skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That would be an uncomfortable question to ask at the beginning of a long elevator ride, but it's no more uncomfortable than the following common and socially acceptable situation:

I'm at a fairly small club downtown. A woman is walking toward me, so I make eye contact and say "hi!".

She sits down next to me, and we begin to talk. She's very nice, but after a few minutes of conversation, I'm not attracted to her at all, and it's clear we have very little in common.

"Hacker789, you have a really cute smile. I'd love to get your number."

"Ah..."

I look down, and out of the corner of my eye, I see her nervously twisting her hair in her fingers.

I cringe just thinking about that, because it's happened to me before! But I would never shame her for asking me, and I would never charge her with making me feel "unsafe". That would make me into a villain.

And let's be clear—it can be dreadfully awkward to leave the table at a small club, often taking more than a minute to politely finish the task without hurting the other person's feelings too badly. It's even worse if your friend is at the table, happily talking to an acquaintance of the person you just rejected!

At least in an elevator, you're automatically free after the doors open.

Would I ever ask someone at the beginning of a long elevator ride a question that might make them uncomfortable? No, not if I could avoid it. In fact, I wouldn't ask anyone an uncomfortable question at the beginning of a long bus or train ride, either. But not every situation that has the potential to create discomfort is socially unacceptable; part of being a social creature is to take minor discomfort in stride, giving the other person the benefit of the doubt.

And the more frequently an uncomfortable situation happens to you, the better you get at handling it.
Isn't that like asking if the NSA is tapping into Newspapers...
Prepare to embrace Facebook video ads
Ok, but wasn't that like 6 years too late?
I agree with you, in principle. I would like to see less politics on HN as well. But I will admit to allowing myself to get sucked into a few of these debates... and this NSA one is a bit different in my mind. I mean, yeah, you're right that it doesn't necessarily need dozens of threads, but there are important aspects that link this to HN and our crowd. Especially the technological aspects of how to protect our data, and our users' data from PRISM and its ilk, and the sociological aspects of how to educate people on the importance of encryption and the like.
This is a really helpful and comprehensive list. Thank you! I've used knockout (and knockback) in the past to refactor a realtime backbone app, but I'm definitely going to give angular's tyres a kick for my next app.
It seems a quick run through the open positions at Palantir can tell you a lot more...

http://www.palantir.com/careers/OpenPositionLanding

"Embedded Analyst, Government: Canberra"
"Embedded Analyst, Government: London"
"Embedded Analyst, Government: New Zealand"
"Engineer, Developer Support Team (McLean, VA)"
"Forward Deployed Engineer: Singapore"
"Forward Deployed Software Engineer, Government: Berlin"
"Forward Deployed Software Engineer: Denmark"
"Forward Deployed Software Engineer: Finland"
"Forward Deployed Software Engineer: Norway"
"Forward Deployed Software Engineer: Stockholm"
Stealth Mode is a slow way to develop ideas
BSD is great, but if you're on a laptop, I have to say I can't recommend anything other than GNU+Linux. That is the only Unix-like system besides OS X I've run on my MacBook Air that has good power management. Everything works out of the box. Xubuntu is an excellent choice; the 13.04 release works flawlessly with all hardware and I easily get about 6+ hours of battery life out of a 1.5-year old Air.

I've tried OpenBSD on the same machine, and got decent power management with it. It's not as ubiquitous nor as supported in terms of a software perspective as FreeBSD (e.g., can't run some Linux binaries, etc.) but it's still a good choice if you want to stay away from GNU and the GPL.

Personally, I can't live without the GNU tools, so I've never switched.
take my word for it, i'm the last one to take anything seriously. maybe it's the fact that i joke so much that has numbed me to stupid fart joke equivalents :)
Dispensr.net - A better way to distribute Mac and iOS promo codes
Thank you. The mailing list is a good idea, haven't thought of that.
From the recruiting efforts I've seen, I would be surprised if they aren't just hiring everyone who meets their criteria. Which would make your argument that "refusing the job only means someone else will take it" not a very good one.
No, I'm saying "Take this job that is against your ethics and do the best thing you can, because otherwise someone who is not concerned about this job being unethical will take it, and do much more damage than you will".
A test would at least increase my confidence. I guess step 1 is to find something worth reporting, and the article pretty well demonstrates how hard that is.
> Every single thing the government does today has been because of laws written by Congress, signed and enacted by the head of the Executive, and upheld by the Judiciary.

Incorrect. Many of things the government does today are done either within or outside of specific purported statutory authority (in the latter case, if there is a theoretical justification, it relates to inherent powers of particular offices that do not require legislation to activate) outside of the scope of theories of justification that have been challenged in the courts. Its also quite likely that at least some things government does today are things that have been rejected by the courts in the past -- and which would be again if they were challenged again (certainly, it stretches credibility to claim that, despite all the past missteps, many of which involved repeats of the same violation, the government has just recently become perfectly compliant.)
Palantir Rakes In Stupendous Money?
This is why you go to a package store, or some other non-tech establishment. Probably in a shadier part of town.
I haven't seen this interview with him on Charlie Rose yet:

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10549
I still laugh at fart jokes because, why not?
The Master of Hestviken, by Sigrid Unset (long forgotten, but she was a Pulitzer-winning author in the 1930's), is probably the best novel I've ever read.
Paying more may just mean they charge taxpayers more.
Everytime I think a feature doesn't exist in tig, I search the docs for it... facepalm that I didn't realize it could do that and love it ever so much more.
also, I determined that even unplugging the honeypot when "not in use" was not enough, as it appears to be using "bursts" similar to special forces radio techniques, when availability resumes to its cnc system.
I'm hoping that the mass appeal of BSG (especially now that it has a second life on Netflix) and the accessibility of the new Star Trek movies will pave the way for more space opera on TV.
GetClojure: Tons of Searchable Clojure Examples
http://phdtree.org is a Wiki site that allows users to create & edit their academic family tree.
No they report them to their manager ... on the way to their exit interview.
Which one of those two entities has a demonstrated history of eroding personal freedoms? Which of those institutions, has over the span of human history, taken more personal freedoms by force? Which of those institutions has an Army?
i didn't read the entire page initially (and kinda sorry that i went back to do so). but lots of serious projects have quirky intros.
>That is an argument for voluntarily joining the most despicable of organisations with the goal of fixing them from the inside.

More 'damage control' than 'fixing them', but sure, close enough. The point is, do not compare 'this job is evil, I produce -10 units of global utility' and then 'this job is good, I produce +20 units of global utility' looking only at your output. Instead, compare 'By taking this job, I will produce -10 units of global utility, instead of someone else producing -50', in which case the gain from you taking the job is +40.
It is Ghostery. Pause it and the comments will appear.
I think it is clear that the gov't can force you to make a false statement, including forcing you to leave your canary unmodified. At least within the limits of what threats of violence can achieve. I'm going to assume that is the case. That carries some pretty ugly realities with it about the nature of our gov't's recent conduct, and probable future conduct. Good luck to anyone who ever has an occasion to challenge the gov't in a situation like this and does so.
I don't understand what they're trying to accomplish.
The way to get back at politicians for lying is to vote others in office. Unfortunately your average idiot is so bereft of political awareness that their voting decisions are based on those banging the most pots and pans and getting the most coverage on MSNBC...so nothing ever really changes. It's one shill against the other. Bipartisanship needs to be broken in this country. Both parties need to be dissolved immediately.
It doesn't have to be a conspiracy. It's a simple fact that the President is the single most powerful individual in the nation. But given that fact, there are still thousands of power relationships that he has to deal with, so he can't just dictate things. Think of the example of a stock-holder with 5% of the stock -- doesn't sound like a lot, but he has the microphone, and the next most powerful person in the room has less than .05% of the stock.
I had the same question and it leads me to believe the companies saying they had no idea. Someone at Google/MS/Facebook would almost surely notice those extra servers over there, all that extra network traffic going somewhere, or those cables that seem to go into a locked closet.

I think it's far more likely this is built off the back of the data they're already known to be sucking down via major exchanges.

A national security letter for the TLS certs and you can take what you want, when you want off straight from the stream of packets.
I cannot believe the link between palantir and prism is by the mere NAME of the software package as alleged in this article. That's some weak journalism. I mean, just check out github while you're at it:
https://github.com/search?q=PRISM&ref=cmdform
Second this. There are a lot of "signatures" in most asm. Programmers for 6502 and derivatives might be a nasty bunch of sadists that love to do weird stuff to save cycles, but even there there are lots and lots of common patterns that often "happened" just because people learned from the same sources, or because it made sense, or because conventions appeared.

I never had a NES, but I had a C64, and the 6502 code wrote there seemed nasty to translate on the surface, with lots and lots of self-modification, for example. But in the end most of the self modification was specific looping patterns because the 6502 can only index 256 values, and so many loops involved writing addresses into the looping code, iterate 256 times, increase the most significant byte directly in the code and see if you'd reached the end, and jump back to iterate 256 times.

Most of this "nasty" stuff is relatively well known by now and much of it is relatively regular and easy to detect.
I'll check them out later today. Thanks!
See: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/rightof... ("The U. S. Constitution contains no express right to privacy. The Bill of Rights, however, reflects the concern of James Madison and other framers for protecting specific aspects of privacy, such as the privacy of beliefs (1st Amendment), privacy of the home against demands that it be used to house soldiers (3rd Amendment), privacy of the person and possessions as against unreasonable searches (4th Amendment), and the 5th Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination, which provides protection for the privacy of personal information.") (emphasis added).

The NSA's actions seem pretty precisely tailored to stay on the "right side" of the Constitutional line, avoiding the specific aspects of "privacy" protected by the Constitution.
The fact that the existing metrics are flawed mean that it's perfectly reasonable for a person to both:

(a) Believe one thing
(b) Understand that the "accepted fact" contradicts their belief

If no money is on the line, this reasonable person will state their belief. If money is on the line, they are more likely to state whatever they think the "accepted fact" is, regardless of their true belief.

In politics, there are many things for which minor differences in interpretation can cause a "fact" to change between true, false, and unknown. Inflation is certainly one of those things.
SPARKON launches: Generates a MAP TO LIFE to teen's by using personality tests
> It didn't take off because it didn't gather enough audience.

Which of course had nothing to do with the network showing a series of shows written with developments carrying through multiple episodes out of order.
Yeah, the whole 'news' section is a cool use-case pivot on the unerlying tech/UI: http://news.rapgenius.com&#x2F;
It looks like in my state about 1,500,000 people voted in the 2012 presidential election. So if a few hundred thousand people decided to not vote because their one vote doesn't matter, it's conceivable that the result in a state could be swayed.

So why try to persuade people their vote doesn't matter? If enough of them (an admittedly large number) listen, it will matter.
Patent reveals Apple's Virtual Currency: iMoney
If the sole effect of voting is to choose a winner, then you're probably right. But I think that's not the only effect that comes out of counting the votes. It's the one place where voters actually lay their cards on the table, or rather cast their votes in the ballot box. Votes are not a limitless resource to voters, unlike words or even opinion polls, and it is an important form of communication to other voters in the next election.

This is where gaming the voting system hurts democracy. Simply voting for the biggest bloc that is not your vision of pure evil is short-sighted, and causes the voters lose their independence - important for a voting system to arrive at an optimum result [1], and it also destroys the only credible method of communicating the lack of confidence in the system to each other [2]. Everybody knowing that everybody else knows that everybody have lost faith in the main blocs is not sufficient to create real change, but it certainly is necessary.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd

[2] https://youtu.be/3-son3EJTrU?t=8m13s
Not that I'm aware of, sorry. Zentyal is an option, but I believe it is geared towards small business, and is probably closer to Webmin than arkOS/Genesis.

I do have plans of making arkOS work on x86-based systems, but my first goal is armv6 and armv7 (RPI, Beagleboard Black, etc)
Your iPhone works for the secret police
As long as they're connected to a wall socket. Otherwise, citation needed. Power Management in hard. Who does the myriad of hardware quirks for OpenBSD?
> One has to wonder whether the government considers gays and lesbians high-risk dangerous individuals,

It used to be a security clearance risk. The idea that you might be blackmailed with the threat of being outed.
http://vanilla-js.com&#x2F; made me laugh too. but i agree, this sucks
He could also be a woman and a product with a marketing campaign, they are not mutually exclusive.
Ask HN: vpn or other encrypted proxies?
It has been asked a couple of times, most recent w/ any content about a year ago. I know I could set up a host on a remote provider and deal with it myself, but I've got enough other things on my plate.

Who do people use for a vpn service?

I'm looking for multiple termination points (US and Europe), suitable with ios and unix based machines.
Palantir has hundreds of employees swarming around downtown Palo Alto. Hundreds. Somebody is paying that company a LOT of money for something.

There is something very weird about the employees in Palo Alto: I never see them at local meetups, events, parties, and such. They are truly strangers who keep to themselves and don't engage with the local community... and very young. I get the feeling they come from afar and are just out in California for a short time, and don't see themselves staying here. Like expats in their own country. Maybe they are from NSA families. Maybe Palantir functions effectively like an internship program for future NSA employees.
It's already well known that RapGenius are trying to expand into a more generic document annotation service (see "Enterprise Genius").
My site http://gitignore.io was down and I just pinged my CDN and my domain host to see what the problem was. Everything seems to be back up and running now. Does anyone know what happened?
I can't tell what you even mean by "fascist". The word has a specific meaning.

A good example of a fascist was Mussolini. An example of a fascist view is that the nation (which should be holy) has been taken over by degenerates, liberals, the weak and people of impure ancestries or ancestries which don't belong here, and that it must be purified through violence such as purges and wars of glory.
Last I checked, there is exponentially more citizens than government officials. Most military sides with the people. A few cowards would side with the government, but most would support their fellow citizens... the government isn't all that mighty when you consider this...

I dearly hope such a standoff never has to occur, as I think there are better ways to solve these issues we have with our bloated government.
Yes. Why did the put all those smear (slander) quotes at the end of the article?
Nice to see fellow Chennaite launch something on HN. Congratulations on launching.

The results specific to universities or colleges are nicely formatted.

It would help if you have an example typewritten in the box to help get me started. I was initially looking at a blank screen not sure what I need to search for, considering that I wasn't exactly looking & was seeing it through Show HN.

What is the intent of the site? I mean who is your target customer and how would they find studenture in the first place?
I'm not sure if it's deliberate, or if my memory is accurate, but that reminds me a lot of the 'access denied' bit at the end of 'Lawnmower Man'.
As a Venture Capitalist (re: Taxpayer) in the NSA's endeavors, I don't believe I approved this part of the business plan.

As an end-user, I also did not agree to any sort of terms-of-service. In fact, the original TOS specifically said this wasn't part of the agreement.
It'd work best if I fork it and and it myself. Less work for you, more customization for me. :)
Love the quote "Even the head of the CIA can’t email his mistress without being identified by the FBI." :-)
I'd recommend not worrying about it. You can't plan for everything and the time you spend being redundant for this (very unlikely) case is probably better spent somewhere else.

Send an email to one user asking for feedback and you will get a much better ROI than trying to plan for TLD failure.
"and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth."

No joke. These are not idle words.

I grew up in Eastern Europe looking up to the great US of A, where hippies stopped a war and abolished the draft, where people can sue the government and win, where privacy and human rights are enshrined in the Constitution, which more than 200 hundred years ago prompted other nations to adopt something similar many years later.

Then the 9/11 came. Fast forward a decade and it looks like all those great achievements went to the toilet. Sorry, I can't help but feel that the Americans have let the world down, and the terrorists have won.
It is an operating system with a control panel, but the control panel is/will be a lot more comprehensive than Webmin or analogous server management apps. Whereas Webmin gives you a web interface with which to manage your server, if you don't understand how Apache/nginx/etc work then you still won't be able to add your own website, for example. If you have no idea about mail relays, virtual domains and so on, you probably will be way over your head if you try to host your own email. Genesis grinds the learning curve down as much as possible, by allowing websites (or other plugins like email/XMPP and so on) to be added with wizards and non-complicated language. Closer to Zentyal's web administration systems than that of Webmin. But it still represents a big improvement over how Zentyal works when we are just talking about personal use.
Yes: solving drug trafficking routes with several constraints, making the best scams, exploiting vulnerabilities to install a botnet.

All are very interesting challenges.
What does not voting accomplish?
> Why should politicians in a democracy cater to the pet issues of an ideological minority?

From a human and Constitutional rights point of view, they have an obligation to respect the views of those ideological minorities when their main agenda is defending their rights (right to privacy, free speech, or whatever it may be). A pure democratic system is little more than a (usually peaceful) mob rule, but in a representative democracy there is at least the expectation that elected representatives, by virtue of being middlemen between the people and the laws that govern them, as well as only having to risk their job every few years, will be able to reflect on more than what the majority wants at the present moment.

However, if your point was made more from the perspective of maintaining power and control, then I don't disagree with you.
End-to-end sounds interesting! Thanks for creating this. I'll watch these tonight!

I've been playing with Angular for a lil bit. The things that frustrate me as a learner are:

1) Lack of good end-to-end examples.

2) Situations where things just don't work, and give no feedback as to what went wrong. Am I just using Angular JS incorrectly or does this happen to everyone?
Note that FreeBSD 8.4 is from the older stable release branch, and 9.2 will release from the more recent stable branch with a lot of additional functionality and enhancements.

The topic of the zpool version for 8.4 is covered directly in the release notes:

FreeBSD ZFS subsystem has been updated to support feature flags for ZFS pools (the SPA version is 5000). Asynchronous destroy of ZFS dataset, LZ4 compression, ZIO NOP-write optimization have been implemented as new features. loader(8) tunables vfs.zfs.sync_pass_deferred_free, vfs.zfs.sync_pass_dont_compress, vfs.zfs.sync_pass_rewrite, and vfs.zfs.nopwrite_enabled have been added.[r243717, r244088, r247310]

Note that this upgrade can cause interoperability issues when upgrading a FreeBSD 8.4 system to 9.0 or 9.1. This is because FreeBSD 9.0 and 9.1 support SPA version 28 and do not recognize version 5000. To mitigate this issue, the default SPA version for a newly created ZFS pool on FreeBSD 8.4 is set to version 28. To create a ZFS pool with version 5000, use zpool(8) upgrade command after the creation.
Is this really anything new?
I asked have they just given up, so in that context given up referred to stopped trying to protect us. Your comment seems to suggest that yes, they have given up on protecting Europeans' data.
Obviously your definition of (say) a privacy issue is correct, and nobody else is entitled to any different definition.
This and the cost of deployment. Police, for all their foiles and failings are capable of judging a situation as another human would. Thus they can use their discretion in handing out tickets.

Simple fact is that speeding is not that much of a problem. Certainly people do it and it's dangerous, but most people obey speed limits within acceptable parameters and drive fairly safely. Present levels of speed enforcement are doing their job and greater levels would have a point of diminishing returns.
That's because terrorism wasn't specifically defined as an "act of war" for general risk policies under the underwriting standards of the time. (although anything nuke has been excluded for many years) War requires a nation-state actor. Terrorism is a broader concept.