skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nixon's goon squads were reprehensible, but they involved a small number of actors and a small number of actions. It's not strictly incorrect to refer to those actors as "the government," but it's a little misleading. Nixon didn't brief congress on his burglary program. It wasn't a matter of official policy. When these activities were brought to light, the citizens were the first to know. The bulk of "the government" was just as shocked as we were. No one seriously tried to defend the actions as somehow legal because of a state of national emergency.

The current official policy, which has spanned at least two and possibly three presidential administrations, is to use a huge network of government employees and private sector labor working together to spy on virtually every single person in the country, continuously, for years. And this time, it's been sort of an open secret, endorsed and defended as legal from the highest levels, and known to Senators and rank-and-file FBI agents alike. We, the ordinary citizens, were the last to know.

I think it's much more accurate to describe the current surveillance as an activity of "the government," and I think the scale, the audacity, the hubris involved makes it clear that an awful lot of "the government" views the fourth amendment as an outdated relic that must be stamped out or revised away into meaninglessness.

I think the difference between the two examples is extreme and obvious. They are actually more different than they are alike.
It's faster for me to hit cmd+t/f/enter to bring up Facebook (people still use the bookmarks bar?) But I respect the principle of designing my life.

For me it's about having on/off time. There's nothing wrong with scanning Facebook/twitter/HackerNews, but I find myself mindlessly going there, especially in times of frustration or when I'm stuck on something. Basically it weakens my ability to really focus on hard problems. For me the best solution is something like the stayfocusd chrome plugin. It simply makes you aware when you're on one if those sites.
Few hiring officers read resumes.

What is your opinion about cover letters?
Thank you, glad you like it.

Yes, you can set the default view to be the feed version. Currently it is at a feed level, simply click on the settings icon for the feed and change the last option Story/Article view to always show the feed version.

Will definitely fix the Unicode issue.
Dynamic Scope and Resource Management in Clojure
Catch-22.
The White Cliffs – From Deal to Dover Coastal Walk
I've been using Phabricator a lot recently, and it's ace. We started using it because we wanted to start doing code review, and the task tracking came along 'for free'. It's nice & lightweight (in terms of UI), is usable from the commandline via the arcanist tool, and integrates well with the other Phabricator tools.

Downsides? The website's sense of humour is irritating if it doesn't click with you. You have to host it yourself, which can be about a morning of setup. The documentation can be a little bit sparse. But it's the first bug tracking/developer workflow tool I've used that I've actually liked. And I like it a lot.
I'm a PM in digital advertising and normally I wouldn't work with code - I largely build one-offs with vendors so issues/bugs and deliverables - Sifter is by far the best I've used. It does one thing and it does it really really well, has a negligible learning curve, and looks pretty - oh, and it's cheap.

https://sifterapp.com/

Not that there's a reason why it wouldn't be used with code, just a disclaimer.
More importantly, Atlassian is further constrained by the confidentiality clause (section 8) of its End User Agreement [1].

[1] http://www.atlassian.com/end-user-agreement/
None the less, a really interesting read.
I don't follow any of this. I don't know what warrant canaries have to do with the fictitious belief that NSLs compel companies to lie.
After all, if a moron such as myself can do it, genius such as yours should have absolutely no problem using unix-like systems.

Saying things like this hurts the quality of your post and may not be HN-worthy. The rest of your post was good enough to make your point.

(edit: formatting)
The only problems I've had with the admin is that it's very model based, while my user actions don't neccesarily reflect specific models.

If you want bootstrap BTW, this is a dropin addon https://github.com/riccardo-forina/django-admin-bootstrapped
On a extremely big picture 50000 foot level, there's the windows model where you put everything into one piece of software and you run that one piece of software on one server (real or virtual). Its philosophically anti-windows to have more than one piece of software installed per OS. So you want a "something" and a database server, well now you need two installs / licenses / hardware / images / admins / whatever not just one. And in windows philosophy you never run user stuff on a server anyway so right there you may have issues with a "user" app and a "server" db system requiring two systems.

Its hardly all peaches and unicorns on the unix side either. Seriously, you're going to install 17 completely separate, different versions of "magic embedded mysql" or whatever, and have no way to do joins across DB servers or system wide DB backup system? Crazy talk. Why not have every programmer write their own homemade strcmp() complete with different buffer overflow bugs on each version... So the whole concept of a "private" database violates quite a few unix philosophy principles. Handling multiple versions of DBs across different distros is a puzzler for the devs rather than just including one version and calling it good.

The whole mess from the 100K standpoint is DBs and DB apps are too new, too much technical churn, too much incompatibility. For example, why are you installing a new DB and replacing all your API code if all you want is a different engine perhaps (or perhaps not) better suited to your workload? Its conceptually like switching your whole infrastructure to a new word processor in 1985.
I think he means in terms of of understanding, not knowledge.
What a classy comment, Jacques.
Frankly I have very little sympathy that their excuse amounts to "we spent too much money on stupid things and now we are broke."
Fuck em.
We don't do work like that.
Have you seen this: https://arkos.io/
Assembla (http://blog.assembla.com/assemblablog/tabid/12618/bid/98335/...)
I immediately had that thought, but he knows more than "the general public", he might not know more than "informed people on the internet".

Still a waste of time.
I'm curious about 'field helpers,' can you point to a page or briefly describe the difference?
That phrase says nothing about root or xterm and I think you're being misleading by attempting to paraphrase it that way though I think I see how you got there. That's one possible interpretation of it (though not one Greenwald has backed), but it's equally possible, given the assertions of Snowden in the video with the article (which we now know to be true at least for phone calls), that it was an attempt to describe the experience of an analyst using such a system, requesting full access to a user's account, and getting it without interacting with google staff (after what delay we don't know), possibly without any legal paperwork other than making the request. We simply don't know enough details to be able to describe the process any better, we don't even know all the possible sources of intel for it.

Since Greenwald provided the sources for his statement and the article clearly indicates which quotes are attribution and which bits are commentary I didn't interpret it the way you did, and do think it's highly misleading to characterise this as a fundamental flaw in the article, or as something the guardian has 'walked back' - the guardian is not a monolithic entity and features content from all sorts of contradictory viewpoints. The writer wasn't clueless about technology necessarily - remember this sort of writing goes through many hands on the way to publication, and attempts to synthesise knowledge from various sources for a non-technical audience, while not revealing damaging details which could leave them open to prosecution. That process is going to result in text which is not as precise or illuminating as we or the writer would like.

So I'm all for correcting reporters like Greenwald where they over-reach or imply too much, and I do think he should have clarified this particular detail which has been left very vague, but we should clarify or correct, not attack and patronise, reporters who don't specify technical details, and bear in mind that technical questions of mechanism are not the only story here; there are far more important legal and ethical questions.
Yes but a "long way off" is most likely in our lifetime. Great news indeed!
Also note the Google statement from the story:

> In a statement, Google said: "Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data."

A backdoor pretty much implies unfettered (as well as clandestine) access - a limited-privileges backdoor is conceivable, but unlikely. Note that the Guardian didn't say 'here's a weaselly statement that doesn't deny what we're alleging' - it said 'here's a denial of what we are alleging'.
Bug trackers are more fully featured project management tools these days. We use Fog Bugz and some of our non-coders are using it to record what they're working on/accomplishing.
Ask HN: NSA SSL Private Keys?
So we know that the NSA are capturing the majority of internet traffic passing through the USA, currently it's a bit more vage on how much access they have to the data/servers of Facebook, Google, Twitter etc...

And a high percentage of the internet traffic these days it SSL encrypted, especially the more interesting traffic.

So what's the chance that the NSA have Google's, Facebook's Private SSL keys? and their actually decrypting the mirrored internet traffic that we know their capturing?
Context is everything here. There may be a number of companies that fit the pattern, and she could be speaking hypothetically, but Rachel worked at Google and has an axe to grind.
Just curious, why is Mongo not good enough or do you just mean as opposed to BigTable?
Ask HN: Beside C language Arrays and Pointers, what else?
I am currently learning C language and I have spent my time over and over studying Arrays and Pointers.
Now, I would like to study other advanced concepts. Please send my links or pointers to other advanced concepts. I would very much prefer pdf version.
My assumption is based on the author's previous writings. While it can be applied to many companies, google is the best fit for companies she has talked about.
A Flag Day application of Cicada Design Principle
Ride the Hashtag, Don’t Create it.
This is a nice idea. I would love to see these kind of agreements get commoditized and standardized, so that a new service can just check a bunch of boxes to generate their terms, and we can even represent the agreement in a machine readable standard way.
Steve, great post, but you know that Ghostery's function is a part of Adblock Plus? Just add EasyList and EasyPrivacy and disable Fanboy's.

The company that makes Ghostery is cool but alas, it's nice to keep bloat away from the browser. I'd also recommend checking out Firefox Aurora or Nightly instead of Iceweasel.
Is really that impractical to use stationary WiMax access points instead?

Last time I checked range was around 30 miles, couple of stations will blanket a good area without the hassle these balloons bring (you need to pick them and relaunch every couple of weeks, etc...).
For every different tree type i see ,
A searching tree i make it be,
The fruit u see ; are like a key,
i see u on the leaf nodes be.
An Algo by the Almighty.

(tl;dr ) Whenever i see a real tree it looks to me like a specialized tree data structure implemented by the Almighty.

Also i tried to add little programming puns in my pseudo enigma styled poem thing.
>The fact that people share their most private information with Google voluntarily actually makes it worse.

You can choose not to give your information to Google or Facebook. That people have decided to do it anyway, says more about people than it does about those companies.

When you have a central authority (government), you can't opt-out, without being subjected punitive measures. Google can't put you in jail or fine you for failing to use their search engine, or their email service.
Bootstrap is ideal for internal admin interfaces
It is only her impression. :)
Oh bravo. Downvoted me instead of engaging.
LLVM/Clang uses it for patch reviews. It seems to integrate nicely with their mailing lists.
I just mean whatever he happens to find shallow. I can't read his mind, I can only speculate. It might be joining the football team. It might be doing donuts in the parking lot. It might be getting drunk at a party and having his first sexual experience. It might be shopping for cool clothing. It might be riding a skateboard. It might be skipping class, getting high, and failing the 10-point math quiz after recess. It might be joining student council. There are hundreds of things to do as a teenager that really have not much at all to do with intellectual activity, but that nevertheless require subtlety and nuance.
Is there any chance that the people would ever vote for the multitude of these positions? There's probably (I'm not a US citizen) hundreds of federal bureaus. The people can't even bother to vote in the current federal elections.

Also, would the people even know better? Who even knows what the director of the FBI really does, what is the concrete executive power that he or she wields?
I agree, but this still will not make a bug tracker superfluous---if only for tracking change requests.
The Offline Glass
It's a very nice idea, if you have time, you could aim to incorporate other modern tools: robust statistics (trimmed means etc.), effect sizes, confidence intervals
SCO v. IBM Is Officially Reopened
This article reads like the author is just crying about the shutdown of Google Reader.
We have BigTable and protobufs and real MapReduce, so there's no reason to use MongoDB with its JSON storage and Javascript-based mapReduce() function. It's like comparing CSV to SQLite.
No matter how much "free" software you will still be tracked. The government has access to all the data you use on their internet via service providers as well as the internet hubs.

Besides the government the data that the companies collect is used to improve their software, so is that really bad? I agree I do not like being snooped on, but the government is the only body I really have any interest in because it is in the constitution not to snoop on me without cause, the company (usually) doesn't provide such assurances/promises.
A couple of thoughts (including some commentary on the article itself- sorry I couldn't help it).

The central idea of this article, which is that slowing DVD sales due to the explosion of streaming options are slashing profit margins, is fascinating to me primarily due to the relative absence of blame-shifting onto 'piracy.' There was a mention of it, but it seems Hollywood has finally moved past the 'Piracy is causing all our woes, DMCADMCADMCA' delusions of the late 90s/early 2000s. As a Slashdotter from back in the day that saw such scolding played out on the front page I find it strange (yet optimistic) that they finally saw the real writing on the wall.

However, even though the central conceit of the article is interesting to me I find the language just goddamned terrible. I guess if you're looking for properly-flavored industry news then sentences like "[h]is first picture was the tentpole smash Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and he already had three television shows on the air" and "[m]ore recently, he released the smash Identity Thief, with Melissa McCarthy and Jason Bateman" are right up your alley. I'm suprised the author didn't describe some upcoming SMASH deal as BOFFO.
> That people have decided to do it anyway, says more about people than it does about those companies.

Well, yes, but if this is a result of some common form of human weakness, Google is exploiting that weakness. Obviously, anyone seeking power will try to exploit whatever weakness they can find in those they try to gain power over. Both sides of the equation are "natural". It is therefore the government's duty to try and prevent that.
This is what I use it for, almost exclusively, and it works great for that purpose.
Super idea really easy signup too I loved how fast we can just get started with using it,

Keep it running and good luck
Absolutely. How many people do a survey of these types of tools, let alone work deeply enough with a number of them to know the warts?

I've been in the position to choose bug trackers for two companies I've worked for, and I still don't feel competent to vote.
I voted for Google Code because even if it's not the most full-featured tracker, it's the one with which I get non-techie users to actually report issues.

There are no complicated required fields, just name and description, and it mostly doesn't require registration or login because most people are already logged into some Google service. This means that users only need to write their problem and press a button, so they actually do it instead of being scared away by the interface, which is what happened to me with other trackers.
The Best Free Ways to Send Encrypted Email and Secure Messages
Some benefits over stationary towers is that you can easily move the balloons based on different things like natural disasters, political unrest or even to just improve bandwidth under heavy load.
Bugs are inevitable. No matter how much you think about the problem, there will always be things that slip between the cracks.
Nit: I know we like to be all anti-intellectual here at HN, but Rachel's claim that "having a PhD" correlates strongly with "lacking the ability for independence of thought or action" is pretty ridiculous. Undergraduate and masters programs may be fairly structured, but once you get into a PhD program you are shockingly, horrifyingly alone. Those without the ability to act, plan, or motivate themselves independently do not make it through the 4-8 year (depending on your domain) process. Very occasionally, you'll find an advisor or a lab that will hold your hand through the entire multi-year process, but those experiences are a rarity.
I stopped buying movies and going to the movies for the same three reasons:
1. The often unskippable advertisements, anti-piracy warnings and FBI warnings on Blurays.
2. Most movies now have 30 mins of advertisements before them in theatres.
3. Hollywood isn't making good films anymore.

In other words, Hollywood is making shit products. They're just surprised that we're not buying them anymore.
Most of it also applies to Microsoft, the proprietary angle even more than Google.
I suspect this is too specific to the author. If I find out a way to sleep better, it doesn't mean everybody in the world will follow the same. Nevertheless, good idea.
For Brackets, I went with something that's not a regex because I wanted certain parts of the string to be "special":

http://www.blueskyonmars.com/2013/03/26/brackets-quick-open-...

But, I'll definitely look up a couple of the links that people have posted here about some other algorithms (Smith-Waterman, for example).
The article is pretty shallow in the sense that it just casually glosses over a few key characteristics that make the server/datacenter space an interesting battlefield for the current round of architecture wars.

It will be an interesting next couple of years. Intel didn't sit on their hands with this one, like they did with the mobile market. They saw the potential for ARM SoCs, using a large number of smaller/lighter cores to take market share in things like simple web servers or hosting static data. Their response was their Atom based "Centerton" which is cannibalizing their own Xeon line.

As for more CPU performance intensive tasks, ARM has yet to prove itself in the performance/watt arena, especially in the 64-bit realm of server features, like error correcting code or RAS. Most sys admins building infrastructure like to play things safe, since they have to live with their decisions for years.

It seems like ARMs biggest advantage will be price, and the SoC business model of custom tailoring silicon for a customer's needs.
Black Girls CODE - Summer of CODE 2013 - The Remix
They have a guide (http://asana.com/guide/videos/bug-tracking) in their help pages about it. I use it too, but not their way. I don’t have a “Bugs” project. I have a “Bug” tag that set to bugs in different projects. If you already have a projects structure that works for you and can hold issues like bugs, this might work better.
Thank you, would appreciate if you could spread the word.
Packing for a 6 months trip
Ramnode VMs, client DB, and website compromised due to 0day
That's assuming that this post is linked to him/her and comes back to haunt later.
To avoid the downvotes acknowledge that the article already declares the purpose and ask for more details. As it is you come across as not having read it, but opining negatively.

To your question - in my case I had a server returning XML/JSON output and on the client side I needed to parse the output and convert it into an object model, collect changes and ship the. Back to the server. That was a lot of boiler-plate code we ended up repeating in java, C#, javascript, and C++. We used C++ version in lieu of Objective C and it was a pain with memory management mismatch.
Even if the scandal was a side effect of Chinese spying (a speculation at this time), what matters is that this broad surveillance is threatening democracy.

I think Snowden has chosen the best place to go. He wouldn't be safe anywhere in Europe. Likely not even in Iceland, where there is a US military base. The US has entered in Mexico and other countries to capture suspects without authorization. I bet they would do the same in Iceland, despite the political cost, but not in Hong Kong.
I saw that same show and I was similarly disappointed with it. However, my impression was that all of the guests and Maher himself were under-informed. Possibly even misinformed because there were echoes of talking points "Snowden is neither a hero nor a traitor." "Hong Kong is, after-all, China," "Snowden is delusional," "Snowden is a publicity seeker" etc.

Last week, when the story first broke, Maher was ambivalent about it and he justified his ambivalence by focusing on nuclear weapons - as in because nukes can kill so many people the risk is just too great so we need to do everything and anything to stop them.

Obviously he didn't know enough about the situation to understand that dirty bombs are the only nukes that it is even plausible to consider being used by terrorists (rather than foreign governments) and that dirty bombs are all about the dirty and not so much the bomb - fallout over a couple of city blocks and not an explosion that could destroy a city hiroshima style. Still enough to kill hundreds, maybe thousands if an attacker gets everything just right, but not the existential threat that obliterating Manhattan would be.

I'd like to see Greenwald on his show, Greenwald did a pretty good job of calling Maher on his BS regarding the arab spring the last time he was on there. Since he's right in the middle of this story I'm sure he'd do even better.

The only "liberal" group I'm particularly disillusioned with is mediaite - everything I've seen from them on the topic has been despicably underhanded apologisms.
Drug Hacking: Why the war on drugs has been made redundant
Long Term Trends for Capitalism