skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
11% said that they had already abstained from using phone, cell phone or e-mail in certain occasions

That's not extrapolated about predictions of the future. That is about the past situation at the time of the poll.

52% said they probably would not use telecommunication for contacts like drug counselors, psychotherapists or marriage counselors because of data retention

That's is how they would react at the present time of the poll, not predictions about the future.

6% believe to receive less communication since the beginning of the data retention

That is a prediction of the future.

So we got data from past, present and future. One is prediction, one is what they would do today, and one is about the past.

Its a common standard for survey. If it has been about voting, the questions would be: What did you vote last time? if it was election today, which party would you vote on? In the next election, who do you think will win?

Past, present and future. If someone want to ignore it, one is always free to wait until election day and tally the votes. We do not actually use the survey data to decide who wins elections. The survey will always be more unreliable than the actually tallied votes. The question one might then ask is why government pay for poll survey, and why they tend to be correct even if they are made from unreliable self-observation of a "few" questioned people. The answer would probably be somewhere in the profession of statisticians, and as Im not one, I don't have it :).
There's the story that ARM at one point took a "pizza oven" using Intel CPU's as heating elements to trade shows back in the early 90's.
If this is the case, then Google's assertion that it's just SFTP seems a bit meaningless.
Platform/Infrastructure Services Comparison Guide
Prosecuting Snowden
Wireless Syncing Finally Works
Hiring an app development agency? Read this first.
"When human beings are scared and feel everything is exposed to the government, we will censor ourselves from free thinking", Ai Weiwei
It saves you the hassle of logging out of all of your accounts, removing cookies, and deleting browser history. It gives you some plausible deniability. But your IP address could be used to link your incognito identity to your real ones.

I recommend using SSH tunneling: "ssh -D 8080 some@vps.org" - be sure to enable remote DNS in your browser to prevent leaking your real IP address through DNS lookups.
Unfortunately I can't stop people from voting this stuff up and there is no way for the majority of us to vote it back down.
Main Core: Is NSA making a list of "unfriendly" Americans?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Core

http://www.christopherketcham.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/The%20Last%20Roundup,%20Radar%20Magazine.pdf
3 surprises me. I don't think leaking should ever be a crime. Making leaking a crime is an invitation for the government to engage in more illegal activities.

Leaking should get you fired, of course. Realistically, it will and you'll be blackballed from working in security forever. I think that's more than enough incentive not to leak unless there is real abuse going on.
Is this most Americans? Yes it is. Americans paid $250 grand for this "Omar, PhD" but their purchase was lost in shipping. It's time to start yelling at a few parcel carriers.
NSA Prism logo is a copyright infringment
No. (Thank the stars for Alex Kozinski).

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130308/13380622263/9th-ci...
Since I am hearing impaired, the two are not even close to being comparable, as one has subtitles (closed captions) for most movies & tv series, the other only offers subtitles in non-English movies.
It's quite sad :|
The idea an sich is good. In light of last week's news however, I'll stick with 1Password.
Old School - Hacking the Game: Electronic Quarterback (for old folks only)
> But hey, all the stuff HN is going nuts about for the past week was all cleared by the FISA court, AFAICT, so the lack of that fig leaf wasn't really what would have pissed off a consistent citizen in 2006, no?

Assuming by "a consistent citizen" you mean the same people "going nuts" on HN, probably not.

But that's not really relevant, now, is it?
Ubuntu needs to ditch the Orange Brown colour. Its the most disgusting thing about Ubuntu. Can't believe they're using it on their Mobile OS.
I'd like to see every single chat app, mail service, or video-chat app being launched from now on offer OTR, ZRTP and PGP, or some other novelty security technology (like Bitmessage), as competitive advantages over the "big ones" like Gmail and Skype. And they need to make them as painless to use as possible, and enabled by default where's the case.
As a UK resident who has tried both I can confirm this. And even with both the selection is still pretty limited. It's frustrating, as since signing up to spotify a couple of years ago, I no longer buy CDs, yet (in the UK at least) there is no comparable service for films and TV shows.
You're interneting wrong. Of course we can't give official links pointing to where this is policy, that's the point of the policy! But from the information we've gathered so far it very much appears to be the case that companies are forced to deny getting requests from the government, not just be silent.

And don't bother trying to work out how the law allows this, we're not even allowed to know what some of the laws even are.
I have this novel on my bedside table; is it worth the read?
Well, yes and no. They'll have to basically be staring at you for the duration of the video - which is somewhat normal in one-on-one conversations, but sticks out much more in group settings.
We must always remember how rare terrorists are, and what that means for any test you apply to a person.

You have a test that flags terrorists 99% of the time, and also flags innocent people 1% of the time. The test flags a person. What are the odds that this person is a terrorist?

Answer: roughly one in a million, depending exactly on the terrorist:non-terrorist ratio in your sample population. Since there are millions of normal people for each terrorist, a small false positive rate still grabs so many people as to make the test nearly useless.

And of course it goes well beyond this. Since actual terrorists are so rare, you can never confidently state that a test will flag terrorists 99% of the time. You can easily measure the false positive rate, but it's basically impossible to measure the true positive rate with any accuracy. You can guess and extrapolate, but when it comes to actually measuring performance in the real world, you'll have a very difficult time distinguishing between a test that flags 99% of terrorists, and a test that flags 1% of terrorists.
Ask HN: Who is the best web host outside the US?
With everything going down lately with the NSA, I'm sure we are all getting a little anxious about our data sitting on US servers (especially if you are not a US citizen and therefore have no rights).

Who would you host your website with, or your server with? I'd love to hear everyone's recommendations.
Exactly. Border agents have a list of people arriving in advance of their arrival. Flight manifests, if nothing else.
The blog post doesn't say it's an either-or question. It says that, given that Mozilla has limited resources, we think it is more effective to focus those resources on changing the law to benefit the user rather than trying to fix just Persona by moving it to another country.

If we had unlimited resources than we'd be able to do both, but the post goes on to explain why that wouldn't be effective anyway.

(Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla in a different department than the Persona team.)
The obvious counterpoint to your last question is "Why shouldn't we punish our intelligence agencies just because we don't hold our elected officials accountable."

Two rights don't make a wrong, and that argument is just as specious as those who argue that "Well there are already infringements on the second amendment, why shouldn't there be infringements on the fourth?" Logical fallacies notwithstanding, the real question is why don't we hold more elected officials and their appointees accountable? Because it is they who we entrust to police themselves.

The problem is that there are too few punishments meted out, and if we continue to allow our elected officials and their appointees to do what they like without fear of reprisal, it can only get worse.
The reason Nelson Mandela and the whole ANC party who fought apartheid were on the no fly list is because they were labelled as a terrorist group. Nobody bothered to adjust this until a couple of embarrassing moments like this. It is kind of funny that the apartheid government were never denied entry to any country, yet the people fighting an oppressive government were labelled as terrorist. It is also surprising that the countries that helped the ANC were so called communist countries, the world seems more like the Soprano's than countries guided by principles, love and life.
Using the ShowcaseView
MongoDB reduce function for complex objects
Astrophotography with the camera board
The fellow had been in the country for years. If he hadn't crossed the border he would now have his PhD, and would be doing what he had been doing before. No one is safer because they turned him away at the border.

It's either a false positive (that's most likely, considering how few terrorists there actually are), or a subtle hint to discourage his associates from ... doing things.
A Raspberry Pi lab in rural Ghana
This is great if you are stuck somewhere needing to change something. I really like bitbucket, about the only thing I miss on their site is a "gist" like functionality.
The content in this post is in the section titled 'SSL on CloudFlare'. The text leading up to that is (at best) fluff and incorrect in parts.
I find the "some computer" comment a bit odd, because Nelson Mandela most certainly did have ties to terrorist groups. He co-founded one.

This is not a swipe against Mandela in any way. It's just an example that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, and how rigid systems can end up giving you politically inconvenient results.

If you make a blanket rule that people with ties to terrorism cannot enter the country, then you can end up "correctly" denying entry to Nobel Peace Prize winners.
Self-taught vs formal education in programming
On the American side there is a very special awareness of England. (We are generally ignorant enough to not understand the difference between the UK and England.)

That relationship is that you're the goto example of tyranny worth rebelling against. Among politically active Republicans that I know, you're also a good source of statistics showing that implementing gun control increases the crime rate. (Never mind the fact that you changed how you collect statistics to include more crimes in your statistics, the NRA loves the fact that you implemented gun control and crime rates went up.)
I know, it's not a true "hack", but we sure thought we we're hacking in our own little way back then. I'm trying to find a video clip of this. I might just end up buying one from eBay and posting my own! Take care, Henry
Although it has taken disastrously longer than desired, my company is still working on http://parley.co

The project has changed somewhat since we posted the outline[1]; basically we're focusing on email only to start (instead of email/IM) and we'll be a service that sits on top of your existing email inbox (instead of a standalone email service). We'll be releasing a [possibly paid] beta by the end of July.

1. http://parley.co/outline.html
a 'show hn' page might be a good idea. It could go right next to 'ask'.
I didn't know if they used git or hg, and I wasn't necessarily having a go at either. The poster obviously thought that there was less friction to an online edit, so you have to ask yourself why that is?

Perhaps they don't like fiddling about on the command line, their IDE is too klunky, file managment is a pain, their version control interface is convulted, or they are not sitting at their computer with their codebase - who knows!

Either way they appear to find it easier that way.
> Civil Liberties Groups Are Ganging Up on NSA

That's a very odd turn of phrase. The NSA is a multi-billion dollar behemoth whereas civil liberty groups are just social gadflys.
Somewhat related: I hate entering a date by using two (credit card expiration) or three (date of birth, etc) different drop-downs.
Ask HN: Where do you find your designers?
We're looking for a designer to do our main website Our startup is still in development process, so we want to find a freelancer who is discrete and will sign an NDA, but most of all we want someone very talented who can create a stunning design!

Where do you guys go for designers?
You do realize that your TN status is only for a single employer, right? You must obtain independent TN status for each employer you work for. Showing an old TN has no bearing on your eligibility to work for someone else - you must reapply.

Not trying to scare you, just noting that I have had at least one friend on TN's who tried to bridge their status without filing a proper change in status ( ie. to B-2 as soon as you quit/are let go from your old employer, to be eligible to stay without packing up your apartment) and were banned from re-entry for 2 years.

I have had several TN's over the past 16 years and the only trouble I have had was primary border guard overreach once or twice (they felt I had been in the USA long enough, arbitrarily. Secondary review fixed that.)
Or for DHS to have a process of checks run on every person scheduled to arrive. I could even be part of a batch process for each flight, or for each day. Border agents know who is arriving through flight manifests.
Oculus Rift goes HD: our first look at virtual reality in 1080p
LFI vulnerability in Whatsapp messenger media server - The Hacker News
>1. Googlers have access to almost all source code.

So what. The world has access to the Linux source code. If I told you there was code in there that sent every byte written to disk to some external entity could you find it? Even if it was clear enough for you to find it, you'd have to be looking for it.

Further, you said yourself that googlers have access to almost all source code. How do you know something else isn't injected in before deployment. Honestly, the vast majority of googlers would have no idea and no way to have any idea if something like this were going on. Especially if people's jobs/freedom depending on no one knowing.
For most use cases, current hardware is sufficient. This will have a profound effect on wearable devices as we use exponential improvement to make devices smaller and more battery efficient rather than faster. This is exactly what Intel and Apple did with the new Macbook Air. They made it slightly faster, but much more power efficient.

If you look into the future and imagine that every 1.5 years Google Glass will half in size instead of getting faster, it doesn't take the long before it's the size of a dime (~4.5 years).

That's why Glass matters: it's just the beginning.

Short blog on Medium about this: https://medium.com/adventures-in-consumer-technology/74c201b...
It seems to me as though an interim solution would be to partner with organizations in other countries to set up Persona fallbacks there. Key to this is that it would need to be a partnership with an entity local to the nation where the server is stored: Mozilla should not run these services itself, for the reasons listed in Mozilla's own post.

Has this option been explored, or at least considered?
"What legitimate reasons are you applying to justify treatment of any or every person on the planet as potential threat"

Because they are? Approximately zero risk, true, but slightly over zero. Its a pretty simple straightforward game theory problem. Whats the total aggregate sum of the trouble you'll get into by letting 1 out of 100 million terrorist thru, vs simply stamping "denied national security" on any random visa and stonewalling? In fact the guy who dared complain about it is probably now on some secret NSA list, and perhaps also now on the no-fly list. That'll show people what happens to complainers, hopefully that prof never has to fly anywhere again for the rest of his life... and probably his families lives, too.

Note, I'm not supporting an unjust system, just explaining how it works from a game theory perspective. I don't see why any individual inspector would ever permit a visa unless there's some kind of piecework payment system or a really good non-retribution system (anonymity?). If a terrorist ever got past them, there would be demands for punishment. Therefore "the system" is going to select for inspectors who are either reckless, careless, actively working against the interests of the USA... None of which will probably have ideal outcomes.
Oh that's true, but I think the problem was still an automated one. No person actually looked at Nelson Mandela's file and decided that he should be denied access to the USA.
Drones for social good?
I agree. I asked that last question because I doubt the American public these days. The politicians that enabled these fiascos deserve every bit the same punishment as the organization(s) that overstepped their proper bounds. I hope both are punished. But at the end of the day, I doubt that either will get what they deserve.
Please indicate what is incorrect and I will ask the CEO to correct.
Student visas (F1 and J1) are valid only so long as you do not have 'immigrant intent' (as compared to, say, an H-1B, which doesn't have this requirement). Marrying an American (even in another country) can suggest to the DHS that you may actually intend to immigrate to the US after all. At that point, though, you have other options (can apply to be sponsored for a green card by your spouse).

I've never heard of student visa problems caused by getting married to a non-American, which seems to be what happened in the case discussed in the OP.
Ask HN: Which Constitutional amendments are being violated by PRISM?
Anyone know off the top of their head?
That's why I like HN - you get useful information instead of likes. Sometimes, at least.
I have done that plenty of times. As long as you do it where there are witnesses and you don't do anything else...
As an immigrant in the US, watching HN lately has been enlightening. Absolutely none of this is new- and it's also almost entirely unrelated to PRISM. Despite the fact that tech companies have been struggling with insane visa rules for years, it's only now that we start posting about individual injustices, now that we can file it under the banner of "government bad"?
Does the USA own the internet?
I always thought the internet was not owned by ANYONE, however with the news of the NSA stuff I have been performing tracert's at my end and I notice that EVERYTHING passes through the USA. So if the USA was to shut off the internet at their end, would it disrupt everything globally?

For example if I connect to a server in France, for some reason that goes through the West Coast USA...
You want Google to penalise web sites that push ads aggressively?

Right.
I host with TSOhost in the UK, they are absolutely awesome.
3 Things I May Have Done Right
If Mobile Safari is a bad mobile browser, what qualifies as a good one?
While I haven't truly thought about it much, I guess my definition of serious would coincide with what government calls a felony.

"What about fraud? Not paying taxes?"

Maybe I'm just naive but I don't think the average person walks around conspiring to commit fraud but is discouraged by the fact they could go to jail if caught.

As for the taxes issue, in this scenario, taxes would most likely decrease since there would be no big security machine (DoD, DHS, NSA, FBI, CIA) to feed, or at least budgets would be slashed. On top of that, there could be systems put into place that automate the taxes and make the current way of doing taxes a thing of the past. The lower taxes and the automated system could make it easy to pay taxes as well as harder to avoid paying taxes.
What do you mean by "history shows us otherwise?" Are you saying that all power structures created by humans have continued to rule indefinitely? History actually shows us the opposite, unless I misunderstood what you meant. Genuinely curious.
I'm not an expert here but it looks like IBM is back up to shipping 5.5Ghz chips in the EC12 as of December 2012. Are these still POWER6 chips as an option or fixed and faster POWER7?

PDF Redbook reference: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg248050.pdf
You mean a felony in the way that assassinating people is against US and international law, it's illegal to hold someone more than 24 hours without charging them and so on? I'm not sure how much laws like that matter at this point.
You might be right, but I have the feeling that something other is at play here too. The PRISM scandal has raised awareness and interest about these things and we are now seeing a suddenly released glut of stuff like this working its way through the system. These things are happening all the time, but I get the feeling that up until now only US-foreigners were aware of the extent of it.
This particular case, if true, may have nothing to do with PRISM. A simple search of communications between the person and only her US contacts would probably result in a small amount of data to search, which could probably be obtained by DHS or CBP via the providers directly.
I imagine a person probably did look at his file and decide (at least implicitly, as part of labeling him as affiliated with a terror group) that he shouldn't be admitted to the USA. Of course, this happened decades beforehand.
"But when you get a black mark against you"

There are better, more accurate literary and historical analogies than "black marks". Things like yellow stars, scarlet letters, that kind of thing. aka reason number 235135 not to be proud to be an American.
I don't like having to enter a date using a specific format like 'mm/dd/yyyy' (as a string, the slashes or dots of course being mandatory as well.) There are libraries whose entire purpose for being is turning datelike strings into timestamps, and anything that doesn't parse with strtotime (or what have you) can just return an error.

There's really no reason i can think of why you can't just enter any number of natural language strings other than laziness on the part of the programmers.
I almost wish they didn't do this so soon. Because now the administration probably won't declassify anything else for fear of getting sued over it. I think they should've waited a little more for more leaks to come out of the Guardian and then the public outrage to force them to declassify more. And then gang up on them in full force.

I'm also awaiting for the PRISM lawsuit, which seems a lot more important than the phone records one, to me.
Wow! This really saddens me. But I experienced something similar. When I got married a couple of years ago (in India) I really wanted my one cousins (who I was really close to) to come to my wedding. Unfortunately, his lawyers advised him no to come stating that given the current state of affairs, his reentry to US might be jeopardized. This is in spite of the fact that he had lived in US for over a decade and paid huge taxes during that time.
I help people who are new to computers or non-computer-savvy build their own PC's from components to save them getting shafted by companies that sell PC's wholly.
But the current system, with all of the "security" it provides, already has a handful of really really bad people that commit crimes. So why should I give up freedoms to try and stop these bad people when despite everything, crime still happens?
Ask yourself, are you going to put in the same amount of design and content work into the mobile site as the main site?

Yes? Anyone not doing that in 2013 is deluded- mobile browsing figures are huge and ever increasing. I can forsee a situation where people design for mobile first, not one where they ignore it entirely.
This deceptively little tidbit of change is probably the most important news on frontpage right now.