skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow. That was interesting and gorgeous, and nicely straddles the line between folklore and whitepaper. (I particularly liked the use of animated gifs.) For one reason or another, you don't get to see a lot of actual proof of prototyping these days, and its comforting and illuminating to see the steps along the way.

Talking a bit more broadly about Medium: I still think the curation aspect of Medium needs to be refined, since the collections are less about quality and more about quantity. Given Medium's connection with Twitter, I think some sort of article feed culled from your followers would be a great first step. (I think its fun to see how Medium's strategy diverges from Svbtle's: while the vast majority of Svbtle's content is SV-focused, which is a shame, the average quality seems to be much higher.)
Seat Pets
Bridgewalker: an exchange rate adjusted Bitcoin wallet
Yeah, I've tried that... with three different cards in the last month. I have yet to have a transaction complete successfully.
That was the case, but it got worse. Lester and McNulty set him up with a great deal on the phones.
Ask HN: Who Does a Cyberwar Escalation/False-Flag-Op Benefit?
What does a false flag op(Reichstag Fire) lead to in `Cyberwar'? Say, something such as personal crypto, stego, deniable crypto, hacking ... becomes illegal? Loss of more civil rights?

Possibly something much more frightening and heinous.

Rather, "follow the money", this new kind of war's required budgets, now even more centralized and higher-tech than Wall Street or Silicon Valley, more remote and alien `mathematical', `quant'; more pure-and-applied `mathematics-weaponized' focused, this new defense budget, will be handled and directed by these re-employed ex-NSA elite.

Who is going to fight a Cyberwar? Not the Marines, Army, Navy, Air Force.
It will be a relatively tiny nos of techs in these Maryland corridors of security/intel-tech corporate parks leading into Fort Meade, with ex-NSA civilians pulling down exec salararies wearing their valuable rare and tightly controlled security clearance badge necklaces.

If the above scenerio is true, this appears quite the nightmare. Prersident Bush was cognitively bovine though recognizably human. These state sanctioned and security cleared career criminals are way smarter, amoral, and frighteningly alien.

If you've the free time, see this (longish 1:27:34) Youtube video of William Binney, harassed and heroic NSA whistleblower, describing huge corporate-intelligence-complex expansion, internal Machivellian selfish intrique, and corrupt revolving door entanglement of NSA active careers into lucrative re-hired retirees.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxnp2Sz59p8
Same goes for the Google Apps Email Audit API[1]. Heck, it even lets you set up keyword queries that get automatically copied to your spy inbox.

[1] https://developers.google.com/google-apps/email-audit&#x2F;
When you get a FISA letter you aren't allowed to acknowledge that you got it, or tell anyone about it. So yes, there are very tricky laws to skirt around here which necessitate the use of a lawyer when responding to these.

Google has been a strong proponent of transparency around these requests, but they are bound by law to not talk about it, so there's only so much they can do.
1) it's "Electronic Frontier Foundation"

2) It's a disgrace that they get so few donations. If that is our investment in our digital future, it's no wonder that it's all going downhill... If you are an entrepreneur or developer, you should seriously consider making healthy, recurring donations.
Duplicate, this was just on the front page two weeks ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5795152
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5842822
Some people are pointing out undefined behavior involving shifts. I agree it's pretty egregious. (Also, how can you hardcode 31 in a bunch of places, make a statement like "if you don't know how many bytes an int is" - and not mention sizeof!)

But there's a special place in hell reserved for this:

> (a) ^= (b) ^= (a) ^= (b);

This is undefined because ^= is not a sequence point.

I feel like the title of this should be "how to demonstrate lack of C knowledge".
If you're jailbroken (which you probably should consider if privacy is a concern), FirewallIP is the reason I still haven't switched to Android: http://yllier.webs.com/firewall.html
5 Insider Tips to Push Your Ho-Hum Business Blog Over the Top
Isn't it too late to prevent the coming impact? Unless the news outlets backed down on the PRISM powerpoint, trust for American technologies and services for anything more serious than cat pictures is dead. Which prompts the question of why Facebook should be bothered by this at all.
Does it imply that any random (p2p and/or encrypted) traffic between two hosts or users makes them suspicious of illegal file sharing activities ?

What about protocols and implementations such as bitmessage then (p2p network, hosts and nodes share everyone's messages, only intended recipients can decipher messages that are sent to them)? Is there a tacit understanding that encrypting any communication is suspicious ?
Don't give them any ideas. :P
The real question clamoring for a clear statement is far more complex:

Does any government, US or otherwise, their agents, representatives, contractors or NGO's have access, directly or indirectly, through any means, to <insert company name here> DATA, FILES, COMMUNICATIONS, LOGS or any other information having any relationship whatsoever to <insert company name here> users?

This could be, and probably should be, refined, IANAL.

The point is simple: We don't care about "direct access to servers". We care about access to data. And this can be provided through many channels, direct and indirect. It can even be provided via daily tape backup dumps. Of course, it can be provided to organizations peripherally working for or with a government yet not directly to a government agency. And, finally, it could be provided to another government that, in turn, can pipe it back to US governnment agencies or collaborators.

The rabbit hole can be very deep.
This One, Tiny Little Tip, Will Change The Way You Think About Blogging
Maybe I'll just wait a day or two for someone at the Pentagon to leak guidelines on how to provide constructive criticism of their budget.

Meanwhile enjoy this quote from Nicholas Negroponte - "Nationalism is the biggest disease on the planet. Nations have the wrong granularity. They’re too small to be global and too big to be local, and all they can think about is competing."
His body language give him away. That is why we have actors in position of power because they need to perform for the puppetiers in front of the gullible.
Yes, I was wondering the same thing. The timing of the leaks is interesting. Has anyone made a good guess about the source of the leaks?
If I was a designer and not a programming type, this would be extraordinarily difficult, especially when it comes to refactoring someone else's code and interface to fit my vision.
I'm using a mouse-less browsing plugin anyway, so don't need shortcat in the browser.

I've had it installed a while now and found that I almost never use it -- surprisingly.

One thing you could support to fix that: why can't I click on the menu bar of an application?

One thing that annoys me: whenever I cylce through open applications with cmd-tab, shortcat is there.
Dog and pony show where the survellance state media gets paid.
Eating Synthetic Meat (and Leather)
I do like the idea of NeWS, but,

Then you aren't fucked by synchronization issues.

I don't know what you mean by this. The EWMH specifies policy for using the Sync extension to synchronize updates between the window manager and the clients.
========QUOTE==========

> But the most relevant quibble is this: a father who beats these rapists with his fists would also face a longer sentence than these accused rapists (who, according to the OP, faced 1-2 years)...because these convicted offenders were juveniles.* *

=======================

These offenders were teenagers. They are not five years old, they know - at least in general terms - what's right and wrong, and they know what will hurt someone. And they did it anyway.

Charging someone as a juvenile ought to be for kiddy-screwup fist fights and stupid kid mistakes, so that some momentary lack of judgement doesn't screw someone's life up, not for raping someone - that's not a momentary mistake.

========QUOTE==========

And as much as we want to celebrate extra-judicial vengenance upon convicts, juvenile or not, I think we should be aware that there may be unpleasant consequences when our justice/political system looks the other way upon unlawful actions in which "the ends justified the means".

...because, I mean, isn't that at the core of the NSA controversy that is currently raging in the the other 20 HN threads?

=======================

Not from my point of view, no. The law is going to be selectively enforced - there's nothing you can do about it. And the law is so ridiculously messed up that total enforcement isn't even something desirable. The average person commits, I believe it's 3, felonies a day. The US gov can't even count all the laws anymore. We're all guilty.

That's why you need a system that lets people adjust the application of law for common decency. That's why you need a jury of your peers with the ability to refuse to convict. (Granted, a legal theory that seems relatively unknown these days.)
His first skydive: http://www.uspa.org/BecomeaSkydiver/ChooseaMethodampaSchool/...

And go with him.

Or a really unique dinner.

Because he'll remember and talk about an experience for years longer than he'll remember a license.
I'm surprised how many people think this is news.

It's simple: if it's passed through the USA, if you store it on a server in the USA or if it contains tags served from the USA you can bet that it's being tracked by one or more three letter agencies. To assume anything less would be folly given the amount of smoke that has been generated to date. To infer there is a fire somewhere is no feat of deduction.

The fact that there is now proof that at least some of these programs are real is only going to convince the last hold-outs, or at least, so I'd hope.
Even though you have a point in that all this massive expense (and more) is a win for terrorists, I don't think they "hate our freedom". If anything, they hate those that cause them pain (like every other human being). The US have playing chess with the rest of the world for decades and they're starting to pay the price. This is not a war that terrorists started because they hated anyone's freedom (why don't they target Canada, then?), but the absolutely only resource they have against a superpower that's trying to crush them (putting dictators in other countries, etc).
Rather than calling anyone a coward, I will acknowledge that standing up for freedom is never easy. I know through direct personal acquaintance people who spent hard prison time during Taiwan's transition from dictatorship to democracy, who were arrested after leading peaceful public protest demonstrations of the kind that happen every day here in the United States. I have seen what kind of sustained effort--and, yes, individual courage--it takes to move a society from a default condition of tyranny to a default condition of freedom and rule by the people.

Rather than name-calling, let's learn how to fight for freedom. I posted yesterday, to NO upvotes,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5840000

a link to the free online book From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation by Gene Sharp,

http://www.aeinstein.org/organizations/org/FDTD.pdf

an experienced activist and supporter of people power democratic movements that originated under some of the world's toughest dictatorships. We can learn a lot more from him and his writings and those of his collaborators

http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html

than we can learn from anyone on Uncrunched or TechCrunch or any high-tech publication about how to win freedom even while under intense pressure from dictators. Try it. Don't decry anyone else for lacking courage. Build up your own courage. Build up your own effective communication with other freedom fighters, so that the movement for freedom has solidarity, unity of purpose, and resilience. Roll up your sleeves and get to work. (Anyone can participate: as a foreign student in Taiwan in the early 1980s, I was able to turn Chinese-language speech contests for foreign students into opportunities to express dissent from the dictatorship in the hearing of government officials of the dictatorship. This just takes courage and preparation.)
It's obvious — the terrorists that hate your freedoms!

Your skin is brown? DROP A BOMB.
You're a Muslim? DROP A BOMB, AND ONE MORE, TO BE SURE.
You're a goddamn Ruski commie? BOMB, BOMB, BOMB.
Twitter refused to join PRISM
I was with you right up to your last sentence. 'Our freedoms,' that's the number one cause of terrorism?
This is generally true, but what is an issue from where I stand is that companies which are building their reputation on pushing back against too much surveillance are cooperating with the government to make such requests cheaper, faster, and easer, which is to say ensuring we will see more of them.

The responsible thing to do is to require a physical document, hand delivered to an appropriate corporate agent or officer, with a manual, hard copy review process.
Is the site behind paywall? I don't want to register just to read one article.
Vietnamese girl travels to 25 countries with US $700
Stop complaining, start doing something!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5844582
Nice post.
With expanded use of css3 features (gradients, shadows etc...) this will probably become more of an issue, but I hadn't really considered the impact that compile to css languages are having.

With the dynamic nature of the DOM, it's going to be very difficult to automagically improve selectors (that x% unused figure only accounts for the current users actions, not potential actions)
That's unfortunately the problem. We want to make secure software easier to use but we can't get past step 1 if people can't just buy it from the app store.
Mobile browser market share by continent
I loved the Unix Hater's Handbook. Still have the book, still have the barf bag. Still think it's one of the best books on operating systems design ever written.

At least no-one tries to use csh anymore...
You are assuming I didn't write that $50 check.
It's possible. No mention of access to collected data.
Firefox crash bug won't be fixed in 22.0
What I find odd isn't that they don't tell the truth. I never expected them to. That they didn't remain silent on the issue is odd though. What can denying possibly gain them at this point other than tanking their credibility?
Who did your logo? Very cute :)
fdhyzeturyzetdyizet-riu
I'm posting this here because it is fixed in v23 already. You can get it by switching to the Aurora version right now, or waiting for 22.0 to be released and then changing to the Beta version. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel&#x2F;
Python Tutor: Visualize Code Execution
White House admits it has 'access' to Facebook
It's one thing to have a bankaccount in the Netherlands, that's easy. A whole data-center? A data-center with all the infrastructure to support it and employees and it still needs to be fast enough that we can't see a slowdown from moving it out of USA? That's a different undertaking.
I'd say it is basic game theory and statistics.
If we have population of individuals who exhibit three types of behaviour:
A - altruistic (1% of population)
E - egoistic (1% ...)
N - Normal (randomly A or B 98% of population)
Let's them play a game where E - type has muuuuch better chances to win....
It is obvious that the proportion of E - types in the winner population will grow during the tournament.
This explain the current state of world affaires: Usually 'Supreme Leader' is the "biggest bastard of them all"...
Exporting data should always be an option: BeerQuest 1.4
Bootstrap= css + some javascript widgets

Angularjs = a very opinionated MVVM framework for web client applications ( think gmail , google reader , ... )
3 Fundamental Laws of Startups
> It means that if telling the truth is illegal, they should have the courage to break the law.

The time for these companies to fight was before they gave away their user's info, not after they got caught doing so. If they weren't going to standup and do the right thing then, it's unrealistic to expect that they'd somehow find the courage now.
I'm pretty sure most of the one billion people you are referencing wouldn't give a shit if Mark Zuckerberg was in jail so long as Facebook was still up and running.
People tend to view things through the lens of their own life-time. So for someone who looked at the USA prior to 9/11 to look at it today and to conclude that a lot of damage has been done would be accurate.

What it looks like a hundred years from now is something nobody can make a reasonable stab at. Chances are that by then this has healed and gotten better, chances are that it will get much worse.

"This too shall pass" applies forever, and countries have been born and have disintegrated long before they managed to achieve their goals.
First they came for the terrorists, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a terrorist.

Then they came for the whistle blowers, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a whistle blower.

Then they came for the illegal aliens, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not an illegal alien.

Then they came for the hackers--and there was no one left to speak for us.
This suggestion comes up a lot, and yet isn't practical. I can read and write code, like many, but haven't the time or inclination (and arguably skill) to "verify it is secure". I can however watch what an app sends over the wire, which applies as much to proprietary as it does to open source software.

How do you go about verifying an arbitrary app is secure?
There are some fundamental issues here that are upsetting, to say the least. It's a dark day when telling the truths illegal and I'm pretty sure that's not what was intended by the forefathers...

Re: cowards, It's easy to say that when you don't have skin in the game. These guys do and I too expect more of them but I can't fault them, nobody wants to go to prison. Something completely legal, completely within their rights and abilities that they can do is lobby and spend and campaign to end the patriot act and they are billionaires...
The price was really a minor point against the idea. There are more fundamental issue that makes this a non-starter for supplying an actual "burner phone".
Ask HN: How to build a social network site?
The requirements to build a social network with photo sharing.

The website is going to be very minimal and simple
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
Hey, am I actually arguing with the Don Hopkins? Great!

> If you sit down at a friend's Macintosh, with its single mouse button, you can use it with no problems. If you sit down at a friend's Windows box, with two buttons, you can use it, again with no problems. But just try making sense of a friend's X terminal: three buttons, each one programmed a different way to perform a different function on each different day of the week

Beside that this hasn't been true since the mid '90s, I don't buy this argument, especially from you. Uniformity in interface design begets mediocrity, the same way inbreeding begets genetic disorders. I appreciate X's configurability for the same reason I prefer Linux over Windows: I don't like the Windows GUI model. I find it slow and archaic. I don't want to use a Windows GUI clone when I'm trying to code.

The great thing about X's separation of concerns is that I don't have to: I can run a tiling window manager until my friend comes over, at which point I can switch to GNOME or whatever he prefers, and after he's done, I can switch back.

With Wayland, well, either I have to reboot the entire display compositor (does Wayland do this gracefully?) to replace it with a new one, or I better hope I'm running one of the several compositors that have no doubt been developed which allow pluggable window managers, and that my window manager and his both run on it.
Do not report it at all - even anonymously! My friends wife works for one of the top digital forensics firms in the US (they're who lawyers use to understand what happened and when). He's told me too many unfortunate cases where people reported items likes this to Fortune 500 companies, that were then prosecuted harshly. I have issues with it - but it's how the world works. I would stay away from it.
The key takeaways:

1) There's at least one tech company that was approached about joining Prism. Presumably similar approaches were made to other companies.

2) The participation was at least in this case voluntary

3) Without that participation Prism was unable to access Twitter data (based upon the slides).
Or you could, y'know, judge the arguments on their face.
yeah...I'm going to go ahead and say this won't work out well. You'll need a little more detail and a lot more research.
A tangential ad hominem about Arrington's personal life does not constitute a counter-argument.
"Meanwhile, the BBC has learned that Twitter was invited to join the Prism programme last year, but rejected the approach from US authorities."

According to the NYTimes article, Twitter chose not to build extra systems to help the NSA collect data more easily for FISA requests. Obviously we need to be careful here, but if that's the wording that was used, PRISM could be just that voluntary system to give easier access to NSA requested data.
Well if you look it the other way, that's a good market to build a start-up for.
Have to click a button for a single line of text? No thanks.
I'm a really big fan of Ramnode right now. Very well priced with great performance. Alternatively you can look at serverbear.com for comparisons.
Twitter _refused_ PRISM, yet Facebook and Google had never heard of it? Doesn't sound very plausible.

I'm actually assuming this is just bad reporting; someone's source saying "refused" instead of "never heard of."

Zuck's response sounded pretty genuine in terms of his knowledge (or lack thereof) of PRISM. He would have zero incentive to say what he said if he _did_ know something.
www.bugmenot.com
8 Questions Keep Great Entrepreneurs Up At Night
>Having him put it all on the table to defend his user's privacy ...

Defend their privacy so he can immediately sell it to the highest bidder?
Meet 'Schmeat': Lab-grown meat hits the grill this month
I'm likely going to use their services in a reduced capacity whether they were complicit or not, simply because this incident has highlighted the risk of companies who store massive amounts of personal information consolidated together in one place. Even if their only reason for doing so is advertising, I'm less interested in participating in systems that collect and store so much information on me. This probably should've been obvious before (people have certainly been saying similar things for a while), but recent revelations have made me more prone to agree.

The problem, of course, is that some Google services are nearly irreplaceable, especially search. There are alternative search engines, but they simply aren't as good for the technical type searches that a programmer needs. Duck Duck Go is better than some older alternatives have been, but when using it I frequently find myself having to return to Google to actually find what I'm looking for. I wish them luck and hope very much they keep improving, as I'd like to use them, but so far I can't really.
"Regarding swagger sticks: If you need one, carry one."
Old-school leadership. Much respect.
Show HN: Yet another URL Shortener - with Wildcard substitution.