skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"But it gives the government enormous power to make decisions about you "

What the government can and can't do is limited by the rights granted to them by the constitution and other laws. They're extremely hamstrung.

I think your TSA example perfectly illustrates how the lack of privacy doesn't lead to an abuse of power; it's ironically a testament to how good our system is. To think there are people the government absolutely despises and whose lives they want to be extremely difficult and the best they can do is make them wait longer in line at the airport? That's awesome.

The real fight shouldn't be about privacy but about openness of the government and the expansion of our liberties. The real tragedy is not that these program exist but that they are trying to hide them.

(privacy isn't a liberty, because it doesn't allow you to do things. It disallows others from doing things.)
If someone lies to your face for years and, only when caught red-handed, claims that what he/she is doing isn't all that bad, would you believe them?

It's worse than that. Not only does the U.S. government expect us to believe the content of our communications are safe from their eyes unless we "have something to hide", they're about to come down hard on the whistle-blowers that made them admit as much as they have. It's as if that red-handed thief were quietly shoving the person who caught them out a window while telling us a story about how it's not what it looks like!

What a crock.
It depends on what level of compatibility we're looking at. It's true that MIT-licensed code can migrate to a GPL codebase but not vice-versa. But a different kind of compatibility (what I was thinking of) is whether you can maintain separate and separately-licensed codebases and legally distribute the combined binary. If DTrace were MIT and the Linux kernel were GPL, you could legally link them and distribute the result, so in that sense they'd be "compatible". Which isn't the case if you have a CDDL and a GPL codebase.
Fix all of these bloody webkit-specific CSS properties, this thing is horribly broken in everything other than webkit. :P
Also, rocket attacks?
I believe with the onset of better programmed accounting packages, now most money that flows from {{3letteragencies}} to companies goes via cursory legit looking shell companies.
Could you clarify what Susy gets right that Bootstrap, Zurb, and 960 don't?
As ever, profiting (and in this case, presumably profiting wildly) from copyright infringement is usually enough to earn the ire of most decent people. "Information wants to be free" is one thing; profiting entirely parasitically from the work of others is another.
Ironic in Catch-22: "Snowden is a member of Yossarian's flight during a mission, and acts as catalyst for the fundamental change in Yossarian's mentality and outlook." [1]

Are U.S. Citizens Yossarian?

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yossarian#Snowden
Speak for yourself, sometimes it is.
It is of course impossible to get true randomness from a deterministic algorithm, but many pseudo-random generators (PRG) are often good enough for practical applications, for example statistical simulations.

Bad PRGs can be ruled out by tests like the one in the article, that is, showing that the exhibit some regularities that would be unlikely to get from a truly random source. An infamous example is RANDU [1], whose output is concentrated on low-dimensional subsets.

Smart people have put together batteries of statistical tests to assess the quality of PRG, the most famous being the Diehard test [2]. The idea is that if a PRG passes all the tests it is indistinguishable from a truly random source for all practical purposes.

Good generators such as the widely used Mersenne Twister pass most of its tests. There are even better generators that pass more tests, such as Marsaglia's Xorshift [3], which is faster and simpler than the Mersenne Twister, and surprisingly not very well known.

For anyone interested in PRGs, I strongly recommend reading Marsaglia's original paper [4], it is a good example of how to design a principled PRG and it just requires some elementary linear algebra on finite fields.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RANDU

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diehard_tests

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xorshift

[4] http://www.jstatsoft.org/v08/i14/paper
On the imminent phone number shortage
> but there are people in the world who do very very bad things to innocent people.

And we have some very good laws to deal with that. Laws against murder for example. I think the analogy between 'terror' and 'devil' is a good one, because it captures the almost mystical 'special' evil that 'terrorist' implies. It's a childish, primitive term, with the same kind of semantic effect as the word 'baddie' in reference to an action movie.
Which countries are you talking about?

No Western country I know of has an even remotely similar policy to the US on drugs. Most of them don't have >99% white population either btw.
I want to see this get lots of votes, just so the White House has to write a response. Even though I know what they will say...
Inspiring Sites of the Week No. 1
similar != the same. For example our sentencing is not similar to most western european countries. There is also a difference between how a law is on the books, versus how it is implemented.

You are completely missing the point: these are laws which were enacted to target a specific minority. And which have been expanded because it is profitable for private interests and easy for politicians to campaign as "tough on crime."

Similar laws in other countries are genuinely irrelevant.
It degrades gracefully in current FF, release channel.
This was really nice, always great to get this kind of stuff in question/answer form. Making you think a little before getting the answer, as opposed to just in the form of some dense reading really makes this type of stuff stick in memory way easier.

Though you have to wonder, since the author clearly knows his browser quirks, as to why this only seems to work in webkit.
الان اعرف نتيجة الشهادة الاعدادية 2013 الترم الثانى ظهرت
I'm assuming a 1% difference could exist holding everything else constant simply to make the example simple. I explicitly disclaimed the idea that my thought experiment was a good picture of the world.

My key point - looking at incarceration rates while ignoring criminality rates is ignoring half the picture. Do you disagree with this point?
I think PHP's rand() just uses the C rand().
So you would think that would be pretty good - well tested.
NSA and FBI don't even need orders at all for this:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/04/fourth-amendment-em...

"As the law stands now, the authorities may obtain cloud e-mail without a warrant if it is older than 180 days, thanks to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act adopted in 1986."
Wow. Just Wow
>yet still wrote something that would cause those same people to have to google who that was.

I don't see this as a negative thing.
I'm not the OP, but:

These systems are broadly the same. If you're writing your configuration from scratch, they're all fairly pleasant, and it's mostly a matter of preference. They share most of the same concepts (although the terminology differs) and features. In my experience, their differences are primarily in feel and community.

For feel: Chef gives you Ruby pretending to be declarative. Puppet and Ansible give you something more declarative at the expense of some expressivity. Puppet has its own syntax, and Ansible shoe-horns some procedural aspects into YAML syntax. I prefer Chef here. (Chef also provides a web UI that lets you edit things, but I strongly advise against using it except for managing nodes. Everything else should be code/JSON.)

For community: With configuration management, one of the things you'll want is good community involvement. You don't want to write every cookbook/playbook/module from scratch. From what I've seen, Chef and Puppet have a large head start in this department.

That said, you should be prepared to customize the community offerings. People generally implement precisely what they need, in precisely the way they need it, and your needs will not always align. Fork all of the community offerings so you can modify them while still pulling from upstream. Managing this is decidedly difficult, but there's no better choice. It's one of the areas where git submodules would be really great, if only they were nicer to use. If you're going to use Chef, consider also using Berkshelf for managing your cookbooks.

If you do not have configuration management in place, pick one of the major ones, learn the hell out of it, and get to automating your operations. Having your infrastructure as code that you can run whenever you want, that you can review to see exactly how something is configured, is life changing. Once you get to doing it, you will never want to go back to the bad old days.
This must be the best argument ever put forward against using the metric system.
What happened when I had my genome sequenced
So what are we doing now?
I haven't finished building it yet (I didn't post it anywhere, the repo was discovered by others). You're welcome to preview it of course :)
In Linux you can use /dev/random and /dev/urandom
This gentleman is willing to risk his life to comment on HN! Very brave, our very own Snowden.
This is fun and informative. Great job!

Many of these JS gotchas you usually don't find out unless you're either writing library code or you're really unlucky. For example, I'd say it's pretty weird for someone to create an script element and not attach it to the DOM at the same time.
The hood?

How about just the cinema? Or stay at home altogether and watch television.
The grid is supposed to guide the visual layout and structure of the page. There's no real reason that it has to be encoded into the markup as we see it in the article except that it's much simpler to implement it that way.

For what it's worth, I tried searching for "semantic grid system" and found http://semantic.gs. I don't really know if it's any good but I like the idea.
If you are a skilled worker (degree etc.) and have a job lined up the visa process is rather simple and painless... or at least as painless as these types of processes can be.

If you are going over with nothing lined up then the UK will be far less welcoming.
It looks like they expected to be shot.
Feynman would have wanted his stories shared, not hoarded. We live in an insane time when sharing the stories of a dead man could be considered an illegal act.
Today: The Government

Tomorrow: Insurance companies, your competitors and your employer.

There is nothing wrong with surveillance per se, however it requires a transparent and accessible legal system to keep it in check - right now that is not happening.
Experience with the public schools is what has made me consider homeschooling my daughter. Her first grade teacher had terrible communication skills, seemed constantly stressed, and there was a huge focus on standardized testing this year which led to lots of repetition of skills students had already mastered (this was the area's honors magnet school). My daughter was bored and eventually uncooperative. I honestly feel she could have learned more studying only an hour a day at home.
On the other hand, the kids in her class were terrific on those occasions where they were given a chance to interact, and the school also had an arts class rotation that she loved. But if next year is much like this year, it's going to be a tough call.
Glenn Greenwald On 'This Week': 'You Should' Expect More Revelations From Me
I feel like I'm dealing with a bunch of Sheldons from "Big Bang Theory"
Since nearly every Tor-exit has working reverse-lookup or by using https://check.torproject.org/ it is easy to deny access to Tor-users while authenticating.

It makes imho no sense to authenticate using Tor.
Gandhi's tactics, while plainly effective in his time and place, against his aggressors, should not be accepted as universalizable. It is not the only way to realize change, nor it is necessarily the most effective way to realize change in any particular situation, nor is it even necessarily a way that works in the slightest in any situation.

Noncompliance and noncooperation have a time and a place. We must avoid the temptation of viewing them as silver bullets simply because we find them pleasant, easy to stomach.
Very far off tangent: I do not know who the author is, but in reading the first paragraph I thought that "The Crow Road and Complicity" was a single book because of the exclusion of the Oxford Comma and titles do not capitalize words like "and." I would assume that the BBC used the Oxford Comma (according to this article, they do not), does the author?
Indeed. I was amazed that The Guardian would characterize Manning as a "whistleblower". Manning broke OPSEC and fed a lot of good people into the meat grinder, rather than show why the policies might be a bad idea.
I HOPE there is a NSA / CIA / FBI spook going through this...because this man and his courage should shake the rust off of people, who are in a position to witness the tyranny of those in power(just like our whistle-blower) and take a stand and start caring more about what is the right thing to do and not what everyone around them seems to be doing.
How about

grep -irn <identifier> .

?

-r recurses and since it is multiple files implies -H.
Canadians too: http://www.law.ualberta.ca/centres/ccs/issues/japaneseintern...
Do you have to use radiation hardened components, shielding, and a multi-core compute and vote kind of system?
When performing searches for chef resources, it's best to use "opscode chef".
Presto: Facebook reveals exabyte-scale query engine
It's got one vote, no one is going to read my comment. The utility on such an action is low.
That's far from the only reason to encourage privacy.

I don't really know how to respond to here. I believe that I see your point, but even though I wouldn't mind my answers to that questionnaire being made public, I still feel that both communal and personal interests of members of society would benefit from institutional pressure in support of privacy, and strong crypto for that matter.
There are EXTENSIVE efforts in place, but I am willing to bet they are less than effective. I'd like to see a comparison of how many real terror attacks there are on US soil post-9/11 vs pre-9/11. I'm willing to bet they are very similar.

I think the methods used to sniff out terrorism are the same as they used to be, except now government agencies want to spy on everyone instead of just suspected terrorists.

Not to mention that every method we know about to stop terrorism since 9/11 has been reactionary; it has been a reaction to something that already happened. Not something that could happen.

I feel no safer from terror attacks now than I did before 9/11. Truth is, I never worried about them before and I don't worry about them now. It just doesn't happen that often. As stated, I'm tens of thousands of times more likely to die in a car ride on the way to a building that will be bombed than to die in the bombing itself.
Petition to Pardon Edward Snowden
Think having your "identity" stolen today is bad? Imagine the future when they take your genome.
First they came for the communists,

and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the socialists,

and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,

and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for me,

and there was no one left to speak for me.
Interesting and humbling test of various browser quirks when it comes to inserting assets (and sometimes not inserting them at all) into an HTML document. This is good information to know but a bit too edge casey for me to commit to memory relative to what I personally do on a daily basis at this point. A nice table of all these quirks would be really useful though!
Actually that's about the biggest change: Bootstrap 3 is Mobile First and the grid is fluid-only.

Pros: you can nest the hell out of your layout without putting your brain on fire.

Cons: didn't find one, so far.
Compartmentalisation in intelligence is rather more established and effective than in private sector companies, to the best of my knowledge, though.
It doesn't seem to scale well at large sizes. It's almost unusable in fullscreen Safari on 1920x1080.
Tor does not provide security, it can provide obfuscation that may lead to anonymity or pseudonymity, not more.

I concur with your statement that SSL isn't really secure end-to-end communication when 3rd party certificates are involved.
29/39 is damn good, it seems. What's yours!
There are both clear and subtle implications for widespread surveillance. Whether they will practically impact your life and rights depends on chance and your private habits.

Here's a broad list of consequences that is by no means exhaustive:

1. You can be indicted and charged with a number of felonies, most notably treason and violating national security, for your private correspondence and electronic habits.

2. Incidental to an existing charge, you can have your private interests and communications leveraged against you as evidence not directly relevant to what you're being tried for.

3. You can be implicated in crimes for communicating with known criminals or having any demonstrable (reasonable or otherwise) association with "people of interest." Corollary to this, you could be harassed and pursued and made to act against such people in the interests of national security.

4. You could be blackmailed or slandered in the public eye, effecticely crucifying you in the media, by taking your private life out of context in the name of the legal process.

5. You would be effectively "nude" in the virtual sense - every thing you do is and could be an actionable offense or interpreted as one, despite the fact that it's not in direct offense to anyone else and despite the fact that it's private. Your every interest, hobby and habit could be dissected and questioned as though an Orwellian thought police agent were ever vigilant in your room.

6. Innocent until proven guilty would be effectively null and void. You could be presumed guilty for all of the aforementioned reasons and due process would be extremely hard for the average individual to utilize to their advantage.

All of these would scale (against you) in a situation involving mass media. You might believe that on a cursory inspection these are justified if it prevents terrorism. That is a fear response, to which I reply that our government, and the rule of law it represents, is lost if we walk down this path.

Sacrificing liberty for the sake of liberty is both absurd and fundamentally objectionable.
OK so what is random.org doing that they can claim it's a true random number generator (TRNG)? I looked at the page but didn't see any explanation, maybe they don't say, but as others have said there's no way it can be a TRNG. edit: I see the explanation on random.org

I'm not a mathematician or computer programmer but wouldn't a TRNG require infinite memory, infinite storage, infinite time to generate etc.? One number generated may be 2 but the next number may be negative infinity.

I work in a casino as a slot tech and sometimes even though I know it's not true some patrons can almost convince you there are patterns.
Couchsurfing without the Couch?
I'm wondering how this piece of n00bishness is at the very top in HN.

The only reason there is a perceivable diference (in the presence of patterns) is that rand() is not very solid (it's optimised for speed, they recommend mt_rand() where a stronger generator is needed, and you can still do much better).

PHP's mt_srand is a Mersenne Twister, which is pretty good http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_twister
Could be better titled "PHP's rand() is utterly broken".
When I was a kid Russians from the CCCP wanted to defect to the USA... Now we have American Edward Snoden seeking asylum outside the USA for trying to bulk up the 4th amendment of the US constitution:

"...My predisposition is to seek asylum in a country with shared values. The nation that most encompasses this is Iceland. They stood up for people over internet freedom. I have no idea what my future is going to be. ..."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblowe...
Maybe Waze has certain patents that Google thinks are worth a lot?
Is there no system to swap ownership of coins?

If not there should be. You send X amount of bitcoins to a middle man who then gives you X amount back. Technically they will be different coins and they'll go to a different account #, so you can't trace anything.
We have seemingly already gone back that far into dark times that any criticism can only be voices as comedy, fairy tales or sarcasm - here's the one for this:

How do you know that monopoly is an old game - because the rich also go to jail.
The scope of hardware startups
It's always amazes me to see almost every startup being software based. Is there still room for hardware startups? What does a hardware startup need to make it as big if not bigger than a software startup?
Oh I don't doubt that it will somewhere - this is a reminder that others aren't going to stop doing it, though and also that of all the places, the NSA seems like an unlikely source of such leaks.

Also, whilst they undoubtedly keep data around awhile, it's not kept indefinitely, surely - it has a shelf life after all. Whilst someone might get this stuff wrong in the future, again, surely that would come about most likely due to some discontinuity in this process (like if they were forced to stop awhile and then continued, losing operational details in the process).
I got 200 points! ;)

Just open the test, answer the first question and press and hold Enter key :)

Tested with latest Firefox.
What I found most peculiar in the knowledge provided by this quiz was this answer about the old method of reloading a page in the onresize handler (Anyone remembering this from Netscape 4):

https://github.com/jakearchibald/request-quest/blob/master/w...

Only look if you don't want to do the quiz!
Print to PDF?
His public disclosure makes that exceedingly unlikely. At this point, China would rather let Obama reap the shitstorm alone.
How? I can see no way this argument can be used against the metric system.

The abacus method is a fundamentally different way of doing arithmetic, that's why the abacus guy didn't know numbers. But metric and non-metric are fundamentally similar, only metric is much easier, gets out of the way, and lets you think about the quantities instead of thinking about factors.
I suspect they knew the possible consequences going in and did it anyway. They're obviously not stupid people, and knew the lengths the government would go to protect a nuclear weapons facility. I applaud them either way.

They have exposed how extremist our government has become in the name of "stopping" terrorism, and have probably had much more far reaching effects in doing so than if they had just been charged with trespassing.

Many eyes are on the US government right now, and things like this inspire criticism from within and without.
This is exactly what I mean about an arms race. If an agency is legally entitled to access private keys, for example, through legalised hacking of your home computer via backdoors installed by cooperative corporations, you're back to square one. If the network controllers make the so-called metadata of who talked to who and when, they've got a heck of lot of data to start with. If the control as much computer power and as much of the world expertise on crypography as some people claim, maybe they can break crypto in ways that appear mathematically unlikely now.

Arms race. You cannot win with purely technical means when you fundamentally lack control over the technology.