skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth. -voltaire
IsNSA=true
These sites write for traffic first, topic second.
How do we realistically expect companies and government to react for these revelations if they would turn out to be true? Is it realistic to assume that they go "Oh, you caught us, here is what we are doing"?

PRISM is not system handling common law enforcement issues. Those documents reveal very large scale secret government intelligence collecting tool. If companies are involved, they are forbidden to reveal it and there will be spin, of course.
Just saw the "Page One" documentary about the NYT and came to the same conclusion. While the NYT staff spent most of their time talking about how technology is affecting their "interests" there were only two people in the documentary who mentioned the importance of a free press for promoting justice and disseminating truth: Julian Assange and Markos Moulitsas.

So we see shots of NYT reporters checking Google News and talking about twitter. And then the most appalling bit of the film where Judith Miller justifies her behavior by trying to pass the buck to the government, as if anti-war sources (like the FAS) who were actively debunking the crap she was publishing and clamoring for attention did not actually exist.
Generated : "...We need a real PHP batman to join us..." :P
I was not aware of any terrorist attack on Chicago. Nor do I believe that any terrorists have your children on their checklists.

Hyperbole is a fun game. But this is beneath you.
Calm down before you get a stroke. I wasn't serious.
Why a top terrorism analyst thinks US government surveillance has gone too far
Yeah. I want to host an i2p site on my AWS free tier account but can't because it will exceed the 15 GB bandwidth limit due to all the volunteer routing.
I didn't know the WaPo story had been authored by someone working with Assange to make a documentary on WikiLeaks. That would at least explain why "data directly from" was misinterpreted to mean "backdoor direct access" since I doubt she had the training to disambiguate the terms used.

Not that it matters too much anyways, I'm assuming it wasn't an OpEd and therefore she'd still have received the normal editing and source-checking services. But I do wonder if there is any reporting that was done by those who don't hold quite as much of a bias as Poitras and Greenwald, for the same reason I would be suspicious of a history of the Iraq invasion authored by Rumsfeld...
As long as I can tell a cop to go fuck themselves without being arrested, I don't feel oppressed.
Show HN: Trailers for Netflix (Chrome extension)
Even if life is found on Mars, the human race has lost it's right to celebrate.

Every 3.6 seconds some child dies of starvation here on Earth. How many children can you feed with $400,000,000+?

http://goo.gl/s46ol
An echo chamber of debate as the ship continues to sail into the flames… godspeed everyone.
Besides the usual damage caused by false allegations, the PRISM story also confuses people into thinking that the other recent NSA-related story [1] isn't true either, but it is.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/confirmed-nsa-spying-m...
Sounds like fear mongering.

They are saying hackers are accessing things they shouldn't, but it's probably partly our fault for having some of these things not lock'd down better off the internet.

Why is it that every time a hacker is mentioned it's a "chinese cyber terrorist" or a "russian skilled hacker who is only interested in CC details?" I am aware from reading some security articles that it is often the case, but I really do not think all hackers are either russian or chinese. That seems a very shallow view.

Honestly, I don't think Obama trying to support any of this makes many people feel any better.
Assuming you are qualified at making such a judgement, or even more qualified than any who have differing interpretations.
Defending Alternative Education
How can you misread "COLLECTION DIRECTLY FROM THE SERVERS" (sic)?

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/343421926057861121

And what about the FISA requests Google cannot legally talk about?

http://uncrunched.com/2013/06/07/cowards/﻿
I think that's a really important question in this current debate...several years ago, Google fired a senior site reliability engineer who had allegedly stalked teens and read their inboxes...apparently, his role was of one that required deep access into these databases:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/14/google-engineer-spying-fire...;

That was three years ago though...a lot may have changed about Google's infrastructure...I'm thinking, for example, whatever work has been done to unify login systems between Google Apps, GMail, Youtube, and of course, Google Plus. Presumably, as complexity has arisen, so has the need for better access-control infrastructure, which would (hopefully) prevent someone even at Eric Schmidt's level to lose his wits and trample around in the system without many, many flags going off first.

So with that said, that's why I'm skeptical (in the layman sense of, this is all more complicated than I can dream of) that this surveillance alleged in the PRISM reports could occur with just a few dedicated employees in the know (or a few moles).

It's not just the data transfer that has to go unnoticed, but the successful navigating of the access control infrastructure. And even if Google were to be completely in cahoots with the NSA and built a backdoor, wouldn't there have to be a testing suite that would make sure whatever normal changes to Google's code base also didn't inadvertently restrict (or reveal) the back door logic? And then wouldn't there also have to be at least one layer of oversight to make sure that that testing suite itself was maintained but otherwise unnoticed?

But I'm speaking as a layperson here who thinks that the kind of infrastructure Google has would require a framework that would make backdoor access awkward to implement. Just so many things could break across all of Google's servers, otherwise...like this fun incident that most people probably still remember, if you happened to be awake early one morning 3 years ago:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/this-site-may-harm-yo...

> If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message "This site may harm your computer" accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.
>
> We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file.
Now would be a good time to give variuous good organisations cash.
what are the name of the 50 companies?
http://www.news.com.au/business/world-leaders-in-secret-soci...
<q>Do we want to be in that transition setting a good example or a bad example?</q>

The way you posit the question... Are you sure they care about any such example?
Show HN: Travel Discovery for Music Lovers
>Am I the only programmer who doesn't like being economically exploited (in the formal microeconomic sense)? For me, it's demotivating to know I'm putting forth effort for which someone else is reaping huge value.

There is no formal micro-economic sense of exploitation, except perhaps not getting the competitive wage, which is not what you are describing.
I think it is reasonable to question the levels of sophistication of people on the FISC and officials who have approved the policies.

In the past for instance the ACLU has pointed out that about 2/3 of the US population lives within 100 miles of a land or coastal border, and that border security law can be construed so that all of these people are subject to searches in a way not prohibited by the fourth amendment protections.

More than I think those searches are an issue right now is the possibility that legislators could have not recognized how much of the county's population is within 100 miles of a land or coastal border.

The terminology has been pretty folksy, but it seems absurd to imagine that are very many people who don't have someone adjacent to them in their social graph who is adjacent to a node that has been suspected of being a terrorist.

If the description of how they use the data is correct, then it probably is truthful that counting the number of people whose data have been collected would index those people in such a way that their privacy would be further compromised. However, it seems plausible to guess that the scope of the call data could be estimated, and that most people's data has been collected if not analyzed, indexed and mapped.

However, is the existence of all that data an enormous liability for the future?

During the 1930s the brightest minds in the country were asking fundamental questions about the very nature of how we should organize our country, including crazy ideas involving fascism or communism which probably seemed to make more sense in the context of possible societal collaps. Later in the 50s, the brightest minds were no longer as likely to be working on public service (or on a war effort) yet a paranoia of dunces filled the government, and the country had to deal with their efforts to blacklist people and shape the country as they pleased.

What percentage of interesting people doing the best things in the world right now weren't even heard of twenty years ago or even ten? How many of them unseated someone else's vested interests and who would have preferred not to be surpassed?

Though bad things will be done by people in the future who we've never heard of before, unknown people will also be stomped on by those who are already successful, using whatever tools they can find.

The point isn't that people with wealth and power or people unheard of are more likely to do good or bad things, but that powerful tools in the wrong hands, and anything that encourages self-censoring and slows the flow of information limits possibilities and the talent pool.

It is difficult to understand how unquestioning some of the trust is when top executives really didn't seem to see how anti-competive practices like gentleman's agreement's agreements about poaching each others' employees was wrong, and Congress has such a difficult time putting anything in place to effectively limit their insider trading privileges. And finally for those who do implicitly trust officials right now, did they notice how close people they'd trust less often get to winning elections?
- How is a one billion dollar grant going to make progress on discovering if there was a creator?

- How much evidence do we expect to get for a billion dollars? A decibel? A hundred decibels?

- Would sufficient evidence either way come about anyways, through other human endeavors?
The Washington Post reporter claimed that they carefully selected what to release in order to protect people/programs that they thought were worth protecting.

Start ~2:00.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/video/thefold/nsa-leak-source-...
True, if not for this http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/veri...

The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compels Verizon to produce to the NSA electronic copies of "all call detail records or 'telephony metadata' created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad" or "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls".

The order directs Verizon to "continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this order". It specifies that the records to be produced include "session identifying information", such as "originating and terminating number", the duration of each call, telephone calling card numbers, trunk identifiers, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, and "comprehensive communication routing information".

This court order and the extremely wide net makes me believe the worst for the rest.
You've got to be seen to have the last word. You were wrong. You called and continue to call me names, and you call me hysterical? Troll.
Freedom of religion and freedom of speech were already common in at least some European governmental systems and certainly in the philosophy of enlightenment. I am not quite sure what you mean by ‘2 state legislature’, if you refer to two chambers/houses of parliament: Britain had two chambers since at least 1706, and ancient Greece and Rome often also had two chambers. The Holy Roman Empire was a strongly federal state/union with very independent member states. The annual state of the union address can be found in basically every remotely civilised form of government, be it the speech from the throne in monarchies (e.g. the UK) or those in the Roman republic.

I don’t think ideas from native Americans were of particular importance, or, even if they were, substantially newer than those from Europe.
Last I read about it the performance was directly linked to the size of the network. In Freenet, if I remember correctly, larger number of nodes with the same content is proportional to the speed of the content download. And the content spreads to other nodes automatically, so if the network is big and demand for the content is big the content becomes very quickly downloadable (it's both "near" in terms of hops between nodes and there are more nodes with better bandwidth).

So I think that such networks will be niche until enough governments try to censor internet at once. This will make enough people interested in networks like Freenet to make their performance ok. I would like for Freenet to be adopted much faster and on a greater scale without some cataclysm for free speech, but it doesn't look like it's possible :(
Forgive me, but I'm thoroughly confused. What objection is brought up here to Greenwald's work? That he's using the noun "program" instead of the noun "document" when discussing the program that the document entails? That Greenwald's tone is not sufficiently interrogative and peppered with "claims" and "alleges" and "supposes"?

There's no substantive difference between "It was followed by Yahoo in 2008" and "The document claims it was followed by Yahoo in 2008." The furor of the past 72 hours has given no reason to question the document's authenticity nor the existence of the program the document entails. The president himself has alluded to the existence of the PRISM program and attempted to assure us all that it was only to keep an eye on foreigners and not citizens.
Eric Schmidt attends the Bilderberg meeting behind closed doors
This article is a little short on details on how she accomplished this, which is what I'd be most interested in. Couchsurfing means that she saved a ton of money, but it's only one of three major expenses (besides food and transportation).

-- Did she work legally in those other countries?
-- What were her main modes of transportation between countries?

And because I'm a cynic...

-- How many of her new "friends" were simply men looking to take advantage of her?
How Redis Took Us Offline And What We Did About It
There are federal laws against marijuana but the Feds don't bust people in MA for smoking weed, though apparently technically they could.
Its easy to say the right things from the outside but when you enter the sausage factory you see how the sausage is made and realize how hard/impossible it is to really change things
The lack of superhuman bravery is not cowardice.
Unless I mistake what you're talking about, that's something very different:

http://rope.sourceforge.net
The question nobody is asking: would more money help?
Ask HN: is there any good email service hosted in europe?
in the light of the current NSA leaks, i am thinking about changing from my current hotmail and gmail accounts ... to something else. Any ideas?
First and foremost, because I need that information wherever I happen to be. Second, because it's a sync scenario I can delete everything while going through immigration/customs, and re-sync when through, and lastly, if I lose my phone, it's all encrypted.
they're not just maximising impact, they are most likely currently having discussions as to what they can legally release without getting into too much trouble or causing a national security problem (e.g. see redacted names on latest slide).
NSA's Prism surveillance program: data collected 'directly from servers'
Why try Soylent?
With PRISM, if the allegations were false, Facebook and Google would deny them, but if they were true, Facebook and Google would still deny them. So the denial carries no information in and of itself. Parsing the denial might bear some clues--for instance, all these companies use the same technicalities and talking points.
Britain has access to PRISM. I wouldn't be surprised if other European governments do as well.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jun/07/uk-gatherin...
So which is it? Is he "welcoming a debate over spying on Americans" or is he prosecuting the whistleblowers (again) and requesting state privileges to protect themselves against further scrutiny? I don't think the two can really co-exist. And if all of this was "already known" what's there to prosecute then? The amount of double-speak from the Obama administration astonishes me.
Ask HN: How can I easily but securely encrypt my laptop & emails?
tptacek is a supporter of Obama's program of extra judicial drone executions, so it goes without saying that he dislikes Glenn Greenwald. Additionally, he feels he can make attacks on the tone and minor details of Greenwald's reporting so he comments on that, but does not comment on this story for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5844972 where it's more difficult to discredit the messenger.
Nice follow up
Obama is currently meeting with China's President Xi in California. It seems unlikely to me that the US government would publicly reprimand China while its executive is meeting with theirs.
Especially when you're doing X' instead, and don't want to draw attention to it.
Then how do you explain the difference between Verizon's statement (http://publicpolicy.verizon.com/blog/entry/from-the-desk-of-...) in which they basically acknowledge the reports and point to their gag-order and tech company execs going on record to strongly deny the reports?
Pretty much.

You can't distribute large files like in Usenet, though. Look into I2P + BitTorrent for that, or GnuNet.
The terminology in the article is somewhat idiomatic: "After the Directed Flow Graph (DFG) or syntax tree has been generated the compiler can use this knowledge to perform further optimisations prior to the generation of machine code. Mozilla’s IonMonkey and Google’s Crankshaft are examples of these DFG compiler."

"DFG" usually refers to some sort of dependence graph. What IonMonkey and Crankshaft have is a traditional CFG (control flow graph) in SSA form. That means the code is represented as a set of straight line code paths (basic blocks) connected edges in a graph representing possible control-flow transitions. The instructions are in SSA form, which means that each variable is assigned only once and pseudo-instructions called "phi instructions" are used to merge results when a basic block is accessible from multiple predecessors blocks, both of which might assign the same variable. A "syntax tree" is different yet. It's a higher level representation that preserves the syntactic structure of the code. For example, it represents loops and "if" statements as nested elements in the tree. Translation to a CFG throws away most of that information (e.g. reducing loops to simply control flow edges in the CFG).

For a (relatively) approachable set of materials on the subject, see: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~keith/512/2011/Lectures. I also highly recommend Cooper & Torczon's "Engineering a Compiler" (2d Ed.) In a world of CS researchers that can't write an English sentence to save their lives, Keith Cooper and Linda Torczon's work is a paragon of clear prose. (Their lab at Rice is where Cliff Click got his PhD, and if you've read his work on the JVM, you know that he too has a talent for explaining complicated concepts in plain English.)
This is almost fascinating, but the article is short on details.

I really want to know how she got across borders; did she need visas? How did she choose which country to go to?
Ask HN: Why is PRISM a bigger deal than IRS targeting?
The IRS targeted the Tea Party during the 2012 elections and it is clear that it goes nearly all the way to the top of the food chain.

This is a big deal, and I never once saw a post about it on Hacker News. I figured, this is okay, these guys are mostly liberals anyway. They wouldn't care about Big Government bullying.

Then, a couple days ago, it's revealed the same government is tracking nearly every American's phone calls(big surprise), and NOW Hacker News cares? Why is it that IRS targeting is not important enough to merit a single post, but Verizon et. al giving the NSA access to all our data is?

Is it because more people are being harassed than before, a numbers game? Or is it because none of you are Tea Partiers, so it's okay for them to get taken out? It seems like it's only when they come for you that it's suddenly doom and hellfire.

Please, enlighten me. I'm a bit disappointed.
One more resource on Ropes, more Java oriented http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/j-ropes&#x2F;
The LittleBigFund launches Crowdfunding & storytelling for charitable passions
ChatSecure crashes so much it's unusable. IM+ OTR costs $6 and is closed source.
Read about his treatment of his daughter Lisa (he finally came around but jeez...)

Ripped off the Woz...

Parking in handi-cap spots...

Buying a new mercedes whenever it came time to register his car cause he hated license plates...

His collusion with publishers to artificially inflate the cost of e-books...

The likelihood that he bought his way to the top of the donor list for a kidney transplant (that's more of a strong rumor than verifiable fact)

Or don't I don't care...

I respect his drive and his vision for his company and products, and how he got a lot of good work out of some talented people. That's it though.
What's the point of classified information if you don't punish those that leak it?

Don't get me wrong, the treatment of Bradley Manning is absurd, and there shouldn't be any sort of prosecution of the journalists involved (which has been happening recently), so it's fair to complain that they are coming down too hard on whistle-blowers. However, you have to expect some sort of investigation into who did the original leaks.

We can also have the debate about whether they overly classify things and should be more open in the first place, but that's not the same thing.
Ask HN: increasing business profits through software
I'd like to start working as a contractor, my idea was to focus on increasing the profits of a company through software. I have a programming background(web development, machine learning, web crawling...) but I don't have any business and finance knowledge.

I think that in order to get good results and to talk with customers I'll need that kind of knowledge.

So I'd like to know experiences from people that were in a similar situation and what resources I can get to increase a particular and needed knowledge.

This course looks interesting but it starts on september: https://www.coursera.org/course/strategy101
Not sure if you really mean 'social justice' or the less controversial good-old-fashioned 'justice'.

The overreach by various government agencies has been an injustice that needs to be addressed but the issue doesn't have to be clouded by pulling in the complicated disputes about 'social justice'
It's not necessary but would definitely help. Actually, living in NYC or around the I-87 corridor would also be good, it's close enough to me that I could run down there for a weekend if need be.