skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read it after I posted the comment. Like I mention above, I was uncertain about the terms. It seemed to me that the terms are overly broad. For instance, he says "maybe they want to compress the data". Well, then if that's the case, write that. But currently it gives them the rights to modify source code. What happens if there is an implementation of patented code they don't like in a private repo? The current terms allow them to modify the data to remove that code.

Sure, probably won't happen, but what if they get taken over by another company. How do I know they won't do that?

He then mentions distribution in order to distribute to others specifically if you elect to do so. But if I choose not to, the wording currently allows them to distribute no matter what my wishes are.

Again, not something they are likely to do. But with legal documents, surely it's a good idea not to give overarching rights that you never intended in the legal document?
The fact is that what another person chooses to take is none of your business. You use fearmongering as an irrational pretext to usurp someone's right to choose what they do with their own body, and sadly, that fearmongering works. It just doesn't work on reasonable people, who are in the minority.
I think you become great by accident, as a side effect of solving difficult problems with great tenaciousness and energy.
Ignoring the dubious baseline assumption that your data really is at risk of exposure, why do you think what you're proposing would make you safer rather than put you at more risk?

The thing is Justin, right now we don't know for sure just what Google hands over to the Feds and why, and we're all grappling with whether the alternatives are worth the convenience trade-off. I know I am.

You still need to actually home your servers somewhere, which means a colo or VPS that is subject to the exact same laws.

I don't live in the US so no, I'm not subject to the exact same laws. Similar yes, but I don't have to worry about the DMCA for instance. Of course if I do want to use AWS or App Engine then yes, it applies. But I've always assumed that foreign hosted servers can and will be compromised or spied on.

Do you expect the providers of those services to have the capability to fight such requests better than Google, given that Google has a full time legal team dedicated to doing so?

And that legal team has been forbidden to communicate with customers about certain information requests made by Federal agencies. Not much of an advantage is it? Do you guys really get on the phone with your customers and tell them when their data has been handed over? Come to think of it, do you ever speak to customers at all? I can get all of these things with a local provider outside US jurisdiction.

What about the basic security of the provider itself? Do you really expect that to be anywhere near the level of what Google provides on its own systems? To top it all off, there's the maintenance and securing of whatever you're actually running, which requires significant expertise and takes quite a bit of time if you don't want your box popped and turned into a zombie host (which is what is most likely to happen).

If you can't do something like this yourself, or don't have time, then you pay a professional to do it, either by hiring or by outsourcing. It's just business: create a relationship with expected levels of service with people you trust 100% and then pay them what it's worth. You seem to think that not using Google only means having to roll your own when in fact there are many alternatives.

My point here is that you're not being honest with yourself if you really think you can manage this as a side project better than the full-time teams at Google do. If you want to pick another provider of email, etc, then investigate carefully and find one you're happy with. But I'd strongly discouraging running your own services.

If you don't want to spied on, then you absolutely must run your own services. When the feudal lords start fighting or not taking their responsibilities seriously, it's us peasants that get trampled. Perhaps more of us need to move outside the feudal system and help others that also want to.
I think you're reading way too far into it being about a specific company. A number of companies people love to like/hate could fall into the specifics she lists, depending on one's views. It's like a crystal ball or clouds in the sky--one sees what they wish to see.

Guessing the actual company, if there is one, is kind of disingenuous to the article's message itself though, since it is good depiction of the "ideal" company most of us would want to avoid.
Native Americans on the whole didn't give anything away. They had their land taken by force and by disaster.
monsterboards (http://getmonsterboards.com)
"Our tools have been getting more precarious, thanks to bugs introduced by the browser vendors"
Bugs introduced by the browser vendors? What? What?? Wait just second there, you think the global economy and power structure of the world is being affected by bugs in browsers?

There's no need to take everything literally. It's a fact that, for many people, the web browser has grown to a very important communications tool, and "we" have failed in making it a good basis for secure communication.

Also, it depends on what you call a bug. Why do we still rely on the broken CA system for SSL certificates, for example? Not for technical reasons.
Profits down, are they?

Well, maybe if they didn't swear blind that they never made a profit on any film ever and that actually they made a loss so there won't be any taxes, I'd have some sympathy.
"General warrant wiretapping": NSA Getting Call and E-mail Content
Modify & Distribute: If someone wants to download a zip file of your repository, then you have give BitBucket the permission to modify the content (to produce the zip file) and distribute it (to send it to someone who wants it).

Use it: I'm not sure, maybe to do syntax highlighting, they need to use the source code with a syntax highlighting software.
Seems pretty far fetched, I mean can you imagine what ridiculous lengths you would have to go to in order to maintain the loyalty of the minions? I mean seriously if they
woke up to the reality of their situation, who knows what would happen :-) Seems like a common problem explored in literature as well, minor discontent, then an awakening, and then failure as the evil empire fails under more and more egregious attempts to maintain order ...
Well, that traded off the govt's ability to wiretap.
Show HN: FeedRebel.com - Your Google Reader Replacement? - Thoughts/Feedback?
hey Everyone,

I built FeedRebel [ http://www.feedrebel.com ] partly because I needed a feed reader myself but mainly because it ties in nicely with an idea that I've been working on. For those of you that are still on the fence when it comes to choosing a Google Reader alternative, I would love it if you could give FeedRebel a try and let me know your thoughts.

I realize that there are quite a few options out there already with some big launches yet to come. I look forward to your comments and thoughts.

Thank you
Not with 100% confidence, but "outside" can tell the browsers are both running under the same OS, and on the same resolution display. Doubtless other attributes as well.
Gemini (http://countersoft.com)
i don't think you need the last sentence, fwiw.

also, early on (before the backpacks and logos), talking about capturing them young reminded me of http://www.nsa.gov/kids/home.shtml
If I recall correctly, this book also comes very highly recommended from Rich Hickey, the author of Clojure.
This is probably my favorite self-hosted solution.
Not really. All of this can be applied to almost any bank, accountancy firm or large corporate's graduate recruitment strategy.
I implore you to watch the clip

What do you mean "the clip"? He's said it over and over and over while playing a game of "catch me if you can" where he goes beyond the authority that he is supposed to have. He is supposed to enforce DOMA. He is supposed to enforce on-the-books immigration laws. He was not supposed to unilaterally declare congress out of session to make recess appointments. He does this crap every opportunity he gets and the media just navel gazes.
Technically, yes. Google could track what ip address is sending what requests from your household. They would only be able to track your household not your specific computer due to the NAT on your router.

In reality, ISPs change your ip address a number of times over a year, so Google couldn't know when the change occurs without some extra knowledge (such as you being logged into your Google account, but that also isn't fool proof because you could log in any number of places).

Google probably doesn't care that much about an individual's data and would not invest the time and resources to build software to track information on the level you are talking about
If so, it is rather only her impression of Google. For any company that creates technically challenging products, senior hires should be (and most often are) vital.
Some facts to support the anecdote of F# code conciseness and expressiveness.
I had two thoughts.

1) That the golden age for DVDs only lasted about 10 years. I think the golden age of cinema lasted from late 1920 to early 1960's. Acceleration in technology results in accelerated culture change and accelerated market changes. We're use to it in tech, but I didn't think much of other industries.

2) Along those lines, I was surprised this was such as revelation to the author. As soon as I saw Netflix go streaming, I knew this was the way I wanted my movies delivered. And the attitude in the OP seemed to be, "Hey, we can't make great movies and take risks on movies because you guys aren't buying DVDs." Innovative films never seemed to be big-budget anyway. And for an industry that's not use to change like technology is, they seem to fail to see that with new technology comes new business models, and new opportunities. I wonder how tech can educate hollywood on this.
Clickable link - http://www.feedrebel.com
The Bug Genie http://www.thebuggenie.com/
Totally agree. The bad thing about blowing the cover of NSA is that now they don't need to pussy around to keep the secret. They'll be much more brazen.

The good thing is that now we have momentum to change how we communicate. If we don't, we'll lose this train. We have had research in anonymity going on since 2000 but people haven't been motivated enough to adopt them en masse.
One straightforward fix: A law that says an "I Agree" button only binds the user to the text that's actually visible on the screen. More text? More buttons!

That will drastically cut down on the boilerplate. Want to straitjacket your users with 60 pages of user agreement? No problem! You're only 60 button clicks away from complete lack of liability.
TED and the Declining Value of Ideas
Metamaterials breakthrough could lead to the first invisibility cloak
Code is unlikely to be accepted upstream because it very rarely is (assuming you mean by the SQLite team). They are very picky about code contributions and almost always implement themselves. One part is legal - there has to be very clear lineage/authoring to the code, patent clearances etc.

The second part is that the actual code to implement any particular functionality or even a bug fix is relatively trivial. There is far more effort and far more lines of code for testing: http://www.sqlite.org/testing.html - and implementing code to enable the rigourous testing usually results in a different structure.

The third part would be conflicting with the existing goals: http://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html

OTOH if the intention isn't to be part of the core then upstream doesn't matter and the code can be distributed in any way you deem fit.
Scala Pickling - Fast, Customizable, Boilerplate-Free Serialization for Scala
You may find there are even more nuances now that you have those additional 35 years under your belt, who knows...
I hope you are bring sarcastic. Never ever do something like that! Or would you also blindly execute anything I tell you to?
Some people have taller monitors than others. Some browse in different font sizes. There is no way, even in theory, of determining what was visible on screen.

edit: really, this is the exact same problem as "some people have taller screens than others", but some people have taller browser windows than others too. If I want to get some text off screen before clicking "I agree", it's fully within my power to do so.
A great quote from Sallust, a statesman of the Roman republic. Specifically, he lived toward the end of the Roman republic.

Another quote of his that seems applicable here:

"Yet many human beings, resigned to sensuality and indolence, uninstructed and unimproved, have passed through life like travellers in a strange country."
Maybe I'm the stupid one here, but how does Google offer to provide people 4GB of email and storage... without actually storing that?

And like you yourself mention, to add security to prevent automated hacking scripts from 0wning accounts to add to a botnet (attempts that happen orders of magnitude more often than an NSL or FISA warrant) they have to add IP tracking for individual accounts.

You talk about GPG but there's little safe way to do that from client-side JS, would defeat most of the point of offering free email for Google in the first place, and is already supported just by offloading that onto a real email client.
I ordered the hardcover Proofs a few weeks ago after seeing the Calkin-Wilf tree [1] [2]. I cannot suggest it on the Kindle because you're going to want to write in it—there are even large margins to encourage this kind of behavior.

[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/prelude-safeenum...
[2] http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/jeremy.gibbons/publications/rationals...

It's one of the best books I've ever bought measured in raw joy and satisfaction per page. Like all proofs, reading is a very involved process, but these are genuinely stunning ones.
The H2 open source java database implements "alter table" exactly as per the description of sql alchemy: create a new table with the new structure, copy all the data across, delete the original table, rename the new table to the origina name.

This could perhaps be acceptable for sqlite.
This is one of the best needed extension. Also this gets user some idea on how each site treats users.
So, I get, there is no "out of the box" email client that would be easy to install for the masses? Maybe we need a whole distro targeted at this - personal cloud services.
Is this a common reaction to working at Google?
This is a fantastic idea. Of course, you need to be able to trust that the summaries cover the most important aspects but this seems like a good team to deliver.
I'm surprised GitHub is by far #1. I wonder if it's familiarity rather than preference. Github's minimal approach of using labels for everything is like Gmail's tags over folders.

I wish GitHub had a "This bug affects me" or +1 button so the comment history stays clean of "me too" responses.
Places With The Most Tech Jobs
What would the point of the band of minion be? To what (possibly evil) purpose will they be used?
It was through economic bonds. Not to get into too much detail, but the lower ranks of feudal nobility were "lords of manors" (with higher ranks being lords of lords). The manor system (manorialism[1]) was the economic foundation of feudal society. Back when I studied history (many years ago), I read one the most fascinating history papers I've ever read: The Rise of Dependent Cultivation and Seignorial Institutions by Marc Bloch[2] (I couldn't find a free version online). There was little, if any, violence directed at peasants - certainly not one meant to get them to work. The entire system was founded on the fact that peasants had little choice: they didn't own the land, and it was hard for them to relocate to other manors.

Systems built around direct coercion, with the threat of violence, are rarely stable. Successful exploitation is one whose targets either hardly feel or one that's not bad enough to get them to rebel. The way these systems often collapse is that over time, the exploiters feel more confident to exploit even more, until they reach a breaking point at which a rebellion occurs.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manorialism

[2]: http://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/histories/ch...
No, Dave Winer writes in order to get attention to what he does. Now he's dabbling in javascript, so he drops javascript in everything he can; if the topic of the day were the cup size of Miss Universe, he'd write that javascript was invented to measure breasts. And of course, since RSS is his main claim to fame, that also must make it in the conversation at some point.
We use redmine internally, but I find myself preferring Github for issues. The interface is much simpler and easier to use. Redmine, on the other hand has 10-15 fields for every issue. It may help with very large projects but most of it is never used for small-sized projects.
It's false in that it's technically inaccurate, even given nothing but the slides.

E.g. "direct and unilateral access". Unilateral means exactly that only one party needs to decide, the reality is that it is bilateral access (both parties must agree).

So that's at least one thing Greenwald managed to screw up in his "book review" of a single slide. The question is whether blame lies with Greenwald alone, or if Snowden mislead him into that by stupidity or malice.
Piece of paper taped to side of monitor, with badly written reference to a page in someone else's daybook, including cryptic calculations that are actually not at all related and enough circular rings from my tea mug to create a sort of mutant Olympics logo.
Yes, this article is absolutely horrible by coming to the opposite of the correct conclusion.

How could an attorney parsing the documents not notice the "in connection with operating the Hosting Service" stipulation?

Further, Bitbucket and Github are opposite in terms of the freedom you have to control your FREE repositories. Github forces your free repositories to be open to the public. Bitbucket allows you to keep some free repositories private.
The very idea of a web-based control panel for a Linux server is a recipe for disaster, because it means giving root access to a web-accessible program. Remember why you're never supposed to run Apache as root? Or why you should never give PHP scripts permission to write to any location outside of the upload folder? Root and web-access don't mix, period. In the VPS business it's a kind of necessary evil, but that's all the more reason to check if the survival of your business depends on a bunch of unsanitized SQL queries.

Back in 2009, before SolusVM came along, the most popular control panel for low-end VPS hosts was called HyperVM. One day in the summer of that year, HyperVM got hacked, or more accurately, a combination of slow updates and weak passwords caused major data loss at a popular low-end VPS host. The next day, the developer of HyperVM, an Indian man, committed suicide. There was a lot of publicity surrounding the incident, and many low-end VPS hosts went looking for a less infamous control panel.

Then came SolusVM. I can't remember exactly how it came to be the primary replacement for HyperVM, but almost overnight everyone adopted SolusVM. I'm actually surprised that it lasted nearly 4 years without a major security incident like this. The low-end VPS market is so crowded with assholes and 14-year-olds looking for a quick buck, the so-called companies exchange DDoS attacks every other day. Now that the easiest route into another company's servers has been published, expect them to start hacking one another into oblivion.

Meanwhile, I'm already starting to wonder what kind of flying PHP-spaghetti-code monster whose name is /^[A-Za-z]{5}VM$/ will come to replace SolusVM for the next 4 years or so. It probably won't be much more secure, since most of the kids have budgets that are too tight to buy proper software. Developers who know how to use prepared statements cost money. Auditing a complex piece of web app costs even more money.

Writing control panels is hard. Remember, even Linode sometimes gets it wrong. If you trust your root account and therefore the fate of your business with a bundle of obfuscated code that may or may not have been audited by any competent security researcher, it's only a matter of time before something like this happens to you.
I'm sorry, but that is the most difficult 'map' I have ever had to read.

What happened to colour bars?
Since Obama wasn't sworn into office until 2009, I'm curious what he did in 2008 to prevent financial disaster.
I have been too successful muting my sarcasm. You are correct! My impractical idea is, indeed, impractical.

The point is that when we allow arbitrarily complex language to be buried under a single agreement action, a user has no idea what they are actually agreeing to. And everybody knows it. So we should just make such agreements null and void until the technology community (us) and the lawyers can come up with a way of breaking these user agreements down into digestible, understandable units.
No different that any other big industry.
The "real problem" is their product is no good compared to the expanding competition for consumers (shrinking) entertainment budget.

If the disposable entertainment cash budget of the median consumer is dropping fast enough, and it seems it is, then they could create the worlds best movie and no one would spend money on it. So if there's no money to get, just go thru the motions and collect the paycheck until it stops, the output is going to be a crop of shovelware, which is a pretty accurate summary of the current situation.
I think you're missing the point and are simply suggesting the colour of which we should paint the bicycle-shed.
I also feel such a questionaire is mostly driven by experience not by preference. Not many people learn to know more then 2 or 3 trackers in their career.
What would be nice is if they included the summarized legal text under More Details. So I could click more details and actually see what the ToS says for that particular summary.
I agree. I also wonder if many of the great programmers would consider themselves great?
Even as far back as WW2 (and probably earlier), mail was being routinely opened, inspected, resealed, and passed on its way.

The technology for doing this in a virtually undetectable fashion has been around for a long time, and I'm sure it's far more advanced now. I very much doubt that ordinary letters have to be opened to see their contents anymore. It can probably be easily done using any number of scanning technologies.

The main problem for them is that it takes more time, effort, and money to do this for snail mail than to just ask a company for a hard drive containing all the emails and tweets of a few hundred million people.

On the other hand, a lot fewer people are using snail mail to communicate these days. So total surveillance of the relatively small amount of snail mail might just be done as a matter of course anyway.

Of course, there are some pesky laws presumably protecting the sanctity of physical mail. But if you think spies have ever let the law stand in their way, you live in a much rosier and prettier world than I do.