skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find it hard to believe that a huge amount of money can be quietly booked by a publicly traded company without it raising all kinds of hard-to-answer questions from employees in many departments, as well as the outside auditors. Even more so that it was actually the monetization strategy approved by the board for the acquisition.

Here's a more conventional theory why they bought Skype. Around 2010, Microsoft is already moving toward a huge investment in mobile, where they've been completely blindsided by the staggering growth of iOS and Android. Their investment in Bing has not really paid off, and fighting Google on search has arguably been a distraction while this new-fangled iPad is about to destroy their entire PC market.

One major gap for their mobile strategy is a messaging platform. Windows Live Messenger capped out and is on the decline. They can build a new platform from scratch, but Windows Phone needs a tool that drives preference over iOS or Android. I'm not sure what their plan A was before Skype became available to buy, but it made sense as a plan B when it was for sale. With over half a billion users, it starts to look like a $10 CPA for customers.

Mobile also helps explain the shift toward client-server (as questioned by UnoriginalGuy below). If you had used Skype for mobile before, you'd know that it was basically a battery testing app. I haven't touched Skype much in the past year, but I think it's clearly improved.

Skype's business fundamentals aren't doing half-bad either: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/02/15/still-think...
oddly, Atlas Shrugged is along a similar vein but many here seem to dance around it, as if it were taboo. An overpowering bureaucracy is bad regardless if it manipulates an individual or a group of them.
Credit card terms vary from country to country.

Here (Singapore) card conditions were recently changed so that you would only be liable for the first $100 of fraudulent transactions (assuming you can prove it wasn't you). I think the bank can still hold you liable for more if they find you were negligent about guarding your card details.

Prior to these condition changes, I remember being told by the bank that you would be liable for all charges incurred before you had reported the card physically stolen or lost.
It's Obama's own fault. During the election campaign when the audience was more sympathetic to minorities issues, anti-war, etc. he used to actually proudly state his middle name. I.e. when visiting Arab counties during his first term he used to emphasize 'Hussein' like in each and every speech he gave. Then when back at home, especially talking to more right-wing minded electorate he doesn't mention it at all, and when somebody asks pretends to be seriously offended.

You can's have it both ways Mr. Peace Nobel Price Spying Americans.
How Glenn Greenwald Began Communicating With NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden
That's not what the down arrows are for.
I know there is no end to this discussion so I'll just put in my 2cents and GTFO.

As a user of Windows systems in the 90s, the so called "openness" was precisely the reason I moved to using Linux. Most software available for Windows, in those days was crap, and I as a user needed something that worked, not mostly but, all the time. Linux gave me that. Even if there was just one office suite (star office, remember?), it worked.

After using Linux for about a decade or so, I moved to OS X, since Linux wasn't really going anywhere. The fabled desktop linux wasn't coming and everything seemed in a limbo.

OS X and Apple, for all it's faults, works, for the most part, for the user and that's why the platform is popular.

We guys here are talking and thinking with our developer hats, but users think very differently.
How Google Sets Goals
I gonna go with all Intel/AMD chips have a backdoor or weakness...

It's been done before and since:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/01/nsa_backdoors_...
"libFLAC encoder was defaulting to level 0 compression instead of 5"

Level 5 is better imho, as I guess most of us want smaller files not faster encoding. Computers today are fast enough to do this without a significant wait.

Also this:
Created: 2007-10-19
Closed-fixed: 2009-01-02
Released: 2013-05-26
And from a legal standpoint just because there's a law that happens to force you to break a contract does not usually absolve you from liability for doing so. Of course, many of these contracts may contain some kind of "you have no rights if the law says so" clause, in which case the companies would be in the clear.
What has Amazon Web Services had to say about Prism? Anything?
Sorry I should have said "potential felony history never goes away".

Basically:

we want to talk to this person about their friend, let's see what we can bring them in for and threaten them with so they talk...
It may help to remember here that Ayn Rand wrote that stuff as an ex-citizen of a country with a communist regime that employed exactly those tactics against their citizens, I highly doubt that she intended or foresaw those words to be used against the rulers of the country that she chose to live in.
EU breaks silence on US snooping scandal
A state that monitors without limits is dangerous for several reasons. Mainly because those who watch may or may not alter its ethics, for example, for personal gain. Someone with access to data can fuck another. A typical example would be a company, which is surveilled and they know all their movements, communications, contracts and any possible information that a government can sell to competitors or people who pay for this information.

Amen to these problems will also be those, as noted in this article, the issue of being "possible guilty" all the time is just plainly sick.
To me Nineteen-Eightyfour is mostly about power for the sake of power, and the role language plays in that (which extends to the ability to think), and I think in that sense it is sadly timeless.

If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?
Thanks: here's a decent-looking media report from the time. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/11/home_office_fbi_mlat...
It's the same everywhere :) No matter the country continent etc.
Yeah I think this is on the right lines. See also the detail from this other article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5845258 that implies that the government does not see _holding_ data as a particular problem, it believes that _looking_ at data is what it needs a FISA order for. The metaphor of receiving a van full of boxes, and only needing permission to open the boxes, but not needing permission to store them. Thats bad news because of the lack of oversight once the boxes are in their possesion.
"Dutch Intelligence" sounds like a good idea in theory, but it would never work in practice.
Israel. They're under a constant threat of terrorism, but their intelligence has been relatively successful.
Been using this since the release candidate a week or so ago and absolutely loving it. Has a few quirks here and there which need to be configured or ignored, but I've found it the best organising tool for mail on OSX in a long.
RSS reader in Mail.app is removed in OS X Mountain Lion
Fascism, Nazism and the dominant, authoritarian forms of Marxism grew quickly, in a short time span and had similar philosophical and cultural roots. Modernism, industrialism, internationalism, the Great Wars, etc.

Their symbolism and many aspects of their modus operandi were very similar to each other. A "holy book" a founding figure, paternalism, revolutionism, populism, ideology, enemies, uniforms, monologues, youth groups. By 1948, Hitler in 1938 looked like a caricature of a dictator. Orwell was incredibly sharp in seeing the commonalities between that generation of dictators and seeing it as early as he did. The relationships between the ideology and control, the axis of cultural control. I think starting with a literal parody was useful approach. But, in 1948 he was describing something that had happened and had largely already (though he didn't know it then) reached its peak. Even though he was clearly skeptical, critical and wary of authoritarianism going back to his days in the Spanish civil war a decade earlier, he didn't have that sharp, simp effective vocabulary that exposes and characterizes the thing until it had passed its peak.

The authoritarian states that did survive were/are tended to be descendants of those 1920s-1940s systems, often in cultural backwaters. Orwell's terms hold up pretty well for describing North Korea, Baathist Iraq/Syria, Nasarist Egypt, Maoist China, Central Asain Former Soviet Countries or Ghadafi. Remarkably well.

My point (poorly made) is that whatever authoritarianism is/will rise out of this data gathering, corporate-government surveillance euthorotarianism model is only now taking shape. It hasn't peaked yet. It isn't fully formed. We don't yet know what its central themes are or how it works. We don't know how it maintains power or dampens opposition. It may never even come. I hope it won't.

We won't have the right vocabulary until its too late. The Romans were on the lookout for potential Kings. They didn't know to watch out for Caesars.

I can make some guesses but I really don't know what the symbols of this new tyranny are. I don't know how to parody it.
Exactly. Filtering out this pre-known email is even trivial.
And in a world where AIs write stories (http://narrativescience.com) I'm pretty sure the nsa does a lot more than filtering for keywords.
I'd use Xquartz with like rxvt-unicode or termite. It's fast.
Digital Show and Tell
And then you would have to trust app approval to a government entity.
"Oh what's that, some encryption tool for secure communications? Not gonna happen."
You would have lobbying from the big corps to have advantage over indie developers.
And all those other things that happen every single time the government messes with private matters.

Regulation rarely targets the real problem. It targets a problem, creating another one.
care to elaborate why you have all of this in one device?
My guess is that having 3 seperate devices (a workstation, a NAS and a small HTPC) makes more sense for encapsulation and failure scenarios. However, if the workstation runs 24/7 anyway it might make sense as the uptime of the NAS/HTPC probably isnt very critical if you mess something up on the Workstation and have to reboot or something.

Also like to know what you use 6(!) displays for :) What do you work on ?
This is a bizarre claim when phrased as an absolute: Eisenhower should have published the Normandy invasion plans?
First off - why would the NSA want your keychain?

Prism is all about getting the information directly from the service providers - no need to "steal" it using compromised user credentials.

What else would you put in this - a credit card number. Again - why would the NSA need to get your credit card number this way? Surely they can just ask the fucking bank directly and/or request info via FBI/CIA/etc. Credit Card companies already cover purchases from stolen cards/card numbers, so in the unlikely event some rogue NSA goon steals your CC number and buys a heap of tin foil hats, you're covered.

This of course all assumes that the NSA breaks the AES256 encryption on your keychain.

I really cannot understand the number of people going batshit crazy over a Crypto-Intel agency spying on people (shock fucking horror, what did you think they do all day?), but happily using search/email/document storage/etc from a for-profit company that freely states "we are going to scan all your email and track all the shit you do, so we can create a profile of your entire life, so we can target you with better ads"
yeah, you still have to hope it will be easy to program this stuff. and let's see the technical details on that too.
Pinhole Camera Lights The Way For Traditionalists
It depends. Some US entities are keen to hire US based freelancers, just to be 'more' safe. Others do not care, and hire freelancer with best proposal/price. Also some hire people to make their critical product for pennies, and then complain that the freelancers suck at their work. As for my experience US people mostly care that you will be available during their working hours.
OK, now I'm REALLY confused.

I've moved all my documents from /var/www/lighttpd/mainSite to /var/www/lighttpd/mainSite/webdocs (leaving .git in .../mainSite).

I've updated /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf to point at /var/www/lighttpd/mainSite/webdocs, and confirmed that it's pointing at the right place by editing a file, and confirming that that change shows up on the site.

I've confirmed that there is no .git folder in webdocs (you never know!)

But calling my.site.com/.git/config still serves a file!?

Time to go ask on some lighttpd fora...
Russia may deem civil servants’ use of Gmail, Facebook ‘high treason’
Can I trade them?
Indeed, the Guardian's recent track record is remarkable. It takes a lot of guts to defy the powers that be again and again. All the journalists involved must live under the assumption that their phones are tapped and their travel patterns monitored. The Guardian must be a major target for intelligence agencies.
Staying Anonymous Online: Screw You CMS, PRISM
Exactly, this article doesn't deserve to be on the frontpage of HN. It's sensationalism, we really don't need to know where is Snowden at all time. It's not a sitcom.
I called out the Podcast App because it was unusable by almost everyone who tried it after it shipped. I personally spent 45 minutes trying to graph out on paper the interactions between various channels/tuner, and mastering the finicky little switches on it, to no avail.

I cannot believe such an App had even a single "average" user attempt to use it - it had to have been entirely the product of one or two individuals operating in a vacuum.
He was a sysadmin and he didn't finish high school, let alone receive an actual technical education -- he's said a lot of very difficult to believe technical things. I don't mean to imply that only educated people know anything important, but unless he just had an amazing aptitude for learning this stuff on his own, I find it plausible that he had only a slight idea of how consumer encryption works and he actually didn't know what he was looking at when he saw whatever made him leak. Who knows without his documents -- I could be all wrong.

At some point I think he claimed that he could've copied the list of all US intelligence assets, even those undercover. Well, given that the NSA developed selinux to compartmentalize filesystem access in such a way as to make such a breach difficult, I am not sure how to reconcile his statements. I also find it beyond belief that a contractor could actually access what he claims he could've.
Apple Makes Bing The “Default Search Engine” For Siri
If there is one thing that sucks for an inventor it is to see their inventions being turned around from good uses to bad uses.
It's up to all of us.

We, the people, can stop what we're doing and create fundamental change. We have to eliminate the secret echelons that are above their bosses -- us. We can reboot the notion of congress, with elements of direct participation, campaign reform, and make lobbying illegal.

It's easy to point a finger. It's hard to roll up our sleeves. But now is the time; now more than ever.
GistBox - The Beautiful Way to Organize Code Snippets
You need an NSA and CIA simply by virtue of the fact that every other country has one.

Secrecy is also an essential part of negotiations - you can't reach middle ground if all your concessions are made public. There's a balance to be struck, though we're clearly far from achieving that atm.

A little secrecy by itself is not an issue, as long as the process built around it is as transparent as possible. That's the issue you're facing with this whole PRISM thing, lack of accountability and transparency.
Yes.

It wasn't so much that FF was good (although it was), but that IE sucked so unbelievably hard. The difference made the switch a given for anyone with a passing understanding of computers.
Greenwald Says "There’s A Lot More Coming,"
Cibo: fame e sprechi. Iniziamo a vedere…
Anyone who's had their company try to get rid of them is keenly aware of this on a micro scale.

Its amazing how many weird rules and regulations you can suddenly find yourself afoul of once somebody high up enough has it in for you ... apparently this is true on a macro level (country/government) too.
Yep, we plan to make our design more flat.
I work on Linux version of Opera Mail. Windows and Mac is released today. A rc/test version of Linux will follow soon.

(What is soon, you ask. Well that depends, but I guess in this case over a month would /not/ be soon.)
Since posting this quote is apparently now a thing that happens in practically every HN thread, I will take the opportunity to repost this reply:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5708196
Linux support is coming
Switching to Chromium was a big mistake IMO, seeing how inferior, unstable, and slow the new Android app is compared to the original. I get it, they had to cut costs, so they fired a bunch of people and gave up their proprietary edge. It just seems to have been the wrong decision because they took away one of the core features that used to make it great (at least with regards to the Android app): speed.
5 Awesome Torch Browser Features You Will Love
Cloudflare. On and off.
Personally, I'm super excited about the possibility of ultrasonic consolidation hybrid printers:
http://reprap.org/wiki/Ultrasonic_consolidation_Hybrid_print...
As a hybrid approach, it wouldn't be quite as flexible as full 3D printing, but still, it's pretty cool!
"I find it hard to believe that a huge amount of money can be quietly booked by a publicly traded company without it raising all kinds of hard-to-answer questions from employees in many departments, as well as the outside auditors."

I don't know anything about what happened, but Microsoft must be one of the easiest companies to send a gift in a hidden way. Lets say the NSA bought Windows Vista upgrade licenses for a couple of million servers, then upgraded them to Windows 7 and form there to Windows 8, instead of doing what sane people do (upgrade from XP to a mix of Windows 7 and Linux). If you also upgrade SQL Server, Active Directory, etc, frequently and buy copious amounts of Remote Desktop licenses, I bet you could get the bill into the billions. And you don't even have to install that software, or even download it from Microsoft's servers.

Yes, it would raise suspicion that the NSA buys Windows licenses, even more so that they buy them at retail price, but I doubt that the auditors at the NSA are 100% independent from the NSA, so they would just (be ordered to) ignore it, and the NSA could route the buys through quite a few shadow companies, making it hard to spot anything suspicious for those working at Microsoft.
See also

Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2203713
Inside the United States | GlobalPost
I second this. Any suggestions appreciated.
There is, I only entered my fastmail address (not even using the fastmail.fm domain) and it configured automatically.
Agreed. Hopefully it never gets to that point, and from what I see, it wont.

I was just referring to the effects of these variables on people's minds. I agree with you that it's almost always contextual, but you'll find the odd person or two that feel very strongly about a low odd potentiality and it can definitely make you feel like their are some crazies...

But I think everyone does this to some degree. If you cancel a marathon in Halifax because of a 5 seconds phone call to the police referencing a the Boston Bomber, then most understand that... However, when one looks at the facts, in my country no one has died from Terrorism in the last 9 years... a far fetched reason for this government power grab. So I don't know. Maybe the Gun Nuts are wrong, and they have nothing to fear. But maybe most of the populations of OECD countries are completely wrong in this manufactured fear.

Source: http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/11/6/332/T1.expansio...
Well, just installed and I rather like it. Sleek design. Simple interface. RSS is a good addition. Sadly, though, no auto-feed discovery like many RSS clients do nowadays.

At first glance looks more appealing than Thunderbird. Certainly so in configuration, which is simpler and more intuitive. Thunderbird's single SMTP pane for all accounts annoys me each time I see it.

Lacking vertical positioning for the "List and Message below" layout. But I guess it's just a bug.

They launched it very timely, when the cloud is no more to be trusted. Behold! The return of the desktop app! :)
There is a 4th possible contender that isn't owned by Sony, MS nor Nintendo. And personally I'm more excited about the Steambox that any of the other consoles (the ability to buy games once and play it on my laptop or games console depending on what room I'm in (or even if I'm at home at all) is very appealing.
Hit refresh in your browser. :)
keyboard navigation for the news feed ^^
The download page is so sleek it doesn't even have a link to documentation so I can see what I'm downloading before wasting my time.
Big Data Startup WibiData develops Big Data Applications.
Do the flip test:

Would the US allow the Dutch, the Germans, the Belgians and the French to have military bases on US soil?
Notice that Thunderbolt 1/2 are full duplex. With Thunderbolt 2 you get an independent 20 Gbit/s channel in each direction.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7049/intel-thunderbolt-2-every...
Because the indie game industry pre-App Store is so comparable to the indie game industry today…
So long as the initial checkout wasn't made via https://user:password@github.com/your/repo/ URL it might not be an issue. But git doesn't warn in this case, happily writes the password you provide in plaintext to your web root, and you may never notice anything is wrong until much later. If it's not that, then perhaps it's the rude comment made about a coworker in COMMIT_EDITMSG that you abandoned before committing..

Even if neither of these were the case, the general principle of unnecessarily exporting chunks of internal state is asking for trouble somewhere, even if you can't think of a good reason why it would bite today.
It's only for the benefit of all the people who keep saying "Sony hasn't confirmed or denied that they won't be doin the same as the Xbone"
Dual flush: interface design gone down the drain
Moot v1.4 — Focus on text
There's a few tourist tours of the mansions as well. It's been described as a smaller, nicer, friendlier version of Kowloon Walled City with licensed dentists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chungking_Mansions

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_walled_city
The content of the slides is good/informative.. but the UI for the slides is terrible. I didn't know where to click, I tried clicking on the slide next to it... tried dragging the slide over, and selected a bunch of text. Clicked a few other parts of the screen.. Then it occurred to me to try the arrows. If I hadn't thought of that, I would have just left.

Why would you design something like that? At least give people instructions.
I'm sorry, but I don't consider the content of the article important enough for me to spend time proofreading it.

> my written english is horrible.

I commend you for writing anyway. The best way to improve your writing is to write more. Read a lot, and write as often as you can.

I can't even speak a second language, let alone write in one, so I respect your effort. Keep at it!
The first rule of FISA Warrant Club is "do not talk about FISA Warrant Club."
Can you enlighten us to the Vita process?

I've dabbled with iOS games but found it a tad boring as I love games with proper controls so the possibilities of this excite me.