegister()/cudaHostUnregister() and letting the GPU operate directly on CPU memory rather than copying it over. Should saturate the PCIe bus, which is way faster than a disk.
Doesn't anyone wonder HOW the Guardian got access to those documents? Not only classified, but also to not be shared with foreign allies.

Conspiracy theory:
If I were a Chinese official whose team obtained a truckload of these docs - and given the recent rhetoric coming out of Washington, wouldn't that be the perfect punch in the nuts?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5837529
An important thing to know here is how compartmentalization works.

On one hand, it's to help limit classified information to those with a need-to-know.

On the other hand, it's used to mislead oversight and limit the visible scope of an overall goal.

So while it may be technically true that PRISM is only doing x, there may be a separate compartment (called, say FROGBUTT or whatever) that performs the sister role of y in support of PRISM.

This is how intelligence agencies hide and mislead the public. They say "Yeah, we do have a program called FROGBUTT that collects call metadata, but we don't collect personal information or examine the contents of a call." What they don't mention is that they have another companion program called LIZARDDICK that does collect that accompanying personal information, and they have yet another program called COWBONG that collects the contents of calls.

This is how this work. Plausible deniability, onion layers, confusion. Combine this with the fact they periodically change compartment program names, and it gets exponential.

See also: RAGTIME, THINTHREAD, STELLAR WIND, TRAILBLAZER, etc
Only two sane choices.

Fight or flight.

1) Speak out, set up organizations like the EFF or similar to fight for privacy. Or advocate on behalf of such organizations. Work the politicians however you can, to whatever extent that might help. Encourage the people you know to do the same; encourage people to give a shit again. Explain why it's important to fight this.

2) Try to leave the US, or at least begin disappearing yourself. Leave less of a trail. Communicate as little as necessary over the phone or digitally, and keep it strictly business (so to speak). Use good encryption wherever you can. Encourage the people you know to do the same.

Either option is valid, both are entirely personal, moral choices. Some people stayed when the Iron Curtain went up in Russia and tried to fight it, some fled; ditto Germany, China, Vietnam, Venezuela, Cuba, and so on.
Tee-hee! I hereby waive my copyright interest in the comment above and offer it up freely for this purpose if anyone feels like implementing it :-p
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> disturbing both that it exists and that our government can't keep highly sensitive secrets

Why could it be disturbing that a government's officials can't keep secrets about cases where they abuse their power or act against the public interest? Isn't that how democratic institutions are supposed to be designed?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maher_Arar

Yes, he's Canadian, but still.
I'm not really sure what you're getting at. I acknowledged efficacy in my comment. Individual reluctance to be harmed has almost nothing to do with the calculation of whether it's overall a better world with the policy or without.
Ugh... another note-taking app. How does this non-innovation make frontpage news at Techmeme and other places? I don't get it.

Make an app that takes notes FOR me, automatically, without me having to even think about it, and I'll pay $5 for that. Seriously, we've been making note-taking apps since the dawn of the text editor. It's a solved problem. Move along.
Probably not. Just look at Qwest.
Just need to ensure a proper counter measure is (1) available and (2) legal.
We have been operating such a "warrant canary" since 2006:

http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt

Some additional details - we update the document weekly, and include a non-vague news item from the financial press that we could not have known about - this proves that these are not being pre-populated, or published automatically, etc.

Further, we replicate these to our non-US (Zurich, Hong Kong) locations so that multiple court jurisdictions are required to coerce them to be created falsely.

I wonder how the canton of Zurich would rule in such a case ?
The page mentions what they do but not WHERE they do it ...
Aha. So, now, since you haven't disarmed yet, your government is still afraid of you, right? And they wouldn't, say, break the constitution and unlawfully spy on all their citizens, now, would they? Oh wait, they do! So how did the guns prevent it?
Yate does voice/video/xmpp. the Yate-Qt4 client is incredible under linux, and the Windows/Mac ports are awesome as well.
U.S. Government creates jobs for data warehouse experts and recent CS grads
oh yeah, http://yate.ro is the address.
They're doing that now... bit too late..
But who's going to believe they needed a nuke to blast a few flies?
He may have legal immunity, but pulling stuff like that can easily make him into a pariah making certain he never again accomplishes anything in senate.
For YouTube? The 'tone' of YouTube comments is different from that of, say, web sites or regular emails, so one could guess that their software to parse the comments and get real information from them wasn't good enough to be worth it before.
If I were a spook, I would throw myself under a bus.

Barring that, I would just keep my mouth shut if I were in an unprivileged position like that. If I don't have permission to declassify it, what business is it of mine to say that the public does not have the full picture? I can't imagine even saying that much isn't frowned upon. No, I imagine any official statement to the effect of "you don't know everything" is only authorized very carefully.

There is no real "partial explanation" option here. There are only full explanations, and unverifiable PR spin. Nothing in between. Unverifiable PR spin is the only option? Tough shit, I am not satisfied.
I used to live in a (now ex-)communist country, where state authorities blatantly breaching citizens' privacy and spying on their every activity was pretty much usual.

You're in great error thinking this has something -- anything -- to do with a president in particular, or with a few people at the top of the decision-making chain. It doesn't. My own country changed two dictators (and a handful of "democratic" regimes afterwards) without this matter being solved.

It's a combination of two things:

* A large block that supports such decisions and even actively pushes for them. The elected President will only be there to implement them for two terms at most, but the people supporting them have no cap on their term. Since two presidents from two different parties (it doesn't help that they're basically the only two parties you have...) did similar shit, it's only safe to assume that either both parties have such groups, or that the groups who are supporting them aren't affiliated to any party in particular.
* Woeful lack of alternatives from your voters and, quite possibly, misinformed voting (although the second is something I can only intuitively state, as I don't live in the US). The people who deal in power are greedy; if they had any reason to believe this kind of stuff would have their asses bust out of office, they'd stop doing it. However, my own experience tells me what they feel is that this kind of crap actually ensures their continuous tenure in their offices.

Also, while we would all wish everyone realized how dangerous this is, the sad truth is most people don't care, or don't realize the atrocity of it. We are a minority; a handful of well-educated people who can think for themselves and who can fully grasp the intrusiveness of such surveillance. Most people simply don't realize enough to care that "the State" (whatever the hell that is) knows who they were calling and when -- after all, who in the world has time to sift through all those pages of phone calls, eh?
Thinking of that George Orwell quote from 1984: “You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.”
Perhaps even in darkness!
So...I am going to just go on the record and say it.

I was an Obama supporter - both times.

But this crap....is definitely impeachable.

He blatantly made it sound nice, that we wouldn't sacrifice liberty for security and all this stuff.

But then all of these revelations - are you kidding me.

Someone has to pay - or many have to pay.

This is disgusting man.
Today is not a good day to post this, likely your message will get drowned in the NSA noise.

> I'm smarter than all my peers at work.

There's part of your problem. If it isn't true then you'll be looking down on those you need to work with on a daily basis and this will be a source of much frustration. And if it is true - which is definitely possible - then you will be frustrated because of that.

Wherever you go make sure you fix this, either by having an accurate way to measure on how you relate to your peers so you don't end up looking down at them or by hooking up with a crowd that you'd be honored to work with - provided they'll have you.
Yes, they deny giving them direct access to their servers, but they admit that they will give them user data when it's requested.

The title is pretty misleading. Facebook isn't denying anything.
IMO, you can ignore the arguably bad reputation of The Atlantic, and focus all your critical faculties on the article itself [ which happens to be written by Bruce Schneier :]
Oh god, so he is a walrus..
"Congress unknowingly legalized"?

I'd say the U.S. has serious problems.
I second you there.
So exactly how are you demonstrating any use of your "critical facilities" by dismissing Schneier's entire article with no thought-through critisism, but just "Tha Atlantic? Meh…" followed by "There is nothing in this article." You clearly haven't _read_ the article, and have some axe to grind against the website. Fine - but don't try and claim this is your use of critical facilities.
You could also stop using the internet altogether, because someone is going to provide an analytics service, even if Google didn't.
Starting a company is not the same as running one
The problem is that to do that kind of queries, if you don't know beforehand what information you are looking for, then you need to store everything.

A comparison can be made to EU data retention laws which stipulate that carriers should keep call records for 6 months (or somehting like that. That is how the directive is implemented here, in Sweden).
I don't think the issue that people are up-in-arms about isn't just the surveillance thing.

It's also because it seemed as if Obama understood that there should be a delicate line between sacrificing liberty for security.

He also talks about people not wanting a 'big gov't...but a smarter gov't'.

But it is becoming increasingly clear that he was just talking smooth - but doing quite the opposite.

Please note, I am not an Obama hater. I supported him twice - I even have a Shepherd Fairy 'Change' poster.

But this is just disgusting man.

It's like someone that runs a campaign talking about how much they love guns, and how much they are going to protect gun ownership - then when they win, they talk a good talk, but then we find out that the government has been secretly buying up all the guns they can (to dry up supply) and closing down all the gun shops.
He tarnished the name of the Republican Party -- the party of Abolition, Civil Rights, Reagan, freedom, etc.

I never cease to be amazed at the uncritical association of Ronald Reagan with freedom. Take a good look at the graph below, especially the labels on the axes.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/US_incarc...

I don't want to get into a political derail because a) I see the larger point you're attempting to make and b) Reagan was extremely effective in advancing US itnerests and thus pretty successful in that aspect of his job, but in my view he treated freedom very much as a transferable commodity rather than a universal grant.
Google Analytics doesn't profile users - it's aggregate data for webmasters.
> It has a well-known and respected editorial process that can weigh the consequences of a leak versus the potential value to the public.

Unfortunately, the well-known and respected editorial process isn't transparent to the public. I'm not implying this is bad; just that it is vulnerable to being used for hushing up stuff, dusting important (but inconvenient) information under the "not important" carpet.
Interesting, I never knew about this. For those who want to read up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwest#Refusal_for_NSA_spying

In May 2006, USA Today reported that millions of telephone calling records had been handed over to the United States National Security Agency by AT&T Corp., Verizon, and BellSouth since September 11, 2001. This data has been used to create a database of all international and domestic calls. Qwest was allegedly the lone holdout, despite threats from the NSA that their refusal to cooperate may jeopardize future government contracts,[10] a decision which has earned them praise from those who oppose the NSA program.[11]

...

Former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, convicted of insider trading in April 2007, alleged in appeal documents that the NSA requested that Qwest participate in its wiretapping program _more than six months before September 11, 2001_. Nacchio recalls the meeting as occurring on February 27, 2001. Nacchio further claims that the NSA cancelled a lucrative contract with Qwest as a result of Qwest's refusal to participate in the wiretapping program

I've gotta say, although it sounds conspiratorial to question the validity of the allegations, recent events do make one think if there's more to the story of the charges and how they were brought about.
I don't usually do this but...

> Because people don't get disappeared off the street inside the U.S.

Fixed that for you.
Yes we can! (but no we won't...)
Good idea. A similar plan would be that everyone starts a pen pal relationship with someone in Iran, Afganistan, Yemen, Gaza or somewhere similarly likely to attract attention and we send weekly emails and texts to them. If enough people do that it could be an annoyance for the spies. It would also be a good thing to do.
> IIRC this came out in the early 2000s from various NSA whistleblowers who were completely ignored like usual.

Well clearly the concerned just had their tinfoil hats too tight. /s

I wonder how long it will be until people start dismissing others as conspiracy theorist nutters for believing that the NSA is doing this shit. Days probably, I'll put money on 'under a week'.
Clark Kent has an interesting relationship with Windows phones ;)
The president has the sole power to go the media every single day and say "this is wrong".

He also has the power to bring to light any bill that is put on his desk for signature.

Obama grew everything Bush did. The TSA, the NSA, all have become far bigger and more "powerful" under Obama.

I'm not an idiot, I know congress is as much at fault. He is at fault for not fighting it - it's his job as president of this country.
Chinese Lantern Festival, Yuan Xiao Jie, Chinese Lantern Festival Celebration
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This has nothing to do with the services being free.
this always annoys me..

common practice in science papers, which is weird as the citations invariably have date.
America: This Is Why We Hate You
You stole my whole data. I never expected this. You are saying Iraq is a terrorsist country, Iran is a threaten to the world, North korea is not good. But what are you doing? Look at yourself. You are stealing all the information about everyone in th world. You are breaking into my privacy without my permission. American government not elected by me or my family or my firends or anyone of us. You call others terrorist, but the problem is you are wearing a yellow glass. That is why everything is yellow to you...
It's only a better world from the perspective of those that are not being tortured.

The fact that by massive voting imbalance those few being tortured would have 0 chance of stopping it does not begin to describe the injustices inherent in your proposed scheme.

Ethics and principles are hard to reconcile with statistics and calculations, by suggesting that there is a greater good for which you will discard your principles in a heartbeat you are devaluing everything.

The question then becomes where do you draw the line?

A few individuals? A few tens of individuals? A few hundred? A few thousand? As long as it is one person less than would be killed otherwise?

Best not to make that first step and stick to 'torture is bad, no matter what the upside'.