skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This has nothing to do with investigating anything. First, the public would never actually realize the reality of war without actually experiencing it, what it can only realize is what the press would choose to tell them and in a way that the press chooses to report it, and there's a real lot of wiggle room in reporting and choosing how to present events. But more importantly, this would be the same with and without investigation - the tragedy already happened, and if you plan to exploit it in anti-war propaganda, you can exploit it regardless of why it happened, who is to blame and any other investigation results. In fact, investigating may only make it less useful for for anti-war purposes - what if after investigation it turns out Taliban deliberately placed their fighters in the midst of the civilians so that the response fire would hit most of them and thus achieve the best propaganda effect? It might only make the society more determined to get those bastards. The most tragic and most shocking part already happened - people died. If you want to say war is evil because people die - no further investigation necessary. Further investigation is needed only if you intend to wage war in the future but want to do it differently - but then it is useful mostly for people that actually wage war.
Regarding this specific point: as someone who likes to backpack, I use a paper map for the following reasons

* Because I may not have an internet connection near my destination

* Even if I do, my maps app has a thing for taking me to the wrong place. Anecdote: some friends and I went biking through a popular bike road through the woods. When checking the route on their phones, all they could see was "you are here", and nothing else because apparently the road didn't exist.

* Paper is more reliable than electronics: a paper map will survive a fall, water and mud, and it will never run out of battery.

I don't deny the usefulness of electronic maps for daily use, but I honestly don't trust them for visiting unfamiliar places.
So, after using HNSearch for recent PGP comments, it turns out that at least one such solution exists [1]. It can be found here: https://bitmessage.org, along with its interesting whitepaper from 2012 outlining its operation.

I'll try to submit it to HN to raise awareness.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5845858
Another Myth Bites The Dust: How Apple Listens To Its Customers (2011)
Conversely some people might be more likely to do in-depth research into a subject on wikipedia on a desktop than ever on a mobile phone.

Agree on the more data needed.
"... assistant county prosecutor Kevin Filiatraut discovered the Facebook transcripts in the file and questioned Brockler about them."

And if he hadn't put the transcripts in the file, no-one may ever have known.
I don't think the situation we're discussing here has any connection with anybody being not paid enough.
Would performance increase with average internet speed (upload), right now it's ~5.34 MBit/s[1] which probably gets worse when hopping through several nodes. It's a shame Ookla doesn't provide latency statistics. I'm sure ping is a big factor too.

Might be interesting to see if a few computers strictly on a LAN could communicate quickly over networks like these or if the actual software is slow.

[1] http://netindex.com/upload/#
It's new because it's on a phone, ya see.
Really hard to judge without knowing the rest of the case. Lying to suspects isn't unethical. Intruding into a suspect's personal life by potentially destroying relationships is a much tougher proposition.

Imagine the situation where the man is actually innocent, and his girlfriend(s) go berserk on him because of the ruse.
EasyPost (YC S13) Response to PRISM Accusations
> Freedom from persecution for speaking your opinion (whether right or wrong) is probably the greatest freedom we have. Discussion leads to ideas which eventually leads to progress.

Sure. But if nationality no longer matters, then everyone else gets a say in how far we recognize this, right? That's my point really. If we are so sure nationality no longer matters and we should be one global culture, are we going to be happy with the tradeoff? I don't think we would.

BTW the other is just as valid. My wife is Chinese-Indonesian and she and I have shared what are essentially very foreign views with eachother regarding these sorts of things. I can say without a doubt that American culture in this area is not something that you just show people and they come running to.
This was a fantastic video. Thanks!
Sounds like something a smartass hacker would come up with. There's no way that would fly in court.
Protest the NSA in Silicon Valley Next Friday
Hello hacker news community.

In light of recent events, we must take some action.

Let us stage a protest of the NSA/spying so instead of bitching on HN/reddit let's actually make some noise in the area.
What do folks think of protesting at the US Attorney's office next Friday afternoon?

For those concerned with security, you can respond to this thread with a throwaway account through tor browser.
People with nothing to hide
Scheme doesn't have data abstraction in the sense Liskov's CLU had it for example, you can try to roll it yourself like SICP does, but it is not the same as having it as a language feature. Also interfaces can still be useful in an untyped language and there has been discussion of their inclusion in Python, see a good discussion here (some of the problems mentioned would apply to Scheme just as well I think):

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0245/

I am not invalidating your observation in general, to the contrary, I just don't agree Liskov is to blame of this here.
Freedom of religion and speech were already part of the Roman empire.

That is besides the point really. What I said was in reaction the the quote that America 'created' all those things. While I argue that they were able to pick and choose from existing political systems. So they didn't create, they chose. You can compare this to either building your own framework or picking one that will work for what you are trying to do.
> The first is that yes, the rule of law is illusory. It exists only because people believe in it.

And one of the most frustrating things about American politics as the populist level is that I find that a lot of people have no idea what "rule of law" even means. I don't know if it was in my curriculum, but I certainly didn't understand the concept until my late 20s. So I can excuse people for the ignorance, but it's still a problem.

> But increasingly the government of the US has grown to distrust its citizens.

It's not really a surprising reaction to a citizenry that distrusts its government. The kind of person that goes into a government job has been a kind of person that gets a fair amount of segregation in society. So while I agree with this statement,

> But there's another aspect: politically and culturally the US is two nations under one roof.

I suspect that it's not Republican v. Democrat. It's something more akin to public sector versus private sector. I'm not one to theorize about deep politics, so I can't draw the lines out less vaguely.
> Nationalism says that people in your nation are special...

But isn't everyone special in this regard?

> On your Hopi/Swedish point, the question here is whether the Hopi child deserves government by the same standards and access to the same opportunities as the Swede.

So no more of the ritual beating as a part of rites of passage into the religious community of the village for Hopis? We don't even have to ask why they do it? We can just say "it's abhorrant and not up to our standards" and that settles it?
It is so easy to blame software, is it?

1. If you are not able to manage your keys, which includes a simple unencrypted key-backup, you are doomed, even with a pretty interface.

2. If you insist on other people to take away the responsibility from you, no service, hard- or software will provide security or privacy for you.

3. You don't need a cloud, when decentralized or local services crater you much better and faster.

4. Sharing data isn't really a problem, it's the lack of transparency of the data collecting entity that creates the problem.

The conclusion is, to protect your security/privacy and to successfully utilize any crypto-toolchain you have to accept that responsibility isn't comfy, and delegation will lead to compromise.

Did you really believe that any government, or parts thereof, in the world would not tap the vast resources that packet-switched networks, centralized services would offer them?

Zacqary knows nothing about security, secure procedures or even cryprography.

If you delegate your private, unsecured communications to an entity for a comfortable user experience, you did not want either security and privacy.

Sorry, to tell you so.
Although the outcome here seems good the opposite could have very easily been the case. There's a reason why "due process" is treated as a sacred principle in democratic countries. From Wikipedia:

When a government harms a person without following the exact course of the law, this constitutes a due-process violation, which offends against the rule of law. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Due_process_of_law)
How is the JavaScript JIT different from the Java JIT?
This essay is garbage.

The argument "I don't do anything wrong, therefore I have nothing to hide" is extremely weak. The argument for "national security" is even worse.

I'm not proud of everything I did, and there's probably some information out there that would allow someone to arrest or blackmail me. That said, I don't consider privacy a right and I don't believe we should pursue it. Sure, privacy might be necessary in the short term, but once we get rid of the real issue, privacy loses all value. The value of privacy is not eternal, and it certainly is not intrinsic.

Publicity never was the problem. The problem comes from elsewhere. The problem comes from us.

What do you think happens when a society surrenders most of its freedom and power to a state? The government is not unlike us. It wants to survive, it grows, and it gets greedy. Then, all it needs is more power, in order to keep surviving. Where does this power comes from? Information.

Information is a form of power, and power makes anything more effective. In this case, it's the government, which no longer exists to serve us but only to survive. A huge part of survival is about eleminating the threats, which is done easily when you know everything about them.

Here comes privacy. As long as we worship this beast, we will rely on privacy to protect us, slow them down. But privacy is not a solution. It only gives us more time. Should we spend this time fight for privacy, or should we spend it to fight the government? I think the second option is the only real one.

Once we get rid of this beast, once it's dead. Will we keep seeking privacy? Will we realize that communication is extremely valuable and necessary for growth? Will we leave the hypocrisy that privacy allowed? Will we accept who we are?

We hide because we are afraid. As long as the threat lives, fear will remain. And the beast feeds off of fear.

By focusing on hiding, we forget about the actual problem. And it keeps growing.
You're reinventing a core plank of Marxism, as it happens.

You're assuming that your employer adds no value to your labour.

Maybe that's the case, and maybe it isn't. There's actually no way to know unless you go into competition with them.

Let us know how that goes.
Apple to announce "iPaw" at WWDC
When google are watching and you are careless with your words you may get an inappropriate ad displayed.

When the government is listening you may get on the no-fly list, or worse ...

Not a small difference IMHO.
He misses the part about them not giving the government "unfettered" access. That's narrow enough to meet the criteria of "otherwise" access.

That's the problem with all of these statements. They're very specific with their language.
I haven't tried them yet, but a lot of former Linode users seem to be loving DigitalOcean. [1]

[1] https://www.digitalocean.com
This might be of interest:

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/rope
You can add # which seems to make it ignore the trailing slash:

http://www.example.com/#
I brought up the Hopi very specifically because of their religious practices.[1]

Children among the Hopi are raised to believe literally that the Kacina dancers are literally gods from somewhere else who have come to work miracles on the village. Once every 3 years, the children ages 7-9 are gathered together for induction into the religious community of the village. This induction involves ritual beating and betrayal (showing that what they have been taught all their lives is a carefully constructed lie), and thus induction into the religious community is also a somewhat temporary and violent initiation into atheism as well. However this tearing down of belief in relatively visceral and violent ways is considered necessary for passing on the Hopi understanding of religion.

The problem I have with this sort of international humanism is that it leaves no room for cultures like that. I mean Think of the Children!!! They are being abused!!! and so we go out of our way to impose our own culture on everyone else in the way of proving that nationalism and ethnocentricity must go.

[1] see Gill, Sam D. 1996 "Disenchantment: A Religious Abduction." In Readings in Ritual Studies, edited by Ronald L. Grimes, 230-39. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall.
Remind HN: Cowardice
If you are asked to do something to which you are morally opposed, and out of fear for personal loss you do not make your voice of opposition clearly heard, then you are a coward.

Our world was been built by numerous hands, many fine cowards amongst them. But you may have heroes, and I doubt that they are cowards.
Yes. I am also tired of weightlifting trying to lose weight. Doesn't mean I should stop. The problem is unless there is steady stream of leaks in the next few days it will all be forgotten.
But what exactly has been "confirmed"? There are no details. What is being alleged is broad, unrestricted access by the NSA to all user account data, not specific targeted individuals. While the Verizon metadata case is disconcerting, there is legal precedent for pen register/trap-and-trace going back decades. It's on shaky legal footing, but not obscenely illegal.

On the other hand, blanket access to the email contents of every American on domestic soil, for the NSA to just go run a search on at any time, without a court order, would almost certainly be completely illegal.

It is very very doubtful this is going on. Tech companies responding to FISA requests and sending a mirror of an individual target's account data, that is totally unsurprising. We know they respond to such requests, they've never denied it, and so the way the data is delivered is really just an implementation detail.

What Greenwald is alleging flies in the face of 9 major tech companies full of thousands of engineers who tend to side with civil libertarians, and these companies are under threat of hack all the time and conduct extensive audits of who is accessing who's data internally. It's just unbelievable that the kind of access alleged is actually occurring with active knowledge.

So, whose's to say that these slides aren't being misinterpreted as to the actual details of the program, or that the source may have obtained a copy of the PPT, but is actually not privy to the actual implementation details of the compartmentalized information. Just because someone works at the NSA means they are privy to everything. For example, analysts in WW2 often dealt with intelligence reports from Ultra, unaware of what Ultra was or how they obtained information. I want to see a slide that says "NSA box installed in Datacenter 12, with credentials for direct access to datastore"

From my watching Greenwald on talk shows, he comes across to me as someone who oversteps the bounds of calm rational analysis, and ventures forth into media whorism. I'd rather just have the slides, I don't need him to trickle them out with his interpretation. Dump the slides and dump the transcripts and notes he took from his source. Let us judge and discuss.
This is not direct access in the sense which the Guardian and Washington Post suggested yesterday and the tech companies denied. OP is the Washington Post (which has access to the full PowerPoint) backing down from that claim, something it had already started to do yesterday http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanhall/2013/06/07/washingt... . In the context of the latest slide it's clear that direct collection probably means collection from the endpoint - Google, Facebook etc. - as distinct from "upstream" collection by wiretapping IP traffic through US telcos' networks.
I, too, would like to use this opportunity to declare that I was not aware of PRISM until the story broke and that the US government does not have any backdoors installed on my private servers (to the best of my knowledge, certainly not with my participation).

I will make sure to include this information on my annual Christmas cards, possibly becoming the first individual to do so.
It really is a lot in global terms. E.g.:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/timeline/7971d5fa4...

And the difficulty in spending this much comes in two ways:

a) The more important your hammer becomes, the more everything looks like a nail. The US has frequently undertaken a military response for areas where other countries might use diplomacy.

b) The military, plus contractors, plus jobs that depend on the military, plus PR and lobbying firms, all tend to distort politics in favour of increasing military importance.

Don't get me wrong: the UK and EU in general owes a lot to US military power over the years and should thank the US for a lot of our freedoms. But there is a flip side, and I think it should be recognised that such a large amount of spending does distort things.
For police to lie to a suspect - or anybody else - is not against the law and AFAIK does not violate "due process". Giving false testimony however - which two girlfriends were about to do - is a crime, called perjury. So the prosecutor actually prevented two crimes from being committed.
But nationalism of that sort is just a modern example of a much older pattern, which stressed the exclusivity in membership of one population to one specific culture. The Greeks spoke of non-greeks as Barbaros, from which we get our word "barbarian" via the Latin borrowing. The Roman writers saw themselves as bringing the light of Roman culture to the barbarians (read Tacitus sometime), and so forth. This is found elsewhere too. The earliest Sanscrit writings refer to the early Sanscrit speakers as "Noble" (Sanscrit 'Aryan') which is one of the reasons folks assume (wrongly I think) that the caste system was set up by the invaders to privilege themselves over the local population.[1]

The "nation state" is a somewhat new model to some extent. The older models were more fluid, but the idea of loyalty to one's nation (not necessarily the same as one's state) can be found going back into antiquity, and you can find similar patterns just about everywhere, whether early Ireland, Scandinavia, the Goths during their time in the Roman Empire, India, China, and so forth. The difference is that traditionally loyalty to one's nation was separate to loyalty to one's government.

You can see in racial stereotypes much the same thing going on actually. The old division is between people who "act and talk like we do" vs "everyone else."

[1] Compare the colors of the Varnas to the colors of the Gunas and the colors of the classes in the Scandinavian poem Rigsthula and you see that the three colors in common are white, red, and black which represent spirituality, war, and labor of the earth respectively. Also note that if you compare functions to the labels of classes in Solonic Athens, the bottom three match-- Hippeis to Ksatria, Vassyia to Zeugmatis, and Sudra to Thetis), while the designations of the upper three match between India and Ireland. There are also long-standing spacial associations with these which can be found across Ireland, India, Scandinavia, and the Greco-Roman world. On this I conclude that the 5-fold division of a king and four castes was brought by the Sanscrit speakers fully as a ritual division of space and implemented in ceremonial divisions of society.
>There are few European countries where I can unconditionally refuse to speak to police or refuse them to search my home or person without a warrant.

these rights in the USA are lost when "national security letter" provisions involved
NSA wants to hire hackers on Defcon (2011)
I have been playing around with Mercury[0] for a while now which is a quite practical logic/functional implementation. It has a very small user group but it's worth giving it a try.

[0] http://mercurylang.org
Janne Aaltonen's Patents and Appications: http://www.plainsite.org/flashlight/index.html?id=2228089&ta...

The USPTO doesn't have any assignment data for this particular publication yet, but this assignment looks pretty similar (same title): http://www.plainsite.org/flashlight/patentassignment.html?id...

Application No. 12/664,079, which that assignment is based upon, and which Apple, Inc. also owns ("13/753,189 filed on 01-29-2013 which is Pending claims the benefit of 12/664,079"), has been pending in the USPTO's system since December, 2009. A final rejection was issued September 7, 2012, after which a Request for Continued Examination (RCE) was filed, and another non-final rejection was issued May 31, 2013. Pretty typical path for the USPTO.

I filed my mobile payments patent around the same time; it was finally granted in March. Apple e-mailed me saying that they wanted to buy it in late April. When they called to follow up they told me they'd contacted me in error. Oops. I guess they're placing their bets on this extremely vague application which should have zero chance of being granted instead?
Why is that? Is there some poison or deficiency in lobster meat?
What about the massive mobile money networks in Africa?
Don’t Take Your Vitamins
Forgive my lack of understanding, but what's with the four paragraph pattern in all these responses?
There doesn't have to be a startup scene in all of the countries. The books were written for entrepreneurship, not Valley-level startup scenes.

Eiter way, have you checked out write ups of the recent Echelon event in Singapore (http://e27.co/echelon/)or that 500 startups just set up a fund only for SEAsia countries?

As far as the spam-market quick-e-books comment, I'm pretty sure it was the absolute opposite of that. Did you read that after a year and a half of hard work he released these?

I don't see these books as a fail at all, but instead a step forward to good, actionable information that is useful to help bring and grow entrepreneurship to Asia.

I would love to hear what's important to you as I'm currently running a startup in Thailand and would love to learn more about all the countries, especially China.

Why don't you offer some advice as to what you see ont he most important areas of consideration and what is overemphasized?
The perfect multi room sound setup
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRA_law

.se, huh?
I'm in. And I don't consider my objection to surveillance something worth hiding.
It seems the report was written by a German. When the report was written (apparently around 2000-2001) "computer freak" was commonly used in Germany to describe what today would be called "nerd" or "geek". There's even a Wikipedia page: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computerfreak It's not really meant in a derogatory way, it's just one of many annoying pseudo-anglicisms.
Direct access, direct access, and direct access - all use the same word. What do we make out of it?