skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey, then why don't you stay the hell out of our country. Thanks, love and kisses, Jason
Space-age underwater hotel planned for Maldives
Off the top of my head, if you use an email (to commit) that you don't want the outside world to see, now it's exposed.
>I think the most immediate step going forward that can be done on the side of the private sector is to stop collecting, as much as possible, extensive profiles on people, especially profiles that are, or easily can be, tied to their real identity.

So Google and Facebook should commit Seppuku?
Ask HN: Review our interest network startup, Raveler
We think of Raveler as an interest network instead of a social network, since we specifically designed the app to focus on interests and the corresponding contents. In essence, Raveler lets you follow tags and in turn receive contents for the tags you follow. At the same time, Raveler has a reply system encouraging people to converse around the content. And last, Raveler is a completely open network that allows you to see all the contents posted in chronological order in the "Discover" view, where you can discover interesting tags to follow.

We just launched about 2 weeks ago. And we'd love to hear from the HN community. Please help us by providing your valuable opinions. Feel free to just post on Raveler directly ;)

Here's the URL to the App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/raveler/id641285606
There is one already, Soundation (http://soundation.com/).
I haven't used it though, so I can't talk about its features or quality.
Improve our economy first. Then we can spy
When the enemy is 'terrorism', anything you make public is giving information to the enemy.

That is why the expression is so important and why Obama (and Bush in his time) keeps saying that the US is 'at war'. Because that allows them to subvert the law.

Honestly: I am not defending the Administration, on the contrary. I am just explaining why they are going to try to persecute him for treason if (when) they find him.
I've always thought the 2nd amendment wasn't necessarily totally aimed at the federal level of government, but at the state and local levels as well. One could say that it is almost aimed entirely at the state and local levels.

When the Constitution was written, the US didn't normally have a permanent standing army. It allowed for a navy, but an army was only intended for times of war and monies for it to be used for two years at a time. Of course, that changed over time.

The permanent military of several branches is a modern idea.

I agree with you, despite history, I would imagine there would be a serious morale problem if the military were ordered to open war against civilians. The Civil War comes to mind, many in the military left the North to fight for the South to defend their home states.
An interpretation of the word "reasonable" is literally all discussions of the 4th Amendment have ever come down to, you can't pretend like someone with a narrower scope or "reasonableness" is just haggling over semantics and nitpicking tiny details.
What I am stating is that "rights" are a necessity of creatures like human beings living in societies based on equality under the law. You can have national (and sub-national) jurisdictions that do not honor certain rights, but that doesn't make the concept of rights relative, it makes the ability to judge the jurisdictions by the protections they guarantee, and thus whether they are actually based on equality under the law.

They may be deemed "natural rights" by the nature of mankind living in what I will term "just" societies (where jurisprudence and justice coincide), but they are not "natural" in their springing forth from the natural sciences of physics, chemistry and biology.

There were a number of people involved in the Constitution of the US of A who did not want to enumerate the rights, knowing that they were not the government's to give and receive. The pragmatic reality of the day was a yield to legal codification, since most knew that a government not explicitly bound, was bound to implicitly violate those rights. The escape clauses were (probably, I'll let others debate that) the 9th and 10th amendments.
Google has been making large profits since long before Google+ even existed. There's probably some incremental value in having real-name profiles tied to data, but there's very large incremental harm as well, such that adding such functionality is net-negative for society. A large number of Googlers have made a similar argument, which is why the real-name policy was so controversial; the argument was already pretty strong before the NSA revelations, and is only stronger now.

Facebook is a trickier case. Their business model may simply be incompatible with a non-surveillance society.
As another answer points out, the mathematics of the discrete logarithm on elliptic curves is closely related to factoring, and most factoring algorithms have close analogs for the discrete logarithm, so the difference is actually not that great.

However it does have a subtle consequence. We've developed some very good sieve based algorithms for factoring in recent decades that do not have obvious analogs for elliptic curves. A large part of the performance advantage that elliptic curves have is that you can get away with shorter keys. However if we developed an analog to our best factoring algorithms, then that size (and therefore performance) benefit becomes much less.

If you choose key size to "be good enough that people won't be able to break this for X years" you really should assume that such analogs exist, and will be discovered within X years.
I think this is really hyperbolic. The fact is that Snowden violated the conditions of his Top Secret security clearance, which is a crime that is subject to criminal prosecution.

Now, I'd argue the leak that Snowden made was much more acceptable than, if he had revealed the identities of CIA spies to foreign countries and caused them to be killed.

Nevertheless, we are a nation guided by rule of law, and it would be unreasonable to expect that Snowden wouldn't be prosecuted. Just because he did something which many people consider was a good thing, does not mean that he didn't do something illegal.
I had the impression that is quite hard to survive in Germany just with English.
"The study of the patterns produced by vibrating bodies has a venerable history. One of the earliest to record that an oscillating body displayed regular patterns was Galileo Galilei. In Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), he wrote:

As I was scraping a brass plate with a sharp iron chisel in order to remove some spots from it and was running the chisel rather rapidly over it, I once or twice, during many strokes, heard the plate emit a rather strong and clear whistling sound: on looking at the plate more carefully, I noticed a long row of fine streaks parallel and equidistant from one another. Scraping with the chisel over and over again, I noticed that it was only when the plate emitted this hissing noise that any marks were left upon it; when the scraping was not accompanied by this sibilant note there was not the least trace of such marks.
"

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

These patterns are also drawn on tiles in the Rosslyn Chapel and are thought to be displaying music:

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Rosslyn_Chapel_music_score_'deco...
Try http://tldr.io/discover - it uses a chrome extension and lets users summarize content (the content also has a nice HN rollover that shows you the summaries of stories). The web page has the summarized links organized by category. You can also use it to summarize your own blog (via an embed).
(I have no relation to tldr.io, but I just like the tool).
Here's a not very good example using hair and a car stereo (http://youtu.be/4s_lpBkdoNc)
rasterizer is correct. I think people are misguided in believing that there are viable alternatives. The reason this is such a big deal is that the US (on paper anyway) is built on a tenet of civil liberties which is/was unique.

Obviously, reality is entirely different but my point is that, in other countries/localities, these so-called fundamental freedoms either do not exist or are diminished. In most of the western world, governments have significant leeway into the private lives of their citizens in the areas covered by PRISM.

I think we can be reasonably certain that programs like this already exist, or are identical, in almost any country with the technical capacity to provide similar services to the US.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights

The Bill of Rights was explicitly presented as a statement to secure natural rights, and at least one founder (George Mason) explicitly boycotted the Constitution over the non-incorporation of the Bill of Rights into the main document.

One could even argue (though it would be a stretch) that the constitution articles are technical details, and the book of rights is separate because it intended to document the natural rights that should go without saying (but government not trusted to do so forever), separate from the procedural technicalities of the main text.

Now you are the one with "interesting" ideas.
Hopeful yes, but no one expects a drive failure before even half of the warranty has expired surely?
(See above, cannot edit). All hinges around the 'war on terror'.

I am not defending the Administration (I may have made myself unclear), I am explaining why they are going for him """"lawfully"""" in their words.
"I tend to take the opposite of the popular HN view on security issues (to my karmatic dismay), but..."

Ironically I can almost guarantee that there are people who will openly state agreement with something that they wouldn't actually ever do (say, something that would send them to jail) in order to not loose karma points.

Consequently the popular opinion on HN is not even just based upon an already small group of people who already are homogenized but an even smaller group that fears being downvoted for going against that crowd thought. So much for freedom of speech.
Emad Mokhtar | Solution Specialist Arabesque
For your convenience, here's the clickable link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/raveler/id641285606
As it's closed source isn't it entirely possible that the client keeps copies of the keys that are accessible on demand from the server end (I guess that counts as a backdoor of sorts).
Trivia for geeks: where internet-related words come from
This seems like a joke that got overdone - I can imagine someone saying 'hey it would be funny if the whole world emailed each suspicious shit to troll the NSA' across a dinner table but any more than that and it stops being funny
Anyone Can Create
BBC Weather app launches for Android and iPhone
Imagine if with the simple act of buying a firearm, you agreed to increased government monitoring of your online activities.
Just call it what it is: Edward Snowden Defense Fund. Hopefully they raise a lot of money for his lawyers. He's gonna need it.
Doesn't that just illustrate that their odds would have been better had they started with arms instead of acquiring them as they went though?

This is somewhat similar to another argument I've had - there were some armed Jews in Germany who were able to leverage that firepower to hold off the SS and, eventually, escape. It certainly didn't stop the Nazis from committing the Holocaust, and communication / coordination are key to mounting a successful offense that the Jews didn't necessarily have time to mount, but while there were lots of Jews that died (some of them which might have even been armed), there were some that escaped (some of which were not armed); regardless, guns were demonstrably beneficial to those who fended off the SS.

As pertaining to the US Military, they have proven over and over that guerrilla warfare is not their strong suit, and especially so on foreign soil. Vietnam, Middle East, etc., have all shown that to be true. Also, as was mentioned earlier, many, if not most of the existing armed forces would have a very hard time mounting all out martial law against its citizenry. That isn't meant to imply that the situation couldn't be framed as such that it appeared to be necessary, but that also doesn't hold for long.
I didn't say people don't find solitary confinement to be a form of torture.

I did say it's still better than labor camps, especially for the types of "solitary confinement" usually being discussed, which are "cells or prison wings without other prisoners" and not "dark holes with only a slot on the door".

Should I ever go to prison I would greatly prefer the "prison wing without other prisoners", though I understand that's only a personal preference.
It solves a problem which does not exist - people organise things based on an agreed timezone already. The pain of transitioning to SUT is not worth the (debatable) gains.
Someone called us "Startup Nation", if that is even partially correct, then, it will explain the numbers.
I don't. I accepted the surveillance long ago. I'm sorry this is coming as news to you.
The problem is that 100-minute hours isn't better than 60-minute hours by one particular metric: divisibility. 60 is highly composite (divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6), and one of the most common operations performed on an hour is division. Perhaps dividing an hour by 5 isn't particularly common, so 24 would have worked -- as such it's not surprising that there are 24 hours in a day.

24/60/60 weren't chosen willy-nilly, and replacing them with 10/100/100 isn't an improvement.
> what was the excuse for voting for him again in 2012?

Romney. Unfortunately.

> One day they bitch about invasion of privacy the next day they want the same people to have every bit of control over their health care.

In one instance we have the institution of a massive surveillance state, with always-on data gathering of "meta-data" across the internet and phone calls, and seemingly secret-if-any limitations on how that data is used.

"Trust us", they say.

In the other, we have difficult-to-abuse sharing of medical data, subject to transparency, protected by extremely strong HIPAA laws.

These are not even remotely the same thing.
I'll answer for him.

Neither, I read about the apartheid from reliable sources and I know the situation but also read about statistics to make sure I'm not being unfair to either side.

But what about the people who say "Israel has apartheid"? Did you ask how they can claim that? Or do you just assume that they are/have met South Africans who lived under the Apartheid?
IIRC only the Supreme Court can really decide on constitutionality other judges are just supposed to follow the laws laid out by Congress.
I've done this, accidentally published my livejournal passwords on a project. Now I make certain that at the very least I have a folder covered by .gitignore in my local repo that contains any auth tokens or whatnot and I double check the history before pushing it anywhere.
Life On Bitcoin - A Documentary Film
Half of all STEM jobs are available to workers without a college degree
I know this is intended to be a clever marketing thing (and it is pretty clever) but please don't. It is well off color relative to the importance of the issue.

"Spy on us equally" and "he's defecting to China" are the two emerging ways pro-NSA people are spinning this thing. Don't fuel them.
Thoughts on Edward Snowden
Energy is always lost as you move up the food chain, because no predator can capture 100% of the energy stored in their prey.

Consuming plants is not as efficient as photosynthesizing, and consuming animals is not as efficient as consuming plants.

In this case, the cows burn energy from the food they consume for as long as they're alive, meaning it's a physical impossibility for the meat produced from them to contain as much energy as the food they consumed.

Unless you're claiming that raising livestock violates the laws of physics, but that's an entirely different argument.
This strikes me as "selling tools to the miners", but hey, whatever works.
You can't do end to end encryption if the receiver doesn't know how to deal with encryption stuff.

The second best thing to do is to use a e-mail provider that encrypts your e-mail using asymmetric key the moment they receive your mail. It protects you against search warrants but not active eavesdropping of your mail. And if the receiver's mail provider is being eavesdropped or receives a search warrants then there is noting you can do.
Stop Blaming Social Media for Our Behavioral Problems
It starts ar 13:00 in NYC, so that means that it starts at...how many hours behind are you guys? oh yeah..should be 12:00.
I think a better approach would be client-side: Something like a browser extension for identity rotation, for one example. I also suspect Tor-for-the-masses has a larger chance of becoming a reality. Presumably, VCs are now wringing their hands over the money to be made in the newfound software industry of identity obfuscation.

I'm sure all of this has the NSA folks whining and moaning, to which I'd have to point out: You made your bed.
I was thinking the same thing, images like this could definitely be how Obama's presidency gets remembered.
The fact that Mozilla is a US corporation means that it will still have to give the US government the data it asks for, regardless of where the servers are hosted.
I'd love to see an enormous version of this harmonic motion demonstration.

(http://sciencedemonstrations.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyw...)
Jobs doesn't have a history of EFF-like activism and has always played ball with the government. I think its a little unhealthy to build him into this superman juggernaut. Yes he was talented and died before his time, but he's no NSA slayer.
Is moving data centers off-shore good enough?

"Microsoft admits Patriot Act can access EU-based cloud data" http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/microsoft-admits-patri...
Your second figure doesn’t include Gaza and Judea & Samaria, while your first figure does. If you would include those areas, the percentage of Arabs in the area would be over 50%.

Most people in historic Palestine, be they Jews or Arabs, can’t say their family lived there 100 hundred years a go, the population has grown twenty-fold in the last century. However, there have been Jews and Arabs in that region for thousands of years. It would be silly to deny that.
The Irrationality of Giving Up This Much Liberty to Fight Terror
This is fantastic advice. I've never thought about looking into Sinatra first. I'll definitely be checking out resources for this. Anything you'd recommend before I start my search?
Why don't we keep pretending that there is a way to wage war without innocents dying? Why don't we mention the morality of terrorists using villagers as body shields? There is some complicity for both the villagers and the terrorists in all of this as well.
FlightCar on Disruption
I disagree with the thought that one has a moral obligation to do something about something you find immoral. What argument would you put forth to defend such a statement?
Right. Israel has "kept expanding". Ignore the strategic positions that allowed them to survive (the Golan), ignore the repeated aggressions from the Sinai which made Israel have to take it and give it back several times.

Besides, are you saying that wanting someone out of some place but justifies violence? If so, expect me to come at your house and get you out of there with a rifle and don't complain when I do so.
Well, probably the most widely used cryptography is SSL, specifically the kind used in HTTPS. The whole HTTPS ecosystem revolves around certificates authorities that sign your RSA key. So on that fact alone, I would say there's more RSA out there than ECC.

SSH is also very widely used and it has traditionally used RSA keys, though it supports DSA keys, too and, more recently, ECDSA (the "EC" being elliptic curve). Sadly, Mac OS X's built in openssh is an older version that doesn't support ECDSA and apparently Redhat turns off ECDSA support for some sort of legal/patent reasons. So that's another case where RSA is more popular.
Introducing the Startup Pitch Breakdown
> except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace

Congressmen telling the public about this would have been a felony which they are not protected from. That's part of the reason Obama's comments are completely disingenuous.
OK, so I knew about this one before. But if you didn't, there's a better solution than just remembering it, which seems to be the gist of this post.

Solution: run one or more automated security tools across your sites, before deploying them to public locations. If possible, automate this process, so it happens all the time. The tools won't catch everything, but they will catch something you didn't, some of the time. Testing is good practice with all software! Do it.
My point is that he's arguing about precisely where the line should be drawn, not offering an example of the police engaging in clearly unreasonable conduct. You can't claim that the 4th amendment has fallen by the wayside just because you disagree about precisely where the courts have drawn the lines in edge cases. You need some stronger evidence than that.
> is it worth the trouble if Wuala's clunky client takes 100 times longer than Dropbox to sync a file between two devices

Is this some general FUD about encryption being slow, or an actual measurement?

Maybe all client-side encrypted solutions happen to be crappily implemented, but I don't think that client-side encryption would necessarily lead to something noticeably slower.
If you don't expect your source code to be made public and don't take care to keep secrets out of it, then you will be surprised when attackers have (for example) your cookie signing key.

I know checking secrets into source code is already a bad practice, but accidental publication takes bad practice and makes it a security hole.
Indeed. This would need to go through one of automatic writing app we see from time to time.
> The reason this is such a big deal is that the US (on paper anyway) is built on a tenet of civil liberties which is/was unique.

The US didn't invent most of those liberties. Your assumption that those liberties are not part of the law in other countries is wildly incorrect.

The assumption that most other western countries have as extensive intelligence gathering as the US needs proof. I'm aware that Sweden and the UK are quite big on data gathering, but there are hundreds of other countries in the world.
Can I buy you a glass of wine?
My cofounder and I are visiting SF from NYC in July. We run a 6+ year old startup in the food/local space. Visiting SF to see the culture differences between NYC + SF and also thinking about YC as a home for our future endeavors. Love to meet and just chat up some.
You know how I know HN is going downhill?
> Are police knocking down your door without a warrant? If not that's the 4th amendment working as intended.

Damn right they are. Exigent circumstances. [1]

Police routinely coerce people into consenting to searches during traffic stops when there is no RAS. If there's a K9 unit around it's even easier; look at how often they just happen to trigger when there's no contraband at all [2]. Does a 56% false positive rate sound reasonable?

And, once they've gained access they've got wide leeway to seize whatever they want in the name of the war on drugs. At that point the owner must pay a bond to contest the seizure, and then has the burden of proving that they were not party to the crime. Note that no warrant is required for property seizure, merely probable cause [3].

[1] http://themoderatevoice.com/110361/supreme-court-expands-war...
[2] http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/01/06/false-positives-police...
[3] BJA publication NCJ-137994 – CIVIL FORFEITURE FOR THE NON-LAWYER
Does not UN consider some of that soil to be occupied land?