skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thorbjorn Jagland, said that members this year took a more practical approach in their unanimous vote for President Obama.

“It’s important for the committee to recognize people who are struggling and idealistic,” Mr. Jagland said in an interview after the prize was announced, “but we cannot do that every year. We must from time to time go into the realm of realpolitik. It is always a mix of idealism and realpolitik that can change the world.”

But Mr. Jagland seemed to savor the risk. He said no one could deny that “the international climate” had suddenly improved, and that Mr. Obama was the main reason.

Of the president’s future, he said: “There is great potential. But it depends on how the other political leaders respond. If they respond negatively, one might have to say he failed. But at least we want to embrace the message that he stands for.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/10/world/10oslo.html
I'm willing to state my support for him too - in fact, I view him as a hero. I'm just a boring guy surfing the Internet. I'm more concerned with the overall erosion of our privacy than this specific incident. I'm certainly not a terrorist or even an anarchist, but my own government is slowly turning my sentiment against the country in which I was born and raised.
According to your quiz, I have nothing to hide, but I'm still a strong privacy advocate. Privacy to me is all about context and understanding the consequences of your actions. If I run naked through Times Square, I shouldn't have any reasonable expectation of physical privacy, but if I whisper to a friend I would. Either way the important factor in both scenarios is that your expectation of privacy aligns with reality.

As for context, specifically with regards to prism, if I dial a wrong number that happens to belong to a terrorist, I may find myself guilty by association, with the burden of proof of innocence in my own hands. Quickly hanging up and dialing a similar number after might not be sufficient defense since that could be a strategy terrorists use to cover their tracks.
So the watchman watches the watchmen. Interesting.
They don't have phasers that can be set on stun either.

There are chemicals, of course, that can cause loss of consciousness, but any that causes loss long enough to be effective against the force of 400 people hiding in urban setting, would kill most of the civilians. It's not random that when the human is anesthetized it is done in controlled setting by an experienced doctor with very precise mixture of chemicals - it is very dangerous to do it and exceeding dosage could be lethal or cause permanent harm. Military weapon can not adhere to such dose requirements so it will be either ineffective or extremely dangerous.

Read this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostage_crisis

This was the easiest setting - everybody in one enclosed building and civilians can be treated within minutes after the attack is done. Imagine doing this in a complex urban setting, with multiple buildings, with 10 times as much enemies, where both enemy and civilians can be anywhere. It's just impossible to do without killing everybody and leaving the place a chemical wasteland.

And, of course, on top of that, if US military does it once, Talibans get gas masks. But civilians would not, so the only effect would be killing civilians.
Can someone with deep knowledge about Waze or the market explain why it would be worth $1.3B? It seems to have okay but far from insane traction. The technology seems less than trivial but at google scale shouldn't be that hard to develop in house. Once developed, it can simply be built into Google Maps and get overnight traction. As such, using Waze to me seems like a hack anyway.
Where does running traffic via a VPN [0] come into this?

Does that count as HTTPS, or are they referring to 'SITE.COM' having an HTTPS certificate?

Is it possible to use Tor and a VPN together?

[0] e.g. I use https://ipredator.se
Wasn't one of the PirateBay guys hiding in some godforsaken village, and one day he was quickly sold to Sweden by the local (not exactly champions-of-democracy) authorities?

HK is a strange land, but it's not lawless and has enough political peculiarities to be a good bet -- maybe not as good as Iceland (I don't understand why he didn't he go there in the first place, tbh) but one of the best. It certainly beats a windowless room in an Ecuadorean embassy.
Now this will be the test for the "I have nothing to hide" philosophy.

a) Everything is legal and backed by the population, then the NSA didn't have anything to hide.

b) The NSAs concedes that some people and organizations have a legitimate interest in some privacy.
If someone doesn't want to click: It's a css 3d animated quiz with scores and covers questions about whether any browser loads a ressource like css, png or js-file or iframe under certain corner case szenarios (like writing a comment using inline script and the browser having a prefetcher with preparsing)
The whole article rings true with my personal experiences, but I'd like to make it very clear that this has nothing to do with religion. Secular households are perfectly capable of making similar mistakes.

Homeschooling ensures that if your family has issues, kids will be exposed to them 24/7, without the time spent elsewhere such as school. It effectively removes all checks and balances and leaves everything up to the parents, who can easily mess up.

Particularly re: lack of socializing, I like to think of it as overoptimizing for IQ instead of EQ. It works, but as the kid you'll regret it down the road.
Hypocrisy? I'm not so sure.

It is really difficult to get a single person to change their mind about something. Even more difficult to get large groups to change their collective opinion.

Theoretical concerns about how a program might be abused are much less convincing to people than actual abuses. It isn't surprising to me that people who discounted the possiblity of abuse in the past might now think differently about it (politicians and public citizens alike) when presented with actual overreach or even abuse.

I don't think that is an example of hypocrisy though.
No reason, but PRISM as explained in #1 doesn't seem like that big of a deal, or at least, not that much more shocking then what we already knew.
Certainly better than Bradley Manning's approach of indiscriminate mass disclosure.
Any rumors of legal defense fund for him? I have a feeling he will need it and I am more than willing to donate.
He's not gonna get the Nobel Peace Prize. Liu Xiaobo can get the prize because pissing off China is not controversial, but the Norwegians wouldn't do the same to the US.
You can get some pretty cool stuff done with firebase. Its not really providing a service though.
off the top of my head I've used Disqus, Facebook pages, and all kinds of social buttons
Eve ( http://www.hotkey-eve.com/ ) will recommend shortcuts when you don't use them.
We'd like to help. Could you drop us a line: info at paralleluniverse dot co
That aligns with the general rule that if you are inclined to give advice on the internet and you have nothing backing it up, you should probably stop and refrain from posting.
It's on CNN now.
I agree. I use s3 for this and it is excellent
Assume the security was 'fixed'. Doesn't mean that someone couldn't come and chop the fence with full intention of getting arrested as part of a political protest.

If the known penalty for doing this (even with fully operational security) is light, then that activity isn't really deterred.
Setting The Default Encoding In Python
This is Japan we are talking about. One of the most xenophobic societies that exist today. Encouraging immigration is equal to political suicide.
What experiment? And is it flying on Dragon out of curiosity?
For this, he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize
If "effective" includes only "not killing civilians", opening a hot dog stand nearby would work as well. However, if it also includes "stop 400 Taliban fighters from shooting at us", the situation become a bit more complex. Smoke would just remove visibility. But Taliban don't need much visibility - they already know where the forces are, they were fighting for the whole day in the same setting, and they probably know the village inside out anyway. And they also don't care if they hit a civilian by mistake, so they can just keep shooting in general direction. And if you use some real active chemistry, the civilians - especially children - would be the ones hit the worst.
This is from the book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, available at http://www.chem.fsu.edu/chemlab/isc3523c/feyn_surely.pdf Plenty of other similar stories in there too.
He said he had access to other information.
He didn't copy it. No way to know if that's correct.
But the CIA is not gonna believe him so their next step is finding out what else Edward has.
My guess is he has more and at least one other person is involved as a backup.

So what's next ?

The CIA will want to have a word with him before they decide what their next move will be because he's holding the cards and they don't know what they look like.
By the way, I don't know about anybody else, but for the first time I can think of, I'm seriously concerned about the consequences of posting support for somebody like this online. I don't know how things will play out years down the road and who will do what with this information

this is exactly what's so scary. people have to think about posting on Hacker News.
Interesting fact, the low-level people in an intelligence org tend to have the broadest access. It is the high-level people that are put in compartmentalized verticals and plausible deniability (one of the latter DIRNSAs used to be famous for trying to know as little operational details as possible).

IT needs to have access to all systems to install patches and such, strategic decision makers just have access to need-to-know.

The KGB would always try to recruit people that ran the copy room and mail room. Now IT is probably the biggest target.
How have you found Chef to be and what alternatives did you consider? We are evaluating Chef and Ansible right now.
The underpinning assumption seems to be that genetic code works as a program - that there is computation as understood in the sense of Church/Turing. I don't know if that is true. I do know that no one knows if it is true.

The other stronger assumption is that the processes that underpin how cells work are mechanistic in the way that we understand mechanistic processes, that is to say that there is no hidden step that invokes "a new physics". Again I say I do not know if this is true, but no one knows that it is true.

We are silly apes at the beginning of an intellectual adventure that may last for hundreds of thousands of years, or more. Or it may not, we may snuff ourselves out, or we may find that things are as simple as our current theories seem to intuit. However I would point to the following; until recently (20 years) cosmologists were utterly unaware of 80% of the universe as it is now perceived, there are five models of probability in common use in statistics even though there are probably (geddit) an infinite number of models, no one knows what life is, no one can adequately define intelligence, no one can adequately define consciousness; no one can describe the processes that define a cell; no one can make a list like this that is not risible (seriously). The point is, we know shit, and it's really not surprising given how big the universe is and how long we've been in the game of trying (with any degree of seriousness) to understand it.
It isn't prominent, but CNN has a link to the story on their front page.

NBC just seems to not have a lot of up to the minute content there (I would be pretty surprised if they do not cover it).
Good point.

Still, I can't help but hypothesize that the primary reason terrorism is such a rare occurrence in America is because intelligent people living comfortable lives without mental illness (read: the vast majority of the US) very rarely want to kill en masse. Or kill at all, really. If the opposite were true, I highly doubt our current counter-terrorism efforts would be good enough to prevent disaster after disaster.

For example, we were completely unable to predict and prevent events such as the Colorado theater shootings, the Newtown school shootings, the marathon bombings, etc. And the list of foiled Islamic plots since 9/11 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_foiled_Islamic_terroris...) can almost be counted on two hands.

Our justice system promises pretty severe retribution on those who would commit acts of terrorism against US citizens. The threats of ostracism, humiliation, prison time, and execution act as deterrents, because we've proven again and again that they're basically inescapable. Consequently, most reasonable people don't even consider terrorism.

It seems to me that punishing the guilty is far more effective than spying on the innocent.
UX Apprentice - Get Started with UX
I'm referring to the winner from 2009.
If he is actually in HK, he might be more of an inexperienced and naive idealist than anything else. Traveling to a territory with US extradition treaty and under Chinese control seems very unwise.
As far as I can see, this debacle is entirely the fault of one journalist at The Washington Post, and the people who believed his interpretation of some aspects of some PowerPoint slides. A lot of hot air was also generated by people who had forgotten about interception facilities like Room 641A, and thought it was news.

</unsubstantiated-claims>
Wouldn't outing himself reduce the probability of being assassinated by those he exposed? I'd guess he's safer with the eyes of the world on him.
They win because you enable them by your votes. Each politician elected today had people voting for them. Each of this people decided to vote for this politician in his own free will. However rich you are, you still have to have people voting for you. So these "well connected" people are there because of the voters that put them there.
Meet Edward Snowden, the NSA Whistleblower.
I'm bad.
I have an extreme amount of respect for this guy.

Yesterday I made a snarky comment about how nobody believes this whistleblower will lead a long and untroubled life, and while that's true it's not the point. This guy is a hero in my book for doing this, and I am very happy to see he seems like a very balanced and normal person.
I've switched to using Ansible for this very reason (after getting frustated with Puppet) - I like it a lot. Also I just want to join the choir: Vagrant is awesome!
I'm sorry, I just don't see where you're coming from. By the most common usage of the word, most countries deemed "democratic" have some type of constitution, and many of them even have things like monarchies that are nearly impossible to abolish according to the written law--through there's a practical understanding that if the people wanted to, they could do away with these things.

On what authority was the Constitution itself established if not the will of the people? On what authority does the Constitution assert its own if not, in its own words, "we the people"?

I contend that the people of the United States could do away with the Constitution the same way they did away with the Articles of Confederation. The Constitution even gives them a mechanism: pass a Constitutional amendment that repeals every preceding amendment and article and establishes a new Constitution on top of it. Once this legal maneuver was done, no one would ever need to read the original Constitution and its authority would be moot.

In fact, if you consider the idea that the Articles of Confederation were the original constitution, the fact that they are no longer in effect today even absent a formal mechanism in the Articles to abolish them shows that the Constitution could be replaced in the same way. "We the People" somehow had the authority to establish the Constitution in 1787--on what grounds do we not have the authority to establish a new one should we see fit?
Thanks for screencasts - your episode 5 is missing audio making it harder to grock the context, just heads up in case this is unintended so you can fix
Lol? NSA Panel, helps NSA agents fight terrorism
As far as I'm concerned, Edward Snowden is an American hero...

He's a hero. Putting the word American in there is very, well, American. The NSA has done a lot worse by foreigners than Americans.
It's going to be testing 4 Gumstix modules on the external NanoRack platform. Here's the grant announcement:

http://www.iss-casis.org/NewsEvents/PressReleases/tabid/111/...

And, yes, I believe it'll be flying on Dragon.
Give the man a medal "Hero of the Human Race"
Seriously, Edward Snowden, China was your first choice to hide from the NSA?

Holy shit that was a bad choice for many reasons. I can't think of a worse place to go, other than Russia or Iran with respect to the intense desire of those nations to extract as many secrets about NSA capabilities as possible. These are the most secret of the secret capabilities of US intelligence. He even boasted that he knows many more secrets that he himself took care to censor unlike Bradley Manning. I think China will be very interested in hearing those redacted snippets.

Secondly, if he ends up revealing sensitive information to these countries, any sympathy from the US population will turn into calls for frying him as a traitor. Going to China makes him into a Rosenberg.

This guy doesn't seem very smart at all. And using pillow cases and shields over screens to stop the NSA? You're telling me this guy doesn't know what TEMPEST is? Didn't he see Gene Hackman in Enemy of the State? You need a Faraday Cage.
Also ostensibly the people on the bottom are the easiest to recruit: disaffected, least paid (at least before 200k/yr salaries), perhaps uncommitted to mission or easy to mislead.

I don't understand why a low level IT person needs so much access though beyond a need to fix systems - there's no audit control on who is accessing these systems?
Seven Links Every Sunday
...and the FISA Court makes the blanket orders allowing the security organizations to have billions of collections in the U.S, see the output of the program made by NSA:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-boundless-in...

It is all "legal" in a sense that there are court orders, but there are no real checks as the orders are blanket ones.

Moreover, to read your mail older than 180 days from any provider according to the current laws they don't need any order at all to do it legally:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/04/fourth-amendment-em...
A Conversation with Jane Jacobs
Ouch, this is the first report I have had! What OS/browser are you using?

You can download the raw content via these two files, so you can watch locally on your computer (both the same, just different formats):

http://sysadmincasts.com/static/videos/5-create-a-vagrant-box-with-veewee.mp4
http://sysadmincasts.com/static/videos/5-create-a-vagrant-box-with-veewee.webm

I am using a javascript player, which should send you the correct file, based on your browsers support for webm and/or mp4/flash. I have verified that both versions contain audio. So, I suspect there is some browser issue at play here. Anyone else reading this, and who has watched episode #5, want to comment on if it has audio?

Thanks,
Justin
The workers, as a group, are the main consumers of their own output.
CNN put up a 4-paragraph softball piece [1]. Edit: CNN added to its reporting.

You're right about NBC. Their current headline:

>Game of spoilers: Did Twitter kill DVRs?

Which is a piece expressing some TV viewers' outrage that tweets spoiled an episode of Game of Thrones for them.

[1] - http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/09/politics/nsa-leak-identity/ind...
Is the NSA Using Backblaze Storage Pods for PRISM Surveillance Data?
Wonderful idea, is it geographically restricted?

I would pay (e.g. $0.50 per item for free items, more for paid items?) for this service.

Please throw up a simple Bootstrap theme (from e.g. http://wrapbootstrap.com) for a bit of quick polish.
Actually, my year of graduate school was pretty positive, as far as things go. No complaints. I did look ahead and realize that academia was not the best deal in the world.

Also, you're a douche for bringing up irrelevancies like that.
The only grid system that get things right is susy (http://susy.oddbird.net)
Starting with Ivy Bridge processors, Intel has included the RdRand instruction which uses random processor noise to generate random numbers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RdRand

Pretty cool in my opinion; at least for applications where you don't need to repeat the same set of numbers.
For something more in-depth about the types of randomness, Brian Hayes has a superb article:

http://bit-player.org/2011/a-slight-discrepancy
NSA whistleblower is revealed
I'm fairly sure they will now be screening for that in the future.
Also ... .replace(/HTML/HTML,CSS,JS/)
I've never understood the mentality that leads to homeschooling. When so many people are terrified at becoming parents/at being new parents because they've just been entrusted with a life and they're afraid to screw up, where do parents find the confidence in themselves to believe that they should be responsible for the totality of a child's exposure to other people and knowledge? At least a school experience allows for new ideas, experiences, role models, and environments.

E: Not to disrespect any parents who have decided to homeschool, of course. I was homeschooled before I was old enough to start preschool, and my brother was homeschooled for a year during, I think, middle school. It's a decision my own parents made, too, for a period.
How could a CIA employee not know the blackmail techniques the CIA uses to recruit agents? All intelligence agencies leverage debt, criminal records, marital infidelity, or closeted gay behavior as leverage to "turn" a foreign agent.

This has been documented by numerous ex-CIA employees, like Bob Baer.

So his turning point was finding out a Swiss Banker was setup in a bar for a fall, and then offered a way out in exchange for information. He didn't know this before applying for CIA work?

Give me a break.