skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sen. Wyden is on said Committee, and asked Clapper a question that, in Clapper's own words, he answered with a "least untruth" statement that was "too cute by half". This can be roughly translated as "a baldfaced lie".

Apart from that, I am personally unaware of any instances where DNI Clapper has publicly lied.

Additionally, DNI Clapper appears to only answer prepared questions (i.e. forwarded to his office prior to the discussion). I'm not sure if this is standard protocol for Congress, and for obvious reasons I also don't know if this applies to private briefings.
I really like to see things like that! Well done.

But I would like to mention that the parallax effect is only one use case of the new UI Dynamics introduced with iOS 7. Apple has built in a physics engine right into UIKit and has created a feedback loop: A action in the UI is fed back into the engine and vice versa.
I'm conflicted; on one hand, obviously protecting against the HTML sent in an e-mail is a good idea. I seriously considered having all e-mail bodies run through https://code.google.com/p/owasp-java-html-sanitizer/ to strip out bad elements. On the other hand, MailDrop obviously isn't meant to be secure-- if you're worried about a truly private, secure inbox, MailDrop is not that application.

Got a good compromise between the two? Send a pull request and I'll get it in.
No Such Agency --> New Spotlight Agency is a 180 degrees turn-about.

Why?

She offers:

"...From the standpoint of the police state and its interests — why have a giant Big Brother apparatus spying on us at all times — unless we know about it?"

More than tinhat?
It's all rotten to the core.

I honestly think the method for defeating fascism, the blue meanies, is sustained whimsy and fantasy.

Block their rigid methodologies with simply enjoying life and giving them the middle finger as they sit in dark rooms poring over the details of our lives.

Cave dwelling sickos.
Wikipedia bans Tor editors because editors who use Tor are overwhelmingly doing so to avoid bans. I'm sure there are a subset of Tor editors who are good-faith contributors, but, just like with HN, a bad-faith majority has ruined it for them.
That's pretty cool. It's the black parts in between that make it "unusable" for anything serious, but still a very cool demonstration.

I wonder if you could use the same idea to produce something like the whole "wiggling 3D images" [1] thing automatically, since it would involve smaller gaps. And somehow fill in the gaps using an equivalent of Photoshop's "Content-Aware Fill", based only on the layer of the same depth -- since it would just be for narrow strips, for most things it should probably give a pretty realistic effect. I'm unaware if there's any kind of general-purpose library which does that, though. (I vaguely recall that Gimp has a similar, but less sophisticated, implementation.)

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=wiggling+3d+images
"Has no one ever noticed how poorly the leadership of our democracies are treated?"

No, I haven't noticed this (because it's not true). What I do notice are many stories about politicians abusing their positions, almost systematically [1,2]. I see no reason why a higher rate of pay would curb such behaviour (it's not like they're broke in the first place). I don't see why leaders of the commercial sector should be considered the "best of the best" either (think back to banking and other corporate scandals of the last decade).

In addition, the gap between CEO pay and 'normal' people has been the subject of debate before. When you realise that some of these folks sit on each-other's compensation committees it's easy to see how such arrangements can be abused -- and conveniently justified in hindsight as 'necessary' to "attract and retain the best of best".

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

[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/jun/02/lobbying-mini...
Actually, it does limit the need for Warrants to "unreasonable searches and seizures".

But, ah! Is this a "reasonable" search on the part of the IRS? Congress thinks so, but we would have to leave it to the Supreme Court to decide.
Warning: Just as with UIScrollView, there's a lot more to getting this one right than it initially may seem...

But here's probably the next thing I'd address: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimbal_lock
It's exactly Apache's known-good status that makes it a point of leverage. Surely the pragmatic thing to do is to put pressure on organizations that you think may respond, rather than organizations that you know will not. I really don't understand why everyone is saying that Apache's hosting of this project is irrelevant and useless to the NSA. Would you say the same about other projects that Apache hosts?
If I have already been successful and paying a disproportionate chunk of the taxes that are going to these people, then it perhaps doesn't do me a tremendous amount of good (directly).

If I'm starting a business, it does me a tremendous amount of good for my customers to have money enough.
This is an interesting take on the situation, although it's one that I would normally dismiss as tin-foil hat thinking. Given the source and clear reluctance in making these assertions, however, it's definitely a perspective worth including in the discussion.

If Wolf is right, it certainly seems like a risky move on the part of the NSA (or related organization) - one that could easily backfire, since for the most part it's just fomenting more negative sentiment toward government in general. The shock of these "revelations" will subside and the country will likely go back to business as usual (as it does after most shocking revelations"), but with even less trust in its leadership.

As for discouraging whistleblowing, they have so far missed the mark - for the most part Snowden has come across as pretty difficult to hate, even for people who disagree with his actions.
Freelance Tools for Project Management and Planning
No, it isn't. At least not for Google.

Firstly, Google has Glass, self driving cars, Google Fiber, Loon, and every single one of them has the potential to be the most significant thing of this century - though these are mentioned in the article, their potential is __highly__ underestimated. Its true some of them will (I prefer might) turn out to be duds, but definitely not all of them.

Secondly, all three companies make a conscious effort to be innovative. Sometimes they err on the side of innovation. And the smartest brains are still proud of working there. And until that changes, one can argue that with the recent deluge of startups that it has, they will continue to dominate.

And talking of AI, I guess almost all the leaders in the field are have a strong relationship with Google. Andrew NG, Sebastin Thrun, Peter Norvig, Ray Kurzweil...
A couple years ago I went to a weekend seminar on political activism, taught by some long-time GOP political consultants. They said there is one good use for third-parties at the national level, and that's to punish one of the major parties.

They told a story about Democrats in one state putting up a (national) candidate for the House with a poor environmental record. Republicans in that district consistently got 45% of the vote. The environmentalists went Green Party that year, and the Republican candidate won with the usual 45%. Two years later, the Democrats learned their lesson and picked a strong environmentalist candidate. The Republican got his 45% again and the Democrat won handily.

To use this strategy you have to be willing to put up with some short-term pain, but if you're successful once you'll be in a strong negotiating position for a good while to come. The voters with power are single-issue voters willing to switch parties.
This would be better on /r/conspiracy than Hacker News.
What you wrote is so misguided that I got up from bed and turned on the computer just to reply it (I was reading HN on mobile).

Brazil (where I am from) has one of the biggest politician salaries of the world, also politicians here get many secondary ways to get money, for example our last president, Lula, when he became president he owned a single apartment and two more or less nice cars (Chevrolet Omega).

When he left the presidency he owned 53 apartments. And noone could prove that was from stolen money...

Our congress also can vote on its own salary, and they frequently do, a recent scandal was when they refused to increase the police salary and then increased their own by 70%, later smaller chambers from around the country went into more outrageous mode (one city for example, gave their lawmakers a 100% salary increase, while reducing the salary of teachers and medics to compensate the budget).

No, giving politicians money, won't make them less self-serving, if anything it gives a very clear incentive to self-serving people end there.

I am very sure if there was ways to ensure political power could not translate so directly to money, people would abuse it less.
And slowbanned again.

I've now lost all faith in HN. It's okay to criticize big evil government invading our privacy, but please don't say anything bad about our own industry.
You think the forensics capabilities of the Washington Post have a chance of detecting NSA? You think if NSA breaks into a laptop, it would be apparent to a forensics person that they'd "covered up traces of being there"?

Teenagers had rootkits that swapped out system libraries to hide processes and binaries back in 1996. The very, very lame teenagers had utmp and wtmp editors to "cover up their traces".

It's worth taking a moment to examine your thought processes here. "Now, in light of NSA/PRISM, we have a good suspect"? We clearly do not.
It wasn't well established. Income tax had been found to be unconstitutional. An "excise tax", which was the same thing, was implemented as a workaround. The income tax amendment eliminated the unconstitutionality decisively and was championed by the Prohibition movement.
I'm suspicious too. The Hong Kong part is what irks me - I cannot imagine making that choice, given a world of asylum options. His line of reasoning is borderline incomprehensible.

Add that to the concerted effort of the powers that be to paint China as our cyber-terror-enemy ... and he is aligned with China now, vis-a-vis HK ... you know very well that j6p already refers to him as "that nerd that defected to China".
they're not attending because it's theatre. the NSA briefers are going to read from the script, no difficult questions are going to be asked, and even if they were, since it's secret, the public wouldn't get to see it so it doesn't matter.
It says on the site that they charge during the day and run off batteries at night.
And the now AT&T carried over SBC's senior management, with all their -- in my opinion -- bad attitude and practices.

Today's AT&T is not the AT&T of yore. Neither in its technical research, nor in its management.
Signals In The Sky: Google Announces "Project Loon", Balloon-Powered Interne
Let's have more articles of pure speculation.
I am interested in the topic of the NSA spying program, but it feels like I am reading post after post of articles that are just reinterpretations of facts that were already presented and interpreted numerous times. People have already insinuated that Snowden is working for the chinese/russians/whoever you care to name, and its an interesting theory, but we need some evidence.
Microsoft doesn't give "exploits" to the government. Microsoft doesn't have the in-house expertise to write many of those exploits. It provides information about verified security vulnerabilities (different from exploits) before they're patched, because their patch schedules are elaborate and necessarily create a window of unpatched vulnerability. Microsoft also gives the same information to many commercial vendors, so they can write antivirus and IPS signatures.

NSA does not need Microsoft's help to break into computers.
More here: "5 Ways NSA leaker Edward Snowden's story isn't holding up." Nearly every statement in his video interview is vastly exaggerated.

http://news.yahoo.com/5-ways-nsa-leaker-edward-snowdens-stor...
java swt in linux is still horrible (yes i know there are workarounds such as patching your font [1]).

but if you use jedi and by extension things like youcompleteme[2], vim-dispatch etc. the only thing that's really missing is debugging support and refactorings.

omnisharp[3] does pretty cool refactorings with nrefactory. and the author youcompleteme is interested in having youcompleteme work as some sort of ide daemon, where you could for example add stuff like refactorings as ide features.

vagrant and virtualenv support sounds interesting though.

[1] http://gleamynode.net/articles/2280/

[2] https://github.com/Valloric/YouCompleteMe/

[3] https://github.com/nosami/OmniSharp
Ask HN: Is Sweat Equity a viable idea?
My cofounder and I are discussing the idea of making a startup based on Sweat Equity. Meaning, startups have many needs, not just money, like development tasks, marketing help, legal advice, content creation, etc...

Our site would allow startups to exchange equity for those needs.

As part of our discovery process, we'd like your feedback.

Would you be willing to exchange equity in your startup for a particular resource mentioned above? Why or why not?
No, no...

They do read all the letters (at least, the researcher does.) It is only the first signal.

A handwritten letter isn't in itself an indicator - someone may simply have not had much time - if the writing is difficult to read, or if it's several pages long, then we're into danger territory.

Generally the MPs first see their mail alongside their researchers' draft responses to them. They do need to know what they wrote back to everyone so that if they meet the constituent at a Surgery they will know what they're talking about.
Only the official confirmation is new, word that she thought her computer(s) were compromised has been out for a while.

I'm not at all sure Linux is the solution; the only plausible culprit for whom that would be a barrier is a non-state actor doing a modern variety of "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Becket). But the reported sophistication of the attack makes that less likely that previously speculated, and I assume that "Linux" is not a high enough barrier to a state actor.
So what's wrong with this article?
I realized, there was a difference. People in China know about the firewall.

That's the part they know about. Political dissenters in China are actively censored, suppressed, imprisoned, spied upon - systematic efforts to access overseas email accounts of dissidents and the personal computers of journalists outside of China have also been reported. So the government is most certainly 'going behind their backs' and doing a great deal more.

But my point wasn't really to discuss the ways in which China isn't actually an open democratic society - everyone knows that. I usually hesitate to use the word 'propaganda' since it tends to be broadly over-applied to things like 'US Congressperson says a stupid thing' which are just 'someone saying a stupid thing' rather than propaganda. But this particular item is clearly a piece of hypocritically indignant state-sponsored propaganda. There's a great deal to talk about regarding the NSA surveillance programs - I just have a really hard time imagining how this sort of piece is a useful or interesting starting point for any such discussion.
The man who made a copy of himself
"I'd call it a major innovation..."

The company behind the Loon concept has been working on this for over a decade. http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Space_Data_Awarded_USAF_Cont... Innovation on an existing idea, no doubt but
Notify this guy if you want to add your own google glass related startup to the list:
https://plus.google.com/117240032172833853307
86 year old woman pepper-sprayed, stripped at Wal-Mart
If your desk isn't level or if you have a fan on, the mice could move enough to wake the computer. :)
Or if you live in Europe.
Beer with coffee in it. Problem solved!
But aren't the encryption algorithms involved pretty similar? Public key exchange of symmetric keys for some well-known algorithm?
Greenwald was talking to him since January or February. So yeah, I think he had time to prepare what he'd say in front of a camera for a few minutes in this historic moment...Wouldn't you do the same? Or would you rather sound like a blabbering idiot?
Robomongo: A shell-centric cross-platform MongoDB management tool
> He is not struggling for words, or thinking hard, as even bright, articulate whistleblowers under stress will do. Rather he appears to be transmitting whole paragraphs smoothly, without stumbling.

When I watched this, the assumption I made was that he was carefully prepared to take on this massive endeavour – better to be prepared for the consequences and media than to foil the effort.

But, really, we have no fucking idea.
Maybe they're trying to trick us into thinking that they're trying to trick us so that they can trick us by trying to trick us into thinking we're being tricked!
Tarun Wadhwa: Approach life like an entrepreneur
> Where by "economically free" we include such freedoms as "ability to deploy child labor", "ability to pay workers below subsistence", "ability to create the equivalent of company towns", "ability to dump toxic waste into rivers", "ability to blot out the sun with airborne waste", and "availability of vast pool of rural poor workers".

You can't deny that this is indirectly partly due to America's demand for cheap goods that China provides. Look, United States has already passed this stage -- we have had dark spots in our history too, with crimes among the most heinous in world history: slavery, genocide, child labor. We've mostly improved... and I expect China will improve as well as its populace becomes more learned and starts demanding more freedoms.

But at any rate. I have one question for you tptacek: don't you agree that the extent of child labor, improper wages, toxic dumps, etc. taking place in China would be considerably less if Americans conscientiously chose to not fund these operations by essentially doing business with them? In other words, isn't America -- and the people of America -- culpable of these crimes that you make note of to a non-zero degree?
The design is simple but nice. Congratulations on launching your app. Is this a 1 off or a business for you?
Yes I'm aware of that. Verizon isn't either, yet they do plenty of intelligence work.
More of a problem for Representatives than Senators.
Who profits from this breach?

I have a hard time believing any sort of script kiddy would risk major jail time and a high profile arrest for hacking into a journalists laptop for no profit.

The NSA/Gubberment however, does have quite a bit to gain from this information/deletion
How Lincoln Was Dissed in His Day
Best Selling Tauck Tours
See the downvotes you are getting!
This article is complete and utter bullshit.

Disregarding the obviously silly idea that he is a fraud because he is organized and well spoken, her basic point seems to be that since he doesn't have a lawyer present during media interviews, then Snowden is an actor basically playing a role in a news story created by the NSA whose purpose is to scare people from becoming whistle blowers.

Give me a break.
They weren't questioning or investigating, they outright fined based only on that status report. Guilty until proven innocent.
On this topic, check out REAMDE - one of the characters makes a reference to ripping off Google Earth, but not feeling bad about it because Google Earth itself was directly inspired by something someone had read in a science fiction novel.
It's probably a good idea to question everything, but this analysis is so weak it's laughable.
Many people used to have knee arthroscopy. Doctors felt it was useful. Patients thought it was useful. It had a credible mechanism of action.

When we do double blind placebo controlled studies we find that knee arthroscopy for some conditions is no better than placebo.

> Why is it okay to report that Joe said "I feel less depressed when I exercise" or "I feel less depressed when I get to bed earlier" but NOT okay to report that Joe said "I feel less depressed when I use the tCDS"?

It isn't okay to tell people to do exercise to treat their depression unless you have some kind of evidence to back that up. The evidence is weak, and the effect is small, but more research needs to be done. (http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD004366/exercise-for-depressi...)

It is not okay to tell people to go to bed earlier to treat their depression unless you have evidence to back that up. I can think of a bunch of pros and cons for going to be earlier. I wouldn't voice my uninformed opinion in a national newspaper, and I wouldn't want that national newspaper to trumpet my uninformed opinion as a facty truthy comment.

> Why is he allowed to KNOW those first two things based just on personal knowledge of how he feels, but not that last one?

My position is that he doesn't know any of those things, not that he can know two of them but not the last one. Especially things like your gin / vodka example: I'd want evidence. Get a bunch of people in a room. Dip the rim of some drinking glasses in gin, and fill the glasses with cold tonic water. Observe. They're not drinking any alcohol, but they do have loosened inhibitions.

So far I've just spoken about the need for a trial. Good quality trials are always needed. Cognitive biases are very strong, and very hard to protect against, and can cause people to undergo lengthy, risky, poor quality "treatment" that just doesn't work. (There are many good books about this. "Bad Science" is a good quick read.)

Let's look at some other flags that might cause us to want better data, rather than just accept his word.

He sells the device for $600. Right there is a big flag.

Either he knows it doesn't work (I don't think this is the case) and he's a scumbag, cynically exploiting people. Or he really does think it works, and he wants to help people. Either way, better data is a good thing. Better data helps us stop the scumbags, and better data helps people like him sell the device and treat ill people.
Watch 2013 Barack Obama Debate 2006 Joe Biden Over NSA Surveillance [video]
Ummm, this is as reported by CBS as reported by whomever they hired to do the forensic analysis.

And yes, if "the NSA" were to break in it's possible they might not be able to do it tracelessly. E.g. no one as of yet is suspecting a black bag job.
There is way too much speculation in this article. Actually, that's all there is.
Certainly you'd send a list of prepared questions if you were holding a hearing to get answers. Otherwise the guy might be able to plausibly claim that he doesn't have the details and would have to get back to them.

If you're holding a hearing just to ask a trap question on camera then you might deliberately not send prepared questions, but I would like to think my elected representatives have more respect for people than that.
Posted on Facebook. :) Waiting for the article that says that Naomi Wolf may not be who she purports to be.
I would guess not. They're on a different frequency and their cross-section is almost nothing. It's probably no worse than a large bird flying in front of your dish.
It seems disingenuous to compare it to the disclosure to commercial vendors when the government is not listed as a MAPP partner. I have no clue what they actually disclose, but I disagree that the issue is so cut and dried.
Careful, though - that might just be your filter bubble.
A simpler explanation: They are actually criticising the Chinese system as well, they just can't say so explicitly.
Jacob Appelbaum said since last year that it only costs smaller countries like $10 million a year to collect everyone's data, in his Not My Department speech:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mnuofn_DXw