skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Recommend a code host?
I'm looking for a place to upload my Free Software projects. I'm nearly up against Google Code's project limit and I'm not a fan of GitHub. Hosts outside US reach strongly preferred but not essential. Hosts that support git strongly preferred but not essential.
Without releasing the decision there is no real proof I don't think.
maybe, maybe not
point is, it is a very effective idea for civil disobedience
The country needs more media organizations who are willing to take non-partisan stances like this.
I just don't understand how the NSA can even have the technical capacity to store all of this data. If their total operating budget is a few billion dollars, that doesn't even really come close to buying enough disk to store what some claim they are storing (all network traffic, social data, images, emails, voice, etc).
This is a very important distinction to remember when you hear people trying to find little technicalities around the law. This solution may subvert the letter of the law but it does not give you immunity from the spirit of the law (which is considered in courts).

Also, if you are going to try to make a play against the letter of the law you need to be excellent at maneuvering the details, which this solution is not. The definition of "disclose the existence of" is not confined to explicit verbal or written behavior and this could by every definition be disclosing the existence of something.

Something that would have a better chance of holding in court would be to encrypt the NSA Requests for information in a file, host them publicly but "lose" the keys. It would be hard to prove that it was more than negligence.
Not just the counsel's office, she worked for Brennan at the White House, i.e., the legal side of counterterrorism. Morrell was indeed an old hand, and was elevated to the #2 spot to assist Panetta when he was appointed. In contrast, Brennan himself began his career at the CIA, so he already knows the place pretty well.
The meme I more recall is "Columbus uniquely thought the Earth was round." Really, most people thought the Earth was round; Columbus thought the Earth was 1/3 its actual size...
I believe the decision was know as in we know that they ruled some parts of the law were unconstitutional. But if I understand correctly, it wasn't released what parts of the law were unconstitutional or why they were unconstitutional. This was for public disclosure of that information.
Ask HN: Social Network Alternatives?
With the recent issues regarding Facebook and Google, what social networks are people turning to now?
Social networks do provide a medium for self or business promotions and keeping your audience up to date, so is there any other feasible alternative?
I doubt that a heatsink on an engineering-sample test board would be sized within a 1% margin. Seems more likely they'd be error generously on the side of big.
The trouble is that most computers aren't bought at Best Buy or Walmart, and the ones that are tend to be the low end garbage with no margins for the hardware vendor.

Keeping AMD out of Dell and HP is what kept them out of corporate America. Corporations literally buy PCs by the pallet, and then they pass on the volume discount to employees who want to buy one for home.
>...then his point would still apply, would it not?

Impossible to say. He couldn't know for certain that none of the data could harm national security any more than Manning could. They both could have "gone overboard" in their push for transparency, though you could guess I'd argue neither of them did, and that far more right than wrong has resulted from their actions. Things like "the name of an enemy target, the names of criminal suspects, and troop movements" aren't exactly actionable years after the fact and are likely already available to the enemy. Methods for diffusing IEDs are the only substantially problematic item in that list, though something tells me that the insurgents were already quite adept at that cat and mouse game, preferring IEDs to open encounters since at least 2006 [1]. That doesn't make it right. It just makes it "1 thing wrong" amidst an ocean of data that revealed the true extent of the wars and just how badly they were going. It was the raw proof needed to document that the Taliban and other anti-coalition actors were dealing out just as much death and destruction on their own people as the coalition, if not more so (in Afghanistan at least, _substantially_ more so). And yet the natives of the areas were still largely unable to form a unified political, social, and military response to address the sectarian violence within their own ranks. If that isn't evidence for a failed intervention in areas steeped in historical sectarianism that we needn't be involved with any longer, I don't know what else is.

I'm very interested in knowing about the supposed "dozens" of other compromises the Navy Times mentions:

>"For the first time, prosecutors presented evidence that the disclosures compromised sensitive information in dozens of categories."

However, getting information out of the proceedings has been a battle all its own. We've had to fight tooth and nail to even get a _typewriter_ into a separate media room, and it's looking like this is the only public record that will ever exist on the matter. Those journalistic organizations that have gained access to the proceedings were forced to sign documents agreeing to not release certain information in exchange for the privilege of attending. And it wouldn't surprise me if most of those "dozens" of bits of evidence are all locked up in off-site locations away from the proceedings, making it difficult if not impossible to reliably fact check and cross-examine potential witnesses during trial.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/25/ieds-improvised-...
I use https://www.assembla.com/home for open source projects
There is always being an intrapreneur.

No there is not, in most companies. In most firms, if you try to be an "intrapreneur" while the middle manager to whom you report has to deal with typical corporate dreck, you'll break this "Law of Power" (Never Outshine the Master): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMy8Tf-zCag Then you get fired for being "distracted" because the perception is that you care more about your career goals than your manager's. (Of course, this is usually true for most people and there's nothing wrong with that, but one can't be brazen about it.)

There are benefits to working in larger companies, but the idea that one can just decide one day to recast his job description to "intrapreneur" is laughable for most people. The people who have jobs that would allow that (in small or large companies) don't need to fall back on some templated concept.
12 months at BlackBerry, I learned these things
It's a sex position? Kids these days and their newfangled terminology.

Still, it seems unlikely that no one had ever snickered about the phallic symbolism of the construction equipment of the term's original usage.
The academic paper that predicted the NSA scandal
Maybe that explains the similarities in Windows phone and ios7 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DM8NSSzxNGM
I wonder how secure the governments facilities are in retrospect.

We'll find out, I imagine, as soon as Anonymous gets their press briefing finalized.

But I wouldn't say there's a complete lack of interest. For most Americans,this is just another in a series of scandals that play out on television, abstracted from their real lives. And as someone pointed out to me recently, almost no one seems to care when facebook and gmail mine your data. If it weren't for social media, I don't think PRISM would have been as acceptable culturally.

Although I am a bit disturbed that the threat of affordable healthcare seems to have been far more revolting to people than this.
Referring to comments as dangerous is dangerous.
Unsurprisingly, it appears you are either confused or being purposely obtuse.

I do not doubt that they have constructed for themselves a legal scenario that allows them to command warrant canary operators to lie. On the contrary, I am suggesting that they have with all likelyhood done exactly that.
Compiling big projects (10+ minutes) is still a big use case for a beefy CPU.
>A majority of the insinuations of the original "leak" have since been retracted

I don't think this is true at all. Glenn Greenwald is sticking to his guns, alluding to further revelations, and there has been no evidence contrary to his claims other than press releases by the companies in question.

I'm not sure where this "nothing to see here" idea on HN came from, but it's false and dishonest.
Instinctly, I would agree with you. As a counter-argument though, the gun industry has been able to pull off many legal hacks with similar spirit. See "bullet buttons", 80% lower receivers, or bump-firing attachments. These all got around the spirit of laws and are routinely done now. I don't see why the computer industry can't have their set of legal hacks.
I am going to be really curious to find out how this plays out for OP. I don't know anything about MSFT, but it's a courageous and insightful post that underlines many of the awful truths about typical corporate programming.

The nonsense (endless meetings, anti-intellectualism, lack of passion) is why so many people check out for good around 40. I really hate the stereotype that that's normal, though; I go to Lisp meetups and fairly often run into people in their 50s to 70s who are still passionate about technology.

I want to know, now and in 6 months, where the OP ends up. I'm not going to get into more detail than this, but one learns a lot (about others, organizations, and oneself) through whistleblowing.
And I'm getting a server error.
"Oops! A server error occured. It's been logged."
Not Dutch but I have lived in a few places around the world and never assume I have any privacy, unfortunately.

Im sure any HN readers from the Middle East, Eastern Europe or Asia would probably know the feeling.
Additionally "surveillance" is far too general a concept to be considered harmful or helpful in and of itself. The determining factor lies in the system that surrounds it.

In other words, a "democratic surveillance state" isn't an oxymoron. Nor it it necessarily a bad thing. However, it differs sharply from an authoritarian surveillance state, which is invariably horrible.

Writing for the Washington Post, Mike Konczal elaborates on this distinction in the best surveillance-related piece I've read post-PRISM.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/08/i...
From watching the C-SPAN video that was on the front page of HN, I take from it that different senators and congressman have different levels of understanding. Senator Mary Landrieu (D-Lousiana), for example, had pretty much no idea what was going on ".gov is a coke bottle" ".com is the room surrounding the coke bottle." (paraphrasing).

While Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) had a better idea of what was going on "How did we get from the reasonable grounds, relevant authorized investigations, statement of facts, to all phone records, all locations, all the time." (@ time 1:22:05)
Tagging with Active Record and Postgres Arrays
He's probably right about some things; but he's wrong about people having life outside of work, but that's OK, he's young and his only passion is his code and growing his career. However, there's something about the tone of this posting and the sarcastic overtones that I'd probably fire him....if at least to free him from his corporate shackles so he can go find himself.
Who is the woman behind Keith Alexander passing him notes?
He probably has so much dirt on the politicians that they have to do his bidding.
PlayStation 4's Shuhei Yoshida on Oculus Rift: We have dev kits, 'I love it'
>Furthermore, doesn't this make the task of detecting or hunting non-state aggressors that much harder now that they know all electronic transmissions are recorded (and thus forcing them into an electronic darkness where they can't be spied upon).
>I think PRISM and all these internal external spying facilities are inevitable but the ramifications of their public knowledge are going to be interesting.

I think an adversary with any chance of succeeding already assumed this sort of program was in place. I don't think this revelation will force any adversaries into electronic darkness--I imagine any actual capable adversaries were already there. That's one of the most ridiculous parts of these programs to me.

>Im also surprised by the complete lack of interest by the general US population.

I think there will be some major objection and noise from Americans about this. I just don't think there's a full realization of what's going on yet. Many people are just a single debunking of "nothing to hide, nothing to worry about" away from being upset about this. And a lot of people are passionately doing just that.
The difference is that this doesn't get around the "spirit of the law", but directly acts in breach of it. They are essentially creating a heart beat, and using a break in that heart beat to signal that a certain event has taken place.

As best as I can tell, that is disclosing information.
There was very little content in this article. I expected at least some insight, there isn't any info provided on the keywords that were used. I guess I should learn not to trust articles like this since if they give away their secrets it could easily lead to less money made for them.
Information theory is basically irrelevant here, as is any formal logic -- I would think that someone with your legal background would understand that logic and the interpretation of the law do not always coincide. You can easily create a paradox by making the canary be a daily notification sent to each customer informing them that they are the target of an NSL, which may be logically problematic but is completely irrelevant in court. I also think a company could have a reasonable defense if the fact that a customer is under surveillance were revealed by a side channel e.g. an observable increase in latency, despite the clear information theoretic argument that that such a side channel "communicates" the surveillance to a customer.
The tiny bit of actual content in this comment is absurd, illogical and harmful. The rest is defensiveness.
Earlier Denials Put Intelligence Chief in Awkward Position
Nintendo came to E3 swinging with yesteryear's games
It's effectiveness is not proven one way or another, as it has not been implemented by many people, or tested in a court of law. At best, it's a novel hack.
Not sure what your point here is; their name predates the stigma.
This is exactly the idea Microsoft had and demo'd at PDC 2003. Longhorn's WinFS was supposed to deliver all this metadata searching and so on, presenting a unified interface.

It is. It's a pity that WinFS never hit 1.0.

Interestingly, though WinFS was one of the "pillars" of the ill-fated Longhorn, it didn't die with it. The team existed until 2006, and even released a beta and a beta refresh. I was on the team, and most of us got moved en masse to SQL Server. That was a heart-breaker.

The team's blog is still on the web: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/winfs/

I haven't kept up with Microsoft's post-WinFS storage initiatives, but it sounds like Microsoft Semantic Engine may be keeping the spirit alive.
Humans in 100,000 years: What will we look like?
"should the government know less than Google[?]"

It's an interesting framing but I don't think a correct one.

To the question itself, in some areas the government should absolutely know less than other groups/individuals. My wife should know a lot more about me than the government does, and she does very little data mining.

To the framing, though, just as there's a tremendous difference between "follow that car" and "follow every car" (http://www.schneier.com/essay-109.html), there's a tremendous difference between "knowing what Google knows" and "knowing what Google knows plus what Facebook knows plus what Apple knows plus what Twitter knows plus what Verizon knows plus ...".
I've used Tabbles on Windows for file tagging. What other systems are there?

http://tabbles.net/
I'm just flabbergasted at this part of this article:

...At the March Senate hearing, Mr. Wyden asked Mr. Clapper, “Does the N.S.A. collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

“No, sir,” Mr. Clapper replied. “Not wittingly.”

...In an interview on Sunday with NBC News, Mr. Clapper acknowledged that his answer had been problematic, calling it “the least untruthful” answer he could give.

Michael V. Hayden, the former director of both the N.S.A. and the C.I.A., said he considered Mr. Wyden’s question unfair, given the classified subject. “There’s not another country in the world where that question would have been asked and answered in a public session,” he said.

Am I to understand that Hayden feels that the public should have no knowledge of the data the country is collecting on them? And this makes sense because the war on terror is so important?

Furthermore, is he saying that 1) the question shouldn't have been asked, or 2) more likely, that both the question and answer could have coordinated in such a way to make the public think one thing when in fact the other thing was true?

When the American people don't have the right to know what the government is collecting on them, and major officials seem to feel that this is the way it should be, that's some serious institutional rot. Somebody needs to clean it out.
I honestly cringed at "Cyber-warriors"
Yeah, I first heard that by the earlier 90's. Except that the timeframe was 10 years, not 5.

Most of the time, people don't want to bother with several ortogonal tag sets. That's because most of the time, just one hierarchical set is enough, and when it's not people simply put lots of data inside a single file, and use application specific tools for dealing with it.

AI will probably change that. But untill then, no, people won't organise their data in an n-dimensional space.
Are the CIA basically the not-so-bad guys now? Seems like they haven't been busted for doing anything super-nasty lately.
I pretty sure he meant most of his friends work at big companies.
If you notice, many of the papers were passed to him as he read, so it's possible one of his advisers had many prepared answers or simply wrote them down as the senator asked him questions.
I must be missing something, because when you have a debt/equity ratio of 173, isn't that a huge warning sign?
What does telling the Washington Post that he had access to President Obama's email have to do with being vanished?
I did my first IBM intern stint at Boca in 1995 (my second at Hawthorne in 2000). Many of the people laid off were hired back, then laid off again. It was definitely a very messed up time (incidentally, OS/2 was moved from Boca to Austin in early 1996 while I was there, many people moving but many laid off). They didn't really get out of trouble with the 1993 lay offs.

IBM culture back then was pretty toxic, and there was a lot of dead weight to lay off. It makes sense that many of those job could easily be moved to India, yeh for them! But now...even the high-end tech people who worked there are moving on to less toxic companies like Google. What's left? A bunch of consultants and a huge insourcing operation in India?
the mainframe / high end server market generates only a small portion of the overall profit at IBM. And it has by far not the highest margin (that would be software and services). Just read the earnings report from last year.
It's really funny. Civil liberties seem to be the one thing that both Democrats and Republicans can agree is worth protecting, but both Democrat and Republican politicians tend to give bipartisan support towards programs that infringe on them.
The relevance of the article has changed, hence the upvotes. The point of the system is to deliver articles, that at any given time, are most relevant to the audience reading them (which is why I would imagine I have not seen many articles about Fortran frameworks or the Princess Diana death on the front page as of late). It's also the reason that articles have a karma decay formula based on time.
Meet Thomas Drake, Senior NSA Executive, whistleblower
I see him as more of a responsible citizen with a big brass pair. It's the 50+% who apparently don't mind what's going on as long as it keeps them safe from terrorism that I consider traitors.
CIA Chooses: Amazon or IBM?
Right! They are mostly a consulting company now (much like PwC consulting was...), and we should judge them as such. As I'm interested in tech R&D, that makes them completely uninteresting to me, and I don't think they should be valued higher than my current employer (Microsoft), but the market works in mysterious ways.
Stop Allowing App Reviews From Beta iOS Versions
"I bet in other contexts (say insider trading), you'd agree that it doesn't matter whether some CEO tipped off his buddy about insider information by carefully varying load on a server to modulate response times on a web page, thus communicating bits of information."

Ah, but what if the CEO is just taking a long time to reply to emails from friends, because he is very busy preparing for some huge business move -- is it insider trading if one of those friends sets up an options position that profits from increased volatility? This gets down to the difference between a side channel (inadvertent) and a covert channel (deliberate). The distinction does not matter from an information theoretic point of view; the same information is communicated in either case.
I agree. I do think, however, that a 10am-8pm work day (or later) is not at all uncommon in Silicon Valley
A notable quote from our public servants:

"The executive order, as you know, is this administration's effort after an attempt to get legislation last year."

Let that soak in for a bit.
According the Washington Post and other outlets, they do have approximate location data: "So the NSA is collecting information about my location as well as who I’ve called? It appears so. Cellphones make calls using the closest tower. So if the NSA knows you made a call using a specific tower, they can safely assume you were near that tower at the time of the call."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/06/e...
This came up last week, too. Joseph Nacchio sold millions of dollars of Qwest stock after gaining access to information about weak future sales and, according to other Qwest insiders including the company CFO, being warned specifically about the future value of his shares. Nacchio also wasn't the only Qwest exec to get taken down in the probe, and, obviously, Qwest wasn't the only company to be probed and ultimately prosecuted during the same time frame.
To one using "god" as a figure of speech, "self-evident" and "god" are sufficiently equivalent for the purposes of this discussion. You can consider both concepts to imply that the subject is considered beyond question and in need of no external justification. I have no literal believe in gods, but I use the terminology semi-frequently in the manner being described.
He said Azure.
I agree with you, but I've recently (few years ago) learned about the difference. I was born in Bulgaria, and I thought we were democratic back then when communism was "all good" :) (lol, how wrong was I).
> I also think a company could have a reasonable defense if the fact that a customer is under surveillance were revealed by a side channel e.g. an observable increase in latency, despite the clear information theoretic argument that that such a side channel "communicates" the surveillance to a customer.

If the intent was to communicate, I don't see how the fact that it's a side channel is relevant.
I'm surprised this still an issue with the iOS betas, surely developers have made enough noise for Apple to begin adding beta only restrictions to the App Store?

It's a shame that these people also exist, confusing a beta for production ready usage and taking it out on the third party developers.