skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My point is that the number of countries with the capacity/capability to provide the level of service that the US provides is quite small. Of those, I imagine most if not all of them have similar data gathering practices that extends to their own citizenry, so non-citizens are not even an issue.

Let's look at the list of countries (order is random):

1. EU (probably only France, UK, Germany, possibly the Netherlands)
2. Israel
3. Canada, solely by proximity to the US
4. Japan
5. China
6. Brazil
7. Russia
8. Australia, that's a big maybe though
9. India
10. Iran
11. South Korea
12. Singapore
13. South Africa
14. Scandinavia (Finland, Denmark, Sweden)

These are the countries that likely have the technological advancement required to even offer cloud-based services of the scale and capability offered by US based organizations.

This is also assuming that significant parts of their overall connectivity does not route through US controlled territories or demarcation (which likely rules out any south-east asian country like South Korea, Singapore, also Canada and Australia).

Of those remaining on the list, very few of them have even have civil liberties legislation codified. A rough guess might be:

1. EU
2. Israel
3. Japan
4. Brazil
5. Scandinavia
6. South Africa?

Israel we could likely rule-out. Not exactly the most trustworthy government, and the close ties with the US likely means that they either participate in or benefit directly from PRISM.

As a collective whole, the scandinavian countries likely could offer the level of cloud-based services provided but not individually.

So, in no particular order:

1. France
2. UK
3. Germany
4. Japan
5. Brazil
> why include suicide-prevention as an abuse?

Letting someone sleep naked is not suicide-prevention, it's abuse and humiliation.
As a libertarian, this travesty has given me some hope that my liberal friends will be somewhat more sketpical of the government as benevolent provider. For years and years I have seen people online belittle libertarians as crackpots and "tin foil hat conspiracy theorists". One wonders when the average joe will stop and come to terms with the fact that these "crackpots" were far more insightful about the nature of the state than they were.

Sadly, I think the answer is they will never come to terms with it.
Well, most European countries have similar laws like the United States. Possession and use of cannabis and other drugs is illegal. There are a few countries like Netherlands which have lax laws, and some countries have decriminalization laws (like Portugal).

There's a difference in policy with respect to sentencing. While in Finland (for example) possession of cannabis usually gets you a fine, it's possible to get a jail sentence for that in the United States (though it's legal to possess small amounts of cannabis in some states). However, this difference can be explained by tougher sentencing for crime in general

Decriminalization of cannabis seems to be slightly more common in the USA than it's in Europe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World-cannabis-laws.png

I don't understand where this idea comes from that drug laws are lax in Europe (maybe from pop culture references to the Netherlands?). They're pretty tough, but jail sentences are less common just as it's for other crimes.
Are you ready for iOS 7? Get flat in 7 days.
Good point, and you don't even need to be very imaginative about the future, imagine Google Glass but with the government quietly able to pull down what you are or were seeing.
Having lived in Amsterdam I would strongly deny this. Restaurants in NL are below Western European standards. And a quasi-monopoly by one particular supermarket chain means it's a hassle to find quality ingredients for home cooked meals too. For instance, if I recall correctly, Albert Hein ham has about 60% meat in it and it looks really pale.
This is the smear they're running already - have seen him referred to as a "Chinese spy" a couple of times already. I'm sure they'll get Greenwald on charges of being his cohort for China.

Diplomatic incident ahoy!
I'm not sure this is of great interest to HN overall, but as perspective to those who weren't in Europe in the 1980s:

This is interesting to the Dutch in particular, because the political decision to accept or reject (American) cruise missiles with nuclear warheads on Dutch territory was highly, highly controversial in the mid-1980s. There was a substantial division in the population on the topic, and it was the subject of some of the largest public protests seen in the country.

We learned in the past few years that nuclear weapons were allowed to be stored anyway, and now we learn that the prime minister of the era knew that all this civic debate was in fact moot, as he had been aware for 20 years that there were already nuclear weapons in place. That's interesting to me and I think it leaves room for reflection and debate about the functioning of a democracy.
This would mean the larger your network, the larger your likely hood of being a terrorist
Please. The money Apple makes from their 30% cut is a tiny fraction of what they earn from hardware sales. It supports the operation of the App Store and makes some profit but it's never been their key moneymaker.
Ask HN: Is a for-profit TOR feasible?
I'm asking this fully admitting I don't fully understand the technical underpinnings of TOR.

Is it technically feasible to create some form of TOR that would allow people to pay for it (exact payment model doesn't matter now) through some form of consumer-facing peering agreement, and that money would get automatically sent to those (or become available to claim by those) who are running the entry/exit nodes?

Also, is there any way you could set it up that would improve latency to the point where the average user would be willing to use it without sacrificing anonymity?
I'd guess that there are plenty of 2nd amendment supporters who would be happy to ban flag-burning...

There are indeed, and I know more than a few of them. They post on the same gun forums I do. What you see among the "pro gun" crowd is a pretty clearly ideological divide between Libertarians and traditional Conservatives. The Libertarians take the 1A, 4A, 5A, etc. just as seriously as the 2A, whereas the more traditional Conservatives tend - in my experience - to be a bit more narrowly focused. It's unfortunate, but real.

That said, I take it as encouraging that I feel like I'm seeing more libertarian thought and less of the "yee-haw, let's kill that fag" kind of stuff on one of the NC centric gun forums I post on. And lots of people take a fairly moderate approach, offering up strong defenses of the 2A, without doing the full-on "captain redneck" thing.

On a semi-related note... it's kinda sad how prevalent stereotyping - and making broad assumptions based on those stereotypes - is. For example, many people seem to assume that most active 2A advocates are, indeed, "redneck" types: from the South, with CSA flag stickers on their trucks, a Bible in their hip pocket, and a mouthful of chewing tobacco. But, while those people exist, most of the pro gun folks I know are actually well educated, level-headed, reasonable and rational.
Also: short term effect (arrest some people every now and then based on surveillance) vs really long term effect (slowly start to get your act together using foreign policy). Same with everything else, really.
Who comes up with these? Do you really think they won't check the sha of that text against something? Imagine the 100 billion dollars of "Buy boner pills @ onlinepharmacy.ru" type emails which make the 68.6% of all the email sent worldwide, do they really think that they can top that?

if (mail.sha == "6ead421c0d8c4e36dbe5c4f5b2f14d93fa634da65f024f6440e4cafc13e7d0e4")
irs_audit(mail.sender);
> dumping your program's stdout to /dev/null should result in an error

That's not what's happening though. The invocation is:

hello 1< /dev/null

i.e. stdout is read-only, and it seems reasonable that that should be an error.
107 HTML Elements Periodic Table of the HTML5 working draft
Regardless of the service's value I found the security explanation on this page (https://www.wuala.com/en/learn/technology) to be a great example of clear communication about the differences between client-side encryption, SSL security, etc.
This is pretty much a blanket statement for any project of reasonable size (or even with just a sole clueless developer). But don't take my word for it, check the evidence first hand by poking around the list for yourself :)

The solution is so effortless that it seems indefensible to serve .git, when the risk of doing so is a fleeting moment of forgetfulness leading to your site and databases getting pwned. Kind of like /etc/passwd being "public" so long as nobody puts their password in their GECOS field. Why take the risk.
They are measuring buzz/some sort of interest. If buzz is not there, you could pump more money into marketing and see if it raises the buzz. That's probably the only thing you can do that late into the game, marketing spending.
Somehow I doubt HN would have the same reaction if MS forced people to use Internet Explorer to watch a video.
I really think it's more of a problem of familiarity with foreign press (which is to be expected). Americans know how to read, say, a NY Post article, which is probably filled with exaggerations, as opposed to, say, a NYTimes article.

In Israel, as in all countries, different media outlets, and sometimes different sections, or even different authors within the same organization, speak in different registers. It's hard for a foreigner to fully grasp an article without prior familiarity with the writer, that provides the necessary context.
> I'm not convinced that a salaried PhD would be an advantage

As someone who is just about to complete a PhD at Delft, I agree. If you are paid a salary, you are treated as an employee. In my opinion, this is not a good fit for the PhD process. That said, it was nice not having to scrape by.

> Is there not something rather bizarre about the government taxing the money it's giving to you to support your studies?

At least at Delft, many PhD's are partially funded by private corporations.
Then maybe Mozilla should move outside US juristiction.
You bring up a good point. Maybe the best form of protest these days is not to take to the streets but rather take to the highways. Blocking a interstate highway going into/out of a large city might get more attention.
My very first node/web app : Convert any Spotify track to Youtube in one click
Amazon wants to infiltrate your house
It is strange that the same country which cherishes its 'right to bear arms' on the grounds that it gives them a level of protection that the government is unable to provide is 'happy' to build the infrastructure which allows the same government to peek into their lives.

I think part of the issue is that this kind of electronic surveillance, and the corresponding awareness of the issue, is relatively new (compared to, say, the firearms issue). I mean, I don't think a lot of people were thinking about the government capturing emails and cellphone records, 100 years ago (or probably 50 years ago, or 20 years ago, or maybe even 10 years ago). But 200+ years ago, private firearms ownership was already a big deal.
Or Mozilla should create a separate Persona organization that is outside US jurisdiction.
Engadget: Apple WWDC 2013 liveblog
Reference and Learning Resources for Industrial Engineers
Bigger nit: that's not the whole story, either.

The entity now called Costco was called PriceCostco after the 1993 merger. That they ultimately chose the Costco name doesn't change the dual heritage; founders of either have a fair claim to being founders of the combined entity.

But even further: key founder of pre-merger Costco James Sinegal got started in retail working at Sol Price's San Diego-based FedMart and Price Club. He then copied the PriceClub membership/bulk/employee-development model starting from Seattle. (A friend working for pre-merger Costco at the time described it as an almost-friendly rivalry, with each racing to expand the shared model from their home cities into the rest of the US.)

So the PriceCostco merger "got the band back together", Price Club was the older and model-foundation entity, but clearly both teams contributed enough to be credited as "founders" of the current behemoth.
No, it really isn't a blanket statement. Almost all of my organization's web properties are public github repos (yay, non-profit organizations!). I doubt any of our properties serve .git, but that's just for technical architecture reasons (they're mostly Django apps), and there's literally nothing in the .git directories that isn't already available for free.
At various times I've been asked a lot of detail about the company I work for, also I got a lot of questions once about why I went to Turkey so often (it's a really nice place to go on holiday didn't seem an acceptable answer).

Having said that, last few times have been pretty painless. Although I must admit the idea of the fingerprinting does freak me out I'm usually in a state where I don't care when I actually get there.
Hi, Persona dev here.

We want to do better: we want to get rid of the Persona servers altogether. As tlocke said, Persona is designed to let you choose who you trust, and anything that requires centralization is considered a bug.

There are 4 points of temporary centralization, each of which can be replaced independently:

1. The JS polyfill. Until we stabilize the API, we ask that you link directly to login.persona.org/include.js

2. The persona.org interface. Once browsers have native support for Persona, that will supersede both the polyfill and the persona.org interface. This is all based on what Mike Hanson called Locally Isolated Feature Domains (LIFD): http://www.open-mike.org/entry/lifding-the-web

3. The Fallback IdP. If your email provider doesn't support Persona, Mozilla will certify your identity after you click a confirmation link sent to your email address. If your email provider does support Persona, it automatically supplants Mozilla's fallback.

4. The Hosted Verifier. Until we stabilize the data formats, we recommend that sites POST identity assertions to verifier.login.persona.org/verify for verification. The assertions necessarily contain your email address and the site you're logging into. We want this to go away soon, and François Marier has suggested a pretty slick way to get us there. Until then, we've got a strong privacy policy in place and we limit the data we log. I believe Ben Adida is going to comment more on that shortly.

If you're interested in getting involved, drop me a line and I'd be happy to help you get started.
I wrote a lengthy comment about this on a previous occasion when it was discussed:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4106567

It has been submitted and discussed several times:

https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=dragonbox

To reiterate my referenced comment, I think this is brilliant, but I have reservations that I'd like to see addressed or allayed.
Blimp launches free personal workspaces
Of course, sometimes the dock really is moving too. Like when you try to recompile your tried-and-true system with a new compiler and discover you'd really been utilizing undefined behavior...
In Corporations We Trust
If the US decides your France<->Iceland traffic is that valuable, it's a small matter to reach an arrangement with friendly-or-easily-pressured governments, agencies, or companies to have your traffic routed in such a way that the US can see it, whether that's in the US or not, or to just have one of those governments, agencies, or companies to play MITM and pass everything over wholesale.

For that matter, go look up Ivy Bells. Sure, fiber can't be tapped in the same manner, but you can get around that by placing your splice/tap during other outages, especially if you arrange for those too -- "Here's <insert amount> dollars/euros/ducats/doubloons/etc. Drag this across the bottom from point x to point y on your charts on date z, then cut it loose and leave it behind and go on your way."

Now, with a straight face, can you claim that you know, for sure, that your undersea links are pristine and unmolested, either at the end points with the equivalent of the infamous at&t "nsa rooms", or somewhere in the middle? Do you know, for sure, that the people who own the fiber trunks aren't playing ball with the nsa/mi6/dgse/etc?

Unless you own the entire infrastructure, and actively monitor it to be sure of such things, it is best to assume that your communications are vulnerable at some point along the way.
Raw Meal - Organic Meal Replacement Drink
Further, I believe that there is not an explicit "right to privacy" and therefore there is not a right to privacy.

So are you saying that a "right" has to be explicitly spelled out in the BoR in order to be a right? If that's what you mean, then how the heck does a "strict constructionist" get that to jibe with the 9th Amendment?

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people
If I type I hate Obama?
If I type I hate Obama, Obama is a evil, the IRS deserves to be shut down by any means necessary, terrorism is good, down with the U.S., etc.

Would everyone who likes this be linked with potential terrorist activities according to the NSA?
My guess would be Venezuela or Cuba.
I agree, it does seem somewhat silly and is akin to complaining about how rape cases are handeled by everybody going out and crying rape. Wont fix rapes, wont solve rapes, will make it harder to see real rapes taking place.

With that if this event takes place and somebody dies due to intel not being obvious due to the amount of troll/spam then would those instigating the troll/spam and those partaking in it be as guilty of the crime that was not stopped.

Certainly not a impossible situation and with that I sure would not wont to be responsible impossing detrement against another, even if the intentions were good, the approach is wrong.
It's disrupting supply lines that does the real damage. Fuel trucks in Iraq were an extremely popular target for this reason.

You seem to think having piles of guns to start with puts you at an advantage. It doesn't. If anything, having piles of guns is a liability. In Libya they would just raid police stations and military depots and get all the guns they could ever want. I'm sure the same thing is going on in Syria.

Even in a place like Japan where firearms are heavily restricted, it would be only hours after some hypothetical civil war broke out before the resistance was armed.

Guns are an important tool in fighting, but there's billions of them in circulation around the world. If people want guns, they will get them. The amount of initiative lost in not having guns in the first few hours of a struggle is negligible. This kind of unrest takes years to resolve.
Well unix timestamps are not quite readable for humans, this is a bit better. It lacks a system of weeks though, so I guess it's only a midway solution, not great for human usability either. And it's not so much of a system as it's an idea.
Netherlands, Sweden are good candidates.
Ok, now this is just ridiculous.

Entrance into the walled garden is only a couple of hundred for a used Mac mini on eBay plus the dev fee. If you can't afford that, you probably can't afford all the money you're going to lose developing an iOS app you can't afford to market.
US surveillance has 'expanded' under Obama, says Bush's NSA director
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5853452
what ! this is a huge security hole !
Poll: Who will be attending Apple's WWDC?
Don't forget to upvote the poll with your choice!
Should Your Startup Take a Moonshot?
Especially when it looks like Raveler co-opted Path.app's logo.
If you have a Bank of America credit card you will find ShopSafe under "Information and Services" tab when you click on the card in question.
No doubt. That reminds me of the old joke "If you get stuff in the mail from the ACLU and the NRA, you're probably a libertarian".

As somebody who is an NRA member and who has donated to the ACLU, that rings true to me. :-)
Really. I can say it easily. It's a risk I'm willing to accept and a risk I would hope every patriotic American would happily accept to preserve our liberties.

BTW, where does your logic stop?

My brother got killed by a drunk driver, but at least the government can't read my facebook messages about porn and cat pictures...

I'm sure we could cut down on drunk driving fatalities (10K / year) if we applied the NSA to the problem. Should the government search through Facebook messages and Gmail to see if people are writing stuff like 'man I drove hammered last night'?
In the words attributed to Joseph Stalin: "Quantity has a quality all its own."
Indeed I didn't know about him, thanks.
SLAC X-rays resurrect 200-year-old lost opera
A good starting point for this discussion might be this quotation from the late Israel M. Gelfand, a pioneer of writing correspondence course materials in secondary school mathematics in both Russian and English: "Students have no shortcomings, they have only peculiarities. The job of a teacher is to turn these peculiarities into advantages."

Thus far the Stack Exchange discussion includes a lot of complacency along the lines of "some students just don't have the capacity to get it" that I never found when I was living in Taiwan. Over there, even the below-average students in seventh grade are all expected to learn quite a lot of algebra and geometry, which they consolidate knowledge of during junior high school. By the end of junior high, students in Taiwan and students in urban areas of China and students in Korea, Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong generally know United States secondary school mathematics quite well. (I have heard Chinese graduate students in the United States, students in nonquantitative subjects, deride the mathematics section of the GRE general test used for graduate school admission as a test of "junior high math," and that is literally true in terms of the standard curriculum in China.)

So how about it? What creative ideas do we have here to help the young learner learn how to solve proportions, an aspect of day-by-day reasoning that only secondary school graduate might reasonably be expected to know? How to reignite a spark of interest in mathematics after school lessons that may have been a turn-off, may have been flat wrong,

http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

and at a minimum have left the learner with an excuse to not keep trying to learn?
Thanks for commenting - it's good to hear that you are aware of the issues and that Persona is moving in the right direction.

Also: Good job on Persona - you guys deserve praise - as I said in the blog post, I'm very excited about Persona, primarily because I see it as a huge user experience improvement over the current normal sign-in flow.
UK Prime Minister: Intelligence agencies work within law
Hacker SuperDaE Releases 1.7TB Trove of Gaming Info
That is a false decision as well as an unlikely result. False Positives are 1000x more likely than actual positives.

The more likely result is 100000's innocent Americans are placed on the no-fly list, thousands of innocent non-americans are waterboarded in Guantanimo, etc for each potential terrorist stopped.

Most terrorists are incompetent and would get stopped get good police work or fail because the bombs do not explode.
SELinux's Toxic Mistake
Hi HN, this is a little something I built during my 1st week at Hacker School. Happy to answer any questions.
For everyone asking for a Windows or Linux live stream, last time I watched it on UStream on Win XP - it worked flawlessly, and was about ~30 seconds behind the live blogs.

www.ustream.tv/ltktv looks good for today
Wonder if there is a market for phone modifications that add an external on/off switch for the mic's (and speakers). Silly but paranoia sells.
> down to Costa Rica and overland to Ecuador

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_Gap