skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Long ago I concluded that
any of my personal data
or business data outside the
locked doors of my own
facilities would be an open, engraved
invitation for lawyers and big
government to get between
me and my data and cause me
no end of time, effort, and money
wasted, so much waste that
the lawyers and big government
could easily ruin both my business
and my life, even if there is
absolutely nothing at all wrong.

Here's the real situation:
Lawyers and big government, especially
the second, have unlimited time,
money, effort, and powers and nothing
much else to do but cause trouble,
and I just do not have the resources
to defend myself against them. To
them a false alarm is just another
project at the office;
to me their false alarm is
likely the death of my business
and a big torpedo below the
water line of my little boat
in life.

So, my 'tactic' is just to
do nothing wrong,
certainly have nothing wrong
in my data,
try to remain mostly anonymous,
stay
the heck below their radar,
and keep my data inside my
own four walls.

I can still be vulnerable to
various false alarms.
And if my business is at all
successful, I may have to become
something of a 'public person',
that is, not so anonymous,
and, then, be on the radar of
various people who would
like to cause me trouble.
There could be news reporters
looking to 'manufacture' a
scandal for a 'scoop'.
There could be politically motivated
attackers.
And there could be just common
shakedown artists who want me
to give them something and else
trigger some false alarm
to have big government
cause me trouble. One false
alarm could cost me my business,
years of time,
millions of dollars in legal
fees, all for nothing substantive
at all.

Just as for anyone,
any of my data outside my four
walls is just raw meat for
lots of people who could do
me harm. So, no 'cloud'
servers; no 'cloud'
file backup;
little or nothing on
Facebook, LinkedIn,
Twitter, Google+;
all blog posts anonymous;
mostly don't let browsers
accept cookies,; etc.

Let lawyers and big government
go after easier targets.
I remember the old joke
that don't have to outrun
the angry bear;
instead, just have to outrun
the poor other guy trying
to outrun the angry bear.
Though not the same ones but here are the lectures from University of New South Wales - http://academicearth.org/courses/cs2-data-structures-and-alg...;
> Yesterday, Larry gave a thorough point to point denial to the Washington Post article. Conspiracy theorists@HN moved the goalpost and started talking about how if Google isn't doing X they must be providing data to NSA servers. Now that David Drummond has come out and denied that Google's not doing Y, some HNers start complaining that he's lying even though there's no evidence to the contrary.

The documents provided with the Washington Post and Guardian articles are not no evidence.
United States v. Reynolds: State Secrets Privilege
The political will to align the UK's interests with the US is just that - political will. It depends upon a mandate from the people, not the law of gravity. Political constants are lexically scoped within representative forms of democracy.
Yup. Let me support that with a link: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorFAQ#Can...
How difficult would it be for someone to create an open-source version of this tool? From the readme for the now-paywalled utility, it seems that the utility only modifies a single directory in a predictable way... http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/tzupdater-read...
An Introduction to Xojo
Automated WordPress Development
Yea - I wasn't going for optimal but just wanted to have some fun and decided to take a stab at using Prolog.
National security and civil rights: not mutually exclusive
Is GitHub Racist?
This is not a correction, as the provided translation is fine. But because I have a personal interest in the subject, here's one that tracks the Latin a little more closely:
De mortuis [On the dead, ] nil [nothing] nisi bonum [unless it is good] dicendum est [should be said].
He's not the German Justice Minister.

He's "the justice minister for the German state of Hesse".
No it won't. The NSA just have to cooperate and send requests of behalf of foreign countries and all will be forgotten and for the greater good.

Every foreign leader will be delighted to have access to his nationals data.

If some country leader - lets call it Angela Cameron wants some info for the citizens under her rule - she just have to ask Obama for a favor, then the data will be delivered. The leader is not guilty of anything because the servers are in US and not in the nation jurisdiction and US will have no reason to not comply since these are not US citizens ... everybody wins.
I see nothing with this ethos and I'm a full blown anarcho-capitalist so it's not a lack of scepticism towards government that is to blame. The reason is that internet is winning over the state, which is now forced to a reactionary role adapting with regards to new technologies that come out at an accelerating pace.

Some examples: Youtube and social media make war crimes more difficult to hide, Silk Road makes the war on drugs irrelevant, Bitcoin will make monetary policy irrelevant, open transactions will make the law system irrelevant, 3D printing will make border tariffs irrelevant, etc. Every software commit is a sign of progress, a log of someone trying to make the world a more voluntary, peaceful and decentralized place.

Given all of this, please excuse me in not caring about the idiots in Washington, London, Brussels, Paris, Moscow and Bejing who want to make me believe they are worth my time and emotional investment.
Thanks for sharing this. The way these are defined reminds me of the way I'd be defining methods in SML - a base case and then a recursive one to deal with the tail.
C implementation: https://github.com/kshulgin/crope
Maybe next time you should wait before shooting from the hip with some pointless rant.

Other people have already provided some real insight into the issue. It doesn't sound like it's a major issue. Larry just wants people to pay or do the work themselves, if they're going to lag behind on older versions. It costs him extra money and development wasted time. He should make it even more painful so companies must upgrade. When I hear people tell me they're still using Java 1.4, I find it very hard to think they're not being extremely lazy.
You have to admit, the US is doing a pretty good job with that $80 billion/yr.

I mean, what's the alternative? Spend $0 on secret data intelligence gathering? Of course not! I for one am happy to know that there are people on my side, looking for people who are not.

Furthermore, I can't seem to understand why people are so up-in-arms over US data gathering. I for one, have nothing to hide. Every crime I've committed online is so small, the NSA simply doesn't care. Obama said in his latest press conference, "We collect the meta data, not the data. We can see who is calling who, and if we need to listen to that call, we need to go before a judge."

I, a person of the people, am fine with the government spending this kind of money on secret data intelligence, because it keeps me safer. Period.
I wonder if being part of Facebook (from which Cassandra originated) has anything to do with the choice for Cassandra over other databases.
Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper, in the WaPo story: “information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable foreign intelligence information we collect.

In the intelligence world, this is an important program. It is “among the most important and valuable” programs. That makes it a desirable project to work on. If you're in this industry, you want your name attached to this project. To get that kind of assignment, in addition to being smart and capable, you need to be seen as dedicated and loyal.

It's not impossible that a leaker will end up on such a project (indeed it seems to have just leaked). But the culture will select against anyone seen as a potential risk, in a variety of ways.
I keep this one bookmarked, for exactly that reason:

Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have 'Nothing to Hide'

http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127...

The problem seems to be, to me it's so obvious that it matters even if you have "nothing to hide", that whenever someone confronts me with that argument I'm a bit dumbfounded :)
I've been called a conspiracy theorist enough, I wear it as a badge of honor now. I'm not one of these anti-vaccine, anti-gmo glenn beck style conspiracy theorist.

No, just one that accepts there is most certainly things going on behind closed doors the public is not privy to, which is all the definition a conspiracy is.

People say, "you are a conspiracy theorist" or a "tin foil hat wearer" in an attempt to discredit what you say. The government doesn't need paid goons to sleuth on the internet to defend them, their are armys of people just waiting to comment on how stupid we all are for challenging the government positions/laws. The battle is already lost in the mind of the average american.
while the education budget is less then 70 billions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Ed...
With a technical field, though, you have the added constraint that you need people who are familiar with the technology involved. At the low-level infrastructure level of a company like Google or Facebook, that might number in the dozens-to-hundreds - not exactly a huge pool to choose from, particularly when implementation will require quite a few people. And you need someone to do the choosing who can both be trusted by the government and knows all the people with the relevant technical skills.

There's also the issue of how to hide the source code (to my knowledge, both Google and Facebook use one source repository for the whole company, to which virtually everyone has access). This can be gotten around - I'm sure that there are private repositories off to the side that you could use to build a binary - but this is yet another integration point that could be discovered. (Eg. some SRE notices that network bandwidth is high for a DC, traces it to a machine, notices the machine is consuming a large amount of CPU, gets root and runs 'top', and suddenly notices an unknown process siphoning off all data. At this point, how could they not assume their network is being attacked - because that's really what this is, the U.S. government hacking into the company's DCs - and pull the alarm? So all the SREs, abuse teams, internal security, etc. would have to be briefed, which is small compared to the whole company but still a huge surface area for a top-secret project.)
I agree that stashes should be short-lived, but

% git stash list

will show you what branch was checked out when you stashed. Also, because a stash is represented as a commit, you can know what commit the stash is based on. From the git-stash man page:

"A stash is represented as a commit whose tree records the state of the working directory, and its first parent is the commit at HEAD when the stash was created. The tree of the second parent records the state of the index when the stash is made, and it is made a child of the HEAD commit. The ancestry graph looks like this:

.----W
/ /
-----H----I

where H is the HEAD commit, I is a commit that records the state of the index, and W is a commit that records the state of the working tree."
As others have noted, this capability was intentionally removed. From http://redis.io/topics/virtual-memory

"Redis VM is now deprecated. Redis 2.4 will be the latest Redis version featuring Virtual Memory (but it also warns you that Virtual Memory usage is discouraged). We found that using VM has several disadvantages and problems. In the future of Redis we want to simply provide the best in-memory database (but persistent on disk as usual) ever, without considering at least for now the support for databases bigger than RAM. Our future efforts are focused into providing scripting, cluster, and better persistence."
Oops. I meant to say Backbone not Bootstrap!! It was Backbone on my todo list, but Angular seems to be getting all the attention now.
+1 for a well-grounded response, declan. I'm ashamed this didn't make it to HN's front page.
>Why should Mark Zuckerberg, et al., know things about you that the government shouldn't?

Zuckerberg can't indict me. I don't pay taxes to Facebook.

There are powers that the government has that Facebook does not, and therefore there are things I would be comfortable telling Facebook and not the government.
> Maybe Google Glass will provide something like this in 20 years, but otherwise,

Oh god, I'd kill for a real set of augmented goggles. By augmented I don't mean ads over my field of vision, I mean like the ability to see magnetic lines, or any range of photon radiation or ability to zoom in and take picture of far away objects.
How can Delhi be made safe for women?﻿
That's just at the federal level. Total is about $800 billion[1].

The US is regularly on top of the OECD for spending per student in school. The idea that it doesn't spend much on education is one of those bad memes that never goes away.

[1] http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_education_spending_20...
I assume Instagram was a serious user of Redis. If you can switch from Redis to Cassandra in a matter of days, even after presumably years of Redis-usage being ground in your code base (because no matter how much you try to abstract out your fundamental data store, it always comes poking out in your architecture), it's probably not useful for Redis to try to out-Cassandra Cassandra. Let Redis be the best Redis it can be, and let Cassandra be the best Cassandra it can be.
I made a skip list based rope implementation in C and Javascript. In C, the crossover point when ropes become faster is around 200 bytes. They're an awesome little data structure.

C: https://github.com/josephg/librope

JS: https://github.com/josephg/jumprope
Our database uses Ropes internally as it deals with large strings and frequently inserts and removes sections.
Your link is broken, but this one works: http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127...;
Looks like the server is under fire, and Google didn't cache any of those links, either. Tears of desire.
What would you expect an FBI informational notification to say? What would they notify you of, that your activities have warranted investigation?

If anything, being notified that I'm being looked at would freak me out more than not knowing. We've entered this weird world of now needing to avoid appearances.

The thing that troubles me the most about the government accessing ALL of my data is the idea of false positives -- or hell, even purposefully spinning one aspect of my data to mean whatever the hell they want it to mean. If we don't have access to the same information, how are we supposed to defend ourselves against accusations?
It's a little more complicated than that, as one of those "atrocities against Muslims" is the existence of Israel. Even if the US ended support for Israel, it's likely that Muslims would still bear animus towards the West due to Israel's pro-Western worldview.

Now, maybe if we started bombing Israel to demonstrate our sincerity...
While I appreciate this statement I doubt that Germany and the EU is fundamentally different from the US in that matter.

Sure, in Germany recently we've been quite successful in fending off planned legislation that would've allowed massive privacy intrusions but in general the political establishment over here isn't exactly a champion of civil liberties either.

Besides, I'm certain both German and EU administrative bodies closely cooperate with the US on intelligence matters and would more than gladly accept sharing those findings.
http://sapphiresteel.com; might be what you meant to link
> it's not open source, so you still have to trust the app (and the OS) not to send out your private key.

Or that it actually implements encryption correctly.

Closed source is really not an option. Let's get it right this time.
If you really want to stay anonymous, you'll need to hack your own servers :)
Why is just reading the fingerprints to each other via video chat insufficient?
Not only the Middle East but also Asia, Africa and South America.
I've heard this phrase floating around my whole life, so I was prompted to look it up on Wikipedia. I used the freer translation. According to Wikipedia, it's a Greek aphorism τὸν τεθνηκóτα μὴ κακολογεῖν (“Don’t badmouth a dead man”) attributed to Chilon of Sparta (ca. 600 BC), one of the Seven Sages of Greece.

As for Ellison, I think the Christian warning about mammon applies:

"Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon." - Matthew 6:19-21,24 (KJV)
Hey look, I'm already being proven right http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/07/europe-surveillanc...
Yes, it's a very old meme.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tithe

And I'd consider putting 10% of my income towards social good a much better goal. It's not one that I always hit, but I think almost all of us could stand to carve this portion of our income out of our budgets, especially when it can so greatly benefit the causes we really care for. EFF is certainly one of mine.
PRISM PowerPoint Redesign
Lawyer-resistance; remember the situation a year or so ago when the tzinfo files were the subject of a patent claim? Oracle's weren't at risk because they have lawyers on retainer.
Fixed mine. Yours is broken in the same way :) Some weird escaping/encoding quirk going on there that seems to be caused by the trailing slash.
This is pure pretext. No one denies that the US has made itself any friends in the Muslim world, but the security apparatus in the states has achieved levels far beyond a reasonable level given the threat.
Indeed. The time zone database is managed by IANA [1] and is the de facto standard of time-zone management, and used by almost every platform (including GNU, iOS/OS X, Android and *BSD) [2] except Windows. The database itself is in the public domain. For Java, it looks like Joda Time implements tz compatibility.

[1] http://www.iana.org/time-zones

[2] http://www.iana.org/time-zones/repository/tz-link.html
This doesn't appear to have much, if anything, to do with the so-called 'PRISM' everyone is talking about at the moment.

Also, the presentation has been freely available online for some time: http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA465876
Yes, they closely cooperate. But EU agencies (except for UK) don't have a record of torture, abduction and overly use of secrecy. Comparing the budgets of the various secret services should be informative. US agencies are WAY bigger and I think much too big. UK is the exception - being in line with US.
#ShitHNSays
Ask HN: Frontend Tools for this Backend Developers Toolbelt.
I am a backend developer, usually on apps that don't have a web focus at all (think network monitoring). However, these days I'm usually tossing on a web interface of sorts for easy statistics gathering. And more often than not I'm not doing that is REST/JSON services as customers find them handy, and so do I. So I've got the backend down for REST services.

What I currently don't have is a set of tools to build up quick user facing interfaces to display this data (and perhaps some admin functions) in a functionable way (I don't care too much about fashion).

Is Bootstrap and Backbone (or AngularJS) going to give me all I need? I've played a bit with Bootstrap for some layout and widgets and like it. But am looking for something to add more structure to my web pages (ok, single page apps).

Ideally I'd rather learn 2 or 3 libraries very well, so I can whip up quick user interfaces without thinking about it too much. But the Javascript world is moving so fast right now it causes my head to spin.

Would something like Dojo or a Sencha product allow me to stay within the realm of a single product? Community support is also important.

Thanks.
What are those 'modern beliefs' then? Modern democracy, philosophy and human rights are not American products, but European, starting with ancient Greece, further expanded during the Renaissance and the reformations after the 2 world wars.

How Eurocentric of you.

As http://www.america.gov/st/washfile-english/2004/September/20... points out, the US Constitution took some of its inspiration from the Iroquois. They provided inspiration for freedom of religion, freedom of speech, a 2 state legislature, a federal system, the requirement for an annual state of the union address, and so on.

Of course the influences you cite were also hugely important. However the USA introduced important ideas from the native Americans that had not previously been part of the European tradition.
That's a pretty shallow reading of Western European/Middle East relationships.

I don't really want to start a big argument about international political history, because that's not what HN is for, but your reason for anger (a hundred years of meddling) isn't the real one. If you were going to make that argument, by the way, you should pick up a history book pre-1900 and see that Western Europe has been 'meddling' in the Middle East for a few thousand years.
Ask HN: Any advice for attending a trade show?
I'm taking my startup (www.partnerpulse.co) to a trade show next month (Microsoft WPC in Houston). Every attendee (40,000) is a potential user of the site. I'm going to spread the word, network, and get feedback.

I have no stand, and it is just me going.

I have some meetings lined up, I have leaflets and business cards, and plans to walk the floor networking.

Any other advice on how a small fish can make a big splash at such a show? What works well, on a budget?
The article is free if you click on it from google's search results. Here is a link: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=data%20intelligence%2...
I guess we're in this together: At the least, there's gotta be a way to up the "getSearchRecords" API quota limit from a measly 250. We asked if we could _buy_ more and were told flat out "No."

I can understand APIs and UIs are complex, evolving features, but simple API quotas should be changeable. Would a limit of 1,000 / day be that stressful on your system?
This is a great overview (assuming it's based on some knowledge, and not a total work of fiction). It puts things in context, and asks the right questions.
The title was "German State Justice Minister Calls for Boycott of US companies".

I think the only way to roll this back, if it even can be rolled back, is to attack from the states using state power. If CA, NY, TX, UT, VT, every state, starts making their own privacy laws to hamstring the Feds they may have to change their tune for practicality.
While Mr. Hahn isn't directly involved in last week's Blockupy incidents in Frankfurt, one of his colleagues (the state's Minister of Interior) is and certainly benefits if public outrage is targetted on someone else for a while.
Barron's Cover: Trouble Ahead at Tesla
No no no. Firstly this is just an arms race between you and the most sophisticated, well resourced and technically savvy surveillance organisation that has ever existed. Secondly, this strategy might temporarily protect a tiny knowledgable fraction of the population, which is of no real consequence to society in general.
One thing that the author omitted: "empty" apartments can be furnished and rented out on airbnb, letting landlords run lucrative unlicensed hotels. I have to imagine that there's some crafty service provider out there who lets landlords outsource the whole messy business of listing properties on airbnb, maintaining a social identify, distributing keys, collecting rent, and getting the place cleaned between visitors. If not, I smell a market opportunity.