skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree, some key points were clarified. To wit -

1. Encryption works, but "endpoint security" is easily defeated.

2. "US Persons do enjoy ... one very weak technical protection - a near-the-front-end filter at our ingestion points. The filter is constantly out of date, is set at what is euphemistically referred to as the "widest allowable aperture," and can be stripped out at any time."

An "ingest point" appears to be the term for a preprocessor that parses raw data before sticking a normalized copy in a database. I believe this is talked about more in Boundless Informant papers.

3. American data is regularly collected "incidentally", and when between an American and a foreigner. "Americans' communications are collected and viewed on a daily basis on the certification of an analyst rather than a warrant."

4. Intelligence agencies (including GCHQ) have raw access to query NSA databases, and GHCQ is cited to have 5% of queries audited.

I made an effort earlier to try to write up a fully cited description of what we know about NSA activities. If you would find that useful, you can find it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5892755
Sorry to hear! Are you still experiencing issues? Feel free to email me directly at mitch@digitalocean.com.
Depends on the country, try to travel to or from Romania or Bulgaria next time ;). Not only that they check the ID, but they sometimes check the baggage as well, and when they do that it's a sign that they will find something and cause you trouble unless you discretely pass them 25EUR...
Co-Ed Supply Ships You a Box of College Essentials for $20 a Month [video]
Assuming rules / laws / regulations weren't put in place to counter this, yes. We all know how fast government is to act ... which is why there should be concern.
Not including modern inconveniences of the airport... like the TSA.
I once wrote a programming language that had a localised 'this' called 'it' exactly for this pattern.

if (something_exists) {
do_something_to(it)
}

It was really useful (and readable).

I believe Perl has something similar but it was less readable.
But that's taking the second derivative of the situation. Most people can barely take the first.
Anyone else notice he doesn't flat out deny giving secrets to the Chinese when asked?
"They own inflation-proof assets like real estate"

But such assets are taxable, and those spoiled rich people are probably paying, don't they?
more along the lines of "either I have one or mayday mayday".

That would be the Perl way of

my $person = $data_source->get_person($id) or die "No person available";

ie, there's code to be executed (to raise the error) in the case that there is no person. The callback structure from the article doesn't allow for this.
Heh - Just like all the promises of the military recruiters to me when they saw I aced the asvab.

"No thanks!"
Now You Can Build Google's $1M Artificial Brain on the Cheap
The other most obvious point is that on top of all external considerations he had some particular friend or resource in HK. Having left the hotel, where is he staying now? If he got there and then later wished to go to Iceland, would he have anyone beyond what popular sympathy drums up to help him?

Even if Hong Kong has lots of practical concerns because of its relationship with China it was obviously going to provoke obvious questions about idealistic / vs ulterior motives, a big negative I would think for someone acting from idealistic motivations and knowing from experience how much that would be questioned.

I'm inclined to agree with Glurgh's comment and Occam's razor -- he's surely bright, but doesn't necessarily seem to be some type of master manipulator / strategist to have ended up in Hong Kong at this point, good cell phone access aside.
There can be corporate policies that forbid two or more key employees from flying on the same plane for fear of losing irreplaceable knowledge & skills if it crashes.
The computational cost of Bitcoin mining not only serves to bootstrap the totality of the BTC into the ledger but also is designed to protect the network. It is also a teeny-tiny fraction of the power required by the legacy banking infrastructure all over the world. It is not a waste.
I don't feel you have much right to call to the dirt someone else's coping mechanism. Some cry for death, some laugh, and some seek meaning.
If they want to save lives, they are better of putting their dwindling resources, into repairing their roads and improving enforcement of traffic laws.

Just to get a sense of the numbers, more people are likely to die on Indian roads every year, than the sum total of deaths in the Afganisthan+Iraq wars since 2001.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collisions_in_India
Blame Facebook and Google, not the NSA.
Ok, as a dev who doesn't use github much, I'll give my best guess as to what those icons mean. Respectively:

Home

Alerts

Merging

Documentation

Interactive Heartbeat Sensor, presumably using my webcam, to notify authorities when I'm having a heart attack

Graphs

Branching

Settings

How close was I?

By the way, alt text is absolutely essential for screen readers to function. Don't exclude the blind if they have reason to use your site! Blind people definitely use Github.
Every site should have this.

I bet you could also add aquarium fish pretty easily.
You are partially true. Omidyar had a business co-founder. Airbnb founders were front end/design folks, Vente-privee in Europe was started by people who came from the liquidation industry.
If you look at the last 10 years, many successful eCommerce sites (Fab, Modcloth, One Kings Lane, Gilt) or marketplaces have not been started by CS majors.
I imagine the types of question he'll get asked are fairly predictable. Potentially he could have done extensive mock-interviews already and somebody will just post his answers online in response to any matching questions. That way he could avoid being traced.
The timing part is something really important, and something that can't be controlled, because it depends on outside factors. What entrepreneurs CAN do is try to choose businesses that are less dependent on market timing.
I heard you say this in MA this past weekend. Even more impressed that you ran there to do it :).
right.. good luck doing a search for that..
It's not possible to criticize the ultra-rich (for any reason) without being accused of being envious, however. It is literally the first response you'll get on any forum: "You're just envious."
Just recently my enterprise retired our Windows 3.1 environment. It was kept running to support a system that supported a system that supported dial-up VPN access for a certain subset of users. And that's not incredibly uncommon...
Realistic camera model demo
Isn't that control-click, not shift-click?
Once that statement is true, Rails will BE the enterprise. Don't bank on it. (And by that I mean we'll continue to release new versions that at times will be backwards incompatible and require work to upgrade to).
The problem isn't technology. The problem is motivations. There's no situation in which people in the future will be better off having thawed your obsolete corpsicle out. Until you solve the 'why bother' problem, it's completely pointless.
Sure.

To start with, take a look at that first clause: "The man who admitted leaking classified documents..." The framing of this is right off the bat aggressive, casting him in the light of a criminal. Were CNN to want to cast him in a positive light they could have chosen to write it something like this: "The man who exposed widespread secret surveillance of American's electronic communications..." Instead CNN chose to emphasize the criminal aspect, rather than the civil liberties/anti-democratic aspect.

Next: "... purportedly went online..." The use of the word "purportedly" here is interesting. Why is that questioned? To associate doubt with him. It's subtle, but nevertheless there it is.

Next: "declare the truth would come out even if he is jailed or killed". Out of all the questions which were answered CNN focused on this one because it most easily supports the "egotistical" narrative they are attempting to paint him with. Implication: "He is setting himself up as some kind of martyr! How arrogant!"

Next: "Obama did not fulfill his promises and expanded several 'abusive' national security initiatives." This one is, to me, the most blatant. The scare quotes around "abusive" are of course the most obvious. But look how the frame it: "national security initiatives". Not "domestic spying programs", or "electronic surveillance mechanisms", or something else. After all, no one who calls themselves reasonable can be opposed to national security!

It's subtle, and of course debatable. But it's certainly present. CNN has their own slant, and it is obviously pro-NSA.

Also note that nowhere to they actually link to the Q&A page.

Let's rewrite it, communicate the same information, but make it skeptical towards the NSA:

"Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who exposed widespread secret surveillance of American's electronic communications and online activities, did an online question-and-answer session today, making himself available to provide follow-up answers to questions raised by concerned citizens over the reach and power of the notoriously secretive intelligence agency."
Has anyone watched Battlestar Galactica?
>If I have something I want to communicate to Bob what matters is his identity not really anything else.

But how do you know that Bob exists and you want to talk to him? At some point you met someone named Bob and at some point you decided you wanted to communicate with him, but Bob as an identity really only exists in your head. He could be named Jim, he could be someone that is pretending to be Bob, Bob might be one of two twins both named Bob. Maybe Bob is working for your enemies.

One way to simplify the thorny issue of identity is to look at what someone wants out of the communication. The part of the identity Bob that matters to a communication is the expected utility of the communication. The identity is merely an end to that utility. For instance when you call tech support, you are trying to solve a problem and it doesn't really matter if the person tells you their name is Jim rather than James.

The only hard and fast identity is cryptographic identity, it can be compromised if someone shares their secret key, but at least you know that you are communicating with someone that has access to that secret key. That is, I can send to a message to all parties with access to the secret key, SK0. The next question is how do I know that parties which have access to SK0 will increase my utility via communication. That can only be built from past actions either directly or indirectly performed by that party.

Utility of identity depends on reputation of identity.
Reputation of identity depends on past actions of identity (think stackoverflow/hackernews/silkroad).

All of which can be cryptographically proved if the identity consists merely of access to SK0. Note, this is how identity and trust works outside of computers.
And this is why the hospitality industry is organizing against them.

I love the AirBnB idea and the implementation. There is a dark side however. Hotel organizations have historically been unable to change quickly, and operate on pretty thin margins. So the existence of a significant quantity of AirBnB rentals in a market does the equivalent of the Federal Reserve 'stress test' on weak banks, except it isn't simulated.

I am really on the fence about what that means. On the one hand it means a number of hotel properties will come on the market at distressed properties, on the other it means there will be a huge gap between really cheap motels and really high end hotels.

One thought was to buy up a mid-range hotel property and convert it into "Tech Suites" where for each pair of rooms connected by a door, one side stayed a hotel room and the other side became a small office. My local Sunnyvale city supervisor isn't completely against the idea but they are dubious about a mixed living/commercial zone at the scale of a motel/small hotel.
Well, you don't need to have the source code for Windows to make a core memory dump and resume it at a later point.
I was actually surprised reading that statement given Rails' maturity. When the large AD vulnerability was announced and many people were caught in the open for a while I had assumed there were a large number of people running version n-1 Rails.
Huh? He didn't assert that the NSA has omniscience and the ability to instantly target, decrypt and analyze every piece of digital communication in the world. What he's talking about is the broad collection and storage of this data that can then be retroactively mined, possibly decrypted (for cases where encryption is even used) and analyzed when the sender and/or recipient becomes "interesting" to them.

Do you think he used his work phone to call Glenn Greenwald's personal phone or something? I think it can be rationally assumed that he used the best anonymizing techniques and encryption he's aware of to transmit the information.
Animated GIF to be beamed into space as part of alien communication effort
I agree. I would like an option to have unused imports and variables ignored during development. But I would also like them gone in the final code, because they are noise inhibiting future human understanding of the code.

It might also be useful to have gofmt auto-remove unused imports and variables.
With many screenshot tools there's a 'capture this window' option, which makes it much more easy to grab the output of a window than choosing 'select a box' and dragging a square over the entire window minus the chrome.

That said, it doesn't look like they did that here...
It's my understanding that he gave the Guardian a lot more raw data than what they've released so far.
Colonial British Military scientists had tested mustard gas on Indians
Just moved to Toronto - want to meet up?
Hey, I'll keep this brief - I'm fresh off the boat in Toronto, Canada and would like to meet up with other Hacker News users who know the city. Is anyone in Toronto and interested in meeting up?

Tom
> Many of the gems/plugins which you might be using with your current application will not be compatible with Rails 3.

I'm genuinely curious what gems people are using that are not yet compatible with Rails 3, given that it was released almost three years ago. Maybe my use cases for Rails don't match the most common ones, but I have yet to run into this issue.

For Rails 4, well, that's another matter =)
"...the security could be updated but I do not see how this can be done in practice without a central authority"

The same way the fork was fixed and how any upgrade happens with Bitcoin. An idea is proposed, a small group of developers work on it, the mining pool operators decide to implement it or not, then all the individual miners vote on it by deciding which mining pool to mine for. Basically any change has to have 51% agreement from the miners.

"Ironically, for what is suppose to be a highly decentralized currency, the collapse was avoided because the system was "controlled by the will of a very small number of people – particularly, the operators of mining pools" who effectively agreed which block chain to support."

The avoided collapse only appears to be a centralization of power because it was a good decision. I'm defining good decision here as one that increases the value of a bitcoin. The majority of miners were using the new software, the majority of businesses were using the old software. If nothing was done, bitcoin mining for everyone with the new version would have kept plugging along fine, but all the businesses that had to re-install or rewrite their old Bitcoin software would have had to shut down for many hours or days.

The majority of mining pool operators decided that it was better for the longterm growth of Bitcoin to give up the bitcoins that they mined on the new chain and minimize the downtime of Bitcoin businesses rather than keep the small amount of bitcoins and have Bitcoin suffer bad publicity in the coming week. This is a very important point. Every individual miner had a choice of what pool to use. When they found out about the change, they could have just as easily flipped a switch and started mining for a pool that decided to keep the bitcoins. That didn't happen. The Bitcoin miners/holders aren't reacting only to what gives them the most bitcoins today. They are thinking long term and are doing what they think will give their mined bitcoins the most value in the future.

Bitcoin is sort of like the federal government and the altcoin experiments are like state governments. If there's a really good idea that an altcoin comes up with, Bitcoin can integrate it by a 51% vote. If an altcoin experiment uses SHA-512 successfully and is gaining value over Bitcoin because of it, bitcoin can integrate that feature by a 51% vote. If an altcoin has a desirable feature, then bitcoin might be able to integrate it and enjoy the benefits of the feature + the network effect to stay relevant.
Reiterating my previous comment: Information wants to be free, man! Except, you know, when it's my information, then it's just a breach of privacy.
my thoughts exactly

we're already traveling at the speed of light
Sometimes hotels underwhelm too. It's (unfortunately, from a measurement perspective) a matter of degree.
I do this in my PL/SQL code occasionally, when I'm feeling lazy and either don't want to handle errors properly or want to take advantage of auto-defined iteration variables.

Since it's a nasty dirty hack that tends to misbehave on bad data instead of failing cleanly, I generally restrict it to experimental/throwaway code. Seeing it recommended as a good idea is a bit WTF.
From my reading I understand that the comment on being able to wiretap absolutely anyone was on the basis that he was a sysadmin. He had write access to databases of people who's communications were to be intercepted in full and could add arbitrary phones or emails to them.

Binney on the existence of this list: "what they do is take their target list, which is somewhere on the order of 500,000 to a million people. They look through these phone numbers and they target those and that’s what they record." [1]

This appears to be separate from the Main Core list of 8 million Americans "which contains personal and financial data of millions of U.S. citizens believed to be threats to national security." [3]

Another Binney interview: "he [Snowden] had access to go in and put anything... If he knew their phone numbers or attributes, he could insert them into the target list which would be distributed worldwide." [2]

[1] http://dailycaller.com/2013/06/10/what-do-they-know-about-yo...

[2] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/06/16/snowd...

[3] http://www.salon.com/2008/07/23/new_churchcomm/#
On the other hand, if there is an issue with a train, it can break. Stopping a plane when there is an issue is a lot more hassle.
Under our system of laws, the corporations own this data, and they can do what they please. Sell or give it away to the NSA? Well, why not?

Even if the FISA court is eliminated (fat chance), it will not change much in the long haul. "Cooperation" will be encouraged by many legal means.

We should not expect that corporate-owned property will be used in a way that we are all happy and hunky-dory about. If we do not like that, change the laws.
Take a look at this adaptation of a keynote talk on the design of Go, with the title "Language Design in the Service of Software Engineering": http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article

Section 7, "Dependencies in Go" addresses this issue: http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article#TOC_7. The relevant paragraph states,

The first step to making Go scale, dependency-wise, is that the language defines that unused dependencies are a compile-time error (not a warning, an error). If the source file imports a package it does not use, the program will not compile. This guarantees by construction that the dependency tree for any Go program is precise, that it has no extraneous edges. That, in turn, guarantees that no extra code will be compiled when building the program, which minimizes compilation time.
Oh, how else would you die for your country? Patton's quote applies to revolutions, etc.

You never win a fight by dying.
No, data_source.person(id) will return a collection of 0 or more Person objects, and the for loop will iterate over them and call .setPhoneNumber and .update_person methods on each them. The null check is replaced by iteration over a possibly empty collection.

The author's example code appears to be doing the same thing, but iterating using Ruby's block syntax:

data_source.person(id) do |person|
person.phone_number = phone_number
data_source.update_person person
end

I'm assuming data_source.person(id) would return 0 or more Person objects.
> Many codebases are littered with them [null checks] and,
> as a result they [codebases] are often very hard to understand.

I wager they're referring to null checks complicating the codebase (introducing uncertainty into method signatures and argument values down the chain).

And that's what creates a ripe environment for such bugs and vulnerabilities that you mention.

Anyways, my big a-ha moment in programming was when I started thinking in terms of data-structures and mapping functions/transformations across them.

(map update-phone (filter ... users))
Yes, I read that. What I was up to is how painful this makes development. Even developing on a laptop is utterly painful - single small screen, no mouse, no real keyboard. It is probably nice to look at the sea while developing but it is not productive.
The point (as I read it) isn't that money is not a good motivator. However, if you are talking about something like the next penicillin, then your potential to monetize dwarfs the million dollar reward. That money would be better spent to incentive things that would not otherwise make the person rich.
Git From the Bits Up: Advanced commands that reveal a sort-of internal Git API
"Your code, images, and other files get synced to our cloud servers."

That kills it for me.
An Old Mystery Solved: Project C-43 and Public Key Encryption
Makes me think: why don't they just start shipping macbook airs with 4G.

The app looks great though. Been wanting something like this for a long time.
VSXu Real Time Visual Programming Language & Music Visualizer 0.4.0 released
I am interested in helping gems that are not Rails 4 compatible get so, so if you can point me towards some that aren't, I'll reach out to the maintainers.
> This man is the Thomas Paine of our day: "Give me liberty or give me death."

Patrick Henry is known for that quote, not Paine.
Pagoda - Web-based editor for Jekyll-style blogs
Google Opposes Russia’s ‘SOPA’ as Blocking Legislation Passes First Hurdle
I really find this type of business model intriguing. Who's the market for this? Is it students or parents. I can see it cutting either way... or even the indulgent grandparent. An easy thing for them to do to support their little darling while they're away at College.
>Imagine you find a cure to cancer. Do you really think every governments and public opinion are going to let you be the sole producer for 30 years while people are dying ?

Isn't this the way medical patents work currently?
"It's amazing more American's don't realize they are the fundamentalists they are told to be afraid of."

Sorry, but no. Fundamentalism is the belief that only the literal interpretation of a religious text is the correct and acceptable one, that only ordained religious authorities are capable of understanding these texts (others must simply obey), and that those who don't share this view are enemies who must be subjugated or killed.

This position is diametrically opposed to the notion of inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit happiness in legal equality with one's fellow citizens - regardless of their religious beliefs. Indeed, there has been no greater check on fundamentalism that the legal, cultural, and intellectual tradition that America's founding ideals encapsulate.
Supercomputing for Everyone