skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think Palantir is a sinister NSA conspiracy so much as a manifestation of a certain kind of corporate culture present both in and outside of the intelligence community. At least from my interaction with employees there, it's not an NSA feeder nor an NSA nepotism apparatus, just a corporation that hires aggressively out of Ivy Leagues and then indoctrinates into a specific culture.

In my experience Palantir employees tend to work late and party with other Palantir employees. A friend lived with a Palantir employee and I worked in one of their buildings (100 Hamilton). In my limited observation I noted a definite "wake up, go to Palantir, work, go out with Palantir, go back, after-party at Palantir, sleep" lifestyle that many Palantir employees subscribe to.

It's very "corporate cult"-esque: they hire inexperienced fresh grads from top-tier universities, and put them all together so that they foster relationships with each other, then build social events and in-office parties so people are reluctant to go out.
drchrono (YC W11), iPad EHR, hiring iOS and Python/Django Devs
Okay I may be nighmar-ishing here, but is it possible that since Peter Thiel owns/owned large chunk of Facebook and also owns Palantir that works for government contracts, is it possible that Thiel could have been passing by info from Facebook servers via Palantir to the Government?

Wouldn't that make sense? I mean, lets say you own Facebook so what you say needs to be programmed or Facebook employees get pink slips, simple. Is it possible that Government does not tap into Facebook servers, BUT it does contract Palantir that the owner owns Facebook at the same time and thats how Governement gets up to date access to Facebook servers?
Tar is an archive tool.

Gzip is compression tool.

One difference between them: an archive tool would e.g. concatenate files just once but a compression tool would compress files individually.
Show HN: moo.bz - Google Universal Analytics integrated URL Shortener
The problem: If you're posting a link to a site that doesn't have your own Google Analytics code on it, you can't track clicks on to that link within Google Analytics.

Solution: Shorten the URL with moo.bz and provide your google analytics universal GA code (this only works with Google Universal Analytics accounts), and every visit to the shortened link will show up in Google Analytics Event Tracking.

http://moo.bz
I don't agree with how you have portrayed this as a matter of 19-year-old immaturity. Every sentient adult who saw what was happening in the early 2000s and yet assumed the NSA would not have access to (say) call records was being naive. People who assumed they would have access to call records have seen that assumption vindicated. Internet companies suffer major compromises on such a regular basis that it is pretty foolish to have 'privacy expectations' about your use of the internet, even if the NSA did not exist at all.
Just because we voted people in doesn't mean they're gods as soon as they enter office.

And positivity is useless if you just think everything can be fine as long as you have a positive outlook. That's foolishness. You SHOULD have alacrity towards this issue, but if you don't, that's your choice.

In ten years, you will look back and wish you did something. Mark my damned words.
Yeah, they want people to vote because then they can say: "will of majority". If only 1 person voted, the so called democracy would fail (people would eventually get it), because 1 person is not representing majority and majority is what democracy is all about (with all respect to minorities). They only made semantic switch saying that if you don't vote then you don't care -> not true because what if you are against (for example corrupted?) system and want real change -> should there be an voting choice: "this is not working, change the system"? :-)
Privacy is an illusion, and a dangerous one. It allows dishonest people to appear honest, and further perpetuates the lie of 'normal'. It closes minds and turns us against other people who are just as human as ourselves. Privacy allows corporations selective access to our data, with the promise that it won't be misused, sold or released to those who wish to do us harm. This is a promise that no corporation can reasonably be expected to keep, if they fall under the jurisdiction of any institution greater then themselves (Like the US government). We have a lot of anxiety around people finding out our secrets, but only because we expect privacy in a world (or internet) where true privacy doesn't really exist. If you do a thing, and you do it anywhere beyond in your own mind, you have effected reality, you have changed the universe, it is public. As terrifying as that might seem.
> States petitioned to join, why shouldn't they get out?

Because while there's provisions allowing states to be admitted with the consent of the rest of the States, there's none permitting them to leave on their own once they've joined. That's the deal they signed on for.
Orwellian vs Huxleyian
Third Party Doctrine #PRISM
You bastard, I have a deadline and you post me this?
Privacy group calls NSA Verizon surveillance illegal
Crypto-Anarchism Community
It's not like Sweden is a surveillance state or something

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRA_law
"If the director of the CIA can't maintain his privacy on the Internet, we've got no hope."

Blah. Ignoring for the moment that he's 6 levels removed from the agents in the field, notoriously the very few of them out there (last time I checked 90% of the CIA is desk bound in the US) are very bad at fundamental trade-craft, with the Camp Chapman attack (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Chapman_attack) as a telling extreme example.
> Somebody is paying that company a LOT of money for something.

As they've made perfectly clear, their major clients are the department of defense and hedge funds. Of course they're getting paid a lot of money.
As somebody who's currently making a web app that makes use of a variety of form input types, HTML5 form inputs are great.

I would also add a recommendation for Select2 - http://ivaynberg.github.io/select2 - "Select2 is a jQuery based replacement for select boxes. It supports searching, remote data sets, and infinite scrolling of results."
I'd like to see that blurb about Fikri at the bottom rewritten multiple times over for each of the 205 people on the list that McCarthy bandied about during his Wheeling speech in 1950.

That story sounds very different when it can be used to describe the escapades of a free citizen, especially when the details of those escapades can be used as blackmail against them by another individual with an agenda.

What stops a politician with ties to the intelligence community from using this system to coerce others around him. This is the conversation we should be having, because this very real possibility is what makes these systems sound reprehensible to red-blooded terrorist hating 'mericans who generally defend these actions by the government in day-to-day conversations.
Misinformation in Mary Meeker's "State of the Internet" has influence
Stallman's only "flaw" (but I'm not even sure it is one, actually), IMO, is that he could be more tactful about spreading his message.
If most nerds don't take him seriously, why would any average non-techie person?
Because it's not copyright infringement. Copyright applies to the content (i.e., DVDs, videos, or even simply clips of larger videos). Fanfiction is not (usually) copyright infringement because ideas can't be copyrighted, only the distinct expression of the idea can. (Without going down the rabbit hole, Captain Kirk is an idea, his portrayal in any particular tv show or movie would be the expression of that idea).

The video is disclaiming trademark infringement, which is not a crime.
Virtualization is a priority, both as a host and a guest, but especially on the host side there's a fair amount of work to be done.

BHyVe is FreeBSD's own hypervisor, and can run FreeBSD and Linux guests, but is not yet available in a release.

VirtualBox works well for end-user applications on current FreeBSD releases, and is being used by kernel developers in their workflow.
NSA appears to be trolling with job postings
drool, more likely.
Local elections are a more worthwhile, due to the increased influence of even a single voice and the fact that they are usually decided by popular vote.

And this might really be the place to put most of your political thought and effort. Getting good people into local offices can be a first step to getting those same good people into regional, state, national offices. If we want until the presidential election to care, it's likely too late.

As far as spending time on the major elections... I don't watch the news 24/7. I spend maybe ten hours during "election season" watching debates and reading articles, and a lot of that is done socially with friends and family. I enjoy it, and do not consider it time wasted. My polling place is about two blocks from my home. It takes me ten minutes to go vote. I do not see elections as a worthless drain on my time, even if my one vote, by itself, doesn't matter.
A photocopier is a (scanner+printer), so the problem remains.

Your best bet is large flea markets, where you can buy stuff like WiFi dongles, etc. with cash. Then wait a while before you use them.

I can't believe I'm having to write this, either. This is like giving instructions to a Soviet activist in the Cold War days, but ironically it is in my own country. How did we fall so far?
It's not the leaks that are reprehensible.

http://blog.rongarret.info/2013/06/its-not-leaks-that-are-re...
The entire point of voting is about not being as relentlessly self-absorbed as you've described here.
uh, isn't that exactly what the new Windows 8 approach is?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Runtime
I think that's both unfair and inaccurate. You don't want someone to publish a story based a single anonymous source and unverified documents. That's how bogus stories about Benghazi emails or George W Bush's military record get made.
And if you have the private key, you can generate the public key! You should never store the private key anywhere!
True, to a rational mind, the insult and slander that I have committed against you is a distraction from the debate and the pursuit of truth ... but since when did we become rational creatures? The value of truth was always an illusion to which we paid but lip-service; the deeper nature of reality is that our world; our society is built on nothing more than lies and delusion. Say something often enough and it becomes true through repetition and memory. Say it vehemently enough and you gain followers, mouthpieces for your message.

Rationality and critical thinking are myths. For all practical purposes they do not exist. So, I say it again. Technology is a lever. Over time, it amplifies pre-existing power relationships. Good becomes great, bad becomes evil. Which is which? We cannot tell. Both are banal; grey; undifferentiated. Where subservient relationships exist, they become entrenched; the vulnerable, exposed.

In terms of dynamics, basins of stability become inverted; hills pushing the world-state towards extrema, old arrangements; unbalanced.

Information is power; control the information, control the ideas, control the people. I wish it were not so. I wish that this fatalistic voice; this persona of doom; an expression of my darkest fears ... I wish that it were not so readily adopted. I wish that it were more clearly "playing the fool" ... but my wishes are confounded by a great and dreadful uncertainty ... I wish that my cry could be: "Hail the brave", but my doubts cloud my mind...

so I sink to playing petty, trivialising language-games, because I no longer know what matters and what does not ...
Those are pretty explosive claims.

a) How are you identifying the processes?
2) How are you determining that they are inspecting the filesystem?
I use something similar:

[alias]
lt = log --graph --pretty=changes
[pretty]
changes = format:%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr) %C(bold blue)<%an>%Creset

It's nice to be able to separate the format specifier from the alias itself. Makes the configuration a lot cleaner.
I think it might be helpful to read the article: "But as any internet entrepreneur will tell you, relying entirely on people makes scaling difficult. Technology, on the other hand, makes it much easier. And that means that in many respects, what has emerged today is almost more pernicious; because that same technology has effectively turned not just some, but every single person you communicate with using technology — your acquaintances, your colleagues, your family and your friends — into those equivalent informants."
The very fact of deliberately making copies for financial gain is mens rea enough for copyright infringement. However, that is irrelevant here, since the issue is not copyright infringement but trademark infringement.

Paramount has generally ignored (or blessed) fanfiction videos and literature with regards to Star Trek (but the same cannot be said for video games).
I think the link is that, in addition to creating software under the same name, they received early funding from the CIA, and their software serves the same general purpose of sifting through large amounts of disparate data from various sources.
In a country where the average professional commits "Three Felonies a Day"
(http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/...), you're damned right, "We have a lot of anxiety around people finding out our secrets" Basically, our normal lives exist at the sufferance of these "public servants".
Show HN: ICEcoder v3.0 beta - browser code editor awesomeness
>> The users of FB have decided that this is the way they'd like to organize their information?

>In aggregate, by choosing to use Facebook, and by providing feedback and usage data that shapes how it changes.

I simply draw a different conclusion from that than you do. At some level we have chosen it, yes. I'm not denying that, but instead trying to figure out whether that level is necessary. I appreciate the pushback!
And no matter how smart the crowd here is when it comes to technology, discussing history or politics here is like talking to children. Many of the comments around here today sound like they came from the Drudge Report. It's embarrassing.
How familiar!

https://appneta.tv.appneta.com/nathoeusntaheous

OK, fine, not interactive, but still familiar.
So called "Totalitarian" regimes only spy on dissidents and free thinkers, they don't give a f* about other people. It's only democratic regimes that tend to keep a tally of every citizen and his/her movements.
Activists praise San Onofre closure, but 1,100 layoffs expected
> Relationships should be maintained while they are mutually beneficial, if the benefits are once sided, there is no reason to keep it.

What if the relationship has always been one-sided, but was entered into in the expectation of future mutual benefit?

There is certainly something to be said for two sides agreeing that there is no longer a mutual benefit for each other and choosing to go separate ways. But not for one side to unilaterally decide that they have extracted all they can from a relationship and unilaterally decide to therefore end it.
Personally, I consider the left-wing leadership of the country to be nihilists: they seek to gain self-esteem by destroying others' values (e.g. wealth, rights, etc.). They do it via egalitarian ideology. Hence, egalitarian nihilists.

If you have noticed a subtle ideological change between Democrats of the previous "generation" (such as Bill Clinton) and the "Young Turks" of the party (like Obama), this is the difference.

That said, I don't think this applies to the rank-and-file of intelligence community at large. They're too close to mainstream American culture to be nihilists. Any theories on why they would work to implement these kinds of spy systems would be appreciated. Maybe they have simply been drained of all critical thinking by the education system and just do what they're told since that's their job.
The right to privacy falls under the "human rights" part of my comment. You are free to disagree that privacy in some meaningful sense is not a human right, but the very fact that so many other rights (both legal and human) are easily compromised when it is not present is a strong hurdle to overcome, should you wish to make that argument.

As an example, you have the right to criticize your employer (freedom of speech). For obvious reasons, this right is best exercised in private, where the employer cannot overhear the conversation. If the employer operated a massive surveilance network that recorded your supposedly private conversations, you could then suffer punitive consequences and be denied career opportunities merely for voicing an opinion.

You have a legal right to an attorney, but that right is only useful because your discussions with your attorney are confidential. Without that privacy, the whole value of the right simply evaporates.

My view is that the right to privacy is such an obvious prerequisite for most, if not all, of our legal rights to have any value that it shouldn't need to be explicitly detailed in the Constitution or in any specific law. Furthermore, the world the Founders lived in was a world in which privacy was easy to safeguard, and the few obvious ways to violate it (e.g. unreasonable searches and seizures) were addressed by the Bill of Rights.
"Section 702 was recently reauthorized by Congress after extensive hearings and debate."

Well that's a huge lie right there. I watched the FISA renewal on C-SPAN live, and Dianne Feinstein was trying to take down any criticism of the FISA and rush the vote through with every occasion she got, "because terrorists" and "we need it now".

They let Rand Paul, Ron Wyden, Udall, and one or two others speak for a few minutes each, but then they voted to pass FISA 92-7. It made me so angry.

Not to mention they did it on December 20th, just before Christmas, when nobody listens to politics anymore. They tried that with SOPA, too, a year before. They always seem to do this with the worst of the worst laws, that they know the public would be outraged if they listened a bit more carefully to what they are about. But then they have the nerve to say that "everyone knew about it, and nobody complained so far".
Play-Well - Teaching Engineering to Kids
You remember a different reddit than I do. Before /r/politics, reddit's front page would be covered with the most sensational partisan nonsense. I kid you not, the day after some hippies in a little Vermont town voted to impeach President Bush, there were at least half a dozen stories about it that got absurdly high up.
Are we talking about the same Sweden which had lax laws on copyright but upon pressure from the United States (including threats of trade sanctions) ended up arresting The Pirate Bay founders?
If you are referring to suspend/resume, then OpenBSD has great support[1]. Its one of the very few ACPI stacks not derived from Intel's ACPICA reference code.

[1] http://www.openbsd.org/papers/zzz.pdf (older, 2011)
The Office of the President of the United States is controlled my the machinery of government. At this point, the person you put in there does one thing that we need to pay attention to: appoint judges. Everything else is just nuance of a system so entrenched, even the staunchest Green Party candidate would have problems doing anything he/she claimed as a candidate. Once the person is elected, "realism" kicks in, and the person is merely a guide on an already sailing ship.
My point was, "If you don't want the government to look over a company's shoulder at data they've collected, maybe we should make it illegal for companies to collect that information in the first place."

And, before the age of massive hard drives it was easy to imagine that we were anonymous - that it would be impossible for any government or corporation to keep many records on us. I was highlighting that information is so shockingly cheap to store now, that even your local burger joint could trivially afford to own a database storing a huge amount of information on every single person in this country.
I understand and somewhat agree with your point, but sometimes people anticipate that, given the incentives of the job, they're unlikely to be any better than anyone else when push comes to shove (your pt 2). Think of "golden handcuffs" as one example.

This particular example doesn't apply to me, but I think I'd personally be able to rationalize a lot of selfish behavior following that logic so I try to avoid putting myself in situations where it would come up, even if both points might apply.
Is that in London? If so, how do you manage to pay for accommodation?
Unless they put ads on the videos, I don't think a YouTube post counts as financial gain.
With PRISM, The NSA Is Just Following The Tech Industry's Lead
It's about the same difference between leaking your banking PIN to the Internet vs. leaking your banking pin to your best friend from high school 10 years ago.

If all information were truly meant to be free we wouldn't demand corporations employ strict privacy policies...
Or better yet write a patch and submit a pull request informing them.
I should probably add I'm in favour of full and open access to all data. For CIA Directors and Fishmongers alike. There should be no secrets. This half-assed 'privacy for the powerful, illusions of privacy for all!' approach is obviously not working.
Obama on NSA spying: Congress has known about it and approved for years
Politics is how complex societies make decisions at the largest scale. Despite the wet dreams of the tea party contingent, politics and government-by-mandate aren't optional in the 21st century and haven't been for a long time. Tocqueville died in 1859, back when things were simpler.

If 90% of the population refuse to vote then you would end-up with one of two outcomes:

1. A minority government governing with a mandate from <= 10% of the population. Cue politician saying 'look, I got 80% of the votes cast'. Expect: extreme social unrest, dictatorship by minority, authoritarianism.

2. No government. Not as great as some might think. Expect: nothing-gets-done, social collapse, power vacuum, enemy nations sharpen their knives.

First-world politicians in this century won't have their ambitions "tempered" by large scale withdrawal from voting - all this would do is remove the main mechanism that restrains them. Even in a society that has backed itself into this kind of local minima, politics and politicians would still exist.
> The only records taken from Internet companies pertain to non-citizens living outside the U.S

As a 'non-[US]-citizen living outside the US', I'm a bit disturbed by the implication that it's somehow less bad for the US government to demand any data they like about non-US citizens (from private companies based in the US) than data about US citizens. Non-US citizens do make up 95% of the world's population, and they use Google etc. too.

Most European governments seem to recognise that the contents of 'human rights' documents, if they're to mean anything, should apply to, well, humans, not just the citizens of those countries. (Hence e.g. the ECHR blocking the deportation of illegal immigrants if they might be tortured in their home countries). It seems to be mostly just the US that has this strange idea that, despite one of its founding documents talking about 'all men being created equal' and 'inalienable rights', those rights shouldn't apply to non-US citizens.
Ugh, a quick review on glassdoor makes their hiring practices sound soul sucking

http://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Palantir-Technologies-Int...
Show HN: Crumb CRM, an open-source lightweight CRM system
Ask HN: Can we have a section for technical subjects?
Every time I think about that, I remember Amazon remote deleting bought copy of 1984 from the owners' kindles some time ago. You can justify it with legalese all you want, at the end of the day it's such a perfect example of how awful that whole thing is that it wouldn't pass as real in a story.