skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The key point in the answers thus far is that when he refers to "direct access" he means to some database that has all the stuff in it, and not (e.g.) via a direct conduit to Google or whoever's database.

So what I think is going on is that the NSA archives packets it can see in transit, but doesn't necessarily know who all the endpoints are. (It probably has a VERY good idea most of the time.) When someone becomes of particular interest they can execute a warrant on Google et al and get more detailed information on a specific target which lets them make better use of data they've already got.

The key thing they're doing is, fundamentally, logging packets that they can see going past any number of bottlenecks in the internet, which should have been perfectly obvious that they would try to do from day one. This alone is enormously powerful and all the extra info from service providers is probably only icing on the cake. If you can be identified from some cleartext comms somewhere then all you other dealings have been archived, and can be correlated, and then decrypted and traced back to you posthoc.
Oh dear, you mean the 'meta' VCs, or just any VCs at all?
Want to bet? Clearly the Feds can do whatever they please.
Perhaps surprisingly, you can convert many recursive algorithms into equivalent iterative versions using a series of simple mechanical steps. For example, if we start with the naive recursive implementation of our beloved fib function,

def fib(n):
if n < 2:
return n
return fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2)

we can arrive at the iterative (dynamic-programming) version that follows,

def fib(n):
fibn1, fibn2 = (0, 1)
for _ in xrange(n):
fibn1, fibn2 = fibn2, fibn1 + fibn2
return fibn1

through the following steps: https://gist.github.com/tmoertel/5798134

If you're interested in this kind of thing, I'm writing a series of articles on converting recursive algorithms into iterative algorithms. The initial article: http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2013-05-11-recursive-to-iterat...
Good luck affording a house :)
Setup Wireless Infrastructure Hotspot in Ubuntu that works on Android
DOA system
If you have a system that comes to you as a DOA system and you determine that the purple wire contains 5 volts, which component is most likely at fault
Not sure what you are trying to suggest here:

- We don't talk about this because it is not relevant?

- We don't talk about it because it takes focus away from the Chinese, who are the real villains here?

What exactly is your point?
IGlass
Feel free to ask me for elaboration if you need any, in particular if you have a CTO or other bosscritter who you need help convincing of the importance of this. It will be seriously bad news for you if you stay on unpatched 2.3 over the next several months.
At the moment a single IPS display at 1920x1080. I'm about to get 4 more panels (not IPS, and not as big) so I'll have two portrait mode to the sides of the main display.

Not sure what I'll do with the other two monitors. Maybe kludge them into a nightmare all-in-one with an old laptop.
Where is he complaining about it? I see this:

"Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American"
Fires
which class of fire extinguisher is preferred when putting out electrical fires?
We're not nearly cheap enough: The plane ticket price doesn't capture the cost of flying, the majority of which comes from the greenhouse gas emissions. Further working in the wrong direction is the tax freeness of jet fuel and the 2-3x amplified effect of co2 when injected directly to the upper atmosphere.
Critiques are one thing — the outright hostility I see from the skeptic communities towards feminism & feminists goes to another level. I absolutely believe that, even if not more prevalent, sexist attitudes are voiced more loudly and more self-righteously in the internet skeptic community than outside it.
Is it now possible (and straightforward) to drop the requirement for a username and solely use email addresses for user accounts?
It's a shame facebook doesn't allow for sharing PGP keys, that would solve the problem pretty well.
Awesome tool. Really easy to create wireframes and the support is great too!
Very effective too
"Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American"
"NSA employees must declare their foreign travel 30 days in advance and are monitored."

So how was he allowed on the plane? Surely part of the passport/no-fly-list check would have caught that. Or did he drive to Mexico and fly from there?
The Tragedy of Student Loans: We've Lost the Dream
I really liked the haskell version when I first learned about it in a programming languages course, I believe I've never been more surprised than after seeing the output of 'take 10 fibs' without knowing how did that single line worked.
>Who's to say that an "early" death is not in fact a gift for the living?

Everyone who's experienced it?
Man this guy can write,

"Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school"
Working on a car in a shop is about engineering about as much as driving a car to work is about piloting an F1 race car.
>> Your government has to ask you for permission to access the server

Not true. The government will send orders to the ISP you are reselling for OP and neither you nor your customer will know until the disk drives have been seized.

I would also want you and your staff to be PCI DSS compliant (pass background checks).
I would like to use Linux for ideological reasons. I only realized the value of doing so in the last few years. After buying my last Macbook.

Besides, what's the ideological difference between Dell, Apple, Lenovo and Asus as hardware manufacturers? You know, not in terms of price, but freedom.
Yup. I'm actually working with some freelancers right now and paying for it with my day job (though I'm not a developer myself and chose to work with people specialized in certain areas).
Just a heads up, but our Barracuda Web Filter blocked this domain due to Pornography.
Ask HN: How do you manage your finances?
As a youngish guy with no significant assets financial management or planning has never been something I've invested in mentally. Increasingly though lack of visibility around where my money is coming from and going is becoming pretty frustrating.

What strategies have smart people adopted to accomplish some of the following:

* Monitor, graph and predict money I/O.
* Identify major cost areas.
* Track and improve credit ratings.
* Quantify potential for lending.

I bank with HSBC in the UK, but I have no problem changing that. Having just had to resort to Javascript[0] to get a CSV output of my previous transactions this seems appealing. Is anyone doing modern UX design in online banking? Or are their other services out there to fill the gap?

[0] https://gist.github.com/cantlin/5798166
Cosmetologist / Apprenticeship
PH 4.5
August 2011 – Present (1 year 11 months) Old Towne Alexandria, VA

The all seeing eye of the world's most powerful government is staffed by beauty school drop outs? Is this for realsies? The low standards to getting a spy job are a more shocking revelation than anything Snowden has put forth so far.
Having lost a grandfather and an aunt to ALS, I can completely relate to what this family is going through. It is heartbreaking, and emotionally draining to watch someone go through it.

It also scares the crap out me knowing this is a genetic disease and two of my family members have already succumbed to it. This is known as Familial ALS. Genetically speaking, it comes down to a 50/50 chance I could get it. I can get screened to know for sure if I'll get it, but it requires you do counseling before you even take the tests, considering how it could change your life overnight.

Here's some facts about Familial ALS:

http://www.alsa.org/als-care/familial-als/familial-als.html

- Familial ALS- occurring more than once in a family and accounts for 5 to 10% of all cases.

- In 1991 a team of ALS Association-funded researchers linked familial ALS to chromosome 21. In 1993 the research team identified the precise defect, a change in the DNA for the protein called copper-zinc superoxide dismutase 1 (SOD1). Researchers since have found more than 100 mutations in different places in the coded DNA instructions for making SOD1.

It's frustrating because it seems like every time they get close to finding THE mutated gene, they identify several hundred others. It's like a game where the goal posts in a game are constantly changing.
I enjoy reading Bond's stuff, he's enviably erudite. But he tends to NOT say what he is (as an identity) now, even though he's pretty clear about what he is not.

A somewhat analogous awakening in my life came when I realized that scientists (ones with real PhDs, grants, and grad assistant) were really quite petty and insecure (like the rest of us.)
In Clojure you can implement this as:

(def fib-list (map first (iterate (fn [[a b]] [b (+ a b)]) [0N 1N])))

(nth fib-list 100)
354224848179261915075N
The drive from Hawaii to Mexico must be an interesting one.
I sure hope this is a "You know, just in case" post instead of a "answers appreciated as soon as possible so I can put out this raging inferno."
"If they had taught a class on how to be the kind
of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have
finished high school."
Not to mention if the trains are faster you will need fewer trains to transport the same number of people in the same time interval.
Digital Games boost students score
Ignore the graph. How many vaccines has organized religion developed?
I find it preferable to determine the requests that jQuery is making and perform them myself to extract the necessary data, rather than load up a whole browser just to do the same thing.

Selenium is terrible, performance wise, and requires a significant investment in environment in order to work reliably. I try to avoid it except when I absolutely cannot.
Yes - an iterative loop is much faster, because with recursion you have to calculate a number of trivial fibonacci numbers.

https://gist.github.com/mjhea0/5798178
Can you put a marquee tag in there somewhere? I think it will add real panache to this party.
I like it, so headline "EU Mobile phone directive causes brain tumours and raises unemployment"
Legal Aid Plans
There was something about not being able to get a fair trial stateside.

Although, I don't know what the laws are like in the States, but in Canada you can go to jail if you have security clearance and reveal information that if true would be classified. If the legal situation is similar in the US, he's pretty clearly guilty.
We are clearly entering the '80s of web design.
Is it just me, or does repeating this sort of assassination thing make anyone else more skeptical of Snowden?
Definitely the "meta" VCs get the cattle prod. (I mean, a "meta" VC is just as ethically challenged as the real VC, plus no money!)

The real VCs, I suspect that depends, there are many ethical professional people in the VC world - but do take into account the day you have had and the battery charge left :0
I for one welcome the return of the `aint` operator.
No, it's not, that's the point. Unless you find some way to fly without creating pressure differentials, a plane with wings that are miles wide, or a usable description of airflow transitioning from subsonic to supersonic, you aren't flying at Mach 0.99.
I would argue that none of these developments solved the social problem we're talking about, however, i.e. keeping conversations private and creating trust. Indeed, these developments made it worse because face to face interaction is no longer necessary, and putting the means of communication out of your control (either by transmitting it over a medium you don't control or simply by making it so complicated you can't possibly control it) increasing the likelihood of the "man in the middle" either intercepting your communications or impersonating them.

So I would say that you can reflow communication all you want, but that the underlying problem here is trust and knowledge and those are social problems. People either need to appreciate what these new communication flows mean and/or establish ways to bring their communications under their control (i.e. crypto).

That said, I think the idea of establishing trust through key signing parties (and "crypto" parties) is an interesting one. One of the key features of this is learning from someone you likely don't know, just as when you do a key signing party everyone requires some sort of government ID. In the end, you've got to put your trust in someone, right? So, back to the social problem.
It's an employer policy, and it has nothing to do with the passport or no-fly-list. In normal circumstances, flying without declaring his travel would put his clearance in jeopardy and he'd have federal marshals waiting for him upon his return. Similarly, he'd have security officers checking up on him at home if he failed to show up at work on time (and failed to answer the check up call).
>The second big gripe is that Golang has neither an IDE nor a REPL.

The IDE part is not true at all, why do people keep saying this? LiteIDE (aka golangide) works great, I use it all day everyday. It has syntax highlighting, autocomplete, gofmting, building, debugging, etc and is very lightweight.

Downloads: https://code.google.com/p/golangide/downloads/list
Source: https://github.com/visualfc/liteide

As for the merit if REPL over something like the go playground (http://play.golang.org/) or a debugger, I can't say. Most of the code I wrote before Go was C/C++/C#/Java.
Well that's embarrassing...

Still, why aren't airports checking if people specifically banned from flying are trying to fly?
World GDP is about $83 trillion dollars.

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

It's probably just a matter of figuring out how to funnel enough money and people on the problem. Smartphone advances, for example, will be incredible over the next decade. Much better graphics, CPU, batteries, etc. That's because there's a huge market for them. Another example is 4k TV's, which are out of reach. Within 5 years, they'll be cheap, and a lot better.

Figure out a way to have consumers directly spend more money on medical research/technology and great things will happen.
Trains have degraded security though. Once a plane leaves, someone has to be on the plane or have had access to it beforehand to affect the flight. You can defend against this through security at those specific points. On a train, the entire trip is over miles of tracks which 'anyone' can access. Security at boarding doesn't affect the attack surface area as much.

That said, I might prefer train travel to flying.
Ask HN: What measures can I take to reduce fraud when taking online payments?
I'm currently integrating with Stripe [1] to handle subscriptions to a SaaS product.

I would like to create a minimal form for collecting credit/debit card details.

With respect only to charging a user for a subscription, the details I need are that of the card: card number, expiry date and card verification code. The collection of these fields alone is sufficient for charging a card.

I am concerned that the fewer details collected in the payment form, the greater the chance of a given transaction being fraudulent.

Instead of collecting cardholder details (name on card, billing address) what measures, preferably technological, can I take to reduce and/or minimise fraud?

In other words, what behind-the-scenes, automated measures can I put in place to reduce fraud without having to ask the user for anything other than the credit card number, expiry date and cvc?

[1] http://stripe.com/
I hadn't seen this post in awhile. Thanks for posting it!

Might want to add a (2011) to the title (judging by the "comments" link at the bottom.)

EDIT: Maybe also remove the anchor tag - but perhaps that was intentional?
From atoms to software and back
As with 90% of discrimination issues, it's about socio-economic status. A stereotypical Italian is comparatively "rich", stereotypical Romanians and Bulgarians are "poor".
4G enterprise app hackathon in London this weekend
Being a skeptic means you are someone who is skeptical. It does not come with a membership to a club. Just because you dislike some other people who are skeptical, does not mean skeptics are bad and you need to stop being one. I am sure you dislike some people who wear pants too, but you continue to wear pants anyways.

All that said, his assessment of the people he dislikes is incredibly superficial and childish. What exactly was the point that you hoped to make by posting it?
>>> "I enjoy reading Bond's stuff, he's enviably erudite. But he tends to NOT say what he is (as an identity) now, even though he's pretty clear about what he is not."

There is a role for the critic in society who illuminates the positions of others. I've noticed a pressure in contemporary society to be "for something". That kind of accusation sometimes is used to dominate or discredit the opponent and end the debate.

In fact, being "for something" or "having a position" is not always appropriate. It keeps the brain loose while generating new ideas. True scientists know this.
I typically watch from the periphery of the skeptic community online (reddit, blogs, etc), so take what I say with a grain of salt.

First, how can someone "no longer be a skeptic"? What does that even mean?

Second, when you reference the skepchick elevator incident as your first and most critical point, you immediately lose credibility. The entire sequence of events and what actually transpired in that event have been gone over again and again and again and at the end of the day, there was nothing to it. So when you make this the basis of your claim, there isn't much there.

Third, rest of the post is rather rambly and, frankly, incoherent. It isn't worth taking point-by-point, though the general feel is such that I'm not convinced the author has much authority and knowledge on the subjects to speak about them.

Lastly, just as a word of warning to people who might strongly identify with skepticism or what not, but strawmen abound and it might just enrage you. You've been warned ;)
Also part of a series.

Chapter 01:
http://michaelrbernste.in/2013/02/19/CTM-chapter-01.html

On the paper that sums up the pedagogy:
http://michaelrbernste.in/2013/02/23/notes-on-teaching-with-...
I like powder because it destroys everything.
Is there a way to filter posts like this? I understand things like "why I am no longer using Java" are here. But this is just off-topic.
Would would Spock do?
Seems to break when you press multiple keys at once. Movement starts and then doesn't stop. Otherwise, it is pretty good.
It would go some of the way to solving the problem, but you've got to trust Facebook in that exchange and I'm not sure I do. The only real way to establish trust in PGP is in person (or over the phone if you really know the person).

That said, I do think Facebook could go a long way to establishing a trust infrastructure.
The Faulty Logic of the ‘Math Wars’
Every day this drags on, this guy seems more and more like the most self-righteous and self-aggrandizing douche on the planet.

And yes, much like when Aaron Schwatrz stories completely hijacked HN, I'm really looking forward to this story - which seems like it's increasingly becoming a non-story (or certainly blown waaaay out of proportion) as more facts come out - stops dominating HN.

I realize both of those terse statements probably aren't going to make me very popular around here.
Obama, The NSA and the usual internet suspects: Google, Yahoo, Facebook are getting their asses kicked. This man is the Thomas Paine of our day: "Give me liberty or give me death."
Lessons from Enterprises built to stand the test of Time
Heart and Backbones of the Internet
13 Critically Important Lessons from Over 50 Growth Hackers
Of course, if you were a Chinese spy but you also wanted the world to believe you were not, this is exactly what you would say.
The best you can do without plug ins is to flag it and hope other people join in.
And given up trying to!
He probably asked the compiler to emit the assembly it generates (e.g. gcc's -S option); disassembling or decompiling would be overkill.
He COMPILED the C code into its assembly stage with a gcc option. He probably just looked at the .S file from gcc..
Aren't you stuck with JavaScript then? Sure, PhanthomJS is awesome, but Python is even in the title, so it's not just a side note.
You do realize you are saying "skeptics are skeptical" right? They don't suddenly become monsters when that skepticism is towards feminist mythology instead of christian mythology.
I don't know how people write their code, but I don't like thinking about satisfying compiler when I'm working on some idea, it takes some of my thinking power. I'd rather do that later, probably together with unit tests.
And if you don't set morality aside? There can be such a gap between "legal" and "just", and before anyone asks me to set morality aside, I would love to first hear their arguments for me doing that, other than that they do it.
"Is not that they are monitoring me. I have nothing to hide."

This is not a valid argument. See http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/we-should-all-have-somethin... and http://kottke.org/13/06/you-commit-three-felonies-a-day
In the New York City area, there are millions of people within 50 miles of 3 major airports. I'm 20 minutes by cab from one of them. I'd love to cut a 6-7 hour trip to most places by half. Ideally, I should be able to land in JFK, take a 15 minute maglev to Newark and take a connecting flight.

Air travel could be so much better.
If he is indeed a spy, then the Americans have TWO problems to deal with. And it has absolutely no bearing on the current privacy discussion - the two problems are damaging in two (relatively) different aspects.
Yes, it's an extrapolation from the slides.

My beef with the phrase though is that Greenwald keeps repeating it and sticks by the story that the NSA slides said it so it must mean something, without bothering to ask his supposedly very knowledgable source to expand further on the topic.
If you want to search for linked profiles without paying linkedin use this tool [1]. It generates Google boolean search strings [2] that you can use to see Linkedin's indexable profiles.

[1] http://recruitin.net/
[2] http://goo.gl/xs6sc
What he did was disclose classified information. Which itself is illegal. But its a jump to automatically assume that disclosure of classified information is treason.

Now if he turns around and starts helping China with the information he has, then he will be pretty much done for.
(Verity Stob) Bjarne Again: Hallelujah for C++
Yes, and the guardian actually published a (tiny) retraction to this effect. So tiny I can't find it, but yes the central, core, money-shot claim is actually patently not true.

edit: I found this on the issue: http://www.zdnet.com/the-real-story-in-the-nsa-scandal-is-th...
If you were a Chinese spy, why would you play the game of releasing the information to the public at all? You'd just go straight to the Chinese and disappear into their protection. There's nothing to be gained by an elaborate charade as a whistleblower.
To Dan Benjamin: I'm a happy corporate stooge
Shawn Achor: Creating lasting positive change
For scraping phantomjs or casperjs is the best way to go but you will have to use some JavaScript [1]. Both give you access to everything a WebKit browser user does with either a Node-style callback syntax (phantomjs) or a procedural/promises-style syntax (casperjs). Easy to setup, simple to use and fast enough for scraping but only WebKit (for now).

For testing on browsers other than WebKit (or vendor specific WebKit edge cases) use Selenium. Harder to setup, more complex, probably faster (still slow for testing) but not limited to WebKit.

[1] Sorry folks but some JavaScript is required to programmatically interacting with the web - also need some HTML and CSS.