skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Hatch Act[1] restricts the ability of Executive branch employees to engage in partisan politics. The Smith Act[2] prohibited executive employees from advocating the overthrow of the US Government, although I think it's been found unconstitutional.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatch_Act_of_1939

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Act
I agree as far as customer relations, even if it just pissed off this one person it hardly seems worth it. But I think they're both legally and morally in the right here, not that it really matters much.
This story needs some historical context. This is pointed out in the blog post, but the main reason for wiretapping King wasn't his civil rights advocacy, but his communist leanings. This in no way excuses or apologizes for the dirty tricks used by the federal government against a non-violent protestor. But this should make sense to students of US history.

Communism was the absolute defining political issue of the 20th century in America. Today communism seems like a failed political ideology, a cute thing that hippies like along with pot and drum circles. But in the 50s and 60s communism was the most evil thing imaginable, like aids spreading terrorists who block cell phone signals. Hoover in particular had spent his entire life fighting communism and saw it as the greatest threat our country had ever faced. Many of our parents or grandparents had nuclear bomb drills in elementary school, ducking and covering under their desks to protect themselves from the communist threat. Growing up like that, you can imagine the fear and rabid hatred that people had for the ideology.

This isn't a story of "Evil US government subverts wiretapping power to go after peaceful protestor". This is a case of the government executing the will of the people at the time. Hindsight is 20/20 and looking back their actions seem evil, but in historical context the FBI was doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing: fighting communism with everything they had. It may sound silly to us, but back then that was the only fight that mattered. The FBI and the public didn't see it as wiretapping a private citizen, but as a part of a decades long political struggle.

Recently on HN people have been acting like the government can dominate the world through wiretapping. As if the NSA can find out a few secrets and people will bow their heads and be silent. Government wiretapping found a true dirty secret involving MLK and threatened to reveal it if he didn't change what he was saying. Did he stop? No. Did he slow down for a single second? Fuck no. True political reformers aren't cowed by blackmail and intimidation. As long as we have leaders like Martin Luther King, democracy will live forever.
The NPR article (http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/06/15/191985890/fac...), presumably working from the same sources, quotes MS as saying that up to 32,000 accounts were affected. I have no idea why the WSJ would just leave that out.
The p2p-hackers channel was also interesting around the same time. The fact that you have to differentiate between the "old cryptography list" and its newer incarnations is sad. I think with each move the list went down hill. It seems half the posts to cryptography are either cc'ed to cpunks and a bunch of other lists or the message is a conference announcement.
"We don't hold data on US Citizens." Keith Alexander (2012)
Perhaps the OP meant Castro, many historians have interpreted some of Castro's communications to the Soviet Union at the time as calls for pre-emptive or first-use nuclear strikes - this is mentioned a couple of times in the wikipedia page you linked.
> Even a plain user can install OS X himself. And then upgrade it himself.

And struggle with drivers, too. I bet, OS X still uses them, not magic pixie dust, to work with hardware. So, if you use hardware except for pre-configured one (i.e. one having drivers pre-bundled with OS), you have to figure out what drivers are and where to get them (if they exist).
Mattermark Weekly Issue #1
Either way, he's failed in his duty.
I actually thought about posting this as well... definitely required reading for anyone who believes the government would never abuse their powers to stifle dissent. Really sad chapter in American history.
WebRTC clone of Vine
On a related note, it seems that journalists are listening in all kinds of "secret briefings" of the US government.
I'm not entirely sold on the "Innovator's dilemma" argument that "they can’t muster the courage to disrupt their existing revenue streams" in case of Apple - they seem to have been doing plenty of self-cannibalising since Jobs' return - Jobs slashed the numerous product lines to just 4 products when he returned; iPod Mini that cannibalised iPod sales, iPod Nano that cannibalised both of the mentioned, iPhone that cannibalised all iPods. They at least seem to be willing to compete with their own products.
Nobody understands MRI's GIL implementation
"No, he's an employee" ... who likely has access to all his bosses' communications.
Driverless Car Summit 2013 Part 1 - Fear of Google
I'm not foolish enough to not vet what I take. Or I like to think I'm not. But I can't vet what I would take, because I'm not an expert. Therein lies the problem.

And, no, no free-market solution solves this without people fucking dying. Back to mises.org with this silliness, please.
I just hope that some day some popular software developer would become bored with everything to the extent that he would really consider fucking their users with EULA as hard as possible.
it might be an acronym, like PRivacy Invasion Super Machine or sth.
Don't shout at me, I am only answering because you asked the question, and don't think that I am lecturing you, because personaly I don't really care if you break that trust or not.
That is your resposibility and not mine, I am telling you only the moral implication of your hypothesis of sharing the work that is trusted to you with n people.
"It seems like punctuated equilibrium with a slight downward slippery slope -- it generally gets worse."

Istanbul has been in the grips of a military crackdown of a peaceful protest about a park. In Syria, something like 90,000 people have died fighting an authoritarian regime, with no end in sight. In Iran, people won't even vote in the election (where voting is compulsory) because they know that the elections are rigged. On the other side of the coin, in the UK, you're subject to government surveillance in every public space. It's a trade-off, and the choices aren't as clear as you might believe if you limited your knowledge to what you read on Reddit and HN.

My point is that you have to be pretty cynical to suggest that the USA -- where we let the Occupy protesters linger in front of federal buildings until they were nothing but de facto homeless encampments -- has been on an endlessly downward slippery slope. We live in one of the most free and privileged countries on earth, and it's important to keep a sense of perspective on these things.

I don't necessarily like that the NSA is tracking phone calls, but I'm also keenly aware of the fact that they aren't dragging people out of their homes in the middle of the night, and that we don't have cars exploding daily in New York City. All things considered, we have it pretty damned well.
COINTELPRO did not only target suspected communists.

> As if the NSA can find out a few secrets and people will bow their heads and be silent.

To say that it doesn't have a significant influence is not credible.
http://git-annex.branchable.com/assistant/ is still in active development. It is not exactly a Dropbox analogue, however it can easily fulfill the role of a synchronization agent with a cloud service (S3, Glacier, or similar).

It supports strong encryption.
Why would I bother buying a System76 computer? The point of Linux to consumers isn't "freedom", it's "free". As in, zero-cost. You install it on what you already have. It sucks at doing that.

Restricted drivers. Shitty iDevice support. A mass of stupid UX decisions that are kicked down to the user to deal with. I keep a Linux desktop because I am knowledgeable enough to deal with the issues that arise (like my Xorg getting inexplicably hosed two weeks ago, that was cool). Expecting normals to ever, ever waste their time with it is silliness.
Tonight's violence has been the worst since the protests began.

Following an underwhelming turnout at Prime Minister's rally of his own supporters, Turkish police has attacked the encampment at Gezi having dinner. People escaping the park were shelled by tear gas and plastic bullets and followed, sometimes dragged at the ground and beaten before arrest. A portion of the crowd escaped to Divan Hotel, which was in turn currently under siege by police throwing tear gas through the broken windows. Anybody trying to get out of the hotel is attacked, beaten and arrested on spot. There are children trapped inside.

The police started to stain pressurised water with chemical, which causes burns on contact.[1] The gas mixture used in today's tear gas shells cause facial bleeding.[2]

The doctors trying to set up triage spots and infirmaries are stopped as per orders of Ministry of Health, which decreed today all the doctors that triaged protesters on field will be investigated. There are reports of doctors getting arrested for helping protesters. [3]

The major vehicular traffic arteries are blocked by police barricades, the sea lines cancelled, and major walkways under police assault. There are jammers in the affected areas. The news crew and journalists are barred from the areas and police are stopping those who try to take footage or photos.

There are reports of a large group of people moving towards the Taksim area in response, towards E-5, the major traffic artery, intending to cross the Bosphorus over the vehicle–only bridge.

The Co-head of Germany's Greens Party, Claudia Roth is currently trapped under shell fire in Divan Hotel.

In other words. Mr. Erdogan seems to be fully intent on losing his little remaining legitimacy tonight.

[1] http://occupygezipics.tumblr.com/post/53047048649/doctors-co...

[2] https://twitter.com/Volkances/status/345979905386876928/phot...

[3] http://www.ntvmsnbc.com/id/25449054/
If they did any sort of active MITM like this, this would be incredibly easy to detect and would nearly instantly divulge their intercept operations.

Have we learned nothing from their public history? They simply don't do shit like that.
In Switzerland we rarely have unattributed statements from the government. It would be considered unethical.

Unlike the US with private news providers most Swiss news (television and radio but not print) are mostly funded by the government with fees like in the UK. Government views are well represented but directly.
> people who actually had ran Linux did not complain about the update

I ran Linux on the PS3, and I complained loudly and bitterly about Sony's actions.

> Had you actually suffered from the Other OS removal?

Yes, I have. I specifically asked the Gamestop clerk for an old model, at a time when both the old (Linux-supporting) and new (non-Linux-supporting) machines were available in stores.

I can't speak for sure about a hypothetical alternative reality, but I think it's likely I would have waited a little longer to buy one, if not for the Linux feature -- specifically I was worried that the Linux-supporting older model would become hard to find.

So you can say I wouldn't have bought a PS3 but for its Linux capabilities, and the removal of those capabilities rendered the rationale for my investment invalid.

> it's been already too expensive for the computing power it provided

It's not solely a matter of computing power provided. I thought the Cell's unique architecture was interesting.

Also, in those pre-Raspberry-Pi days, the console wasn't a bad price point to get a general-purpose system with networking, USB and Blu-ray (especially if you bought used hardware), that could also do video out to pre-HDMI TV's.
Thank you for writing this. Do you have a bitcoin donation address with which we can compensate you for your time and service?

I still don't trust it, as the binaries come via the App Store (and without paying another $100 I can't build/install them myself), but it's good that someone's taken the first steps.
I actually like the news summary aspect of this; if you combine quant news about financings with a few more sections (people moving jobs, maybe major startup news headlines), it would be a great way to stay on top of the market with minimal time.
Even then, Apple could just keylog certain applications at the OS level, cryptocat and unmodified-binary ChatSecure included.
The government at the time saw communism everywhere and Hoover's FBI was eager to paint any dissenter as a communist. The civil rights movement and racial relations in the US themselves were used for propaganda purposes by the Soviet Union. The evidence of MLK's 'communist leanings' of any significance is pretty weak.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.#Allega...

The idea that Hoover's FBI was somehow 'executing the will of the people' rather than the will of J. Edgar Hoover seems pretty tenuous.
Multiple downvotes are because your comment adds nothing to the conversation of this article, and most likely people are tired of hearing about somebody's submission not getting the love they think it deserves, and now you'll probably get even more for looking like you care about your score.

And yes, I'm aware that I'm not contributing to the discussion about the article myself.
Simple Statistics, a JS library for doing statistics
Show HN: PocketMod - The Free Recyclable Personal Organizer
I don't follow the logic. Why can't you discuss the documents on the internet as 'alleged classified information'? That reveals absolutely nothing about what you are actually privy to. Not being able to talk about it at all is ridiculous.
Communism may or may not be incompatible with the US constitution. A surveillance state is _certainly_ incompatible with the constitution and threatens our civil liberties.

Having not lived during the Cold War nor studied it, I don't have a perspective on what that is like. But I find it difficult to understand the idea that a political ideology like Communism ought to be "illegal."
Thank you Mr. Snowden. Here it comes. Strap in!
Oh so you mean like the Fast & Furious investigations? Or the Benghazi hearings? Or, I don't know, the impeachment of Bill Clinton?
What relevance does that have to the post it is offered in response to? It seems to me to be a pure strawman, rebutting a point that wasn't argued.
Where I live (Eastern europe) I pay 18 euro/month for 100Mbit download and 50 upload with no crap TV or phone subscription attached. And no traffic limits - you can move 10TB in downloading and seeding "linux isos" and nobody minds.

Quick price check says that comparable speeds in US cost few times that except for Google Fiber where the pricing is sane. Go google.

Until the general public in the States pays lower than that can the author shut up and try to bring real low cost, high speed, high reliability broadband to the masses.
"Guevara, who was practically the architect of the Soviet-Cuban relationship,[149] then played a key role in bringing to Cuba the Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missiles that precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 and brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.[150] A few weeks after the crisis, during an interview with the British communist newspaper the Daily Worker, Guevara was still fuming over the perceived Soviet betrayal and told correspondent Sam Russell that, if the missiles had been under Cuban control, they would have fired them off.[151] While expounding on the incident later, Guevara reiterated that the cause of socialist liberation against global "imperialist aggression" would ultimately have been worth the possibility of "millions of atomic war victims".[152] The missile crisis further convinced Guevara that the world's two superpowers (the United States and the Soviet Union) used Cuba as a pawn in their own global strategies. Afterward he denounced the Soviets almost as frequently as he denounced the Americans.[153]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che_Guevara#The_.22New_Man.22.2...
America kills 20%-30% of its children through abortion, including half of black children. How is this much different?
My point was that things get worse steadily at a pretty slow rate, day over day, and then occasionally there are big shifts for the better (or for the worse), generally in the form of legal decisions or major tech changes. The overall trend might even be net positive (especially for women/minorities in the US over the past 100 years, if not white males).

There's not a monotonically nondecreasing level of freedom, though.

It's like 100 98 98 97 96 130 (ITAR limited) 125 120 120 119 90 (Patriot) 89 88 140 (default to HTTPS) 135 135 133 etc.
Retired Federal Judge: Your Faith In Secret Surveillance Court Is Misplaced.
> "Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed "simply based on an analyst deciding that.""

I wonder if this will temper the shrill cries of "this is all partisan!". Probably not.
Just wanted to point out that banning guns will increase the number of gun deaths, and legalizing guns will decrease the number of gun deaths.

http://orlingrabbe.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/wpid-Ayj53...
How Cults Seduce and What Marketing Can Learn From Them [pdf]
Wait - what? Isn't it our leaders consistent position that "listening" without a specific warrant is wrong? Now I am really confused.
I like this idea. When a teen with a permit drives, the guardian is still responsible for his mistakes. Keep things simple.

>During the discussion session, I put forward a different thesis. Today, there are millions of teens with learning permits. With no skill, they are allowed out on the road, often with just a parent’s supervision, or sometimes under the supervision of a driving instructor, who usually has both their own backup brake pedal, and the ability to grab the wheel. Google, Continental, Audi and all the other companies who are testing on the road also work this way. The software drives, but a safety driver is sitting in the driver’s seat, carefully watching and ready to use the brakes or wheel if there is a problem. I think it’s not unreasonable to claim that the latest robocar prototypes are as safe as a teen taking the first try at the wheel, and this “driving instructor” approach might be a better way to look at vehicle testing. NHTSA and the states can then take on their traditional role, which is to wait, and only regulate if safety problems arise which will not be fixed without regulation.
were you compiling with optimizations on?
The Finnish Winter War - A Thousand Lakes of Red Blood on White Snow [2010]
I don't know how old you are, but the fall of the soviet union and the course of the 1990's was a big improvement. Even since the 1990's peoples' reflexive reaction to the word "communist" has gotten dramatically less. "Terrorist" has never carried the same fear factor.
Thanks. I got my timeline wrong, he got his thing done and then ran for office.
Well, clearly they thought that they could keep you in the dark about the fact that what they can do without a warrant actually extends this far. Obama's credibility is at an all time low.
Note to author: you misspelled Brewster Kahle's name.
I'm not shouting, I'm highlighting the fact that it's not my intention to break anybody's trust.

Morality has little to no place in DRM laws.
Yes. Unless you're running an open-source OS and open-source hardware (and trust the manufacturer and the compiler), you are not safe.
"There's not a monotonically nondecreasing level of freedom, though."

Well, if we do nothing but maintain the current level of freedom, we're doing pretty well, historically speaking.

That said, I don't think we're on a downward slope at all -- that's just techno-nerd catastrophic thinking. The problem is that technology races forward and allows new forms of communication, our sense of entitlement increases, as does the power of anyone (governmental or private) to be intrusive. It's a constant battle against change itself, not necessarily against the surveillance state.

For example, the supreme court said that phone call metadata was collectable without a warrant in the 70s. The fact that Reddit just became aware of this fact is not a fundamental change in reality, or an example of things getting worse -- it's just an indication of how technology has changed this generation's expectations of what "privacy" means.
Does it set a good example to pardon someone who leaked classified information and endangered national security (i.e. treason)? Possibly. I would pardon them only if they had whistleblower status--i.e. the leaked programs were illegal.

Morally, perhaps we should wait to see whether the programs are ruled illegal before deciding to ask for a pardon. So far the administration and Congress (two out of three branches) have maintained that they are legal.

Politically, the administration would not want to undermine their talking points--that the programs were legal--by giving implicit whistleblower status to the leaker, thereby implying they were illegal after all.
Most powerful guy on the planet? I hadn't heard of him until now.

Do you think that your having heard of him, or not, has anything to do with how much power he wields? The guy commands the NSA and a big chunk of US military forces. See: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/general-keith-alexa...
Due to Fortran's memory model, its performance could potentially be drastically improved by altering the arrays such that the program is accessing consecutive columns rather than rows.

from:
r = r + (X(i,k) - X(j,k)) * (X(i,k) - X(j,k))

to:
r = r + (X(k,i) - X(k,j)) * (X(k,i) - X(k,j))
My guess: they realize they are up shit creek because Snowden is about to leak further details of that too. And they hope to soften the blow.
Just because you can't keep a history of more than 2 comments back in your head doesn't mean I have the same limitation. If you follow the thread from the top, you'll see that it refers to the notion of the USG "disappearing" its citizens. Guantanamo is a travesty, but it isn't that travesty.
There's definitely a root cause: he's in power now. I don't know why people assume he must have seen something shocking to change him, the position of power alone could easily do it. His job is now to defend the powers that the government has acquired. That is what he was elected for, whether people want to believe another fantasy or not.

Special interests and insiders own Obama just as they have every modern President.

Our system is not run by: Congress + President + Judical. The Pentagon, US military, DOJ, NSA, IRS, FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, Federal Reserve etc are all directly involved in politics.
Huh? You can probably install Linux on more things than any other OS.
In the sense that J. Edgar Hoover was an "employee," perhaps.
Yes, I am saying that you are at vastly less risk of losing your data to an SQLI flaw on Google Mail than you are on some small competitor to Google Mail. I am saying exactly the thing you seem to be surprised I'm saying, and if you ask any 5 other software security practitioners the same question, at least 4 of them will say the same thing (I'd actually be surprised if 5 didn't).