skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My understanding was that it's less malevolence on Apple's part than Macs not being quite like PCs architecturally, particularly with respect to firmware -- but it's somewhat orthogonal to both my (strained) analogy and my point. :)

I like both OS X and Apple hardware. But we're living in the future, compared to back when I first got into computing, and data is a lot more easily transportable between platforms. If at some point I decide that I don't like that combination enough to pay the price differential between a new Mac laptop and a comparable PC laptop[1], switching platforms will suck a little, but it won't be a nightmare. I simply don't agree with the assertion that my freedom is cruelly curtailed if I can't run OS X on a cheaper Acer laptop.

[1]: Please nobody tell me that I'm paying three times as much for "exactly the same thing," or conversely argue that Macs are cheaper than PCs if you only look at it the right way. No, I'm not. No, they're not.
It seems pretty unlikely, if only because of the very different altitudes the projects operate at (the kites can't be high because of tether weight, and the balloons can't be low because of weather and aircraft).
That comment made this whole thread worthwhile.
The real problem is that once a government program is started, good luck shutting it down. Look at the GITMO detainee program.
$50 per book seems very high. I'd probably buy the whole set at $5 each.
Exceptional Comments
Every political jurisdiction you cross is a new legal and regulatory reality...whether it is a city, state, or national boundary. And laws usually lag innovation.
That is a transistor.
Also, O'Brien is the agent in 1984.
(a) That the correct path for starting any company is to convince venture capitalists to fund it. In fact, this post seems downright derisive of that idea.

Sure. My notes on the problems with VC (specifically, the career incentives on VC-istan that make it suck) were to explain why bad ideas get funded. I didn't think he was arguing that, since he was clearly going out against the VC-istan mentality.

(b) That the way to take advantage of on-the-job experience at BigCo's is to convince them to do things differently while you're on staff there. No, that's not why you make friends with decision makers; you make friends with decision makers to learn what it is they need. Then you leave, and go build a product.

He's still carrying the assumption that the dynamic, highly intelligent people who often end up in VC-istan (by default, because traditional corporate environments can't accommodate them) will be so far above the competition in these stodgy dinosaur companies that they get magically put on a protege track and get to "make friends with decision makers" and acquire the trust (in that company, or later on, as you alluded) to solve their problems. I argue that it's not that simple.
Occam's Razor? Really? No question of trust enters your mind?
I'm not really sure what's more prevalent now days... posts that are overtly idealistic and herald a "follow your dreams" mentality or posts that are ridiculously pessimistic and taut the "your idea sucks so give up" dogma.

I would never tell a graduate to just go "get a job." The cultural mindset to build something independently (interdependently might be better wording) is extremely important. The payment and reward of starting a start up transcends that of funding and exit - the god damned fucking journey, experience, relationships, and lessons are rewarding.
Big surprise to America here. It's just a shame a large majority of people don't care because they say "they're just protecting our freedom" that's a big double stack of bullshit!
Go find an anarcho-syndicalist and ask them what they think of self-secribed libertarians and anarcho-capitalism.
Not disagreeing with your conclusion, but..

> In real life, if you are accused of hiding information in a well known text, you could just show that your version of the text exactly matches the original, and so there is no scope for hiding information.

Except a pre-agreed set of excerpts in a particular order forms a codebook, and the order in which they are delivered easily becomes a code. The code's symbols need not just be excepts, but some combobulation involving the position of the excerpt in the source text, length of quotation, etc. etc

Picking a random book from Project Gutenberg, War and Peace has almost 12,000 paragraphs going by the HTML version. That's enough to encode one and a half words from any of the 235k entries in OS X /usr/share/dict words with just 2 quoted paragraphs
Albania, Argentina, Belarus... am I looking at the right list? OK, some first-world countries are mixed in there too, but the entire list is hardly a source of inspiration.

Many first world countries are absent from that list, as well as all developed Common Law countries (e.g. UK, Australia, Canada, etc). I don't think US should be on that list either. While a National ID is indeed not an instant tyranny, it may well be a step in that direction.
Forgive me, because I'm sure you are as thoughtful as you say you are - but, as someone now a number of years past their teenage years (and who tried hard to be similarly thoughtful) I would argue that you will be even more so in a decade or two.

I don't dispute how you are now, but I promise you'll be all that and more. And that was the point of the previous poster, I believe.
Don't Waste Your Time in Crappy Startup Jobs
That's their position, yes, and was even the position Mueller gave in the unclassified briefing right before the Senator told him there was a conflict in what was said.

I suspect that in the classified briefing the Senator was told something to the effect that phone calls are recorded without a warrant, possibly even that an analyst could flag someone's phone number to be recorded. Presumably whoever was giving the brief failed to make clear that the analyst would need a warrant to listen to the call, as I didn't see in the linked article a direct mention that the analyst could listen, only "tap in".

IMHO this would still run afoul of wiretapping law but certainly the difference between "collect" and "analyze" is an area where NSA has been pushing the boundaries between what is "search and seizure" and what is everything else, so it is at least consistent with their other information collection programs.
That's not the assumption he made; that's a third argument you may have (accidentally?†) made up just to knock down. It's not the case that the only way to find problems that BigCos will pay you to solve is to be smarter than everyone at the BigCo. You will almost certainly have a different tolerance for risk than any senior BigCo employee. It's likely you'll enjoy product development more than they will. It's almost certain that you'll enjoy the trappings of "brand new company" more than they will; Matasano's "brand new company" trappings were "desk at a library", followed by "attic of a print shop with no air conditioning accessible only by a freight elevator".

You also don't need to acquire the trust of BigCo decision makers to sell them products. You can learn about problems BigCo's have just by having routine conversations with the right people, and you can sell anybody a product if the product solves a problem for them at the right price.

Scott Wensing solves the White House Situation Room's "tracking devastating storms" problem. How much do you think Barack Obama trusts Scott Wensing? He has an account in StormPulse.

† I'm a little pissy today
I've had my differences with <tptacek> in the past -- I think polite disagreements over policy -- but he is quite correct here in what he says about Google.
except that anything they do in good faith, could be easily and mechanically turned into more profit by doing something a bit more evil. The pressure to make profit is the driving force, and so the stable norm for any profit making entity is to "turn evil".
I'd argue that you can start smaller than that if you want to get in with decision makers.

Let me give an example. Typically, when people need a software solution and they are not executives, they go to whoever is in charge of such things and ask for a budget to acquire that service. The Human Resources and Accounts Payable departments deal with it, but an employee initiates the prompt. This is the underpinnings of SaaS models, and how they market to a lot of companies.

Let's say I was a waiter in a very inefficient restaurant, or better yet, I had experience for a few years in different restaurants. Let's say our waiter also happens to be a talented software engineer doing market research. He's well within a degree of separation from his boss, presumably, even if the restaurant he works at is part of a huge chain.

If he can justify solving a very important problem that's hemorrhaging money to his immediate superior, his immediate superior can go one step above himself and make a case for the software.

Not only is this possible, I have literally done this, which is why I have such a detailed example. You can go up the chain link by link without having to wait until you've physically climbed to the top.

Now, that said, I also don't agree with the premise of even needing to get in touch with decision makers. As long as you can verify there is an existing problem, and you can verify that it exists for a legitimate group of people who'd throw cash at you to solve it for their own business, you have a business model. Granted, that is not easy, but it's certainly an alternative to needing connections.

I think the author understands this and realizes that he's not suggesting startup ideas require people with extreme levels of experience. He didn't mean that you need to get in with the C level executives of a corporate culture just to be relevant to them - the entire argument about how easy it is, how blind they are to talent, etc. is irrelevant. He's not recommending that. He just wants people to have practical field experience so they understand their problems from the perspective of the domain - whether they are in the top, middle or bottom of that domain is not necessarily important.
I went to a talk by an SOM architect a few years ago, while Tapei 101 was under construction.

He said the principal limiting factor for the height of a super-tall structure is economics.

In fact buildings over sixty stories or so don't make much sense in any real-estate market -- not even Manhattan or Hong Kong -- if viewed from the perspective of real estate as a commodity. Where supertalls make economic sense is if they can be turned into a prestige address when the building becomes a landmark.

With respect to wire rope, there is already synthetic rope with dramatically better tensile strength, and it's displacing wire rope in many applications. Synthetics have a lot less hardness than steel though, and are subject to abrasion. I don't know if a carbon fiber rope would be harder than a steel rope or not, but I know from experience that CFRP panels are not nearly as hard as steel plate.
Related – What Mark Twain Didn’t Say:

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/10/10/twain-father/
OK, I guess the issue is with the "never in production". One size rarely fits all. I can have a lookup table with three rows in my database, for which Large Hadron Migrator is hardly an appropriate solution. ALTER will work just fine. For large tables - yes, a more complex migration solution is in order.
> No court order is required for NSA to issue directives under FISA.

As far as I can see (IANAL) most forms of FISA order do require a court order. FAA 702 orders are issued by the government rather than the FISC court, but still have to be reviewed and approved by the FISC. It's just that the nature of the court's review affords no protection to non-resident aliens (except by chance).

> For all intents and purposes USG never loses at FISC.

Well, it has lost at least one signficant case at FISC, it's just not letting us see the ruling.
I mean, pick one at random. There were a good number of Communist Parties who accepted the Moscow line hook line and sinker--the CPUSA being the foremost example of that, at times worse than non-Soviet Warsaw Pact CPs.

But, to name a couple... Spain, Italy, and the rest of the Eurocommunists (which probably should include Australia); Japan and it's very peace and anti-nuclear oriented party; China and its affiliated Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist-Mao Zedong thought-style parties, which killed more USSR troops in armed conflict than the USA ever did; the Khmer Rouge, which was effectively a murderous pariah state only supported by the PRC (ultimately being replaced by a leftist Soviet and Vietnamese-affiliated government); India with its half a dozen of Communist sects that I can never keep straight in elected office; Yugoslavia with its market socialism and Non-Aligned foreign policy.

There are even oddities like Albania, which took an ultra-pro-Soviet position that outpaced the Soviet Union's CP (it argued that it was turning too far away from Stalin). And ideologically the Cuban Communist Party had few moorings, mostly providing a gloss for nationalism until it actually achieved power.

Even in the USA, although CPUSA was effectively defined as the group of people with slavish devotion to the USSR, it constantly shed members or purged them, who formed their own groups that were anti-Soviet in principle, though many still grudgingly thought it was the lesser of two evils when it came to foreign policy. And the UK Communist left was infamous for its variety of views leading to a "one person, one party" system.

I'd say the biggest issue with your claim, though (aside from ignoring truculent Trotskyites, whose level of influence has persistently remained stuck at zero) is it ignores the China-USSR split. This isn't to the credit of those Communists who weren't on the USSR's side; they were the cheerleaders of the Khmer Rouge, Cultural Revolution, and Shining Path. Most USSR-affiliated ones, by contrast, steadfastly supported parliamentary tactics because they were more likely to rebound to Soviet benefit.

It was a very real and relevant split.
Tell him that you want him to oppose it because you think it will make it easier for less enlightened states to create gun databases. Or even better; make it easier to create a national gun database.

It doesn't matter if you think that is actually true, or think that would be a problem.
Honestly, I don't really care about the "direct/indirect" distinction that bothers you: the only real opinion I have on that point is that if Snowden and some anonymous powerpoint junkie can reasonably characterize their access as "direct", then arguing over whether it is in fact "indirect" from some arcane technical perspective is a waste of time.

> when I asked if you disagreed with the post I made above, and you disagreed with only a small part of it

But I don't disagree with your third through fifth statements. I suspect you're wrong to assume that (1) the FISA process is providing reasonable judicial oversight over requests and that (2) providers manually review the appropriateness of individual data requests. As far as the rest goes, this statement of yours is the core point:

> It does not follow logically that because one interpretation of an NSA slide deck is [X] ... that that's the only reasonable interpretation of the slide deck.

Assuming you believe this, I do not understand why you are so hell-bent on attacking Snowden's credibility and dismissing the concerns many other people have raised about excessive surveillance. There are clearly reasonable interpretations of the released materials which make his statements (and those of the NSA and other whistleblowers) perfectly compatible with Google's own statements.
Note that I'm 98% sure that it's still illegal to advocate the violent overthrow of the government, so civil servants should take the Smith Act overturning with a grain of salt.
I think the senators who did this decided it would play better now that they skipped it, than what they suspected would come out in the briefing, which they would then be demonstrably complicit in by having knowledge of. Accomplices after the fact. They decided this very thin veneer of plausible deniability was the better option.
I looked through a bit of your comment history. You are a freak of nature. You easily rank somewhere in the top 1/10,000th of teenagers, probably in the top 1/10,000th of all people of any age. Your abilities are not generalizable.
There are at least two ways of hiding information here: how much of the text to send in one go, and the time the text is sent. You could vary both to signal information about something, even though the text doesn't lead directly to any message.

A green flare is shot into the air at 11pm. Or, two green flares are shot. That's a pre-agreed signal that something did happen, something will happen or something should happen.

A paragraph is sent on August 2nd. Or, two paragraphs ...
It is but tell that to NSA and to all those angry Senators and Congress people--and especially to those lobbyists from the military industrial complex. He will be kept "in isolation because he can leak secrets even from jail"
When I was a teenager I was much more convinced of the truth. As the song goes -- I was older then, I'm younger than that now.
Note that something similar was done to groups that protested the Iraq War.

Some people who were known demonstrators ended up on the no-fly list.
Honest question: why would anyone assume such a petition would have any effect whatsoever? This is the same institution - the state - which has repeatedly and unashamedly told the most blatant lies to further its interest (increasing its power at the expense of the sovereignty of the people). Sure the petition might result in some bleating from POTUS, but does anyone seriously believe this would lead to Snowden being pardoned? The people in power will never countenance letting such a precedent stand. What Snowden did presents an existential threat to the establishment. He's going to be made an example of, regardless of the campaigning of idealists who believe the state can be cajoled into behaving benevolently.
As I understand it: FAA 702 certifications require FISC approval, but 702 directives don't; there's a 1:many relationship between certifications and directives, and directives are what companies see.
And yet this highly sophisticated secret program neither prevented the Boston Marathon bombings, nor AFAICT, did it aid in any way in the manhunt following the bombings.
You're supposed to go in with the expectation of a true story, and part of the commentary of this piece is exactly where you become certain that it's fiction.
We actually are getting somewhere by complaining. By everyone (everywhere, not just here) talking about it it's built a momentum of public awareness about such programs in the U.S. that has never existed before despite other past revelations about domestic surveillance.

Public interest in the subject has led to more coverage and more investigative journalists digging up additional details. Public outrage has led to the government acknowledging portions of it publicly and providing even more details in secret to Congress, some of which has already leaked.

Because of the events of the past week and a half, the government is already being more (but far from fully) transparent on the subject than ever before.

Now, I'm not saying this is specifically because we're talking about it on HN, but without public interest it would fade away and return to business as usual. It is of special interest to the technology community, so it makes sense that this would be a primary point to discuss it as it continues to develop.

Finally, it's clear that many people do want to talk about it, because they upvote those stories to the top and comment on them extensively. If you don't want to discuss them, don't upvote them and submit things that interest you instead. Other stories are still making it to the front page as well.
The Beautiful RSS Revolution
"The major causes for low subscribership, as extensive survey research shows, are low interest in the Internet and minimal digital literacy."

I'd really like to see these surveys
I assume the people who spend a large amount on the top floors of a very tall skyscraper don't want to have to change elevators halfway there.
Declan, there seems to be skepticism[0] about this story in some quarters. Could you address the concern that Jerry Nadler is simply confused about what he heard?

[0] https://twitter.com/AntDeRosa/status/346072065893355520 & https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedAndrew/status/346072058234540034 for example
Building A Transaction Logs-based Protocol On Riak
Silencing immune attacks in type 1 diabetes
I suggest watching the CSPAN video.I think they are talking about metadata.

http://www.juliansanchez.com/2013/06/15/nadler-and-mueller-o...
>I'd say the biggest issue with your claim, though (aside from ignoring truculent Trotskyites, whose level of influence has persistently remained stuck at zero) is it ignores the China-USSR split.

You're right, I was thinking of western Communist parties, but you already covered those. Have an upvote.
Changing gut bacteria through diet affects brain function
A reply giving the reason you disagree has the benefit of preserving both sides of the argument.
I love when scientific interest articles pop up on the front page like this.

It's really amazing to me that one of the things that holds skyscraper maximum height back is the practical concern of lift height. That's simply not the first thing I would think of if someone asked me the question.

But while that's cool, I don't think we necessarily should be building taller skyscrapers. They're not very practical. If they were, we'd have quasi-Coruscant cities where all the buildings were as tall as the Empire State Building or Willis Tower.

Instead, what tends to actually happen is the buildings become landmarks that attract a lot of attention but comparatively little real estate. Furthermore, when cities expand they generally need to build upwards quickly and forsake extravagance for practicality. If it takes 10 years to build a monolithic structure higher than the skyline, that's a project that's burning money for a long time until it's profitable.
Good piece. His personal concern is for "chilling effect".

His public concern beyond that is for blackmail of national leaders. That actually worries me less, as the public is becoming much more tolerant of "vice" in its leaders. (For example -- President Obama is an admitted cocaine and pot user; President Bush was an admitted drunkard and widely-suspected cocaine user; President Clinton was a widely-suspected adulterer and pot user.)
Nope. Doing this for my own self-education. It's really more of a hobby than a business. See http://sivers.org/eg
I never understood why "conservatives" weren't up in arms over E-Verify. This is effectively a system that gives the executive branch the ability to stop anyone in the country from getting a job.

Even with all the passive NSA spying in the news, it is hard to imagine a system that more fundamentally conflicts with traditional american values than one that lets the president determine who and who is not eligible to support themselves and their family.

Even if we assume it will never be used for political gain in the style of gerrymandering or direct persecution, just having an unreasonably high accuracy rate of 99.99% that means 1 out of 10,000 will find the government interfering with their ability to get a job. Meanwhile any person seeking to circumvent the system will probably find it easy enough since the security on all of the data sources is so varied - you just need one low-paid clerk in one town willing to put bogus entries in their system and it will feed up to E-Verify.