skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It does vary based on the region/era we're talking about. The Russian system of serfdom was much more formalized, closer to a form of slavery, where serfs were owned by their estates.

But you're right that in many other regions/periods, peasants were formally free, and legally able to live anywhere they wanted, as long as they reached an arrangement with the landowner (otherwise, of course, it would be trespassing). Since the land was all owned by a smallish number of landowners, the only way to make a living if you were not one of them was to work someone else's land, on terms largely dictated by them, so economics effectively tied peasants to the manorial lord.

I'll see if I can dig up the source, but I read an interesting analysis specifically of the transition to feudalism in late-Roman Italy. As the pax Romana weakened, the city of Rome was increasingly unable to be kept supplied with food imported through smoothly functioning trade routes (especially grain from North Africa), so much of the population fled the city for the countryside. There, they had little choice but to reach generally unfavorable agreements with estate owners for permission to work on their land, since Italy was already too densely populated for American-style frontier homesteading in unclaimed land to be possible.
What Greenwald/Guardian said about "direct and unilateral access" is what is meant by the paraphrase of "root access".

The story made it sound like an NSA analyst could just open an xterm and copy any data about any Google/Facebook/Hotmail/Skype/etc. user, whether the company agreed or not. That is the part that is not only false, but which Greenwald has refused to back down on by just pounding the slides over and over.

I don't know why I'm so surprised that a writer reporting on tech-heavy privacy issues would be so clueless about technology but it just gives me even more reason to be jaded about activists in general.

Oh well, at least we still have the EFF and ACLU.
At some point, you should realize that conceding an argument makes you look a lot more mature and reasonable than continuing to twist and wiggle endlessly to make sure that people see that you're correct.
> That indicates that there is potentially some very significant leak of someone who is violating their oath

Regardless if he swore to other oaths, this one is THE MOST important and succeeds all others: "I swear to protect US soil from enemies foreign and domestic". It says nothing as of how you are supposed to (or being forced to) execute this oath.
Be wary of installing this extension, and this is why:

It's not lost on the legal world that no one reads Terms of Service. As a result, TOS are rarely enforceable in court, except inasmuch as they comply with broad industry standards.

However, compliance requirements are much MORE strict for parties who demonstrably should be aware of their legal obligations. Lawyers, for example, can't really argue that they didn't read a legal document they executed because of the manner in which it was delivered (in an inscrutable TOS doc, at the entrance to an amusement park, etc).

If you install this extension, you might actually be making yourself MORE bound to crappy terms of service, since you will not be able to make the case that obviously you didn't read them terms and therefore should not be held to some non-standard provision.

The reviews/ratings provided by tosdr.org are awesome, and I hope you guys continue this project, but I, for one, will be covering my ass and not installing this extension.
Golab: A web based Golang IDE
Richard Bird took "Proofs from the Book" as an inspiration for his "Pearls of Functional Algorithm Design". I read a bit in it recently and there are really quite a few nice dderivations of functional programs, where the mathematical and the implementation part go hand in hand.
"Innovative films never seemed to be big-budget anyway."

One interesting hidden assumption deeply embedded in the biz is that big budgets are only for special effects and certain stars, and sometimes costume/makeup/sets although thats all getting adsorbed into "special effects". Obviously big budget never means the writers or any part of the creative team that doesn't involve makeup or blood spatters. Unfortunately that shows pretty strongly.

I would wager this budgeting anomaly is, in the long run, going to be a bigger disruptor to the biz than tech.
I wouldn't use such a pejorative term, but if you want to employ 'minions', you don't need to do anything particularly elaborate - just hire people who want to be minions. You can select for this in your interview process.

There's plenty of people out there who want to be told what to do and don't care to spend time thinking about the moral ramifications of their employment, including a great many skilled and experienced programmers. As long as they can choose how to implement what you want, they'll happily implement what you want, collect their paychecks, and go home.

Of course, that means you'll have to write extremely detailed specifications, which is a big pain in the ass. And you'll be the only one trying to figure out whether your product is actually something people want, so you damn well better be right.
I will be interested to see if there's editorial consistency between the books and between the years. That seems like it'd be a lot easier to achieve if there was one voice behind each book.

On the other hand, it's not like these guides are novels, so maybe it doesn't matter as much.
Given that your hypothesis is rather outlandish even by the NSA's own slides (which explicitly mention 702 compliance) and would require more Google employees than Page to know and willingly lie about it, I don't see why it should take priority over a hypothesis that actually meets all the Occam wickets.
Not even a few that come to mind immediately?
Any news? my VM is down and I see here that all the nodes are still down:

http://status.ramnode.com/
See also the C~ language that the author of Scintilla created for the purpose of building a retargetable text editor component:

http://www.scintilla.org/SWPortability.html

He wrote his text editor component in C~, then compiled it down to C++, Java and C#. Kind of interesting - I actually used SinkWorld in a product once.
The wording "in connection with" is specifically considered in the article. Also, here is the definition for "Hosted Services" (it's extremely broad):

1.2 What's Included in "Hosted Services". "Hosted Services" include any Atlassian online services products that End User orders, which can include "OnDemand" versions of many Atlassian Software products, the Bitbucket hosting service ("Bitbucket"), and other online services provided by Atlassian. "Hosted Services" always means the version of the Hosted Services as described in Atlassian's then-current product descriptions. End User's detailed rights to use Hosted Services are in Section 3 below.
Sure showed me, huh?

Seriously though, I said that my concern is that the terms seem overly broad. I gave some specific examples. Are you saying they are invalid? What is twisty about expressing my genuine concerns?

Frankly, if you believe the terms aren't overly broad, more power to you. I'm not sure I like the terms, luckily for me IMO I chose GitHub for unrelated reasons. Seems to me their license is a better fit for my comfort level.
Do you truly think that Github does not do the same? Any service needs to modify your data on the backend for the good of the service, including copying it to multiple servers for backups and ensuring uptime during a server failure.

They do not need to distribute your code, i.e. making your repo public - this is part of their service and you grant them the right to do so when you make it public.

Do they need to use your source code - well not explicitly as such, but they do modify it when displaying it back to you - look at any source code page, it is modified source code.

This is all in the auspices of giving you a good service.

Furthermore, any fork network modifies your repo - it is all one repository. So in essence, you are modifying people's repos without them knowing.
Why does Kevin Mitnick know more than the general public on this topic?
How do you use Asana for bug-tracking? We're considering doing so too (We already use Asana for task management, etc), and would love some pointers from someone who's already done so.
Can you explain more about this?

Even if my disk wore off faster, I'd still use full-disk encryption. What if laptop is lost or stolen with financial info in it?
Kickstarter Images & Storyboard Class Data Structure
"I'm a fairly new father (two-year-old son), and I have explored switching careers recently. I am a high school teacher, and I have considered switching to programming."

"There's a lot to be said for stability and security, but there's also a lot to be said for keeping yourself excited to be alive, with your family."

(Absolutely 100% correct. If you are not happy and fulfilled it's not good for your kids or your marriage.)

"Switching jobs and switching careers is a lot different as a parent than as a single person."

Let me say this (knowing a few people who spent their entire working career teaching and are now rotting away in apathy and mediocrity). If you are going to make the switch now is the time to do this. When you have one child who is 2 years old. Once you have more children and they are older the chance of it happening (especially with the golden handcuffs of a tenured teaching job if that is what you have) approaches 0.

The time to act is now. You will also have to decide (because from following the links on your profile it looks like you live in a pretty nice place) whether you are willing to give up that geography for giving yourself possibly a more challenging career path. Obligatory: "And only you can make that decision".

I can tell you this though. If you do something that has a bigger upside (financially and intellectually) than teaching it will open up an entire world of possibilities for you and your family that in the end might be more beneficial. You have to think long term. One day your kids will be older and move on. (And in fact they will change once they go through puberty but that's a different story all together).

My advice just knowing what I know from what you wrote (and what I see after a quick look) is to consider seriously switching careers. You can always fall back on teaching (so we are not talking about the downside risk of turning down admission to Harvard or anything.)
Tech isn't much better at this than Hollywood, which has gone through the VCR age, censorship, and the end of the studio system, as well as the DVD age. Microsoft and Sony fought a format war over the successor to DVDs that hurt both of them (recall that Sony "won"). 20/20 hindsight is awesome.

I will claim to have pointed out that DVD was the last format five years ago: http://loewald.com/blog/?p=464

And, by the way, the point is that innovative indie movies don't make their money at the box office. They play in small numbers of art house cinemas, and then they used to sell DVDs. A lot of cancelled TV shows became phenomena on DVD. You can become a cult show on streaming and not make much money.
Julian Sanchez has some thoughts on this at [1]:

Legally speaking, the analysts don’t have carte blanche. In other words, this isn’t “warrantless wiretapping” so much as “general warrant wiretapping.” They can’t just tap any old call or read any old e-mail they strikes them as “suspicious.” They’ve got to be flagging content for interception because they believe it’s covered by a particular §702 authorization, and observe whatever “targeting procedures” the FISA Court has established for the relevant authorization....

None of that would be too surprising in principle: That’s the whole point of §702! It means analysts get discretion to decide what particular accounts fall under a very broad order. A key question, of course, is just what the checks in the process are. Can an analyst technically (if not legally) plug in any selector to start collecting on and just start getting material? Does anyone check their work before call and e-mail content starts flowing in? How closely are their error rates checked after it does? Again, legally, they don’t have a blank check, but it’s the details of the system architecture that determine whether you’d be able to tell the difference in practice.

[1] http://www.juliansanchez.com/2013/06/15/nadler-and-mueller-o...
See, this is what people like me who have been using exclusively OSS (and FOSS) for years have had to deal with! ;)

P.S. Don't forget to enable SELinux. :)

Edit: To be fair to your co-debater, by using open-source software with minor exceptions here and there (unFree firmware in the kernel, a smattering of non-Free software, patent-protected multimedia drivers, etc.) is in the mind of Free Software activists kind of like saying that you should have strong privacy rights, except perhaps for a little bit of metadata here and there, maybe some quibbling about analysis/capture just to make it easier on everyone. Why be a zealot about one of those but not about the other?

I personally believe people are free to choose what to be activists about but that's the perspective I see.
"... with that comes all the awe & terror of living with Windows."

I had to LOL. Not even any point stating the obvious. That's good writing, can coin quite a phrase, unless thats a quote from somewhere.

On the bigger picture, I donno. I've seen the infinite circular wheel of IT rotate around quite a few times and this overall idea sounds like a rehashed Transmeta marketing message. That didn't turn out so well last time, but maybe the situation is different this time. Probably not, but maybe.
Trail Me Up – StreetView for park trails
Other. Write code without bugs.

(I say this in jest, but only a little.) Think about it...

I know so many programmers who get lazy because they have such good debugging tools (Let me just slam something out there and let the debugger catch it.) I hate this.

If we developers would slow down and think a little more about what we're building, we may find a dramatically decreased need for debugging.

Variable local or global? Right variable name? Should that be a function? How much am I repeating myself? How should the data be structured for its intended uses? What's the best way to handle recursion? Where might memory leak? Where's the best place to do this? Which is the best technology for this need? And most of all: Will the next programmer be able to read this and tell what it's doing before they break it?

Slow down. Plan more. Think deeper. Debug less.
Yes indeed. We must use the energy created by this debacle to push forward with change. Of course, those who do will be said to be in league with the traitors and terrorists.

I should given an honorable mention Freedom Box in my previous post: http://freedomboxfoundation.org/
Is this not already common in certain industries? I've seen plenty of video game terms of service that make you scroll to the bottom before the 'accept' button can be clicked, making all the text at least temporarily visible on the screen. (I recall the World of Warcraft client doing this after every single patch update - no idea if it still does. I'm pretty sure every time I update my PS3 I go through this experience, too.)

That said, one can scroll rather quickly.
I just released my first iOS app, XaoS. Here are some promo codes
XaoS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/xaos/id576120234

FHHX4FLW4MXW JXKA7TL4ERYK MHMW639MXL7Y FXXFTEXWP6TE 3XPEE7A3WT3H M4WLY9AHNRXX NR9ATPK6H4RF WWN6JLMH3343 NF7Y3LH7N3ET FPRA3PXAN349 36XW4H7H7MXR YNPXLN4M6NJJ FMK69PXFMYRX ALWA4XHHPY4E 47HX9KH7W4PK 33TKRWHX334J 3ERAY4L3KPTK JJ6PJAN4NNW4 P3H7JEFLAEHK JHRTJYMMY4KR ME3TRHWTK6K7 JKEEKM7NNEHP N4TNX7XP4YLE 7WHKHEPEMRP4 KX4YWFWNH6LL 3L4HJWRK3RFT 9TTNLEXW9JMH WH6YJKN9394M 46AKPHH7N4RH WNXLNYR3X779 73WKT79FALW9 LWJAFRTM3FJM E3FKXNKATH9E 3XWPJWTRHJ7F FXXWN73T4KYW YL3FWWW4TEAE 9MJNA3WWMTTN 4NPFE3HRFXFY NNTWN7KXJ3HE 4HA4NL66LKFT 7PK7JMJXEFL9 4TRPEPKMFTFF KTKAYWJA993N TW4PLRMFPWML JXAWH4HKYHWL LXMW6H3K64MP J3WXY9KTJNJX LYYTNWNNEF36 AFKRLPPYL3AT
President's personal mobile no.s published online by Anonymous Hackers
Even by stating that you wont be installing the extension to cover your ass, you clearly know you should be reading the terms of service...
Regarding 3), FISA allows, as of the 2008 amendment, a period of 7 days surveillance before obtaining a warrant. Failure to then obtain a warrant means the information obtained cannot be used as evidence (unless "the United States Attorney General believes the information shows threat of death or bodily harm") but that's more than enough time to dig through their email/phone content.
Infographic about cost structure of JSCOnf
For those who don't regularly follow rachelbythebay.com, this post is a Google allegory. I disagree with a couple points.

First, Google really doesn't care as much about education as people think they do. They do love experience. I never graduated high school, and was hired into an SRE position (= programmer writing large-scale sysadmin tools) based on previous work experience. Grades are only useful if you've got nothing else to show off.

Second, if you want employees to be loyal to a company with unusually good perks, taking them fresh out of school is a terrible approach. Many people working here indeed have no real idea what working at non-tech companies is like, and that means they assume every other company is like Google. I have heard stories of employees getting frustrated on some project, leaving to work at (e.g.) a bank or webdev shop, and not realizing until their first day that there's no free food, or gym, or weekly heckling of the CEO. I used to work at a defense contractor, I know what it's like being a programmer employed at a non-tech company, and I don't want to ever go back.

(In other words, Google might get better retention by implementing Rumspringa)

Third, the proprietary parts aren't as pervasive as the article portrays. Our Linux kernel has weird Google-specific interfaces, but they're always in some stage of upstreaming and will eventually be in Linus's trunk. Our RPC system uses the same protobuf rpc-stubs that are generated by the open-source protobuf compiler. Desktops and Laptops run stock {Ubuntu,Windows,MacOS} with a few extra binaries. MapReduce and BigTable were published and inspired dozens of open-source implementations. Many of our Python-based tools have web frontends written with Django. Many systems persist data in MySQL.

When Google engineers avoid particular in-fashion systems such as Rails or MongoDB or node.js, it's not because we're ignorant of them, it's because we think they're not good enough.
Indeed, you can get a general idea of the relative budgets of the CSEC vs. the NSA by comparing their headquarter buildings:

CSEC: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e4/Tilley_Bu...
NSA: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/National_...

Indeed, the CSEC building actually looks much better in that picture than in real life. I see it every day because it's on my commute, and it's actually quite run-down. Mind you, as you said, you can do a lot of damage even with a small amount of money. I also completely agree that Canadians should be deeply concerned about how much of our communications fall under American jurisdiction simply because of the architecture and governance of the Internet.

The NSA is well within its rights, without warrants of any kind and without consulting any Canadian authorities, to intercept virtually all Internet traffic that Canadians produce. Most of it either goes to the States (because most major sites are hosted there), or goes through the States on its way to somewhere else in the world (even elsewhere in Canada).
Ask HN: What is the best way to track a Twitter campaign?
Let's say you partner with someone who has 10,000 followers and they tweet about your site. What is the best way to track this?

A unique URL?
Google Analytics?
Traffic sources?
Pocket TV turns any TV into an Android smart TV
Do you think maybe you could, by sending enough foreign-language spam, push the algorithmic determination of foreignness over 51%?

How about if another ally already possesses or 0wnz another 'hot' (suspicious/tracked) phone, and uses that phone to call another phone of interest, to increase its 'taint'?

I'm also struck by how much this article's description of the progressive process of peeking at already-collected communications using a variety of permissions resembles my speculative interpretation of a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5872125
The Time is Now
Tl;dr algorithms are representations of processes occurring in reality.

That's really all I could understand from this. I would love to hear what would "algorithms being woven into the fabric of the physical world" even mean?
Whoah neat, I have a doppelganger.
I would defiantly use this. I love how fast it works and how clean the interface is.

Quick notes:
- Why required a minimum of 6 letters for a username?
- Defiantly needs an option to make Feed Version the default view (unless it's there and I missed it)
- It seems like Unicode is not supported (http://d.pr/i/Ptwk)

The last two would make me ditch theoldreader for FeedRebel :)
Transmeta's CPUs worked fine, but the market wasn't looking for underpowered mobile processors at the time. They sold off their IP to Intel who rolled it into the Pentium M which was the basis for the Core series.
Any guesses as to how Jira got left off? In my exp it's one of the most popular issue trackers & integrates with other PM tools.
One great way around this is to alternate rounds of sortition with rounds of election:

- You pick 1000 random people to serve as the House of Representatives.
- They elect 100 people from among themselves to serve as the Senate.
- You randomly divide them into 10 person committees.

If you have enough rounds, there are some great effects:

- The election means that only competent or representative people make it through to the next round.
- The sortition makes it so that no one individual or small group is likely to make it all the way to the top.
Above the law: America's worst charities
Rough Road Ahead, but a Robot Driver Takes It in Stride
Of all sites, no ToS on Facebook available?
Does this imply that a personalized canary similar to [1] asserting that no information had been disclosed effectively makes it possible for a company to notify a user promptly (by discontinuing the daily canary)? Or would the court rule that discontinuing the canary is communication, thus requiring the company to continue updating the personalized canary after disclosing information about that person, despite the canary now being a direct lie?

[1] http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt
Well I'm British living in Britain but the extradition laws are such I don't feel safe from US legal processes. Plus there are numerous reasons to tempt me into the US's jurisdiction (for business, conferences or pleasure) so while I don't visit often I wouldn't want to restrict myself from visiting.

There are also non-legal actions that can be taken from insider trading on call patterns of company execs planning mergers to blackmail or straight industrial espionage.
Tech Entrepreneurship in Mississippi
A piece on the current state of the Mississippi Tech Ecosystem.
I had the same thought, it took me a good twenty seconds of clicking around to figure out "What the hell does it do?"