skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why would anyone expect to find a quality appliance in a store these days? It's a toss-up as to whether you'd even be able to find a crappy hard drive enclosure at Best Buy. Brick and mortar are expensive, only the highest-margin items can be profitably stocked anymore. Raising the price just means the item will get ignored by everyone except people like your friend's dad.

Just get stuff like that online.
You really never realized that? It's been the stated reason for people opting out for a while now. It takes PRISM for it to sink in?

Yeesh.
He was 19 years old.

He's 29 now. Think about that for a second.
> There is the substance behind the statement "the trust is gone"? Has there been mass voluntary closings of Facebook accounts?

Do you think there is a link between people "trusting" Facebook (whatever that would mean) and people not closing their accounts?
That's kinda the point: the US Government is threatening to literally put them on trial.

The rest of us are watching all the signs for info to help us develop our own strategy in this not-so-theoretical game of prisoner's dilemma.
Dance, Monkeys, Dance by Ernie Cline
CharityVid - Front-end Optimization
And I seem to remember something about Google requiring all apps to light up the screen, to avoid the whole "stealth" thing.
Hi Larry - I'm a Survata co-founder. Our system screens out respondents who answer too quickly, answer in a suspicious pattern, fail "trap" questions, etc. So individuals not taking the survey seriously do not impact our data collection.
Everybody here seems to be distracted. The law abiding requests disclosed here could still be served alongside a covert operation. This has no impact on the PRISM scandal.
More or less... There are Roman-era writings describing their most common method of making concrete.

What made me flabbergasted is that only NOW someone say this is news...

Seriously, if the thing was written down already 2000 years ago, why noone bothered to test?

Or they did, but other reasons made corporations not use it?

My dad is a engineer, and he told me that some old bridges here in Brazil made with such concrete are REALLY HARD to explode for some reason...

I don't know if that is the case with the bridge that Luisa Erundina tried to explode in São Paulo, but here we have a bridge that there was 4 attempts to explode by a specialized demolitions engineering company, and it barely got dented.

EDIT: of course, most common for important buildings... Poor people won't use that sort of concrete, one of the ingredients is volcanic ash, and you cannot find volcanic ash everywhere, it was probably more or less expensive.
It's already been reported that you can expect to see more disclosures from the DNI and NSA next week. I think the government understands that the past week has been bad for them - and that it's bad for all of us if Americans have recent to doubt their government.

You can also look at it as they would like a chance to correct bad impressions given by inaccurate or incorrect reporting (we can't really judge this yet).
Good call. This whole situation is so messed up that the EFF is one of the few agencies I trust. I'm glad to see there's healthy skepticism about the validity of this release though.
Storing and visualizing LinkedIn with Neo4j and sigma.js
An introduction to functional reactive programming in JavaScript
Integrating 3rd Party Designer with Internal Software Development Cycle
Self-employment.
The world's most mysterious manuscript
Zuckerberg, perhaps. Facebook, as in the current Facebook entity, absolutely not.
This website for one.
Incidentally, this would be a great advance on Zuckerberg's professed goal of making the world a more open place. Safer or better would be arguable - more open would not be.
If node operators could pick and choose whose traffic they carried tor would not be what it is.

If you dont want to handle the stress of dealing with exit traffic run a relay only node:

https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#ExitPolicies
It says " the total number of user-data requests Facebook received from any and all government entities in the U.S. ", which I take to mean the target accounts may or may not be US citizens, but the requests came from US government agencies.

International government agency requests, which I assume they also comply with in certain situations, would be not included.
Why are they only offering figures for the last 6 months?
Consider you also trade high availability away when you build on a single vm.. I can't say I have used either on Azure, but the hosted db service seems more attractive on a budget.
Facebook releases stats to reassure users about NSA spying
Yes, both mobile friendly and native

Our monetization will come from sponsors - we currently do not intend to charge our students.

Knowing our target demographic, we know their in school the majority of the day. We know their busy and may or may not be in front of a computer. We feel having a strong mobile presence will allow them to interact with the website more consistantly and more frequently. I want both mobile and native because I want our students to have the best possible experience. As I'm the sole programmer, I can handle the mobile and iOS native apps myself. I can't handle an (multiple) Android version or even Windows mobile and gasp... Blackberry. As I know the majority of my users are iOS users, they'll get the best experience in a native app. Everyone else - I hope the mobile version is just as good...

The native app is to improve reach and connection. A feature of the native app will be a push notification to notify students when other students need help. Think of it like your question here. You needed help / had a question to ask of your peers; but the only people that saw it are the people that clicked on the link to view your question. If other people got a notification that a question was raised on a topic they care about, your question would have a better chance of getting answered and you'd have a better chance of getting the help you needed.
It's scrutiny beyond national security and secret requests.

Facebook gives some good examples of requests that aren't NSA or FISA based, e.g. "a federal marshal tracking a fugitive". Given the appropriate legal paperwork, should it be scary for a federal marshal to request access to a fugitive's facebook data to check things like last login time and IP address, or private messages?

To really decide how "scary" it is, we need to know what proportion of the requests are related to what kind of thing, and of what scope are the requests. Unfortunately, Facebook has still not been permitted to release any of this data.
Total bollocks. The statement simply discloses some more specific numbers about procedures that were never secret to begin with. The fact that a law enforcement agency could get a court order for an individual's data was never secret: it was even in the online documentation for the site!

Why is this surprising to anyone? I mean, bloody hell, anyone who's watched Law & Order should know that there are lawful procedures for these things.
SCOTUS didn't grant immunity.
They essentially held there was a valid state secrets privilege claim by the government, and thus, the plaintiff would not be able to actually prove their case.

This is very different.

Now, the decision was still bullshit, but for a very different reason :)
I hope you don't mind when I use that one the next time someone brings up some mystifying schism between comments made by "people on the Internet".
With all of the secrecy and secret gag orders, and all of the blatant, proven lies, how on earth are we supposed to trust anything anyone says about this issue?

Why aren't people getting fired and prosecuted for lying to the American public?
He was also famous for screwing over his friends, idiots, charities, business partners, and his family.

I notice that most of your comments show a level of hostility that's often disproportionate to the topic or comment you are responding to. You seem like a very angry person. It's not very pleasant.
What parts are invalid? All, or just some?

I could only read one of the comments, and I wouldn't know enough physics to follow along, anyway.
Agreed, but one can hope, yes? For example, if I could probably kill not-interesting traffic if I could traffic-shape the traffic (e.g. you can't run more than 10kB/s averaged over 60 seconds through my node, which is plenty to browse the web securely but isn't enough to download Star Trek 2.) The question remains: are there ways to manage (not prevent) this issue?
"the total number of user-data requests Facebook received from any and all government entities in the U.S."

It's common for 3 letter agencies to set up a corporation to handle their dirty work. I wonder if a front organization would be considered a government entity?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_organization#Intelligence...
As the old adage goes, "It's not fascism when we do it."

I see far too many people who believe that Democrats can do no evil and that Republicans are evil incarnate, when the reality is that it took both parties, working together for decades, to arrive at the current juncture.
Google was only allowed to release some of this data. FISA requests were not permitted.

>we can now include in a transparency report all U.S. national security-related requests (including FISA as well as National Security Letters) – which until now no company has been permitted to do.

So, this is a change, albeit still a limited one.
I think he will keep things to sporadic in-person interviews and frequent changes of where he stays. But I don't think he will stay hidden. I bet as soon as an indictment is handed down, he will turn himself in to the Hong Kong authorities and start fighting extradition.
Critiquing the WWDC Critics: Why They Think Apple is Doomed
While in principal, I love this... Because JS is not my favorite language... I just don't see the real world benefit. It's going to:

1.) increase difficulty debugging (compiled js -> scala)
2.) decrease productivity, see #1

Why not just write javascript? Though that's my argument against any of these compile to js kits (coffee script being the big one). So maybe I'm just trolling (sorry).

Again, super cool. The author is waaay smarter than I for implementing this, but... The real world.
The principle still applies: the information has been submitted, collected, and is accessible to those who ask persuasively enough.
Yeah, and I'm not sure scala will be that useful without the standard libs, much like C# or Java.

Seeing the presentation, I'm thinking more of using it with something like node-webkit[1] though. Didn't LightTable use clojure-script or something? But then, why don't just use one of JVM's GUI framework?

[1]: https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit
It will be long before someone implement this in the real world (website). It needs 16MBs download for the standard libs. Even twitter only downloads around ~2MBs before showing page.
Show HN: MailDrop, throwaway e-mail addresses, built with Scala and Akka
The article rubs me the wrong way. I agree on principle: I wouldn't want to willingly build technologically that I know will be used solely or principally to circumvent the constitution and reduce individual liberty in a non-transparent manner. Problem is, I don't see any evidence that this is what's happening en-masse in Silicon Valley.

There is a big difference between unconstitutional spying and surveillance per recent new stories (which is abhorrent) and the principle of intelligence work (which is a legitimate government role of even the most minimal libertarian government).

Accepting In-Q-Tel/CIA funding does not imply knowledge and approval of everything that agency does. In-Q-Tel publicly and openly funding a mobile cryptography startup has three potential implications:

1) They want to make money: they have people on staff who are capable of doing the technical due diligence and they think they have a fairly good chance of a return on their investment.

2) They want good cryptography software to be available to their own spies, foreign dissidents (including foreign whistleblowers), and US citizens/corporations that are being targeted by criminals or foreign governments.

3) They hold a master key to this software and want to be able to backdoor all of its users.

Problem is that if claim #3 is true and is uncovered, they risk a great deal: loss of their investment, huge news story, and mistrust of any other software projects that NSA has invested in (including SELinux -- which ships with many popular Linux distributions)[1]. Note that this is security software: extensive third-party testing is required by law for certain applications (and is implicitly invited in most any case); even if source code is closed, the binary is readily available and can be disassembled (revealing which open source libraries and algorithms are used for actual encryption). "Security by obscurity" is not a claim anyone is willing to trust, so pretty much with any kind of security software, intense scrutiny is expected.

So given three of these potential reasons, #1 and #2 seem to be a lot more plausible than #3.

To sum it up, this "guilt by association" article reads much like the hyper-partisan hit-pieces I've read recently in defense of the NSA surveillance programes ("Greenwald once wrote something for Cato Institute, Snowden donated money to Ron Paul, both of which imply that this is clearly part of Koch Brothers/Tea Party/Michelle Bachman/whatever conspiracy.").

[1] For a demonstration, see the scandal around Checkpoint firewall software, which didn't even involve three letter agencies, but merely corporate espionage...
I have not used Scala before. What's the motivation for this? I can think of two reasons - a) to make native Scala programmers feel home with Javascript and b) Scala is a superior language than Javascript, will therefor make many things easier.

How much of this is (b)?
If there's slipperiness in this statement, I think it's probably in the use of the term "user data requests".

>The total number of Facebook user accounts for which data was requested pursuant to the entirety of those 9-10 thousand [user data] requests was between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts.

Is a "user data request" a request for data about a specific user? Would the request "give us the names and birthdays of everyone that has searched for 'discontent with government'" constitute a user data request? Or would that be a "search term request"?

I'm not sure I think this is slippery language, but there's definitely room for that interpretation.
There are things we grew up with which our kids will hate. Time sheets? Offices? Cash? Commercials? Driving a car? Vitamins? Shopping? Two spaces between sentences? "Closed circuit" cameras?

Perhaps our kids will grow up hating Glass.
You and only a few other commenters have recognized the abuse of power here:

> They said sorry - you need to use this software - there is no other way.

It would have been easy for Apple to work with entities such as CD Baby to whip up an alternate method to handle the importation of large catalogs of music. Once specified I'm sure such a trivial web API could be implemented and tested quickly.

But Apple and Jobs didn't do this because they knew they had the power to insist that their software be used even though it was only suited for single CD submissions.

I find it interesting that many commenters are critical of Sivers while completely overlooking Apple's abuse of power.

dmourati not only recognized the abuse of power but recommended a method for meeting it head on.
First, "extreme" does not--basically or otherwise--mean the same thing as "pure" or "principled". Not generally, and not specifically in this context. That being said, characterizing the libertarians as extreme anything is, indeed, a generalized attempt to paint with broad strokes of discredit. Better to specifically reason against their ideals.

Second, Ayn Rand and her Objectivist 'principles' are ideological bunk masquerading as rational philosophy. Given your comments further down, in attempting to champion the need for a rational basis for policies, there is much irrationality in Rand's positions and ideology, and her ideas only trend toward sacrificing the many for the needs of the few. This opposes the purpose of civil society, as well as the cause and foundation of justice. Furthermore, we already have enough individualism going around. It has not made the world a better place.
> literally rekindle the Neo-Nazi movement (reddit now has the biggest concentration of Neo-Nazis on the internet--the fanatical kind that even Stormfront won't tolerate on their website)

I guess it's a legal problem, not technological. Neo-nazis from European countries flee with their online activity to the 'land of the free', because around here their websites are banned, many of them would be hunted and some possibly locked up (depending of the case and specific country's law). It's one of those cases where free speech backfires in your face. Not like we don't have those problems around here, but at least spreading extremist views is a criminalized pathology, not a protected right.

> Whether technology will be used as a weapon in the hands of a selfish elite, or as a tool for liberation for the impoverished and underprivileged, is being decided now by how these technologists use their time.

Cyber-utopia.
You are taking my statements out of context. Almost all my comment talks about HN's reaction to the NSA news. Did I support collecting data from social media websites? No. In fact, if you look at my reply to @Uhhrrr on this thread, you will notice that I mentioned that no org (political or business) should misuse personal information.
The whole concept of a secret warrant is repugnant. A pox on both of them.
Oh, don't get me wrong, we certainly should not start with Facebook.

Going after Facebook would probably be unnecessary after we were through with the accused government organizations. At that point Facebook's innocence would either be clear, or it would be clear that Facebook was a victim in this. If we found reason to believe both of these were not true, then we could pursue them as well.
Alternative title: "American public paranoid, susceptible to leading survey questions".
I actually don't see anything particularly wrong there. If I were to set up a page asking for personal info, and a bunch of college students (supposedly more technologically informed people) were to give them to me, I'd consider them somewhat dumb as well. It's not that I'd do anything wrong with the data, but they didn't know that.

This doesn't mean I support him or Facebook; I certainly don't.
>...Donate his fortune to the EFF and start from scratch. Of course, that will never happen...

Why?

Would it be legally contrary to shareholder value? I think this is a terrific idea for all of them to do. Zuck and the others appear genuinely upset from Snowden disclosure blowback and are frustrated at reclaiming their user's trust. These may be their best cred ROI. Perhaps someone experienced could organize this. EFF ...itself?(?!)
A great deal of the comments here border on being ridiculous conspiracy theories. I know that when it was "revealed" to us that the NSA had direct access to Facebook, it was a green light for many to share their formerly private conspiracy theories as if they were now completely validated. With the revealed claims being bogus, the "validated" conspiracy theories are once again naked.

Of course, it comes as no surprise that when the sensationalized Greenwald claims were walked back we'd hear that it was all a cover-up and the NSA is threatening to throw Zuckerberg in jail and drone strike Snowden, etc. There is literally nothing that could possibly happen that would convince some people that Greenwald was full of shit.
Google does not publish information about requests which come with a gag order. They were the first to request the ability to publish that data several days ago, followed by Facebook and others shortly after. Facebook is the first to publish updated statistics with the numbers from National Security Letter and FISA warrants included after being granted permission. Google presumably will do so soon as well.
Show HN: Echoplexus – An OSS alternative to Hipchat, Flowdock, and others
I was mostly referring to your initial post about Allegra Stratton and the various summaries of the MPs involved in this letter. I vaguely follow UK politics but being able to put news in to perspective, and recognise biases like this, is quite useful.
Apple website mistake reveals alternative iOS 7 icons
I love the design of the site!
Well, the plan was to do it all via RV :) what's the best university to do it at? I could always use another excuse to go back to Hawaii....
Well let's be fair, they both ran on some part by being "not Bush". The GOP couldn't find a corner dusty enough to stick GWB in during that election cycle.
Como Hacer Para Recuperar Un Amor – Secretos
> Any attempt to do stuff like that will still require a clock signal somewhere. That clock will be noticed.

I wouldn't expect to get away with it on all phones all the time. But certain phones targeted by surveillance malware? Sure.

Note that powered-off phones still have real time clocks running, for things like keeping time.

> An attempt to do it in the analog domain with no synchronous logic would be even more apparent to anyone who studies the internals of the phone.

I agree, there's little chance of an analog tape recorder being in the phone.

> In short, no, it ain't gonna happen. It would show up on Bunnie Huang's blog one day

Go ask Bunnie if he thinks a well-funded attacker could implement it, having access to the baseband design docs. Then ask him how long it could be used in the wild against unsophisticated targets before it ended up on his blog.

> and there would be blood in the streets the next.

This surveillance malware is being found on phones and in some places there is, in fact, literal blood in the streets.

https://www.securelist.com/en/analysis/204792290/Spyware_Hac...

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57573707-38/meet-the-corpo...
If it's anything like the last 6 months stock market volumes well it doesn't mean shit; it's probably intended to mislead everyone from the mega volume spikes that often do occur. 5 years data might be worthwhile.
That's a very nice point and is one I had not considered. In hindsight, it's an obvious point, but the best points always are.

I'm curious about your point's effect on Glass: does it render Glass invalid or reduce its market in scope so that Glass is a press/media device? I suspect the latter.

But thinking further: what if, Science-Fiction-style, Glass were so small as to be invisible? Would we all act as if we were always being recorded? What would society be like?]
They don't, but were either not allowed or not willing to publish the number of requests excluding the non-secret ones or the breakdown of the total number into "innocent" and otherwise.
I agree! Though it's a bit too wide with a huge monitor. Perhaps they should consider maybe 80-100em max-width?
Technically 2.2 million is something around 7/10ths of a percent.