skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For me, it's my text file junk drawer. And I mean that in a good way.

Often I need a file to reformat some text or a file to temporarily hold a snippet of text. All this goes into NV. It's _frictionless_ so, for these files, I don't have to think what to name them or where to save them. Just open the app and start typing or paste. The text is there and it is automatically saved.

Instead of composing longish text in the browser (textarea), I now use NV and don't worry about losing stuff due to browser crashes, etc.

Pre-NV, these text files were throwaways. They'd typically be saved on my desktop for a few days or not saved at all in the case of a quick dump. Now they are saved (without me thinking about it) and on a number of occasions it has been helpful to have the archive.

Lately I've been trying to add a little organization to some notes with inspiration from this idea of Semantic Notes [1].

BTW, I use NValt as many others have suggested.

[1]: http://www.abolish.me/blog/semantic-notes
The Stripe and CardFlight of selling t-shirts.. I like it!
And there it is:

"...and nominated him for the next Nobel Peace Prize.”
How much does the NSA pay for this?
Unsubscribe - ALL THE THINGS
Finding Information in Human-Entered Search Queries
A news agency that is known for defending its own governments' dirty stuff, twisting truth, and manipulating public opinions, is now appreciating a freedom fighter and a human rights activist.

Oh indeed, like the New York Times, say?

Obviously, the point isn't that China has democratic integrity.

Rather, it is that China is happy to push the theme that the US is not looking that much better than China given this scandal. And that's good for everyone, in the sense that it keeps Snowden safe and it puts pressure on the US to really prove that it takes democracy and transparency seriously.
Leave it to a #slatepitch to explain why Snowden would choose Hong Kong:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/06/10/hong_kong_...

To expand on this scenario: Snowden knows that the bureaucratic wrangling to get him out of Hong Kong by the book would be significant. He assumes he'll get at least several months of effective asylum in Hong Kong while having easy access to high speed internet, professional filmmakers, etc., all of which are crucial for waging an international public relations campaign. Meanwhile, he's geographically adjacent to China, home of the only government in a strong enough global position to openly vie for him to release state secrets in exchange for protection. This puts the U.S. gov't into a difficult position: they can extract/assassinate him illegally, which of course is a public relations nightmare. They can wait six months to extract him legally, and take the chance that he'll make a deal with China (or be illegally extracted by the Chinese). Or they can look the other way while he pursues another option - asylum in a country like Ecuador for instance. That last option is his only real hope. Basically, that he's able to put enough pressure on the U.S. gov't through public relations and international positioning that they don't pursue backdoor sanctions against a country granting asylum.
This reminds me of Kurtz's hideaway in Apocalypse Now. That film really made me appreciate how bizarre and eery the collision of cultures was. US imperialists/interventionists fighting the descendants of a culture thousands of years old.
> the US relies on AES as much as you or I

Yes, but the government also has other (non-public) algorithms/ciphers/etc. that are used internally.
KDE Plasma Workspace: present and future
Side note: Github's 404 page does that too. Even on mobile:
https://github.com/404
Actually, I'm happy to see both the US and China throw stones at their respective glasses houses. We can hope they both collapse.
I wouldn't trust China for a safe shelter. If you are used as a tool, you never know when it's gonna change.
The comment was that it was hard to maintain the way that it was written, which is probably true (there were hooks everywhere!). I don't know if there are any clever allocator/macro tricks you can use to know how many of each kind of object is allocated without a big perf hit.
I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA has a "special" relationship with many certificate authorities that allows it to man-in-the-middle SSL.
Phone Metadata Proves a Powerful Tool for NSA, Police
That doesn't get you around the Citizens United issue, where 3rd parties spend $$$ on election messaging which favor particular candidates but are not directly involved in the campaign.
It's going to be missed by passive data sweeps. If someone had suspected and was watching him that's a different story.
With call length? No idea. Called numbers? Now we are getting somewhere.

But it probably also includes location, if only the cell tower used.
"We hack network backbones—like huge Internet routers, basically—that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one"
Interestingly, Roosevelt wasn't elected in his first term and only became president because McKinley was assasinated.

Would he have been able to run on his own at that point? I suspect not - he would have been viewed as too progressive by the people in charge.
Im a vim nutball - and i now swear by pycharm + ideavim. I had been using plain vim as my python editor for a long time - and still use it for remote editing and on the fly fixes; That being said, I tried out pycharm with the ideavim about three months ago and it has improved my productivity and the quality of my code base. Pycharm brought several things together: excellent refactoring capabilities, visual step through debugging with realtime pause/breakpoint edits and gevent support, brilliant code and library navigation, code inspection, selective pep compliant formatting that's vcs friendly, vcs integration (though I still prefer command line hg/git + vimdiff), autocompletion that's doesn't need to be configured manually, regex search replace that's actually better than <,>s/a/b/, fast switching between virtual envs, recognition and maintenance of requirements.txt files, support for multiple vcs flavors, and automatic and frequent detection of remote changes.

Ideavim Is not vim. But it does support enough vi features for me to work with extreme productivity. If there were a couple of things that I have to flag as killer fails, it's the poor support for change lists and vsplit/split. Navigating backwards and forwards through changes doesn't work very well in ideavim - there are workaround, but nothing so primal as g[;,]. Other than that I don't find myself missing all that much - the hybrid of core vi features with IntelliJ features more than makes up for the missing vim features - I could never go back.
Sudden Death Entropy Failures
You're quite welcome. I'm glad you liked the description. The title of the article is indeed misleading; a better one would be "PRISM-proof."

With a total record of the entire Internet (global passive adversary), you could definitely defeat anything using Tor, but I wonder if you could make it significantly harder still by randomly generating XMPP accounts every time. There's a potentially infinite space, and you can do XMPP registration in-band.

Of course, you could also just run XMPP servers locally as chat endpoints, and never have subpoena-able records. These could be Tor hidden services, which would give you the added bonus of global reachability. I think this eliminates most correlation attacks you could do; all you'd see on Alice and Bob's endpoints would be Tor circuits.

All this will make for a really interesting Wire reboot, if/when that happens.
God I'm so sick of this lame proposal. What's your evidence that this will improve things? Because we already have term limits in California and our legislature is a byword for dysfunction.
Hypothetical other explanations: 1.) Obama always had the same views, but was lying to get elected 2.) Obama changed his mind, a possibility for any person on any topic 3.) Becoming president gave Obama new information which changed his mind, and which would change the mind of anyone elected president 4.) His opinions stayed the same, but now that he's president it's in his best interests to take this stance, which it wasn't before

There's more than one possible cause here, and possibly more than one of them are the case. Despite the fact that it's much easier to blame external influences.
"Google is 15 years old and has 39,000 employees (54,000 if you count Motorola), and its last major innovation — AdSense — was way back in 2003."

And AdSense was largely an acquihire of Applied Semantics.
Well that's my whole point; half a percent of the population, which is what I also calculated when writing my original comment and consider a fraction, being wrongly incarcerated is an atrocity so Facebook's "fraction of a percent" means nothing to me.
Introduction to Public Speaking
No, that time has not come.
An outdated version of a PHP application (which had a public vulnerability) was attacked, allowing arbitrary code execution. The "exploit" attempted to download and execute a remote file via TFTP. Ultimately, a "remote shell" would end up being installed on the server.

SELinux, however, prevented the TFTP transfer from happening. We saw this in the audit logs, investigated, and discovered what had happened (and, of course, updated the PHP application).

If the attack had succeeded, I'm convinced that it eventually would have ended up as a full ("root-level") compromise.
Make sure you actually authenticate the key fingerprints.
Note, doing this over video chat (if you know what the other person looks like and sounds like) with a fresh key pair is a decent way.*

* Assuming you believe no one has the resources to impersonate your chat partner in near real time.
You don't need a license for each specific usage. Most software doesn't involve surveillance, and most government surveillance software would probably not be an "exception" in the author's eyes. Rhino surveillance is an obscure edge case.
Basically it's a really nice compliment. In a roundabout way.

You're smart enough to look at history, prepare, be presentable and don't even need a lawyer. BOOM.
It's more like an attempt to not let other classified information inadvertently leak because people get careless when they know the information is out in the open.

I would encourage them they still have something to hide apparently :D
> it's probably state-ordered propaganda

I highly doubt that. It's only anecdote but most of my Chinese friends tend to support their government (except on some issues like Internet censorship) and tend to dislike the US government (I live in China). In fact, it would be more accurate to say that they believe the government of China is just as bad as the US government. You could say that the author is a victim of propaganda but I think he genuinely meant what he wrote.
Xcode is free. Write/download source code, click Run.
Where isn't Freedom 0?
Microsoft to Take Over Best Buy Computer Sections With Windows Stores
I use NValt as well, but I held out for a while because I thought a new, possibly commercial, version might be on the horizon from the original developer, Zachary Schneirov. This was based on the following interview with him, which, BTW, offers some interesting background on NV.

An interview with Notational Velocity developer Zachary Schneirov

http://suratlozowick.com/blog/2011/12/notational-velocity-de...

Edit: As an aside, this is an interesting comment from the above (2011) interview:

> Now the first company to sell a mass-market wearable computer with a glasses-mounted display would get my money in an instant.
The Most Accurate Article I've Read About NSA This Week As A Former NSA Linguist
You cannot control or change the OS according to Jeff. Which means that you are as free as the OS allows you and not as free as the hardware allows you.

I do agree that OS that allows you to run self signed code and unsigned code and have root access is almost on the top of the freedom ladder.
It depends on how numerous the threat is. Silently disappearing is useful for a small highly organized enemy, but for preventing large scale unorganized rioting, restricting the information flow is probably better.
Isn't Machiavelli generally accepted to have proposed a recipe for strategically achieving political aims, while he himself supported republics? Do you mean that Snowden is being strategic in how he attempts to further American ideals, as opposed to thinking its the thought that counts, or do you mean that he has some other goal that is not necessarily related to American ideals?
Pine Gap gets name checked in Rap News 15 - Big Brother is WWWatching You: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o66FUc61MvU
They definitely have a strong US presence, but since the company grew (and is growing) out of India, and have customers globally - I'm sure there is a provision to host your account in a country/currency you're more comfortable with.
I find this question highly fascinating.

On the one hand we have a lot of discussion (here on HN and elsewhere) about how to communicate secretly and anonymously with no clear conclusion.

On the other hand we have a guy who managed to communicate about a highly sensitive topic with a film maker who we know was under surveillance and a journalist who most probably was as well.

If anyone knows how to fly under the radar it's Snowden, Poitras and Greenwald.
>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.

Is it news in the sense that people didn't suspect it was going on? No. Are the details news? Definitely.

Things came to light before in a way that was easy to sweep under the rug. This guys seems to want to make sure we have a conversation about it.

> 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.

The likely answer is he revealed himself because he's scared and so the U.S. or China will have to treat him like a human being. Having a public profile affords a great degree of safety. I don't know that talking strategy about his safety would have been the best use of an opportunity in the introduction video interview.

>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?

This is one of the bombshells of the story. If this is true--the government is building the programs and infrastructure that has been revealed, and this IT consultant had access to the information he claims he did--it's all we need to know to conclude these programs are extremely dangerous and that we shouldn't be running them, at least as they're currently conceived and implemented.

>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.

Again, his point seems to be to bring back the conversation. So far, it seems "his role" is more a safety thing than an attention thing.
Crypto is "safe enough" based on an idea of how long the data needs to be protected. Best case it is "safe" for the time it will take to brute force the entire key space, but in reality most crypto will remain safe much shorter than that.

We've increased typical keysizes for PGP many times over the years because we expect there's a reasonable change for smaller keys to be broken too quickly.

In other words: You should not infer that PGP is "safe", but that he believed PGP with the key size he used would protect the messages until it doesn't matter if they're revealed at least from the level of monitoring he feared, which could just mean safe against routine intercepts and security scans for the few months until his identity was revealed anyway.
If someone was able to initiate a connection to your desktop behind a router, and you did not manually set up port forwarding, it sounds like you have UPnP enabled. I strongly suggest turning that off.

This would not happen behind any home router I know of with UPnP disabled, unless you have malware on the machine.
Inside the TPM would be a great place to store the private key, simply because it cannot be extracted.

Of course, that introduces a new problem: securely backing up the private key.
Big Brain Theory : Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs? (2008)
I wouldn't just not participate in a program like this; I wouldn't work for a company I found to be participating in one.

Many (I'd even say most, maybe?) venture-backed startups engage in something like this, though, just not for very concrete things like design or engineering or marketing. Members of 'Advisory Boards' or 'Technical Advisors' or similar often get some nominal amount of stock [options/RSUs/whatnot]. Maybe this just flies under the radar with the expected value by both participants in the transaction being close to nil.
We willingly participated in building a massive anti-consumer corporate surveillance state, called it "analytics", and then are surprised when the government jumps onboard.
> wake up the moronic "I've got nothing to hide" clowns

I take objection to this. The NSA stuff is indeed questionable. Reading your gmail, that's very clearly a breach. But the IRS does have legitimate interest in knowing about when money changes hands. It's kind of their job.

Let's take away some of the linkbait and media sensationalism about this article. IRS already gets a privileged amount of information on the "usual" way in which money changes hands. Bank transfers, stock sales, dividends, your paycheck, interest - they're getting that info already. So how might social media fit into this? I say if a modern day Al Capone figures out a way to launder money based on Farmville credits, yes, I want the IRS to know about it. If sites like Facebook are introducing things like payment platforms, I don't see why the IRS should not be notified that money is changing hands, the same way they are notified for other transactions. That's not the same as reading your messages.

Which brings me to another point:

> An IRS audit based on trawling public data

A fluffy MSN article about what IRS might be doing is not the same as evidence that this is actually happening. If someone has evidence of innocent people being subjected to this in any substantial number, then please, let them come forward. Absent that kind of evidence I don't find it very believable.
With term limits, you'd end up with an even more powerful bureaucracy.
Why the hostility? So many people on the Internet seem to have this urgent need to 'react' to every piece of information that is fed to them. The author presents her points in a thoughtful and well-articulated manner--why not extend her the same courtesy? Keep in mind, too, that this person seems to have a lot of experience in this field and probably knows a bit more about the whistleblowing process than we do.
Sounds pretty cool. I wish there was a general API for HN to see so we can plot interesting data it collects in relation to topics/time/users.
The point that the Christian makes is unalienable rights are given by God Himself, and that no human authority can take them away. You and I are valuable because we are made in the image of God.

Without God, all morality and ethics are completely voluntary.
I agree. It'd be great if we could just ask him, but I don't know if I've ever heard him say something that wasn't manipulative and to his perceived political advantage.
Neoconservativism is a real ideology, with real writings and a history, and people who acknowledge being followers of it.

Searching "Team B" for it's history, of "Leo Strauss" for it's ideology is a good starting point for people interested in this topic.

The actions of the G.W.B. administration are actually fairly understandable when you consider that most of his cabinet was from Team B.

As for Obama, all indications of his pre-presidential history is that he is ideologically traditional liberal, applying the term to him is problematic, even though his actions in office could indeed be described as neoconservative.

This makes him far more difficult to assess.
Ahh, I did not understand you wanted service for multiple users. It sounds like price is your main requirement.

>>Rackspace, Fastmail, and Namecheap

These are slightly lower quality than gmail IMO.
The only thing that can undermine his credibility is if the US government comes up with indisputable proof that NONE of what he said was true. Her arguments are a complete red herring
In order to poison someone, you need to be close enough to them that they're willing to eat/drink something you've prepared for them, which would suggest that the majority of poisoning murders involve at least an acquaintanceship between the murderer and the victim. It seems very unlikely that 85%-99% of female serial killers (the required percentage to get to a 50/50 ratio) are all using undetectable poisons, successfully ordering these poisons in a way that can't be tracked, killing people they know with it, probably during a shared meal, then adequately disposing of the poison afterwards. Not to mention doing this over and over again without anyone getting suspicious about the fact that otherwise-healthy people around them are dropping like flies for no apparent reason. Do you have any evidence whatsoever for this?
The 1st Amendment would need to be dramatically modified to make significant change in campaign financing.
So far as I can see he's basically doing what Assange did, only more so.

Assuming his goals are to (a) maximise exposure of the things he's blowing the whistle about and (b) minimise his likelihood of getting screwed over, this seems like a pretty decent strategy

(I think other respondents are reading your comment about 'doing the right thing' as indicating that other whistleblowers are somehow more morally pure rather than hopelessly naive; whether you intended it or not I'm definitely on the side of the latter interpretation :)
The only way I would support term limits for politicians is if there were a corresponding term limit provision for civil employees. No one should be spending a lifetime feeding off the public trough.
That's completely unrealistic, we've been on one of the main forums for SEO for the last 2 weeks - there are a few decent ones at most (not 250M) - YELLING out that we need real help, and real communication. The have SCALED that communication down for you by front paging it.

There are, at most, a few places like this on the web you could easily focus on.

Bonus: I've written to you 4 times, tried google+, twitter, the lot. Poke poke poke.

I'm armed with a comprehensive set of example data, and have 30 years of programming experience behind me. I've been doing this with a bunch of whitehat webmasters who have a combined audience of about 10 million people a day. We have received absolutely no indication that you have even seen anything we've posted or written, or asked about.

Seriously Matt, you're not exactly reaching out.
Frank.