skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is worth keeping mind that Freedom 0 can be denied to a greater extent than just preventing you from modifying the software. I first understood this when I was an undergrad, and my EE professors assigned us homework involving Matlab. The school had a license that allowed 50 concurrent users, and the software enforced that, which was a big problem when 80 students had homework to do. Yes, the freedom to modify the software would have allowed anyone to circumvent this restriction, but the inability to modify the software does not imply that such a restriction must exist.

All of the four freedoms complement each other. In a world without Freedom 0, you might be denied the freedom to modify your software, because you might not be able to run the software needed to modify other software (e.g. imagine a simple world where all software is distributed as Python source, but where your text editor is designed to not be able to edit such source, and where your OS is designed to not run any other text editors -- modifying your software suddenly becomes much harder).
I need a good podcast catcher (and a bit of a rant)
> Do you have 24/7 control

Pretty much. It's a single user MacBook Air, and I carry it with me at all times, never leaving it out or in the open, or even at home. For suspicious individuals, the CIA can obtain a warrant without notifying the individual, and search his/her apartment/home at convenient times when away, so I never leave it at home, either.

It's pretty much the only computing device I have that has highly sensitive data on it. I don't really care if they take my Kindle Fire; the only stuff on that is books and personal email.
My bet is that they are doing it in spite of their employment contracts, as opposed to the contracts allowing them to do those projects. Let me know in case you check with them. This usually works out because most (statistically) will never make enough money to be a target of a lawsuit.

I am currently full time on my projects, so do not have such legal issues anymore. When I did, I had started looking around to find out which companies have better contracts and who all people do not have such issues. It was largely an empty set. One big-name company had the contract optional with the condition that if you do not sign it when joining, you do not get bonus/stocks in the company during performance reviews (only the base salary and benefits).

I had also posed these questions to several wannabe founders as well as a few successful ones at YC Startup School and elsewhere. Nearly all people in the first category had never read their contracts ever, while the people in the second category became tight-lipped right away and diverted the question. One from the latter category told me that incoming lawsuits are commonplace for his company but that I should not worry about them because lawsuits come only after the company also gets some money to deal with them.
1. Create Hotmail-type account at web cafe

2. Use this account to contact Greenwald and exchange encryption keys for future communication
Off-the-Record Messaging – encrypt your instant messages
It's funny that people would flee from Gmail to other third-party mail providers out of privacy concerns, because it suggests they think their biggest privacy concerns are the NSA. But that's not true; in practice, you have much more to fear from criminals than the government; you can use simple means/motive/opportunity reasoning to arrive at this conclusion.

Meanwhile: no mail provider in the world has invested more resources in security than Google Mail. Google spends millions of dollars to ensure the security of the Google Mail platform. It also runs a public-facing bounty program --- one of the oldest and most reputable --- to solicit more vulnerabilities. It staffs a large and extremely well-regarded software security team to keep up with vulnerability classes and to research new ones.

Can you say the same thing about Fastmail.fm?
Saw this there: http://www.govtrack.us/about, but it just seems like gov data. Maybe instead of just mining, one could crowdsource photos/videos from people as they see them in places and get the timestamps and geotags.
Simplenote is an iOS app that syncs with this. It's a joy to use.

http://simplenote.com/
> whiskey was cheaper than beer

To be honest, whiskey is expensive only because it is a branding and social experiment that was successful, not because of the cost of manufacturing it.
Agreed. And when they complain, we could tell them if they have nothing to hide, then they have nothing to fear.
It depends. Usually, on any Windows box, random sleep wakeups and unverified internet use is usually a sign of malware or a trojan horse. Running AVG twice can be enough to fix it, but sometimes, they've already penetrated the boot process to execute malicious code without you even knowing it. It's hit me 4 times so far, and this is WITHOUT accessing black hat websites, and WITH protection and startup utilities disabled. It could be TDSS.
With no other information, you probably can't. But imagine the metadata as a graph; phone numbers are nodes, edge weights correspond to the length and frequency of calls between the two phone numbers. Clique (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clique_(graph_theory)) -like entities in that graph are people who are all in close communication, so if you know that one phone number is a suspected xyz, the others in the clique are probably of interest too.
It's because he's not measuring greatness by technical achievement, he's measuring greatness by how much you have changed the average consumer's behavior. Amazon's big as far as e-commerce goes...but people bought things before, they can buy things from other websites, and they'll continue to buy things even if Amazon didn't exist. Facebook somehow managed to get people to spend 2-3 hours/day throwing sheep at each other and give up all their personal information for targeted ads.

Zuckerburg's genius isn't that he's a master technologist (I hear he's pretty good, but that was never FaceBook's core competency), it was that he realized social networking would be a billion dollar business long before anyone else did. Google had competitors out within a year, but it never took those competitors seriously, and so 9 years on they are still struggling to play catch-up.

Probably nearly everyone on Hacker News could've built FaceBook in a weekend or so, in its original incarnation. Zuck was the only one who realized he should and then pressed forward with it, and that's why he got rich.
Related - here's a video of Candidate Obama debating President Obama on government surveillance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BmdovYztH8
Can investors make money in social services?
Sugar Grove [1] as well as Yakima [2] have been completely closed. From what I hear Menwith Hill and Misawa have been de-staffed and repurposed. I suspect Pine Gap is still maintained for short term operational projects, but the ECHELON SIGINT program has been effectively shut down. (Rightfully so as its purpose was Satellite intercepts, which have largely given way to fiber optic routes)

1. http://cryptome.org/dodi/2013/opnav-5400-2215.pdf
2. http://cryptome.org/dodi/2013/opnav-5400-2211.pdf
Opensourcing our genetic destiny
You could say the same thing of the New York Times. It's not true in either case.
Just want to chime in and say that this doesn't imply that PGP is safe. I mean, it probably is. They would not let us know, either way.
National Security Agency, not Administration ;)
Trading Faster Than The Speed Of Reality
How To Make A Mint: The Cryptography Of Anonymous Electronic Cash (1996)
Samsung Galaxy NX with 20 mp mirrorless Camera-Specs
The technical descriptions in this article basically make no sense at all. It's worthless.
How about cycling jerseys? I have a three.js app I built for customizing 3D apparel models that I've been wanting to find a manufacturer for.

http://i.imgur.com/xg67kXS.png
We should elect the house (or senate, one or the other) by randomly drawing a large number of people from the population. See how easy it is to corrupt 1000-2000 randomly selected folks who, for the most part, have an ingrained set of morals. It'd be like a jury for the government and they'd easily be able to roadblock the vast majority of bullshit that goes on.

We could even let them decide who the president is.

Alternatively, we could have it set up so our representatives give up most of their rights to privacy. Their whereabouts, communications/conversations (of all kinds) should be monitored and made public after a short period of time. It could be considered a price they have to pay to be in public office, and we could pay them a lot more so that good people would be willing to do this.
Banks have sent info on large transactions to the IRS for some time. I don't see credit card transactions as all that different.
An easy way to log client side information to server
Bad metric. I recall respectable editors pumping the "WMDs IN IRAQ!" story quite frequently once upon a time, for instance.
Your pricing calculator doesn't work on mobile well. Was not able to select 1 tshirt on iPhone. Maybe add a manual text input for size as well? Looking forward to using this though.
This is a deep fallacy. The amount of science and technology behind Google's prevalence is absolutely huge. Google prevailed through better search results, not through execution and marketing.
But exponentially more charismatic to the general public, which means he will run the ball down the field further than Cheney ever could. Look out.
Sometimes we are quick to judge without empathy and consideration for views that oppose our own. Even worse, some don't even make amendments when our views are proven wrong over time.
Save your Tweets and links using #bat hashtag
This kind of shows the amount of power the people behind the scenes have on Obama.
"Nobody is listening to your telephone calls" because the NSA has voice recognition. The machine listens to the call, and saves the transcript as metadata. :)
In "task force black", a book about how the SAS special forces helled fight alqaeda in Irak, they talk how they had all the cellphone network controlled and each time they collected a mobile they tracked their calls and that way they localized other terrorists with more mobiles. It was pretty useful in that situation. For example the top level of alqaeda never used mobiles or radios but eventually they had people around them who did.
The air version, Pneumatic logic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatics#Pneumatic_logic
Perhaps he looked at the results of other recent whistleblowers "doing the right thing" and realized that releasing information without the right choreography would end in no attention from the media or public about the issue and a ton of trouble for himself?

In an ideal world, he could release the information and each individual would engage with it, analyze it, make determinations about it, and judge whether or not it is important.

In our world, if he had followed the path of previous whistleblowers and given the information to a newspaper and returned to his house in Hawaii, he likely would have been immediately arrested, and the newspaper would have published very limited yet broad information in a single article in a way that would be easy for the rest of the media to dismiss. Then the character attacks would have overwhelmed the story.

Like it or not, presentation is important. Snowden has claimed his objective is making sure people know about these programs so they can decide about them. That objective, and his path thus far, seems perfectly in line with American idealism.
I found the various NV apps to be far quicker to pick up and use than Org-mode, though YMMV.
Iran has free elections too: just today they chose a new president out of six candidates. The ad-hominem speech that you exhibit has always been characteristic of communists: Lenin was a master of it for one. And that's where US is slowly going...
You can't - the government's argument is that you can use the metadata to usefully augment other intelligence/investigative techniques without undue violation of the privacy of, well, everybody whose metadata you've collected. If you know a terrorist has used a particular phone number you can use the historical metadata record to try to identify the terrorist's potential associates. Ex-NSA head Michael Hayden claims that's the way the data is used.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/06/09/190092800/bus...

Given the very limited number of hard, verifiable facts about these programs, whether you believe or disbelieve this explanation is almost a matter of faith.
Imagine that.
Do Federal employees have free speech rights? My father was a mail carrier when I was growing up, and according to the union's material that they mailed to the mail carriers, Federal employees don't have free speech rights and that was how Reagan was able to fire the striking air traffic controllers. Mail carriers are not able to complain about working conditions in the post office (that is what the union mailer was complaining about, I guess since a union staffer was writing it they could complain -- it was like 25 years ago that I read this, so I could have the details wrong).
HK was a brilliant idea!

Just look at how the pirate bay guy was deported from Cambodia to Sweden. You need someone really ballsy to stand up to the U.S.. If you don't want to end up in some 3rd world clusterfuck (e.g. North Korea, Venezuela) your options are pretty much limited to Russia and China. Hong Kong combines a relative first world living standard wit the backing of a true superpower.
Sony Smartwatch now open-sourced
You think the average computer user rarely approaches the limits imposed by proprietary software? You must have never met someone who:

* Wanted to rip a video DVD

* Wanted to copy songs from one iPod to another

* Wanted to use Remote Desktop while another user is logged in

* Tried to deal with HDCP problems between a cable receiver and television

These are all software problems, all imposed by artificial restrictions, and all violations of Freedom 0. You seem to think Freedom 0 is about technical competence; yet weak technical skills are what proprietary software vendors take advantage of when they impose these sorts of restrictions.
There's two kinds of conspiracy theories, I think. There's the ones that actually exist and end up getting exposed in a few years: the Pentagon Papers, the Iran-Contra scandal, the trumping up of "Iraq has WMD," and (apparently) now PRISM.

Then there are the theories like "9/11 was an inside job" and "JFK was killed by the CIA," ones that would require an order of magnitude more people to do things an order of magnitude more reprehensible and keep perfectly quiet for many, many more years, yet make slip-ups that only amateur sleuths can find (or at least dare to report on) -- all for claimed ends which are, to say the least, dubious. There are common psychological threads to these theories (the Illuminati run the world, but we know the truth and that gives us some power back), but the most fascinating thing about them is that you literally can't disprove them: they're not making falsifiable claims. Scant or contradictory evidence just shows how successful the conspirators have been; lack of mainstream reporting just shows how the media is part of it.

The thing is (to get back to your actual musing), once you get into that mindset, it's turtles all the way down. It's not really a left/right thing, it's a "fringe" thing -- I suspect the more you feel that your voice is shut out of the mainstream discussion, the more likely you are to suspect it's because the Powers That Be don't want to hear your voice. You may be right, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's because they can't face the holy light of your truth. Even if she hasn't gone full Alex Jones, Naomi Wolf has often seemed to me to be flirting with that kind of conspiracy mindset.

I can't speak to Maher (I can't find any comments he's made on Snowden), but he seems to have a different set of biases, not as much conspiracy-based as a kind of reflexive skepticism.
But there's more to it than that and I for one am glad someone expressed their doubts while everyone else seems to be taking the facts we have and either believing them totally or speculating to the point where its an exercise in spreading FUD.

I don't doubt the authenticity of the leaks and I don't doubt Snowden saw abuses of power. My question is, is this really big news? I remember hearing about it in 2006 and since then I thought we all knew the government was vacuuming up phone and Internet data like it was going out of style. This leak is more confirmation of what we already knew with a few new surprises sprinkled in, but nothing that could overshadow the big problem which was that the government is intercepting about all communications within the US.

What I doubt are some of Snowden's motivations and the amount of information and power he really has. He addresses the question of why he chose to not be anonymous by dancing around the question with some hand wavy answer that just about translates to "because I'm gonna be a patriot and/or a hero". He calls a lot of attention to himself very unnecessarily too. It's almost like there's a part of him that wants to feel important.

Another thing that doesn't fit the narrative around this story is Snowden's role before he became a whistleblower. We're very quick to jump on the idea that the US government is this incredibly powerful, nefarious organization that's been competent enough to conduct a truly massive global and domestic secret spy program for 8 to 15 years depending on your sources. If that's the case, how do you let individuals like Snowden, with what we know about him so far (he's a young high school dropout hopping from job to job somewhat frequently, working for a contractor, who even describes himself as no one special with no special skills - ie an "Everyman") have as much power and access as he claims to have? If you're trying to keep a secret you make damn sure to compartmentalize the hell out of your organization so that no one person can see the big picture without having to go on a wild goose chase to put all the pieces together. Hell, even I don't have access to things you'd think I should have access to at my job and there's not a damn thing secret about it.

There's no defending the NSA though. What's happening is wrong and there's no gray area there. However, I don't think Snowden can be any help to anyone anymore beyond simply getting attention and having something to talk about in the absence of any other concrete facts. I see Snowden as the guy who brought up an issue we should have never let go back when it first came out and because of that I'm glad he came forward. Other than that, I think he overstates his role and maybe even some of the particulars relating to this spy program.
Meet Tranquility, the military-grade 2,500GHZ monster that powers Eve Online
No use for old things
ideaVim is Open Source and contributions are welcome. https://github.com/JetBrains/ideavim
Passing the Patriot Act must've been the most anti-patriotic thing the US has ever done

I'm not defending the PATRIOT Act by any means but I think calling it this makes you a prisoner of recency. I don't understand how someone could genuinely compare the PATRIOT Act to things like the Trail of Tears, Jim Crow, or Japanese-American internments.
Absolute term limits would probably also worsen the trend of retiring congressman becoming lobbyists.

But what if you only limited the number of consecutive terms? This is a solution more directly targeting the actual problem: the advantage of incumbency.

This also creates more positive feedback between their lives in the public and private sector, congressmen hoping to be reelected will need to do something positive when out of office, and when in office they will have more understanding of the lives of working people than those who have spent the last 50 years in congress.

It's important to note that limits on consecutive terms were used by the Greeks, Romans, and supported by many founding fathers (who admired the Romans especially).
This comment brought to you by Duff Beer.
please don't try it. The population of US may double in a very short time.
Taxes are to high for the services provided. Laws are mostly written by lobbyists for large corporations. Now the IRS is going to use "big data" systems -using input data from Google, Facebook,etc - provided by profit driven vendors to enforce this treachery on the middle class and upper middle class b/c they pay the highest tax rates. Its kind of like red-light cameras. Companies who provide the red-light camera technology share revenue with the municipalities who they contract with. Perverse incentives.

Makes me want to collect my family and leave the US. Become an expat in a low income tax state.
I'm certainly playing the devil's advocate to some degree and being hyperbolic, but fact is we, or should I speak for my self and say I, have been on high moral ground for quite some time, demonizing the "great firewall," applauding Google's circumventions, etc. Yet now we find out we're far closer than we would like to be, and have been for some time.
Very cool. Could you share a little bit about the backend?
I think there is a lack of willing and talented people who can pass these security examinations.

I was contacted by a contractor for the government requiring top secret security clearance (10 years back + polygraph). When you start its 7 years back but without the polygraph. Then as things get rolling they send agents to your family and friends to ask questions about your integrity, honesty, and values. And there's the polygraph. It's no joke.

But not only that, this guy who was talking to me said they were affected by the sequester. I think before the sequester, these contractors were rolling in dough, hiring as many people as they could to do more and get more going on.

In 2011, there were 4.2 million people with security clearances. Over 2,000,000 of those people were government employees with secret/confidential security clearance. Another 541,000 government contractors had that access. Finally, 666,000 government employees and 524,000 government contractors held top secret security clearance.

Source:http://news.clearancejobs.com/2011/09/26/how-many-people-hav...

Now, he's been hired for a while from what I understand. But despite that, I think the security complex is pretty much open for business and ready to hire. Imagine how many more there are 2 years later?
It's obvious. Those who know the details don't feel like they need to attend. They know they'll learn nothing new; why waste their time?

Which begs the question: why didn't they speak up earlier? They probably would have, if they cared. The ruling class in this country knows that they won't be affected by these shenanigans. HSBC launders 100s of Billions of dollars for drug traffickers (sometimes literally accepting bags full of cash, and staying open late to do so), and no one goes to jail.
It may be because his statement is an unsubstantiated opinion colored by his political views.
This is a slippery claim; anything the NSA does that you don't approve of would enable you to claim we're "far closer than we'd like to be" to China. It's a phrasing designed to end discussion, not encourage it.
Doesn't say that on Wikipedia, did I miss something? Looks to me like they're just shifting Bell Labs' focus from basic scientific research and focusing all research into computer science aspects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs#2000s