skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Marc Ambinder, a reporter who has covered the national security beat for many years (before that he was a political reporter for The Atlantic, and before that the White House reporter for --- I think? --- CBS), reported that PRISM is a system of dropbox servers and a user interface that allows seamless access to all of those servers, presumably so that analysts don't have to keep track of which data is affiliated with Google and which data is affiliated with Yahoo.

Other reports have corroborated this.

Declan McCullagh, who has covered this beat for CNet for something like 10 years and is most notable on HN for jumping into threads and arguing the EFF's side of any given story against me (in other words: not a guy prone to support of the establishment), ran a story last week with sources that also denied that NSA had unilateral access to Google Mail.

The NYT just a few days ago ran a story with a linked FISA court order that documented Yahoo's attempt to push back on a FISA directive, a process that would not have been necessary (for the government) had NSA had direct access to Yahoo's servers; the court order demanded that Yahoo turn over data.

And, of course, Google categorically denies that NSA has direct unilateral access to their servers and, for that matter, that they've been able to obtain records for large fractions of their user base. Those denials have come from multiple levels of the company, from the CEO to the General Counsel to their tech leaders to people on their security team.

I'm not simply supposing that NSA doesn't have this access. Based on the evidence available, I am drawing the obvious conclusion that they do not.
You can argue about metadata and the third party doctrine, but this is completing against the Fourth Amendment. Unless you're going to say that phone conversations should not be considered 'papers and effects'. Or unless the phone companies themselves are recording the calls and keeping them around, which seems highly unlikely.
How quaint, assuming there would be a trial with evidence and everything.

What makes all of this horrifying instead of merely troubling to me is the corresponding destruction of the idea of a writ of habeas corpus.
I have a joke with my weed dealer, "Hey, can I PayPal you?"

No dealer wants a bunch of transactions that can tracked by the Feds.
Yeah, that is their formal wear. Here is what they look like out on the road.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KTnLVzI2q4
Moving On...
I know that the whole NSA thing is terrible. It is. Seriously.

But we're not getting anywhere by complaining. I haven't seen anyone on here offering ways to make it stop happening (since, you know, we can't).

Can we stop posting about it and move on? We know, and honestly, have known, that these things are and have been going on. Can we get back to talking about technology? Cool things we've made? Even if those things are things that we're making because to make ourselves feel more secure in light of these events?

I know I'm going to be viewed as "that guy," but I'm so bored of it. I hate it as much as the rest of you, but that's not why I come to this site. Please, let's get back to what we're about.
"ALTER is in itself an odd command, useful only in development, never in production"

How would you then ever modify an existing database?
Start me up
"Basically, every communist (Read: Marxist-Leninist/Stalinist/etc) party that existed during the 20th century took its orders from the U.S.S.R."

I don't know whether you're accepting this at face value or just pointing out it was the justification offered for treating people with certain political leanings as people without rights.

But regardless it's worth pointing out that factoids like that are what give anti-Communists a bad name, as it's very, very wrong, particularly post WW2. Note that I'm saying that as someone who is very much on the anti-Communist side.
"The petitions aren't binding and are merely used to help guide their decisions and provide a forum for clear responses to issues."

Are there any examples of these petitions leading to action? It seems like it is just representation theater to me.
I've been trying to get an answer from my Congressman, Steve Stockman (TX-36) about his views on this measure, with no luck so far. He's very against government databases when it comes to gun registration, but when it comes to something related to immigration, he suddenly goes silent...
Do not stereotype teenagers. I am merely fifteen years old, and if you take a look through my comment thread you may find more insight than you expected.

Yes, most in my generation are shallow and passive; but that doesn't mean all are. There are some intellectuals on the fringes.
Imagine if you were designing a system to store massive amounts of intercepted email data for archival and occasional retrieval. The design would be quite different from gmail and it would require a lot less infrastructure.

I think your analysis is perhaps being biased a bit by the idea that dealing with all the email data would be massively expensive.

Also, consider that phone companies already have existing government granted monopolies, while companies like Google and Facebook are significantly more vulnerable to bad press or some kind of disruption triggered by public mistrust.

Hence one possible strategy for minimizing the impact of Snowden's revelations would be to admit to the phone aspect of the powerpoint and to drastically minimize the relationships with web companies.

Also considering the power of ad network cookies and the amount of information stored, the intelligence value of internet companies' data dwarfs the value of phone call data by several orders of magnitude.
Again, just to keep stomping on this bit of urban legendry: while courts can issue gag orders for FISA directives, they cannot compel people to lie.
While I hate email marketing, I have to say that some of the specifics you mention are valid. If you give me something for looking through your email, I won't hate you. Personalization beyond just throwing in my name (ANYONE can do that...) is great, though I don't know where you're getting that info from, unless this is some product I've already given all my personal info to.
What is happening in Detroit seems to me more like "dealing with a mess" than radical social engineering.
I think COINTELPRO is pretty much reducible to a single man's nuttiness, that of J. Edgar Hoover. MKULTRA was CIA as I recall. Worth pointing out that these are different. CIA also has a lot of messy history overseas, in places like Latin America.

But I have to say:

> recent news about the NSA, IRS, etc.

To paint recent stories about IRS with the same brush as the recent news about NSA, or to put IRS on the same level as COINTELPRO/MKULTRA... They're not nearly in the same ballpark. There's this trend on HN right now to say that anything government related (I hear they're putting floride in the water! Don't get me started about the post office!) must be in on the crazy conspiracy, and I find that attitude disappointing. It's not all the same.
Another first-order approximation is: the RCMP do "local policing" where there is no local police force.

So in Ontario, where there is a provincial police (OPP) the RCMP don't do nearly as much as they would in, say, BC, where there is no provincial police force. (I don't think I've ever seen an RCMP car in Ontario outside of Ottawa).
Oh yeah that's very true, many SQL engines seem to lock tables whenever a DDL statement is run. I do like that Postgresql tends not to, it is a huge change from the hoops you have to jump through to add columns in a production MySQL scenario.
We do no work whatsoever for the USG, or for any defense contractors. That's not an accident. There are other software security firms that do; Matasano does not.

Once again: I am not sticking up for NSA. I do not trust NSA. I probably share your opinion of NSA, modulo I might not mythologize their capabilities as much as other people on HN do.

I am sticking up for Google. I have friends who work there. I think very highly of their security group. From my vantage point, Google is in this instance fighting for the privacy of their users, at great expense, and getting shellacked in online forums by people who are happy to use the outrage over NSA overreach to tar Google, especially since Glenn Greenwald more or less defamed them in print.
5 Steps to Brilliant Innovations
I always felt as though I'd be more creative, but I'd smoke and still be in the same bind. I was able to churn out tons of code, but I'd have a lot of bug fixing to do later.
HD is a great example, as they only barely have to try to make functional motorcycles and their loyal fans will still keep buying them.
What's the minimum bending radius for carbon-fiber?
Very interesting. Four thoughts.

1. I don't like the term "cult" and the baggage associated with it. "Cult" seems to mean "religion with fewer than 10 million adherents". The more politically correct (but also more useful term) is NRM: New Religious Movement. They don't all end up here: http://walkthrough.starmen.net/earthbound/image/maps/happyha... . Forming communities is one of the major reasons why people subscribe to religions of all sizes (anxiety about death isn't it, contrary to modern claims; although few are sure exactly what ancient people believed, belief in gods seems to pre-date belief in a desirable afterlife by millennia) and the power law dynamic of community formation applies. Small doesn't mean "bad".

2. Corporations themselves are like cults in accord with this depiction, between the largely unnecessary administrative hierarchies, the drudge work, the unquestionable assertions from authority, and the us-versus-them mentality. Many gods are fictional psychopaths invented by ambitious people for material gain, and many corporations are... well, the same. Quite literally, corporations are treated as persons despite their psychopathic lack of balance and humanity, much like that of an ancient god.

3. VC-istan is a cult for avowed non-cultists or, to continue the company-as-cult metaphor, an atheist religion. Instead of executives, it's VCs at the top. Instead of PMs, the middling ranks are full of EIRs and "founders" who aren't taking real risks because the VCs have already decided who's in the in-crowd (if they don't like an idea but you're in their world, they "mentor" you till you converge on something they'll fund). Instead of "middle managers", there are "tech leads". Startup equity (disbursed, to rank and file, at insulting low levels) is designed to make worker bees feel like owners (and put in long hours) and bullshit perks are used to create a "halfway house" college feel for people forced into prolonged adolescence by high housing prices and social sacrifice. Instead of managers meeting behind closed doors to decide your year end "performance" bonus based on political factors, investors and large-company purchasers meet behind closed doors to discuss the acqui-hire that will determine your financial future... but it's the same thing.

4. Man, I think I'd be good at starting a cult. Maybe I should Kickstart that shit.
Seems like he's claiming it's fact -- https://twitter.com/johnsifton/status/345864867946827777

Do you have any proof it's fictional writing?
The Senator speaking at 49 minutes is Senator Leahy.

Senator Leahy (D, Vermont): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Leahy

Other senators also ask some pointed questions, notably:

Senator Johanns (R, Nebraska): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Johanns

Senator Merkley (D, Oregon): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Merkley

Senator Tom Udall (D, New Mexico): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Udall

Also, Senator Feinstein -- despite being a bit of a wind-bag and despite her enthusiastic support for gun-control -- directed Wednesday's NSA/cyber-security hearing pretty well.

The video offers some very interesting contrast between assumptions that all of congress is bought and paid for, and that voter apathy has translated directly to congressional apathy, but it's simply not true. Senators that look beyond the next election cycle (or their retirement) may be few and far between, but they're out there.
With respect, I don't think the article gets every point wrong, but there may be some merit in what you have written.

I did a bit of reading. First, if you search the web, you can find articles about wire-rimmed glasses being banned for some period of time in some Jehovah's Witness congregations. I didn't find anything about gold-rimmed glasses specifically:

http://yucatan2012.com/Yucatan2012/MysticChristianity/E46336...

There is also some information on "Theocratic War Strategy," for example, in this Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jehovah's_Witnesses_practices

From the article cited above, there is this quote attributed to the Watchtower Society:

"It is proper to cover over our arrangements for the work that God commands us to do. ...."
>I don't know whether you're accepting this at face value or just pointing out it was the justification offered for treating people with certain political leanings as people without rights.

A little of both, I was going to point out the existence of opposition communists, but they seemed too minor to merit mention.

Unless of course you want to show me the non-trotskyists who weren't in the pay of the U.S.S.R? I admit my knowledge of the various communist parties is pretty flimsy.[0]

[0]: This is why I qualify most of my statements with things like "pretty much" or "most of" or "almost every", guess I slipped up here.

EDIT: "pay" is probably the wrong word there, maybe "under the ideological command of" would be a better description.
I would certainly agree this would seem to be the case, but the article is not too clear on that.
But remember, as the parent said, Startup Weekend's goal isn't to create companies over the weekend - it's to teach people about all these tools they can use.

(Disclosure: I used to work for Startup Weekend)
Yes, among the people who have something to gain from hacking a reporter's laptops I would include the Chinese.
> reducible to a single man's nuttiness, that of J. Edgar Hoover

...which demonstrates that the executive branch wields a disproportionate amount of power, does it not?
He's joking. From the front page of warscapes.com: "What does the NSA make of James Joyce? The author finds out the hard way in his imagined brush with US intelligence over the PRISM data-mining program..."
And think how much more astute you will be in 20 years.
Call one on the phone and ask him to meet you in Hong Kong.
You think the average American would be less concerned about direct access to Google Mail than they would about the NSA having the ability to listen to everyone's phone calls?
How to forget a WiFi network in Windows 8
I agree that we should be careful not to stereotype based on age, but your comment made me think of this funny (yet poignant) bit by Louis C.K.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXcWeFn-YYM

"Older people are smarter, and if you get into an argument with someone who's older, you should listen. It doesn't mean they're always right; but even if they're wrong, their wrongness is rooted in more experience."
The front page of the site makes it clear, with the word "imagined".
Here's the deal. Most classified information is segmented. Say I want to build a encrypting radio. I may have one team build the encrypting part, but they don't know it is for a radio. I have a second team build a radio, but they don't know an encrypting part is going in it (there is just a spec for a 'device' to be plugged in). If I am in the radio building team, and the encrypting info is leaked, and I read it, suddenly I know that an encrypting radio is being built, something that the average person reading the leaked info wouldn't know.

You don't access classified material that you are not cleared for. Period.
Language-learning software review: Babbel and Duolingo
Don't be ridiculous!
I'm certainly not suggesting that there's one big, centralized, massive "crazy conspiracy". I'm just saying that there has been a lot of recent news, which hints that our government is not to be trusted, and that meme "the government is not to be trusted" is also supported by historical evidence as well, such as COINTELPRO, MK ULTRA, etc. For the record, I don't intend to posit any connection between, say, the IRS and MK ULTRA beyond what I just said.
I suppose there is some CYA value in HMAC, since there is less attacker control over what goes in the outer hash. If the case is that prefix-MAC (with chopMD) is vulnerable to some kind of cryptanalysis and HMAC is not, however, the hash should be considered broken, and not in the academic sense.
The widely accepted definition of 'national security' means the survival of a state. To say that Snowden endangered national security is to say that he took actions which could credibly precipitate the end of the purportedly democratic regime which is in force, and, for example, lead to an anarchy, dictatorship or a return to British rule.

I personally don't believe this to be true; if anything, he may have enhanced national (and international) security against a future shift to a higher and unpopular level of authoritarianism.

Certainly if the state has secret powers they have the power of surprise over some criminals and can prevent some crimes they might not otherwise, but it is folly to optimise for one thing (low crime) to the detriment of all others (personal privacy, governance by consent of the people, rule of law, balance of power of entrenched interests, due process rather than being targeted on secret evidence), and if the government is doing that, the public have at least a moral right to know.
Only slightly. I interpreted the article as "gain some experience so you can come up with good ideas". He very plainly ridiculed the idea. All I was saying was the idea isn't stupid and that it addresses a real problem facing logistics today. I agree that execution and experience matter, but nothing the author wrote gave me the impression that he would ever think it was a good idea, even if Fredrick Smith himself was pitching it.
Yeah, there's no way that system will be abused…
"it was revealed many years later that pretty much every single Communist-leaning organization in the US had been receiving funds from Moscow"

This claim needs a bit of elaboration, especially since people have called everything from SDS to the Mattachine Society to SCSC to the Black Panthers to the Union of Concerned Scientists to Greenpeace to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament "Communist-leaning."

The broader point is true: McCarthy in his factual assessment that many US institutions, including parts of the government, were infiltrated by agents of and at least in some respects directed from Moscow, was right, although his overall package was very much broken.
If you squint at it just right, this is exactly the advice Patrick McKenzie has been giving people looking for business ideas on HN for the last several years.
The best university would be The University Of Hawaii. And then get some general community members involved as well.
Homunculiheaded was not criticizing or belittling teenagers. Notice you yourself acknowledge most teenagers today are "shallow"- consider that Homunculiheaded is not concerned with the exceptional individuals, but rather the larger group. To attempt to illustrate, a question: "At what age ought citizens read 1984, that more of them will see the deeper meanings?"
Trey Ratcliff video/photos of Project Loon (secret Google locations in NZ).
I think the opposite, which is why I think the story is evolving to minimize the gmail access being done.
Or you may have just cashed out your 1-year CD that paid you .86%. You had $2.3M there and received income of ... $20k. Disappointed by the depressed interest rates you went on a shopping spree, which included a Ferrary.
Sounds like every tech company
I know nothing of this but I figured that when you build up a new subdivision as a developer you are responsible for the road construction leading to and within the new site. Is that not the case? You just build 200 homes and the government has to pay for all of the infrastructure? Connecting municipal utilities I thought would also be part of the developer's cost - which gets passed on to the home purchasers. So there would not be a "free" road for everyone.
I think "acrimonious" was likely supposed to read "acronyms".
Details emerge about PRISM, big tech companies release data request reports
He was using a reasoned argument. There's no need to insult the man.
Useless article. No one outside of US officials knows for sure what goes inside the US embassy. This article is probably just intended to evoke anti American sentiments, riding the coattail of PRISM. It's just another chapter in the love-hate relationship between USA and Pakistan.

(That's not to say USA doesn't spy on the Pakistani president; in fact I'd be more certain it does than doesn't. It's just that the Pakistani press wouldn't know)
I guess FBI is the executive branch, but one of the sneaky things about Hoover was his ability to transcend and defy presidents. A bit different from recent events with Bush and Obama in that sense.

In this most recent iteration of the NSA story it seems like all three branches failed, with congress not giving enough of a crap and the courts rubber stamping everything.
Thank you for posting that. The more refusals the White House is forced to dols out, the more it illustrates what a "dog and pony show" show this administration is. If the petition gets as many as 200,000 or 300,000 signatures which is possible it may signal to other politicians that a storm is brewing. It was like this for Vietnam.
> How would you then ever modify an existing database?

You would use techniques like:

https://github.com/soundcloud/large-hadron-migrator

"""

That is until your tables grow to millions of records. At this point, the locking nature of ALTER TABLE may take your site down for an hour or more while critical tables are migrated. In order to avoid this, developers begin to design around the problem by introducing join tables or moving the data into another layer. Development gets less and less agile as tables grow and grow. To make the problem worse, adding or changing indices to optimize data access becomes just as difficult.

Side effects may include black holes and universe implosion.
There are few things that can be done at the server or engine level. It is possible to change default values in an ALTER TABLE without locking the table. The InnoDB Plugin provides facilities for online index creation, which is great if you are using this engine, but only solves half the problem.

At SoundCloud we started having migration pains quite a while ago, and after looking around for third party solutions, we decided to create our own. We called it Large Hadron Migrator, and it is a gem for online ActiveRecord and DataMapper migrations.

The basic idea is to perform the migration online while the system is live, without locking the table. In contrast to OAK and the facebook tool, we only use a copy table and triggers.

Lhm requires a monotonically increasing numeric Primary Key on the table, due to how the Chunker works.

"""