skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Kind of off-topic, but your comment raises a question that I've been mulling over for a while: Given that the "acqui-hire" employee experience is so much better (more lucrative, more responsibility, more exposure to upper management, whatever your definition of "better" is), you'd think there would be more people trying for this path.

Why jump through the traditional hoops applying at 100 companies, interviewing at 10 of them, then maybe getting an offer at one of them for a "market rate" salary, when instead, you can take a moderate amount of risk and a little bit of time, and start a company with the sole intent of being acquired for $1MM/head? It doesn't even matter what your company makes, as long as it's something that shows off your talent.

I wonder if one day we'll see "acqui-hire incubators" sprint up, focused on helping teams land such positions..
Following the lead of corporate America, the CIA has largely given up on having Americans do actual work. CIA agents are managers, and they source local people to do the dirty work. If there's one thing professional managers love more than meetings and power point, it's travel rewards points. As a fan of spy novels and movies, it's a bit sad to think about how in real life, national security could be compromised by an enemy agent offering platinum upgrades.
The existence of the court is not secret, only its proceedings.
The existence of the court itself is not secret, the proceedings are. But they could issue a fine or jail sentence without leaking the rest of the proceedings themselves, if I understand the legal process right.

Edit: Way to mind-meld on the comments, team. Holy crap.
This seems a bit strange to me. Snowden was very well compensated for his work (articles mention a $200k salary) as a young man and despite this he still did the right thing and followed his conscience. My bet is he would be the first to tell you that the real reward for him is the weight off of his shoulders. Rewarding such a brave act with a "cash prize" doesn't seem appropriate.
Everyone falls for the MONEY
Can we link the actual source rather than some random tweet?

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/new-statistics-about-n...
Can you name five things to do in Sunnyvale when you're bored?
How to Start Freelancing With No Experience
Ask HN: Which HN articles have reached or surpassed 1000pts?
In the wake of Edward Snowden's outing in The Guardian's article "Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA revelations", which has just surpassed 1000pts on HN, I am curious to know what other HN posts have reached this 1000pt mark?
This makes me think of the movie Cube. Wrong or evil? It's irrelevant - the outcomes are perverse.
The point of the 12 columns is it can be divided by 3, 2, 4 and 6. What would be the point of 24 columns grid?

If you need to display 24 items in a row, then you shouldn't have to mess with the foundations. Use CSS or tables.
Actually they fall under Constitutional protections while on U.S. soil, at least. At least as far as I understand the background of the NSA stuff in this scenario.

In fact that's one of the reasons the 'enemy combatant' prisons were at Gitmo in the first place, is that the Naval base is technically leased from Cuba and not actually U.S. soil, which meant (according to the legal theory) that some Constitutional protections didn't apply.
The fact that we've reached a point where one has to question if it's safe for them to contribute to a cause like this makes me shudder with disgust.
I'm sure the NSA doesn't know how to deanonymize flows from traffic analysis. Oh, wait.
This is the hear of it, isn't it? You have a whole bunch of people who don't care if Google uses automated scanning of their emails. You expect them to care if the NSA does it? Sure, there is some subset of people who will draw a distinction between the government and a private company, a distinction which isn't baseless, but most just don't care.

Also, look at it from the governments point of view. If you're NSA, do you really feel like you're violating intimate privacies to go through information people knowingly expose to one time acquantances on Facebook? The NSA is made of people, remember. How people view their own information enforces their understanding of where the line is.
I wasn't clear about what I meant. I'll accept your assertion that it's easy to get a work visa in Japan. It's certainly easy for Japanese expats to work in the USA for subsidiaries of Japanese companies. There are special visas for that.

What I meant by immigration is the whole totality of how an immigrant would become part of Japanese society. My understanding is that's more difficult in Japan than here in the USA.

E.g. this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-born_Japanese makes the perhaps unsubstantiated claim that "Probably because of the difficulty in gaining citizenship and because of cultural difference, foreign-born Japanese people account for a very small percentage of the population in Japan."

Contrast with USA where, as Butch in Pulp Fiction puts it: "I'm American, honey. Our names don't mean shit." And, by the time you get to children of immigrants, national origin "don't mean shit" either. Except, doubtlessly, to a small minority of WASPs who trace their ancestry to the Mayflower.

Hardly anyone will emigrate to homogenous Japan if it's really hard to be accepted by the natives. I was interested in whether homogenous Iceland was similar.
> Your response makes me wonder if we're even talking about the same issue.

We are. That you are confused is clear by other remarks, and it's almost time for GoT, so I don't feel like spending the time restating what has already been said.

> I should have said...

I know what you meant. I didn't really need a citation. I've already made it clear my stance on the matter.

However, that you would make such an error and then question whether we are talking about the same issue should be troublesome for you. In a topic on this very subject, you yourself can't meet your own standards of clarity. So, if you said something different then what you meant, how can you presume to understand those that attempt to hold conversations with you?

It's far easy to assume opinion then to assume perfect English. Especially on a board where English is not always the first language, and the subtleties of "It seems to have very little cost" and "I think it seems to have very little cost" is meaningless to all but a rare few.
I think this is one of the clearest explanations, to me, of the similarity and differences between nullable & Maybe types. Both encode "n + 1" possible values, but the nullable version pretends it encodes only "n" values, while Maybe makes it explicit.
Interesting theory about helping recipients of large numbers of subpoena's streamline their responses / minimize workloads. Personally I think that's giving the government too much credit as if they cared about the burdensome nature of generating such large numbers of overreaching requests.
The existence of the court isn't secret, it's the proceedings that are.
Section 215, known as the "business records" portion of The PATRIOT Act allows "FBI agents to obtain any "tangible thing," including "books, records, papers, documents, and other items," a broad term that includes dumps from private-sector computer databases, with limited judicial oversight."[1]

That Section 215 exits is public record. However, the government has a "secret interpretation" of the law that allows itself many more powers than what is written in the publicly accessible version.

Only congressmen on the Senate Intelligence committee were briefed on the secret interpretation. With the exceptions of Mark Udall and Ron Wyden, who tried warn the American public without revealing anything classified (in 2011), the rest of the congressmen on the committee did not have a problem with what the NSA was doing. Many of the congressmen on the SIC are ex-military or receive large campaign contributions from defense contractors and/or the intelligence community.

[1]: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20067005-281.html
The actual content is the bolded "Update 2013-06-07" text at the top here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/new-statistics-about-n...

In full:

Update 2013-06-07: at the time that we wrote this post [2013-03-06], we asked Google whether its Transparency Report included data about secret FISA court orders that would send data to the NSA. The response we received was extremely vague, but seemed to possibly be "no". In the wake of yesterday's revelations that the NSA was harvesting data from Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, AOL, PalTalk, Skype, Youtube and Apple, Google has now clearly confirmed that the numbers in its Transparency Report do not include the number of orders or targets for NSA surveillance.
Grow some balls.
I don't recall anyone who contributed to Bradley Manning's defense fund (or to Wikileaks) getting hauled off to Gitmo.
Yes.

However, it's grossly misleading to release aggregate statistics without even a mention of the fact that, should other avenues of requesting and/or retrieving data exist, that those are not included in the totals.

It's shady as fuck.
If you have been around the activist community, and people who are willing to engage in civil disobedience... Remember, I was raised as a Quaker. When I was in Middle and High School we used to take a road trip down to the Nevada Test site for the annual protests there. My Friends Meeting used to hold actual civil disobedience training sessions. One of the members of my Friends Meeting (Salt Lake Monthly Meeting) engaged in a similar protest (a lone trespass, though it did not involve cuttng through fences) and was acquitted by a jury. I knew lots of people who decided to trespass during the protests, and many who chose not to. When I was in Middle School I helped build rock barricades on the road into the test site, so I think I have a sense of what people think who engage in protests of this sort.

When someone in these communities decides to undertake a protest of this magnitude, particularly when it is against a military installation, they tend to expect the absolute worst. This means inflated charges, possibly long prison terms, and so forth. When someone decides to do it anyway, the typical approach is to try to use all of this to one's advantage, to emphasize the political prisoner aspect, and to use the trial and jail time as a soap-box from which to make one's view known. Quakers particularly have a long tradition of this but so do some Catholic groups.
I wasn't going to do this, but now I am.

I just let my friends know this: 'I am going to materially aid someone that the US government is very likely to label as an enemy. If that should happen, that could make my act, as per the definition in the constitution, retroactively "treasonous". Everyone who knows me knows that I am a patriot: but only because I believe in what this country strives to be - not necessarily because of what it is, was, or ever will be. And those who know me well should know that I am doing so because I believe generally in the principles set forth by the framers - principles which are supposed to transcend the institution in power.'
I think you misunderstood me. I didn't mean we should be violent. I specifically said civil disobedience because I meant non-violent protest.
Because, outside US, government agencies and companies that considers their communication security critical will choose another provider. They are paying Google Apps, Microsoft 365, etc.
Ask HN:Why do you all use macbooks
So I've been watching a lot of webcasts, talks, etc and I'm wondering why seemingly everyone uses Macbooks.

I've been ankle deep in linux for about 5 years. I phrase it that way mostly because I know I'm nowhere near a 'kernel guy', and I really haven't taken time to look at linux inside and out from even a software perspective. But, I'm fascinated with how many people use macbooks instead of laptops loaded with nix.

I'm guessing because it's been (up until recently) the only mass produced nix system commercially available? Or is it reliability? Or is it just people being trendy? Or is OSX the greatest operating system ever invented?

PS - My intent is not to start a flamewar here, just want to know why you use a Mac, if you do.

[EDIT] - Thanks for the responses everyone -- if you could also weigh in on Ultrabooks (I'm eyeing ASUS's Zenbook/Macbook) if you happen to have experience in both -- I'm toying with the idea of buying a new laptop)

Semi-Full Disclosure - I work for a company that has a stake in ultrabooks -- but I promise (if those are even worth anything on the internet), I'm asking for myself, not on behalf of any corporation/pr company/etc.
Wouldn't be that surprising, given the sketchiness of some Kickstarter-type funds, if the money never makes it to Snowden.
people did. I didn't. But I think this guy is more articulate, more well-reasoned, less impetuous, and more forward-thinking than Manning (and certainly Assange). Disclaimer: I have no reason to believe so except gut feeling.
The other way around; Firefox nightlies let you use Python to script the DOM directly.
Good. I´ll point to that next time I need proof on how hard web development sucks.
He didn't do this for the money...

I've been offered minor cash gifts for significant volunteer work that I've done previously, and it's usually sort of offensive - nowhere near large enough to compensate for my time, and I didn't do it for money.

The right way to go about this is probably to find a way to get meals continually delivered to him in his hotel after his credit card is inevitably cancelled.
He could have, and should have, used JavaScript for those examples. Otherwise it's needlessly confusing. Not every JavaScript developer knows CoffeeScript. What possible benefit could there be in using CoffeeScript instead of JavaScript in an article about JavaScript?
Apple predictions game, fwiw. http://apple.dyaso.com/
I found it difficult to approximate 1/(3*144).
um, this logic is false. you can give money to whoever you want -- this is not the same as hiding a convicted criminal in your basement from the legal authorities.

i can send a $1,000 check to bradley manning (who has actually had charges brought on him, currently in jail), and there would not be a single illegal thing about sending him a check.
Two issues I can see arising from this:

1. You're funding someone who the government most likely has labelled a terrorist. I don't think the government will take too kindly to such a thing.

2. Snowden is in hiding. Not only might it be hard to come into contact with him, but how can we be sure our money will reach him?

I think #1 is not too difficult to solve via ways of bitcoin, but #2 is still a blocker.
>Many claim the NSA is just another agency, and thus will share the same faults found in agencies like the IRS, which recently targeted people based on their political beliefs. This is a terribly wrong comparison. The IRS hires people with high-school diplomas, the NSA hires Ph.D.s with military service. If anybody at the NSA used their position to further their political party, their fellow employees would be the first to point that out, and stop them.

1. A PhD doesn't imply lack of political prejudice. Military service doesn't imply lack of political prejudice. High school as highest completed education doesn't imply existence of political prejudice. This is an extremely ill-conceived argument and really only reveals the author's own elitism.

2. The whistleblower in this case is a past employee of the CIA and current (well, I guess not anymore) contractor for the NSA. He did not even complete high school. The characterization of the NSA only hiring "PhDs with military service" is objectively wrong.

>The rank and file of the NSA is not your enemy. They carry out the mission that politicians give them, and do not cross the line with an almost religious fervor. It’s the politicians who have moved that line.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Trials
Pup2p: i2p live CD based on Puppy Linux built for anonymity
I can absolutely guarantee Nacchio went to prison over not helping the NSA.

(A nitpick but) no, you can't. Everyone getting carried away with hyperbole is rarely useful in situations like these. It is definitely an issue worth investigating, but you can't guarantee the outcome before such an investigation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town
What would he be filibustering? There is no proposed legislation to oppose afaik. What needs to happen is the opposite: someone needs to propose and try to push through new legislation curtailing FISA.
> Now we are at grid systems. So much better!

I'm sure I'm not the only one who sees tables as a logical approach to layout, and sees css grids as weird hacks.
Not plead guilty. You want to turn the trial into an exposure of what is going on. The trial is part of the protest too. Don't count that out. But yes, the jail term is a part of the protest, with that I am entirely in agreement.

> "Terrorism" is a completely unexpected form of government retaliation.

I don't think you can look at the way various other anti-logging protesters and the like have been treated, and the way terrorist watch lists have been assembled, or even talk with activists who were active in the 1960's and 1970's and not expect this.
Director Of National Intelligence Tries To Downplay PRISM Paranoia
Everyone here seems to be assuming that tech company leaders actually knew the whole picture, but that isn't necessarily the case.

Think about it: Let's say you're the CEO of any of these companies. If someone from the NSA or the FBI serves a top secret FISA order on some poor SRE in your datacenter, do you even qualify as one of "those persons to whom disclosure is necessary to comply with such Order", or an attorney?

Now, maybe your General Counsel knows what's going on, or maybe the knowledge is scattered throughout your legal team. Your lawyers, who are supposed to be representing your interests, are now bound to keep these secrets from you, and possibly even from each other. This is something that affects millions of people, and you can't do anything to fight it, because you aren't necessarily allowed to know what's going on in your own company. The only sign might be that a few previously-happy key employees suddenly seem stressed and quit for no apparent reason.

Freedom of speech is such a basic assumption in our society that we struggle to understand the full implications of what can happen when it's taken away.
If they didn't receive any, I assume they can disclose that. I'm really not sure what this means, to be honest. Was anyone speculating that Google never received a FISA request of some sort? Does anyone know how common it is to send out such request to a company?
You'd say "a national hero" (the rest are not commonly used). The person can be any nationality, but he's a hero to the nation.
"I know the difference between the two. My point was that the Verizon collection of data very clearly was for the entire customer base of their major subsidiary."

Again, though...that program is legal. It's not even a controversial point (unlike with PRISM). From what I know of it, the rationale for the supreme court decision that says mass collection of metadata is legal is fairly well established, has a long judicial precedent, etc.

Yes, Snowden's rationale seems to be forthright. He's bothered by the implications of surveillance on this kind of scale. And I get it -- hell, I even agree. But most of the commentary I've been seeing on HN is just embarrassingly uninformed (or misinformed).

"it's not hard to draft a specific warrant for the narrow group of 'every US user 13 years or older' which is what I'd presume PRISM involved."

All of the public information about PRISM has explicitly said that information can only be obtained when one party to the conversation is a foreign national. I've read nothing to suggest that broad warrants of the sort you describe are any more legal than before.
it kind of boggles my mind that it wouldn't be driven by some kind of javascript MVC framework, instead using old-fashioned complete page loads to operate.

It's not like a todo list isnt the prototypical example[1] of these frameworks.

[1] http://todomvc.com/
Waiting For Prometheus
That's a good example of exactly why I suspect they would have expected such charges.
This is an industrial design patent, and there are many like that. [1] Try coping the Coke bottle and you´ll be sued. Try coping the iPhone and you´ll be sued. Simple.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent

You do not understand the term "patent trolling". Give up.
What is that sorcery! Why are we not using this instead of grid systems?
I agree with you, it went to the absurd. That point had already been made over and over, but I should have reiterated it. My intent was to talk about some other aspects that I thought hadn't been addressed.

On a related note, I would actually join the chorus of complaints about prosecutorial over-stepping. This case alone doesn't really rile me (obviously), but as another straw on top of Aaron Swartz, Weev, etc. Yeah I agree, that's a problem that needs fixing.
> Didn't Apple have a similar problem with the ipod? People complained that it was not random because it would sometimes pick the same track twice or would pick tracks from the same artist more often than people expected.

I always thought this was by design: the "shuffle" algorithm wasn't designed to be random, but would instead occasionally group songs from the same artist or genre together (and/or favor songs w/ higher play counts_ - i.e. maintain a "theme" for a couple of songs before changing to something different)

I can't find any supporting evidence for this, however, and a lot of the discussions around their algorithm are hearsay.
Good point. Even by the time Brin entered in 1979, the rules of immigration had changed. Brin got in easily because we had special rules for Jewish families trying to get out of the Soviet Union. More recently (in the 2000's) we did the same thing for certain persecuted people from Africa (a colleague helped sponsor a family of these; sadly I don't remember the exact nationality).

But what happened to the "traditional" method of high tech immigration? I.e. come here for grad school, then stay. Is that all H1B stuff? I know quite a few people who came here for grad school and then stayed to work in high tech. They are now citizens. Their children are native born Americans.
Booz Allen Statement on Reports of Leaked Information
Really, terrorism? How has he inflict any physical damage on anyone? Agree or disagree with his actions, it's clearly not terrorism. I look down in disgust on anybody that frames his actions in that light.
IANAL but as far as I know you can create a blind trust to pay for legal expenses, and have excess donated to charity or something. That would prevent personal financial benefit from a crime.

Otherwise how would any legal defense fund ever work?