skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They put similar cameras up in the Phoenix area.

In Arizona, there is a law that you have to be served with a ticket or it isn't valid; so when people received their tickets they just threw them away. Process servers would eventually come by to serve you but if you didn't answer the door they couldn't just leave them. Eventually serving the tickets became such a burden that they took the cameras down.
I was homeschooled in a conservative (although not full-on-fundamentalist) Christian household the whole way, K-12. No TV, etc... although with my family it was only partially due to Christian conservatism and almost more due to ivory tower intellectualism (an odd mix, I know... I wasn't allowed to listen to rock music, but we listened to either classical music or liberal NPR instead, not Rush Limbaugh). I've never seen an episode of Transformers. Most "Wasn't the 90s great?" memes I can't really relate to.

I learned a hell of a lot, though, because I was allowed and encouraged to.

By the time I was 12, most of my social group (a fun, tight-knit youth group at church) was not made up of homeschoolers, so I adjusted pretty well socially. In college most people were surprised if I mentioned I was homeschooled.

I definitely knew several families of downright weird kids like the ones the author described... they were generally a minority though. (I homeschooled in a relatively large metropolitan area, so that perhaps helped). The majority of homeschooled kids, at least in my area, were not obviously socially awkward, although they were almost all trained by rote to be morally conservative.

The truest line in the article is the first one: "To a very great degree, school is a place where children learn to be stupid." - John Holt

I'd also add that school is a place where we learn how to treat other people like dirt. If I ever homeschooled my kids it would be because I thought it gave them a distinct chance to be a nicer, more decent human being.
> When SGI bought super-computer maker Cray in 1996, our CTO who worked there at
> the time said the running joke was, "SGI sold no units this quarter, but made
> a healthy profit." That wasn’t magic accounting. It was the NSA requiring
> purchases not be disclosed.

Love this quote; when this kind of thing happens does it prove for some difficult finances/auditing? Can you even report the units sold (SKUs, quantities)?
He covers both of your concerns in the interview.
Sadly I was never good with Ancient Greek or latin for that matter.
Hacker News features many programming and technology related articles as well.
Except nothing has changed. This has been going on for enough time that if the average Internet user hasn't been effected by it yet then they don't have much to worry about in the near future. So for the immediate future there are absolutely no implications on users other than being aware that someone can look at your communications, which you should have assumed already. Because if the NSA didn't already have your information than Google, Facebook and every other social network certainly did, something that we have been well aware of for a long time.
Their bellies are full, but their spirit's empty. This is the state of our society.
With the exception of Russia, I would guess that China is the least likely nation to be coerced into extraditing him.
If he is indeed in Hong Kong...
Almost an inevitable consequence of growing too large. You have to start hiring people farther and farther from your core. If you want to spy on everyone, you need everyone's help. But if even a single person isn't willing, you risk the entire endeavor.
> Thought experiment: imagine if half of these foiled plots had occurred. In other words, imagine if every 6 months or so we had a terrorist attack that killed a dozen people (and sometimes more).
> Do you think the American public would take the HN line that it's still a very small number of total deaths, similar to the number of people dying from hot tap water? Or would they elect politicians with a very aggressive anti-privacy regime that would be "necessary" to eliminate these routine acts of terror?

The conditions of your thought experiment are not realized but the American public still reacts as you hypothesise they would if terrorist attacks were a semi-annual occurrence.

People are fucking awful at reasoning about rare but dramatic events. This should come as a surprise to nobody.
Cherokee County schools in the late 90s are the reason we decided to home school our kids. Although we moved to VA soon after, we ran into all those same stereotypes farther North too. My family holds the rare distinction of being kicked out of the local liberal home school group for being too conservative while also being unwelcome in the conservative groups for being too liberal.

My son had a very successful first year of college last year and my daughter will be taking community college classes for this fall in what would be her senior year if she went to high school. They both had the choice to attend high school. They both passed.
Sorry I wasn't clear, when I talked about motive I meant for leaking the information, not for outing himself. (Though obviously, some motives for the leak would require the publicity.)

As to reasons for outing himself, if he didn't want fame, etc., then even assuming no assassination, if he were discovered and prosecuted the right way (by which I mean, by the law, not right as in I think he should be prosecuted), then chances are that by speaking to the media first (which he sure wouldn't be allowed to do after being caught) he has a better chance of getting the public to support him.
But countries which have >99% white population have similar policies as the United States on drugs, so the race theory doesn't seem to be correct.
I don't believe the DNI because of his testimony to Congress in February claiming that the National Security Agency does not “wittingly” collect data on millions of Americans. We now know they've been collecting data for tens of millions of Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint/Nextel customers since 2006.

More recently he also claimed that PRISM wasn't a previous-disclosed data collection program. It hadn't been previously disclosed before; and it is collecting data.

So, let me turn this around. Is there any particular reason why you do believe him?

Marc Ambinder's article, by contrast, is quite believable. But going beyond the quote you pulled, he also has lists quite a few open questions about PRISM collecting data on US persons. So it seems to me that we're still a long way from the bottom.
Vagrant is great. IMHO every open source project should come with an example Vagrantfile or Dockerfile to help get users/developers up and running quickly.
Here is a meta-analysis: http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=718049
Thanks for the suggestion. Someday I could really try :)
Neither I nor you can be 100% sure what's going on (unless you are one of the guys "inside," heh) but I think it's good that now people start to care if the executive organizations are giving themselves unchecked powers.

Let's see if "it's legal" as said by those you quote simply means "we don't need to ask anybody for permission" and "every three months we get from our court the permission to do anything." The fact is that they use such arguments, let's see the extent of it. The recent news seem to suggest that it's bigger that it was known up to now.
Uh, I think you're confusing "ideals" with "lawful behavior".

You can be a supporter of the EFF and believe that the work the NSA is doing is necessary and good for the country. I worked on Lawful Interception systems and I had no problem with their use as long as a COMPETENT COURT was the one regulating it.
Or to explain that and how they stopped a threat might reveal how much they know, who their informers are, what type of codes they can break, and hence make it hard to stop the next one. If you tell Bad Guys™ (a) that and (b) how you stopped a previous attack, then the next set of Bad Guy™ will know not to make those mistakes.
And the government shills come out.
I'm not American but from where I sit this guy represents bravery of the highest order and the tenacity(sp?) of the American spirit. I'd be extremely proud to associated with him. He represents what we -the rest of the world- most value about America, freedom of speech, expression and calling out wrong damn the consequences.
Very nice tool to generate vagrant configs http://rove.io/
People in the US have been constantly told that "we" were attacked. If applicable, the assertion that a person who doesn't live in NYC and/or didn't know anybody who died was not affected by 9-11 receives a chilly response.
Can you elaborate more? I'm considering moving to London to bootstrap my startup.
If it's not connected to the internet, how are you going to get terabytes of data per day in there? If it's not connected to the internet, how are you going to get the "interesting™" stills that it has extracted from millions of hours of CCTV to the Pentagon? There is almost no point in not having it connected to the internet.
For my parents and many of their friends the primary motivation was along this line of thinking. I'm not saying this is a totally fair or accurate line of thought but it is the line of thinking that leads one to decide to homeschool.

I can take my child's education into my own hands and probably make a few mistakes along the way but at least I care deeply about my child and have a trusting relationship with my child. Children are resilant and the real things a child should learn through K-12 has more to do with character, the ability to learn, follow-through, complete a problem, read for comprehension, etc... Things that don't require a degree or certificate to effectively teach.

Alternatively, I can trust their education to the State, to underfunded schools, to teachers (some of whom are great but some of whom are in place purely because of a broken system) who may care a little bit but have to split their care and attention between 20-80 other kids none of whom are their own, to an educational system which has long been optimized in the wrong directions and for the wrong reasons.

Personally, I don't think that public school is worthless, I just think there are plenty of benefits to homeschooling that are well worth considering. Even just removing the in-effeciencies that have to exist in a system like public school, frees up so much time and energy for self-exploration, additional time to focus on things like music and technology which are underemphasized in a school "system". Additionally, if the parents do a good job of exposing their kids to an appropriate amount of socialization it removes some of the distraction of the constant social element in a school system. AKA, it's easier to focus on learning when you aren't distracted by the bully sitting behind you or the cute girl across from you. For me, I just hung out with the bully and cute girl after I was done learning.

I do think some mix of learning with social is good but there are plenty of ways to do that, again in more ideal ratios.
Not sure why people are voting this down. That and the "using pillowcases against eavesdropping" bit in the story are curious given any NSA employee should know about TEMPEST.

I feel there's some embellishment going on about how a guy went from security guard to master computer security dude, yet didn't know about basic signals intelligence techniques and who was also naive about well known techniques that all intelligence agencies use to flip people?

Tell me, whoever voted this down, would you take a job at a spook agency without reading James Bamford or Bob Baer? More than likely, you'd take a job at once of these agencies because you romanticized the descriptions of spying in them.

Agreeing to work for the CIA and NSA as opposed to the FBI pretty much says you're going to work at a "do be evil" organization. That's their whole mission, to do things outside of the law.
You can whistle blow a lot now-a-days...
Are those calculations taking in a healthy amount of redundancy? BlackBlaze Storage Pods were designed without any redundancy as it's done purely in software by the company. They just let the hardware fail and replace the drives. The data is then copied from a near-by, healthy pod.

I'm sure the NSA has redundancy in their design but I wonder to what extent. Are there off-site backups? Could a physical disaster cause them to lose most or all of their data?
If you're religious, then the confidence comes from a belief in a higher set of principles.

Or, if you're terrifically smart, then the confidence obviously comes from that.

Or, if you're a hippy, the confidence comes from a fuck-it-all attitude.

In my experience, these are the three main groups that homeschool.
Many SAP programs are very technical in nature. For example, technicians working with GPS satellites, nukes or IT infrastructure may need access to compartmented information.
There are/were Supercomputer manufacturers that you have never heard of because their sole clients are the NSA and/or DOD. It has been a joke, in Supercomputing circles for some time, that the real top 10 machines are missing from the top 500 list for this very reason.
The only reason to exclude non-American deaths is to make a dishonest comparison, or racism. Vice did it for the first.
White House Petition to Pardon Edward Snowden: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pardon-edward-snow...
And at the time of writing, this is the biggest story on the NYT home page:

Theme Parks Let In the V.I.P.’s
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/10/business/at-universal-park...

A Story about the price of tickets at theme parks.
It does read like a shot across the bow.
Well, don't know how many people the tobacco industry killed those recent years, but that's got to be pretty big for someone who's not part of a war.

One may also argue that a dictatorship pretty much makes a state work like a corporation : you don't have anything to say about the way the thing is run.
Your own assumptions are problematic, IMHO.

I drew my approximation from government data sources. Where have you gotten your idea that "most" are not interested in what the EFF does? Further, where, if at all, are you getting numbers to justify your quantitative approximation that most are not in technology? (Also, side note – the EFF deals with much more than software, despite your implications)

Speaking as someone with a educational and professional background in research psychology, I can honestly say my experience would say you're wrong. As a generalization, I found scientists to care a about free speech, IP laws, fair use and DRM, laws having to do with governmental oversight/intrusion to research. The EFF may not be the first place they'd go, but it's not far off, ideologically.
I can very well imagine indiegogo will work and show the will of the people, similar as the NYT Ad for Istanbul
How are you reloading your Python application on code changes? Are you just working inside the VM? I've tried VirtualBox shared folders and NFS, and never had any luck getting file change events to propagate from my host to the VM.
A Shorter Proof of Euler's Formula
Going forward don't store your bitcoin wallet on gmail or other cloud provider because you might help some analyst pay off their gambling debts.

Also if you are working with a foreign company that is competing with a major US company don't use cloud providers since the NSA has engaged in industrial espionage.

"The first came from a Baltimore Sun report which said the European consortium Airbus lost a $6bn contract with Saudi Arabia after NSA found Airbus officials were offering kickbacks to a Saudi official.

'The paper said the agency "lifted all the faxes and phone-calls between Airbus, the Saudi national airline and the Saudi Government" to gain this information' http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/820758.stm
As I said:

I think you would do well to answer that question first, as your question presupposes this question has already been answered, when it fact it has not.

Asking why X is superior to Y is nothing more than an attempt to place the burden on someone else rather than yourself. You presupposed that Y is superior to X without any proof being offered.

It's akin to me asking you "When did you stop beating your wife," or other questions like that.

> Have I? What's easy to misinterpret?

So, specifically, with your statements, you make it seem like you've already proven your side, when in fact, you've done no such thing. It's disingenuous and manipulative. So, either you meant to be that way (dishonest), or you simply made a mistake of not backing up your opinion (What you are arguing against).

So, considering the later is what you are arguing against, it's very easy to assume you are simply trying to be dishonest. I'd like to think better of HN, and assume that people generally speak their opinion, and only assume they are speaking fact when they are providing sources or it's something I also know about.

> Well, I prefer the latter because it leads to a community where I can take more posts at face value and thus learn quicker.

Their is asking for clarification, and asking for clarification rudely, which is what I saw happening, as did others, I imagine. Their is value in asking for citations, no one questions that. The GP was clearly stating an opinion based on his own observations. The question in response was of little value because it was merely being antagonistic.

> I don't think it's unreasonable to encourage this kind of behaviour.

Peppering phrases with weasel words? People should just say what they think, rather than qualify every statement with qualifying statements. Case in point:

> It seems to have very little cost.

Citation needed.
No problem! I've honestly tried to get into blogging for a long time now. This post just flowed so naturally, I really enjoyed putting it together. Thanks so much for the feedback.
Grids would generally be worse - no semantic info like 'thead' or 'axis' in grids/divs. That said, I'm a bootstrap span fan and don't like this extended naming from the article - reminds me of YUI grids from several years ago.

But hey, "they're' not tables - tables are evil!", right?

RANT: I worked with some people ... sheesh - almost a decade ago that proclaimed "tables are depreciated" (I'm pretty sure they meant 'deprecated') and spent days having a team of people convert tablular data from Excel spreadsheets in to bloated DIV-hell for IE5 and NS4 browsers. That's been my worst experience with table-haters, but it stuck with me.
sure about that? http://i.imgur.com/gQkgwR3.png

(sorry for this)
Ask HN: Do you think Twitter Will Pull a 'Facebook'?
Do you think Twitter will pull the rug from underneath our feet by making us pay to tweet to all our followers (like Facebook did with fans)?
The Booz Allen ‘Partner In Ethics’ Progam [pdf]
Your welcome, let me know what you'd like to see added or improved.
I'm fairly sure SYJMF is a copyrighted work and this is an illegal (probably OCRed) copy. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, however.
If you want to learn what's actually going on be sure to follow the link at the end of the post:

http://cod.ifies.com/2008/05/php-rand01-on-windows-openssl-r...
I used RDRAND to seed a SSE Fractal Flame generator (which is a stochastic system which needs 4 random numbers per thread per loop iteration, sometimes more depending on the variations used). RDRAND has a maximum throughput of something like 500MB/s, and it takes approximately 150 clocks per invocation. I was never able to hit that performance wall with my fractal program. My fractal program is also significantly faster than other CPU implementations, though that is probably due to the intrinsic vectorization more than the random number source. I also got significantly better looking fractals then what I would get with most of the PRNG that I tried.

For more check the "performance" section of this article

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-digital-rando...

Note: if you need more than 500MB/s you can uses RDRAND (or RDSEED in Broadwell, when it comes out) to seed a PRNG. I was doing this at first, but the performance of the system didn't improve enough for it to be worth the added complexity.

And if you want to access it in linux from C you can either:

* Use inline assembly, just be sure to check the Zero flag after calling RDRAND, because if RDRAND fails (you're exceeding the 500MB/s) the zero flag isn't set, so you have to just keep calling RDRAND until it is.

* Use intrinsics (easier, immintrin.h), here's how I did it in my program (bug reports welcome, I'm only a freshman in college who had lots of free time and a fascination with fractals)

https://github.com/aarongolliver/FractalFlameMicahTaylorEdit...

http://software.intel.com/sites/products/documentation/studi...
Backblaze knows how to milk an entirely unrelated event for attracting attention on themselves !
> Hiring dropouts is extremely untypical.

It isn't that untypical. Microsoft, Google, and (to a lesser extent) Facebook have famously hired many high school dropouts.

> Why was Booz Allen paying him (again, as a dropout) $200k for a sysadmin job? Were they?

Because competent sysadmins are hard to find. I'm not at all surprised by this, heck, I got offered $100k for a sysadmin job despite (by my own estimation) not being a very competent sysadmin.

> Why did he choose Hong Kong?

He mentioned the reasons in the interview. But, consider also that he's been working for intelligence agencies for quite some years and thus probably has a better idea of the realities of 'freedom of speech' and surveillance technologies than a lot of us outside it.

edit: it's too bad you deleted your comment -- probably because of the downvotes? I wish you hadn't -- disagreements need to take place for meaningful discussion to happen. Also it breaks the conversation and makes it harder to follow.
Doing a video interview like this was a very smart move. I can only hope his worst fear that he mentioned doesn't come true and that the people actually do something about this.
There are apps for this. Just saying.
But Congress is filled with Democrats and RINOs, so that's a no-go.

Of course, the Court is filled with know-nothings (as in, they are anti-abstraction, so there is no such thing as a valid governing principle, such as a right), so it's all probably pretty pointless.
You see, there is an overlap amongst the qualities that would make one support EFF and also work for CIA -- and that is patriotism and devotion to their country.

CIA for example looks for devoted and patriotic people more than they look for capable people. They figure they can teach whatever is needed as a special internal course but they can't teach patriotism. So for example they love to hire ex Marines, they are considered patriotic.

Now patriotism is a double edged sword. It works well if the government and agencies are honest and transparent. Patriotic people working in such systems might accept a lower pay but they know they are helping their country. When that start to go south and they start seeing shady things going on they have a choice:

1) Rationalize participating in un-patriotic things (illegal search for ex)

2) Fight against it by leaving the agency or

3) Fight against it by going public and exposing it

Most people probably end up choosing 1). Few choose 2) and only select individuals choose 3).
"By the way, I don't know about anybody else, but for the first time I can think of, I'm seriously concerned about the consequences of posting support for somebody like this online. I don't know how things will play out years down the road and who will do what with this information."

Welcome to the land of the freedom in witch people is afraid of speaking their mind!
You might want to actually read the article and watch the video before asking questions that have already been answered.
This is a great way to present this information, thanks!
Blocked.
I think he did that, too. But he's tried that route several times before, and the majority of the Senate voted against it. So he's probably not very optimistic about it.