skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Java and rails engineer for YC S13 financial services startup - SF
We're a current-batch YC-backed social enterprise creating a new and much-needed financial service for the elderly.

Financial services companies stand to make $400b per year by retaining their baby-boomer customers and we're positioning ourselves as the killer app for that. Our team is scrappy and fresh but also includes top talent from Visa and MasterCard. Still stealth, launching into private beta in August.

We're managing four pieces of technology:

1. A rails site that provides an online banking experience that is friendly, simple, and usable. The focus is reliable, secure, well-architected, etc., but the thing that makes it excellent is simplicity and a great experience, not technical bells and whistles. Our javascript is unobtrusive in every sense.

2. An java socket-server authorization service connected directly to the credit card transaction processing backbone. It's accepting, decoding, processing, re-encoding, and responding with fixed-width records over a two-way stream. Two-byte headers and signal bits and all that. High uptime and performance requirements. This is the special sauce where everyone in the industry hears about us and is like "Whoa, they let you guys process transactions! How did you get that deal signed?"

3. A learning system to support the authorization service in detecting fraud patterns. Right now this is nascent because learning systems are built on more data than we have right now. But we'll need a fast-iterating, powerful, and sophisticated framework for modeling these transactions, and we want to bake that in early.

4. The underlying infrastructure for all this, including failovers for the authorization system, integrations for email and SMS delivery, robust testing and hooks, VPNs and all that, keeping our boxes up to the security standards legally required of financial institutions.

The ideal candidate will:

* Be a good person who cares about the social mission of the company. If you're OK with people who rip off grannies, apply for a different job. If not, your country is calling.

* Be fluent in java and ruby on rails.

* Have as many as possible of:

- Some experience in systems with higher-than-average security and uptime/reliability requirements. If you've worked in consumer finance or systems that manage money, that's a plus because you know what we're dealing with. But fine if not!

- Hardware or OS or low-level-language software experience. There will be a certain level of figuring out why two threads in the pool are writing to the socket simultaneously, etc.

- Machine learning – down the road that's going to be important, and fun. If it's an interest, passion, or area of curiosity, write to us!

- Be comfortable with fast/continuous development and release cycles and working with compile/deploy automation with some panache.

We're still stealth or we'd say more! But send us a note with a resume and link to github and we'll tell more. kai.stinchcombe@gmail.com
Hehe, <insert easy joke about Opera here>. Hehe.
> Non-violent protest is how the Civil Rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr. forced better law

The was Malcolm X though. The threat of militant and violent backlash was there and served like a booster for the non-violent factions. Otherwise look at Occupy movement. How many bankers are in jail? None. There _has_ to be a background and credible threat to the system so it would consider the peaceful alternative as a pretty good deal.
Switching my open-source projects from Bitbucket to Github
BAH is a massive corporation full of ex-government officials, and vice-versa; the current Director of National Intelligence is a former BAH executive.

They're gonna be ok.
Considering that FISA was passed in 1978 and that the NSA has been around since the 1950s, I would assume that domestic wiretapping has been going on the entire time. They absolutely have to say publicly that they are not recording any US citizens data, but year after year there are leaks that say otherwise.

Maybe 98% of NSA employees were required to not intercept any US citizen transmissions but there has likely always been a division of the NSA that is devoted to domestic spying. The agency would be completely ineffective if they didn't allow recording domestic communications.
Is it really harmful if government get your call and email?
There are levels, but the danger is that some person with sensitive information may communicate the information using an insecure service. For instance someone might remark that the military appears to be building a large underground structure near their farm, the US could then use this information to locate a newly build ICBM silo.

The levels of action that a nation could take to protect itself are:

1. They could train people who have access to sensitive information not to use any US service. This is what the US has done asking some members of the intelligence community to not use Skype and other services due to worries about its insecurity. This is probably common training for handling sensitive information in most nations.

2. They could filter such services at government offices, schools and sensitive sites. For instance no company can get defense contracts unless they have a policy that prevents their employees from using gmail. This is probably the most likely additional action that will taken and it will hurt US business.

3. They could filter such services at the national level. China (1 billion people) already does this, I wouldn't be surprised if Russia started. It's unlikely to happen on a global scale but each country that bans another US service hurts the economy.

We saw this happen with US crypto export controls, the market spoke and companies began switching to non-US software.
Huh? Are you referring to Office 365 or is there something I missed?
From the article you linked to:

"With the latest revelations just days – in some cases, hours – old, it’s too soon to know for sure."

I think it's still too early and I'd wait until all the facts are out. I can't speak for how people in other countries are feeling, but I can say this...

As an American startup founder, I'd be very worried about what my international customers would think if they knew I was working secretly with the U.S. government, publicly denying it, subsequently being caught in my own misleading statements, and allowing the government access to all of their data after I told them it was private. As a customer, I'm happy if you can use that data to serve better ads that are relevant to me. But I would be very angry if it was being served to a foreign government which wants to profile me a certain way, potentially to justify killing or detaining me.
I keep saying it but it bears repeating. Above street level all justice is just politics.

Add in "terrorism" and it becomes completely non-deterministic. The charges may as well be completely invented. There is literally no way to predict the punishment any particular action might provoke. The complete failure of the rule of law. It's just rule by fiat.
Some political scientists would say we're actually on our third or fourth.

The third U.S. republic was created after the Civil War, with the passage of Constitutional amendments that made the Federal government unambiguously superior in power to the governments of the states.

The fourth U.S. republic was created during the Progressive Era, with the creation of the "regulatory state" in which significant authority over economic matters was delegated from Congress and the courts to regulatory agencies in the Executive Branch. This system evolved gradually over the years (with the biggest changes coming through Roosevelt's New Deal and Johnson's Great Society) into the system we live in today.

The changes wrought by the Civil War were unfortunately quite violent, but all the other changes have been peaceful, as you note. Our ability to reinvent our democracy in this fashion is a big part of why the Constitution has survived so long -- we can change how we govern ourselves in big ways without having to tear it up and start anew.
Tel-aviv is as tolerant as any major city gets, including towards Arabs. Outside of tel-aviv things might be different, but all in all, despite what you might read in US media, Israel is not a racist country (with the huge exception of immigration laws, where it is horribly racist, or rather religousist)
Link bait for Wikipedia? I don't get it.
The Vietnam war protests were largely peaceful, except when e.g. government soldiers attacked college students at Kent State.

With some significant exceptions, like the Weather Underground (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground).
It is for CIA at least. Their tactic is that "we can teach you technical stuff in class after we hire you, we can't teach you patriotism if you already aren't". They like to hire ex-Marines. Someone was saying they also like to hire Mormons.

The kink is that many patriots do actually understand and love the Constitution and if forced to routinely go against it in their line of works, a few will pull a Manning. That is expected. They can't have it both ways.
This is just it. This time last week it was public knowledge that (for example) Google complied with FISA 702 orders. Now it's public knowledge that Google complies with FISA 702 orders, using a workflow-automation system. There are hints of extra reasons to be more worried than before, but so far it seeems they're all either speculative or disputed:

(I'll keep talking about Google specifically just to narrow things down for now.)

* NYT suggested that FISA orders can be broad and shallow ("a broad sweep for intelligence, like logs of certain search terms") instead of narrow and deep (eg. everything on person or company X), but CNET's source contradicted that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5845878 .

* The Washington Post used language which suggested that Google's lawyers may have been taken out of its FISA-702-order-execution loop altogether, but NYT contradicts that and Google has denied it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5847846 .

* The Verizon mega-warrant suggests that NSA might be gathering data under similarly broad FISA orders, something that (like broad-and-shallow orders) would make "no direct access" a lot less meaningful, but that's been denied by Google https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5847959 and the various anonymous sources seem to be contradicting it too.

* The NYT article http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-... seemed to hint at the possiblity that the Google lawyers processing FISA orders could be suffering some kind of reverse regulatory capture or that Larry Page and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond could have lost track of the extent and nature of what they were approving. There doesn't seem to be any specific evidence for that though.

One thing that does seem to be true is that if you make it more convenient for the NSA to get data under FISA 702 orders it will respond by getting a lot more of it. Apparently the NSA's PRISM stack boasts of a 63% increase in the number of communications obtained in 2012 from Google http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-n... (and much larger increases at other companies). Still, it seems the PRISM system hasn't - or at least, hasn't yet! - facilitated an order-of-magnitude or game-changing increase in the scale of FISA 702 snooping. Overall there doesn't seem to be any great change in what we think we know http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2013/05/fisaca... about that.

So, unless some of those hinted worries are true, there doesn't seem to be anything very big that Larry Page could have brought to our attention that wasn't public knowledge last week already. The biggest news is probably the increase in the scale of the data requested, and if Page cared enough about that he could presumably just have done a Twitter and declined to build a semi-automatic pipeline...

(IANAL or anything else.)
This guy doesn't seem very smart at all. And using pillow cases and shields over screens to stop the NSA?

I think someone like him, with his level of access to information, would have his reasons for choosing China.
On consumers I would not expect much change to any other non-us service that keeps you invested and locked-in. There simply are no alternatives, some european services are currently shutting down.

Even Schneier is stating that if you aren't connected with us social media, you simply stop to exist for certain groups of people. That rule applies to nearly every european user too.
The Best Returning Companies in 2013: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
Do you have more information about this theory? The discussion has been so one-sided, I feel obligated to seek other interpretations.
Open-source the code.
I think its a big deal. I'm not American. I don't think things will change - at first.

The leading US internet companies are all built on a foundation of trust. Undermining that trust counterbalances the convenience of their services and over time new competitors without these trust problems are only a click away.
Slacktivism at it's best.
Well, yes. However, refusing to talk without a lawyer should still be possible.
1)
NSA had official policies in the 1980s/1990s which would have prevented individual sysadmins from having broad authority.

A few changes have happened: explosion in number of systems, decline in quality of NSA staff (due to better opportunities elsewhere) on the tech/IT side, increase in contractors (who also tend to suck), politicization (since in the 1990s there was no clear mission, and in the 2000s there was not as morally justifiable a mission).

The NSA IT people I've met in the 2000s would not be people I'd hire to do IT/security. The older "former NSA" people I know are people I would gladly work with.

2)
It appears Snowden has somewhat overrepresented the level of access he had.
Having lost a number of people in the last couple of years, I am of the firm opinion that nobody gets to say what an appropriate reaction to death is. It's a big thing; people have the feelings they have.

I do think there are more and less appropriate contexts to express those feelings. I think the ring theory is a pretty good guide: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-0407-si...

I think here we're all in the same ring in regards to Banks, so I'm ok with people expressing their grief as it comes to them, as long as they're not being giant dicks to other grievers in the process.
If you don't have anything to hide... oh, why was the government doing it secretly?
Given that civil liberties were such a big part of his 2008 campaign, the best case scenario you describe is still a bit of a problem. I'm actually pretty angry at him right now. I donated a lot to his campaign in 2008 based on his focus on civil liberties, and he has only escalated everything I disliked about Bush. (And yes, I realize he made some questionable votes in the Senate before the 2008 election. I told myself it was what he had to do to get elected. By the 2012 election I had wised up and voted third party.)
Not for non-EU citizens, unfortunately.
BAH, SAIC, CSC, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman are all infamous, when it comes to software projects, for being completely incompetent.

What you've described is my experience as well. 9 times out of 10, when a project actually needs to be completed, the task is subcontracted out to a much smaller company who will actually do the coding.
Well, there's that occasionally - but over the last 10 years or so, things have been relatively quiet.

I mean, would you recommend staying out of NYC because of 9/11, or out of Boston because of the recent terror acts, or out of Oklahoma after the McVeigh bombing, or out of Colorado after the aurora theater shooting, or out of Connecticut after the school shooting, or .... (I can probably go on for ten more paragraphs with references to just the last two years)
I use Dropbox with encfs. But now I'm wondering if the client could have a backdoor, since it's a binary.
It's not about affecting everybody. The vast majority will likely be left alone. It's about having the ability to affect everyone.
Launching a new product: 4 Things to Analyze
While that double-standard is unfortunate I do not see how their ability to lie to someone should make that person tell lies. Is the alternate universe where the police are not allowed to lie to you is also one where if an officer makes a factually inaccurate statement during questioning gets the interview tossed from court? I suspect that it is and in that case I prefer this universe.
Media is used to tell people they are part of a minority all the time.

You and I don't actually know how many people know about this, and how many people care, so talking heads will gladly tell us we're all alone in our outrage and we shouldn't expect anything to happen.
> I think really there isn't a big difference between the two. Snowden is trusting Greenwald's discretion on what gets published, Manning trusted Wikileaks on what would be published (and recall that Wikileaks did go on to redact a lot of what Manning leaked)

The big difference is that Manning didn't know what he was releasing.
Yeah, but there are also lots of people who would drive SUVs, but SUVs are impractical. Roads that are hundreds or thousands of years old tend to be very narrow.
What's the Deal with Hong Kong?
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I believe lsof can only display files held open at a given point in time (when you run lsof), no? So if a process opens a file, does something with it, and then immediately closes it, you're unlikely to be able to catch that with lsof unless you happen to run it at exactly the right time.
FISA was passed in 1978 because of domestic spying and has always allowed spying of US citizens who meet certain criteria.

This debate has been going on for 30 years, "meta data" or "geo data" isn't required. This is the NSA we are talking about, they literally have secret patents which can physically target communication sources based on latency and other variables.

The police can track your vehicle movements (if there is a cop that can read your license plate, I forgot what their system is called, it's going in a database with location and time), many many random mobile app providers can track your movements, so why would anyone be surprised that the largest and most advanced spying agency has the capability and motive to monitor US citizens. My point is that there is not much use in all of this fuss, it's been suspected (assumed) for decades that the NSA uses some legal loophole or special permission to gather all data. And even if they didn't, who is going to stop them?

Does anyone think that ANY crimes have been prevented because the person though, "geeze, the NSA will probably see this and pass it to the FBI, maybe I shouldn't hack or steal or murder". Probably. Not saying it's right or wrong, but an interesting piece of the puzzle to consider.
The government making a request like this to an employee of a tech company, with a gag order that doesnt let him share that information with the company he is working for is a blatant abuse of power. An employee has no resources to fight something like this if he cant tell the company he works for what he is doing, meaning that any company is vulnerable to this way of operating.
If he lied to The Guardian I would be very surprised. It would be unlikely to help his case.
I'm pretty tenacious and don't give up easily in general, which has led me to go down with several sinking ships (women and startups). I did realize I was involved in something special - the hard part was getting accepted to the program and for condensed matter physics, it was fairly straightforward to get your ph.d. (not easy, straightforward). Pick an exotic material, do a measurement no one has done and write about it.

I was unmarried, no mortgage or car payments and I had already completed 2 years out of an estimated 5.5. I just had to ignore my annoying advisor, focus and try to enjoy the cool, interesting parts of the science. I loved machining my own metal parts. And also I had to get away at times and try to have a life outside the lab. So, I decided to stick with it.

No regrets - I'm 44 now, and I admit I was fairly bitter about the experience for at least a decade after I finished.

The last thoughts are: Lot's and lot's of work. Can you be force-fed your favorite food 24x7 for 5 years and still like it? Like how Homer Simpson thwarted the devil force feeding him donuts?

I did have an office mate who worked 9-5, was a 6'2" former speed skating champion of Canada, wife and kid and was always planning to work for McKinsey and company, which he did after completing his Ph.D. in 4 years. Other people have different experiences. I was a hard worker, other people were brilliant.
I don't see why this is the most downvoted option. It does seem on point that the piece doesn't have any hard polling data about worldwide reactions to the recent NSA revelations, and the stuff about alternative services mostly refer to Chinese competitors, who are large players locally, but not worldwide. Hence, you'd think Betteridge's law was applicable. No?
Linus's reasons for using a Macbook: http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/19/an-interview-with-millenium...
The law applies (and has been applied) even if you don't know that you are talking to a federal agent.
Big Boulder discussion on Social Data in China
Even Slate admits, though, that they have no idea what level his computer skills are at or how good a fit he was for the job:

>Yes, he could be a computing savant anyway—many well-known techies dropped out of school

They're basically bemoaning his lack of official credentials.
Something tells me he will not forget. However, it might suddenly become very difficult for his family to go and visit him, wherever he ends up.
Encryption? They're pretty good at it.
> The worst they can do is disconnect me, and I can always leave them.

No, the worst thing that Google,[1] can do is share that information with credit card companies, HR departments, health insurance companies, etc, who do have the power to ruin your life and are much more likely to do it than the government.

What happens when the advertising money hits the wall and can't support revenue growth sufficient to keep the Wall Street analysts happy? At some point some MBA is going to figure out that HR departments would love to be notified about e.g. their employees joining say a cancer support page. It sounds inconceivable today, but I bet people who started using credit cards in the 1960's and 1970's never expected that one day the various credit organizations would band together and sell your information to literally everyone, so that you could be denied a job because of your credit history.

I think it's important to keep some perspective, and I feel like people on HN aren't doing that here when they direct all their blame to the government over this issue and hold Google, Facebook, etc, who created this surveillance apparatus, blameless. Corporate America is much more likely to screw you over than the government. They have a profit motive to do so, and can get away with screwing you over on a mass scale in a way the government cannot. I don't know a single person who has been screwed over by the government. I do know people who have been screwed over by credit ratings agencies, having job offers revoked because they struggled financially in college.

Maybe it's not inevitable or even very likely that Google and Facebook will sell your information to the highest bidder. But it's a failure of imagination not to pretend that it isn't possible, and if we're going to engage in slippery slope reasoning with respect to the NSA, let's be intellectually honest and admit that we've built a vast surveillance apparatus in both the public and the private sector, and there are numerous entities within both sectors who have the ability and perhaps the motive to use that information to hurt you.

[1] Or Facebook or whatever. It doesn't matter. One day these companies will become mature and will be headed by some MBA who has never written a line of code...