skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's getting a bit tiresome to read the same stories over and over about PRISM. Can we please move on and start sharing about entrepreneurship, strategy and business again?

Personally, I am somewhat heartened by the fact that this is remaining such a hot topic. I honestly thought it would have already faded as the "topic of the day" at HN by now, and to the public-at-large as well. But it's remaining in the news both here and in the general press, which suggests that more people do care about these issues than maybe my cynical side expected.

Alternatively it would be nice to see someone take action against PRISM. Less talking. More action.

Suggestions?

For my part, I donated $100.00 to the EFF a couple of days ago, and I just registered tricrypto.com, which I intend to use as the website for a new "Triangle Crypto" group here in the Raleigh / Durham (NC) area. The goal will be to engage in promotion, advocacy and education around the use of strong cryptography and related technologies, including Tor, I2P, GPG, SSL/TLS, etc.

Edit: For more information on "Triangle Crypto", see:

https://twitter.com/TriangleCrypto
They don't actually. A member of Congress can't just ask the head of the NSA to tell them what's going on and expect the complete details. Each house has a Select Intelligence Committee who do in fact receive briefs on these subjects from time to time. The Speaker of the House and Minority Leader in the House serve as ex officio members of the House committee and the Majority Leader and Minority Leader of the Senate serve as ex officio members of the Senate committee.

When it comes to these votes on these issues where intelligence is discussed, members look to follow the lead of members of this committee for guidance on how to vote, as these members are barred from divulging the exact contents of the meeting. (Though it may be argued they could easily enter it into the public record and have immunity via the speech and debate clause.) This committee is also supposed to exercise oversight but that's often problematic because...

Once the Congress has passed these laws, the Executive Branch will often interpet the laws as they see fit, and because of the clandestine nature of all of this, there is currently no mechanism by which they must or do inform the committee on how they've interpreted the law. There is very little Congressional oversight of clandestine activities, and this has been the case historically except for very rare occasions where the lid has been blown off so to speak and public hearings were held. The oversight here is the weakest link and in the absence of strong oversight, people in power will continue to expand and condense their power in Washington as history has shown.
Sony misrepresented their stance on used-game DRM, see
http://kotaku.com/third-party-publishers-will-have-final-say...
Google, Yahoo, and Facebook have directly denied that the NSA has direct access to their servers, despite what the slide deck says. The conclusion I've drawn from this is that the author of the slide deck was probably an idiot.
What makes you think that Android is ripping off iOS?
It hard-links directories, which is non-standard but supported by HFS+. It's kind of crazy to do in general, but in this specific use case it's a great idea.
Show HN: Honeycomb - A MySql storage engine for HBase
Here's Some Marketing Advice: Your Product Is Terrible
Security and audit controls are almost always bullshit. We're discussing a story that arose because a three-month tenure employee for an external contractor had wide ranging access to tonnes of stuff in the NSA. Previously Bradley Manning demonstrate the same with the armed forces.

Are all internal Google communications encrypted? Probably not, but even if they are if you work in network security you likely hold the keys to that encryption regardless. You probably have access to their PKI keys as well.
great post btw
> this was revealed under [sic] Obama's watch

Pet peeve: It was ON Obama's watch (it's a Navy term [0]).

</pedantry>

[0] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/on_one's_watch
That's a fairly good point. I do miss the nice variety of subjects on Hacker News lately though. It's all about PRISM.

Just noticed a post over on Reddit though. It appears someone is actively trying to work against the NSA surveillance.

http://mobile.theverge.com/2013/6/11/4418794/stopwatchingus-...
I guess I suppose that by privacy laws you meant something different than simply the ability to be given the information collected about you. I was also coming at it from a governmental aspect versus private as well.
> 3. Google's infrastructure changes. You can't just install a gateway to the NSA and expect it to continue working for a long time. It's not as if user-data was stored in simple text-files.

I think this was the biggest bullshit signal for me (also a Googler, although a recent addition). The high rate of change of Google's infrastructure is astounding when you consider the scale it operates at. The notion of trying to maintain a functional API in secret of the scope they're talking about is laughable without a pretty sizable team.

Impossible? No, probably not, but really ridiculously unlikely.
Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I think this is a problem that is going to solve itself. And it will do so more quickly and more effectively than legislation ever could.

It's a fortuitous coincidence that the same advances in computing power that have put fantastically distracting little computers in all our hands will also grant automobiles the computational horsepower to start saving us from our own stupidity.

We're probably 5 years away from accident avoidance technologies being a standard feature in new automobiles. Even sooner if auto insurance companies start giving massive discounts for cars that have them. Not only will auto-braking and auto-swerve technologies solve the distracted driver problem. They're going to solve the much larger issue that humans are just generally very poor at prolonged tasks requiring a high degree of concentration.

And from there it's only a few more years before the car pool lanes are repurposed as auto-pilot lanse. Filled with endless virtual trains of cars whizzing along at 95 miles per hour with 2 feet between each vehicle. While human occupants are mindlessly (and safely) scrolling through Facebook...
zram in Linux kernel should be quite close to what the advertised "Compressed Memory" feature is in Mavericks.

AFAIK zram is using LZO compression. According to some tests it is about the same efficiency as WKdm (used in Mavericks) but it has bit slower compression speed [1].

zram is an experimental kernel module since 3.2 and can be installed: [2], [3], [4].

[1] WKdm vs LZO
http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~barua/matt-compress-tr.pdf

[2] Gentoo zram
http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Zram

[3] Arch zram
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Maximizing_Performance

[4] Debian&Ubuntu zram
http://gionn.net/2012/03/11/zram-on-debian-ubuntu-for-memory...
I'm actually fairly impressed by the degree of outrage from my left-wing friends. I figured most of them would be far more rationalizing now that "their guy" was in charge.

Similarly, I'm not getting too riled up about all this, since I thought programs like this were Constitutional back when "my guy" was running them.
And that idea was used in Russian novel Ретрогенетика ("Retrogenetics") by Кир Булычёв, written in 1975.
NFS was never especially good, many a system admin would spend hours upon hours trying to fix it when it malfunctioned for no specific reason, but it was just the only viable option for many years. The alternatives were either research projects, or proprietary protocols like Novell used.

SMB isn't so much better as more widely supported.
PRISM sure sounds a lot like a fiber-optic beam splitter. Also known as a prism. Fits the facts, gives the data, doesn't touch the servers or back-door anything, because the data is being captured, in total, on the way in and out of the server farm.
NSA scam
After reading all the news about the latest advancement about a policestate. I was wondered, even if they had some kind of breakthrough on DES encryption (using dedicated hardware to do super fast modulo testing etc). Then still the amount of data would all require to be dechiperd.

Altough if rootkeys from verisign are known to them this might go a lot faster. Can anyone comment on would it would mean if verisign is hacked by them. For example if they have the rootkeys of some https website would they know all or just more easily hack a single account ?.
What you said could mostly be said about Italy too. Except for the STASI, of course :)
Breaking TOS is not a felony or even criminal; it's at best a civil court case.
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As do I. If I am to find myself in an unenviable situation I would rather make it hard for the villains to go about their business than to bow down and beg for mercy.

I might be taken out. I might take my enemy out (shooting a person is not as trivial task as it seems). Or I might just cause enough trouble for the bad guys so their total cost goes up, hopefully beyond break even point.

It is no different attitude than the one US tries to project upon the world.

I only acknowledge that nobody will fight for me if I don't fight for myself.
If something like that would make it difficult to get a security clearance than guys like Manning and Snowden would never have obtained one.
Everything except the home screen icons/default background. Those are still fairly hideous.

Still time to fix it though, I don't expect Apple to leave it in this state.

I'm more concerned with why hasn't Apple made lower case keys show up on the keyboard yet? This is a no brainer.
"If there were more travel time involved, it might not be worth it (or it might be worth switching how you exercise)"

Which for 95% of us out there, is the case. So this is a rather pointless article.
Maybe the best candidates are so apt at covering their tracks that they never make a blip on the radar. hehe.
Show HN: Send father's day card via CURL
SODIMM is a rather interesting packaging method for this kind of thing. Not hacker friendly, but great for OEMs that want to be able to replace this part.
I've seen that "public roads" thing mentioned a lot. In practice, I don't see how it matters: to a very good approximation, nobody buys a car not to drive it on public roads.
When you want to describe someone as a high school dropout, how else do you describe them? Someone who failed to achieve a successful release from a high school?

As for "seeking refuge in a communist nation," it must only be spoken, and not quoted anywhere, because doing a search for "seeking refuge in a communist nation" turns up nothing in Bing, DDG, and Google.

Of course, every new stations was also talking about the "NSA spying" on you, but that's okay.
Of course he is supportive now - they purposely made it "legal".

See we fell for the promise that they would end illegal surveillance of Ameicans

We thought that meant no more surveillance on Americans.

Instead they just made it "legal".

I really cannot believe they did that word game and we fell for it.
SMB has an extension mechanism and SMB 1 has support for Unix extensions for over 15 years - I was the author of the original Unix extensions spec. You can get full Unix semantics using them (links etc).

The predominant form of extension is an "info level". Somewhat analogous to a data structure like that returned from stat, the numeric info level controls what structure is returned (or supplied). Microsoft had a tendency to add new info levels that correspond to whatever the in-kernel data structures were in a particular release rather than longer term good design.

The general chattiness comes from their terrible clients like Windows Explorer (akin to Finder for Mac folk). I once did a test opening a zip file using using Explorer. If you hand crafted the requests it would have 5 of them - open the file, get the size, read the zip directory from the end of the file, close it. Windows XP sent 1,500 requests and waited synchronously for each one to finish. Windows Vista sent 3,000 but the majority were asynchronous so the total elapsed time was similar.

I worked on WAN accelerators for a while where you can cache, read ahead and write behind, in order to provide LAN performance despite going over WAN links. In one example a 75kb Word memo was opened over a simulated link between Indonesia and California. It took over two minutes - while instantaneous with a WAN accelerator. The I/O block size with SMB is 64kb so they could have got the entire file in two reads, but didn't.

If anyone is curious about what it was like writing a SMB server in the second half of the nineties I wrote about it at http://www.rogerbinns.com/visionfs.html
A few things...

First, don't place isolated works of genius against the mundane day-to-day work that most people do. Most of us aren't geniuses. I'm not an Einstein, and I'll never look good compared to him.

Next, I don't think it's that vociferous a demand in the industry. Most of the industry still resists pairing, regardless of results. And certainly, nobody is saying that it's impossible to be productive unless you pair.

Now, some positives for pairing. First, it's a risk management approach. Businesses generally aren't interested in maximizing productivity. They're interested in minimizing risk. Don't believe when they say otherwise, they're full of crap. (To be precise, they're interested in minimizing the APPEARANCE of risk more so than risk itself, but.) Depending too much on the results of individual programmers who could quit, be incompetent, or get hit by a bus is a business risk. By pairing, the knowledge gets distributed throughout the team. Moreover, it helps mentor junior programmers and integrate new staff.

Beyond that, I just find it a useful technique in many situations. Programming requires thinking on several levels at once. I've found it very effective for the driver to focus on the individual lines of code, while the kibbitzer keeps track of the big picture. It also helps keep you going when you hit a roadblock, rather than checking Twitter and coming back to life two hours later. So there are real productivity gains to be had.

Have you ever seriously TRIED pairing?
Who cares people? The gig is up on Google. They are in PRISM. Instead of upvoting every piece of Google PR we should be ignoring their rhetoric and distancing ourselves from this company; and the other 9 implicated in PRISM.

Secret partnerships with government agencies is detrimental to free market capitalism and goes against the true spirit of entrepreneurship.
The US added 723 megawatts of solar power during the first 3 months of 2013
It's a cross between WP and Android. It's a very strange feeling when you realise you could do a better job at UX design then a multi-billion company.
The reason why this is very important for Hacker News (and my business) is that me and my business depends on "internet" and "cloud". If people starts loosing confidence (i.e., that their data in cloud is mined to find "things"), we will be losing customers, people will be more and more hesitant to use "cloud" and "internet" (especially ones outside US), etc.
This is wishful thinking.

I have two ideas that are just as well supported by the complete lack of facts that we all have.

First, that Google is setting us up to believe a half-truth related to FISA letter counts. There are such numbers, we will get them, and they will not include all surveillance conducted with Google's data but anyone who says that will be back to being a crank.

Second, that Google perceives an existential threat to their company along two related but separate axis. The first is that their customers will leave, but that is less likely than the second. The second is that their best employees will leave. Googlers will not want to consider themselves as clerks in the Ministry of Truth. If they and their peers began to think about it in that way, then they will leave and the business will eventually die. If their employees have a credible excuse to think of their employer as a noble crusader, then this threat is significantly mitigated.
> Users notoriously have no idea what they want

This quote is used out of context all the time. Please, I know what I want and so do most people around me. Say that people cannot predict their future and that's fine by me. But don't generalize that to your first line.
Just noticed the order is random. Is that some kind of A/B test?
It probably depends heavily on your device. I've had at least a crash a day with my Galaxy Nexus and the Nexus 7 also crashes at times.

By crashing I mean: device reboots suddenly, which is of course a huge improvement over the 2.x days where the device would lock up completely, forcing you to take out the battery.

I have no experience with more recent devices, where it might be even better.

During 2012 I have been using both a Galaxy Nexus and a 4S as my main phone and at least MY galaxy was much crashier than the iPhone which is the origin of the joke.

The remark was intended as a joke, not as stating fact because I only have two devices to compare. Thankfully, it was clearly marked as such though.
You are so right, bad attention to details day for me. corrected the article in any case. thanks!
Google integration, by definition, defies Mozilla's mission. I'm okay with the integration knowing that I can fix it, though I wish there were a start-up option for novices or to have it outright removed, though.
I'm not saying its not confusing, but that up arrow is there for a reason - a swipe up from the bottom opens the control panel over the lock screen.
A.C.L.U. Files Suit Over Phone Surveillance Program
> It's a cross between WP and Android.

With a bunch of WebOS thrown in, e.g. the task switcher.
Valve new employee handbook
(Disclaimer: I'm a cofounder of Tinfoil)

Sorry about the experience you had! We only ask for your email address in the event that you leave the scan running and go away, so that we can email you a link to your report once the scan is finished.

We require verification before viewing any vulnerability data because we wouldn't want to show the vulnerabilities to someone who shouldn't have access. We'll take a look into the Meta tag issues you were having - normally that works great, but it's possible we messed something up.

The 3 vulnerabilities being reduced to 1 is /incredibly/ unusual, and we've never seen that before. Could you email me at borski@tinfoilsecurity.com with the URL or email associated with your account? I definitely want to look into this and fix it if there's an issue.

As for the two newsletters, you're more than welcome to unsubscribe. We think the information contained in those emails is actually very useful to anybody programming web applications, but we certainly understand that it is more useful for some than others. :)

TL;DR: Would love to fix the issues you ran into - please email me and we'll make it right. :)
it says it's a "Print magazine of Hacker News", but then what does this mean "Digital subscription for 12 months*" Do they mail you an actual magazine, or do they email you a PDF/e-book of the articles?
Sure there are. Android has seen a lot of different lock screen types - drag the small circle out of the big circle, drag the small circle into the big circle, "rotary dial" unlock, pattern unlock, and Samsung's (or was it HTC?) "fling the whole screen" unlock style.

Contextual gesture unlock/launch mechanisms are actually pretty popular. Here's an example with 4 options, but that is by no means the only option set.

http://cloud.addictivetips.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/MI...
So strong civil liberties are only necessary in nations that have large cloud-based services? There goes that double-standard again... :)
Actually Bjorn Soenens, the "America watcher" for the largest Flemish television station VRT, went out of his way to say that this is not the political responsibility of Obama.

I'm sure this seems strange for Americans reading this, but that's how Belgian state television goes. Bjorn Soenens is somewhere to the left of MSNBC.
Of all of those, only the settings one really bothers me
I have found that working out in the morning is very good for my productivity. I've written a blog post about it:
https://medium.com/better-humans/50c835e15244

The keys for me were doing so for only 10 minutes, with 2 of those being very intense, otherwise you get too exhausted.

I've lost 15lbs in 3 months also. By working out in the morning you get over the cortisol peak, grogginess and get off to a good start.

I need to finish that blog post series, but I'm actually working on a mobile app to help me keep track of some data.

To manage those energy/focus swings (especially after lunch), instead of working out, I go for a walk or step outside the office to work with fresh air and some sunlight.
Why I brought Pac-Man to MoMA
The up arrow is to indicate sliding up - but for the control center, not to unlock. I agree that a new user may be surprised. But having seen all three work once - slide left-to-right to unlock, down for notifications, up for control - it makes sense to me.
How is that claim falsifiable?
I don't understand this obsession with complaining about copying or imitating in design. As long as good things are taken and worse things are left behind, the consumers benefit.

It's like being upset that the 2014 cars have the same steering wheel and pedal layout, or that a manufacturer "stole" the idea of using a USB port in a car.
My son, also two years old, can unlock iOS6. He cannot, however, unlock my Galaxy S3, which offers no visual "unlock" slider. It's insane how well a two-year-old can interact with touch devices.
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> Apple's note does not imply it's a design issue.

At no point did I imply that. I was replying to eddieplan9's declaration that

> Timer Coalescing - is the only one that has the potential to alter application behavior

by noting Apple thinks App Nap may do so.
That was in the book "Jurassic Park". That's why the dinos change sexes -- because they have DNA from a reptile that does that.
These aren't mine, but here's the link to the HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5861681
Or DigitalOcean. Usually about 30 seconds for an instance to spin up.
Uhhhhh this is excellent. Love me some adventure games.
Two i's
Exactly. At least if Mozilla would take some action to address the giant Google/NSA search box on the startup page of their browser - it would show us they are doing more than just hand-waiving about these recent revelations.
I think in a proper world Waze would be banned because of its insane idea of encouraging drivers to socially interact during driving. Certainly it is not safe.

Waze has been generally exploiting people's stupidity, people's keen desire for free crap, and corporate dementia.

This is how you do things: by exploiting shortcomings of this world.