skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What about specific unidentified Google employees known to Larry Page, albeit not Google's General Counsel? (In the paraphrased, immortal words of Al Gore: of course it's illegal, that's why it's a covert operation.)

We don't know the intended audience of the slides, either, though with a data source as rich as all of Gmail, presumably there'd be tons of analysts capable of accessing it or else it would just be a waste.
Finnegan's Wake, conceded in a second.

Dubliners, though? Or Portrait of an Artist? Those are readily accessible to anybody and obviously very, very good.

Ulysses I like, but agree it may be too dense to merit the accolades it's given. But "trash" goes way, way over into the opposite direction.
US surveillance architecture includes collection of Internet, phone metadata
Google Glasses on Contact Lenses
I'm 16. I agree with the second statement, but I'd like to point out this: if you're in the public school system and you aren't "shallow and passive", chances are good you'll be given hell if you show it. (Or maybe it's just me. I don't know.)

I'm new to the public school system this year. I live in an area that has no shortage of gun ownership and advocacy, and, the weekend after Sandy Hook, I went to the guidance office to express worry that perhaps some connections would be made that aren't really there. (Not about me individually, but about some poor soul that would slip up and get caught in something)

I was called back to the guidance office later that day, only to be told that I was effectively suspended until I could be, and I quote, "Mentally evaluated". It was handled as a "School Crisis", and I was a "Threat to the school".

Lucky for me, my parents acted quickly enough so that the school system's psychologist could be contacted.

It turned out to be nothing.

(This is the third of four encounters like this. I'm fairly certain I have the high score for most school crises caused in a single year.)

What a dangerous and shady person I am.
This is a very important point. NSA's definitions do not track common English usage.
Six Links Every Saturday - Baseball Stadiums, Depression, The Spark File...
85% of all developer time must be spent on business specific logic

Yeah. Come back in two or three years when your application's code has degenerated into an unmaintainable mess, and adding new business logic is taking four times as long as it needs to because no one sat down are rearchitected the software to meet new needs.

I've experienced two jobs where this, in effect, was exactly what happened. In both firms, previous management used short term contractors to get a "lean" proof-of-concept out the door. In both cases customers loved the product and started asking for more features. And, finally, in both cases by the time I was hired (at +3 years in one company and at +5 years at another) the product had grown so bloated and so unwieldy, management had brought development in-house and was embarking on a multi-year project to clean up and rearchitect the code so that it would accommodate new feature requests from customers. If these two companies had paid more attention to the architecture of their code, then a lot of pain could have been avoided farther down the line.

This strategy is great if you're building a pump-and-dump startup (like Instagram, or Tumblr). But for an ongoing sustainable business? It's a recipe for disaster.
Anybody have a server in Peshawar we can use? I think a better plan is to use _Gravity's Rainbow_. It's just as hard to understand, but more things explode in it.
This really jumped out at me as I was looking through the article. I tried to staved off judgement because I really don't know much about the state of iOS and whether significant changes are coming with the next release. With that said, it definitely smacks of fanboyism. Can anyone comment on how warranted his hype is?
I guess the point of this...is...to separate the Joyce readers from the non-readers? Because doesn't the satire rely in some part on the analyzed content? I haven't read Joyce but if the OP was as unsubtle in referencing him as he was to Orwell I guess I didn't miss much.

The scenario illustrated here is a little absurd. Our nation would be bankrupt well before it had the finances to fund such rabid pursuit of false positives.
Watch 2013 Barack Obama Debate 2006 Joe Biden Over NSA Surveillance
Nobody understands the potential of this technology except the community that builds/markets/etc. it, plus some highly secretive government types. I.e., the tech community needs to take a leadership role in reining in the risks.
A screaming came across the sky...

ETA--

Have to call that out as inaccurate, though, as GR is very comprehensible, if sprawling. Compare:

GR:
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it's night. He's afraid of the way the glass will fall--soon--it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.

vs

FW:
riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passen-core rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer’s rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County’s gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick not yet, though venissoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all’s fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a peck of pa’s malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.
Hey! That's me! (I've covered this beat at CNET for 11 years and at Wired and Time and Wired a second time before that for about 5 years. It's not the EFF's side I'd argue, but I'm flattered that you think so.)

Anyway, I've disagreed politely with <tptacek> before, but he is 100% correct here.
And even more evidence that would take too long to summarize. <tptacek> is correct here.
It's not entirely true that "all the games you already had before the update don't go away". Although you could still play your current games, the multiplayer portions of those games required you to be connected to the PS network, which in turn required the latest firmware upgrade that removed Linux.

I stayed on the firmware with Linux and was fine with not being able to play new games but it did kind of suck that I couldn't play multiplayer games I'd already purchased.
He's advocating getting experience from a job first, not getting a job instead.
Viral [anything]'s almost exclusively fail.
Dude. They have the content of email too. I'm going to make a wild guess here and assume it falls under the "required by law" category of the denials. Well, too bad for them, too bad for us. Welcome to the future, and there's scant chance that any of this will ever get rolled back.

Meanwhile, its also fairly obvious that some security folks sympathetic to the NSA have your ear. You like them, you respect their skills, and social heuristics dictate that you give their opinions due weight. They haven't been overly impressed with the recent leaks and reportage, and why not--we always bristle when the media covers something near and dear, and bristle again when it is sympathetic to the wrong parties.

Back to the contents of email again. How, precisely, it is done is of course very interesting but also an implementation detail. The fact is this kind of content would have been considered very valuable, and therefore effort would have been expended to a) explore the options and b) make it happen.

If you go back over the past few years of leaks, a recurring theme is, it has happened, and it appears to have been achieved via legal compulsion plus some fairly vanilla engineering. However, we may also assume that any serious collection effort would necessarily include redundancy of methods, so if for some reason legal compulsion were to end, the collection could still continue. And this is were we find ourselves today: legal collection at nominal risk, but the program itself secure.

And we know we are here, not from any one specific claim (possibly garbled, possibly wrong), but from the pointillist painting rendered by years of such claims, where the negative space provides as much structure as the positive. So yeah, you don't like Greenwald et al on aesthetic grounds. But Greenwald is also irrelevant to the overall narrative here, which is "when we became cognizant of our pervasive surveillance." Why would they not have the contents of email?
When you say "that's not an accident" do you mean to imply you'd have ethical objections to it?

As you are one of the three most common defenders of the state that I have noticed on this site, that would be very surprising to me. But quite interesting if so, it would be some indication that your perspective on the issues and seeming constant defense is an indication of spiraling paranoia in counterparties to your arguments. Is this how you see it?
What tipped it off for me, was his "transformation" at the end. Until that point though, I assumed it was a true story.

And that scares the shit out of me.
You're not disagreeing with the parent. He's making a generalization about teenagers, not claiming a universal truth. I think you got needlessly defensive.

For what it's worth, I've been quite impressed with your post history to-date (and today is not the first time I've taken notice).
Maybe I should patent the idea of putting the motor in the car and doing away with the ropes altogether. I.e. imagine a vertical electric train.
Mojang and UN presents: Block By Block (2012)
Kraft: Putin stole my Super Bowl ring
These people come from the Sony Ericsson joint venture. Technically speaking, they weren't part of Sony until February of last year, when Sony bought out Ericsson's stake in the joint venture. Sony Ericsson had a reasonably good relationship with the developer community pre-acquisition (they've been called out by JBQ as a good AOSP citizen and, IIRC, had official boot loader unlocks for retail phones before HTC).

At the time, I remember wondering if being acquired by Sony proper would start to move that in the wrong direction, but, if anything, they've gotten better: they open-sourced their sensor HAL, they have official AOSP projects for several devices (including the Xperia S which was the first attempt at a non-Nexus AOSP phone) and now trying to open the SmartWatch.

You can feel free to judge these people for the actions of a different department of a company they weren't even part of at the time. I prefer to consider things case-by-case.
Of course, we may not get a response at all, as in the case of one of the many Aaron Swartz petitions --

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-stat...

(Note that at the time, the threshold for petition responses was 25,000 signatures.)

So, perhaps it'd be better not to hold your breath at all.
If Canada, hypothetically, has the capability to collect all US Citizen's data, then exchange the analysis with NSA, does this make NSA 'spying on Americans' legal or constitutional?
U.S. surveillance architecture includes collection of Internet, phone metadata
Please upvote and raise awareness. The biggest media outlets in the country are manipulating the purpose behind the protests. A respected critic went on air during prime time to dismiss the importance of the protests as a movement of ignorant middle-class kids who only want to vandalize, while the military police is on the street with an order to stop the protests at all costs!
Wow, that's a great read. I've read that post before but had no idea it was about Pine Gap. Thanks for posting.
Yes, intentionally. China has, through various land and farming control laws, retarded their farming productivity to an extreme level.

While their manufacturing / industrial productivity and know-how has skyrocketed over 30 years, their farming productivity has kept pace. That's deliberate to give hundreds of millions of people something to do (as another comment noted). Their manufacturing sector could not absorb another 250 million people overnight (or over the prior 20 years).

South Korean farms are up to ten times more productive. If China's farming was as productive as South Korea, they'd only need 30 to 50 million farmers. Currently China has 37% of its employment base working in agriculture, or upwards of 300 million people. The US by comparison has a substantial surplus of food with just 4 to 5 million total people working in agriculture (including illegal immigrants).

This is a good opportunity to invest into farm equipment companies that will benefit from the coming boom in farming productivity in China. As they shift labor into their urban industrial base, they'll begin to change laws to boost farming productivity finally (most likely you'll see a big rise in large corporate farms in China).
You said it. The number of people saying, "Well, if it isn't abused..." is mindboggling. Any system like this will be abused. The question is by whom, how often, and how the citizenry can hold them accountable.

Because the program is so secret, I have zero faith that there are sufficient safeguards. America was founded on a distrust of unchecked power, and I think we should keep it that way.
You've certainly confirmed my mental stereotypes about objectivists.
I don't see what the actual difficulty is. Being able to do arbitrary schema migrations is considerably harder than making it work for your own data. In my own setup code I look at the schema version and know how to go from version 3 to 4 to 5. It is usually a handful of lines of code for each.

I've reread the content again, and something unstated appears to be the use of an ORM (there are several good posts about why they are evil). ORMs already place several layers of indirection and abstraction between code and the database. It is hardly surprising that the contortions make it harder for them to do things. However I couldn't find an explanation as to why they think the copy and adjust approach would be so hard. Perhaps they are unaware of SQLite functionality like getting the table as a schema or a column by column basis.

I've been on the sqlite-users mailing list for a decade, and use the frequency of requests there to gauge the mood. Alter table is very infrequently mentioned.

It should be noted that just having some code that implements alter table is insufficient. If it doesn't become a standard part of the SQLite core then you can't depend on it being there. And even if it did, you would have to wait years before it is present on the SQLite versions used by stable/enterprise distributions.

If you want to crowdfund this, contact the SQLite developers asking for a quote and use that. http://www.sqlite.org/support.html

You'll also need to establish what you want to happen - eg if a column affinity changes what happens to existing data? What happens to constraints and foreign keys? What should it do if a transaction is already active?
>Who says you can deploy them over china?

Who says you can't? As far as it seems, it will be circling Earth in low-orbit. Not sure China could stop them if they wanted to.
You should spend some time with english majors.

Finnegans Wake is sort of the literary equivalent of The Art Of Computer Programming, widely admired, seldom read, rarely understood.
A slightly different take:

"My Creeping Concern that the NSA Leaker Edward Snowden is not who he Purports to be…"

http://www.globalresearch.ca/my-creeping-concern-that-the-ns...
Ask HN: Should I include my GPA and/or transcripts when applying for jobs?
I am set to graduate with my BS in Software Engineering from Auburn University in December. I am currently trying to get my resume in order and start sending out tons of applications for jobs in the next month or so. I have been programming and doing web development in some form since I got my first computer when I was seven or eight years old, I am having trouble trying to decide what all should go on my formal resume. Many people online state to only have one page, or one main page with everything important on it.

Many people at school are recommending to include complete transcripts with grades (mine are pretty good, I have an overall GPA of 3.4. I generally have A marks in hard major classes such as Algorithms, Networks, Assembly, and Operating Systems.

Do you guys think its a good idea to include full transcripts with applications if I have no paid professional experience to speak of? If I do include transcripts should I have my GPA listed on my resume? Many sample resumes I see do not include a GPA. Others include a full list of relevant courses taken, but still no GPA. I thought GPA was pretty common on a resume if its above 3.

I did my core (non-software) classes at a Community College and transferred to my Auburn University two and a half years ago. Should I include the community college on the resume, should not be as prominent/detailed as the University's listing. How can or should I show/express my own self-taught experience from years before University on my formal resume.

Any advice will be much appreciated! Thanks in advance for your time.
No, nobody thinks they are exercising concrete power by signing a petition. However, those who do have authority over this case are well aware that the difference between an effective example and a martyr is primarily one of popularity. The petition aims to prove that Snowden is popular.
That's interesting, I particularly liked the part where you realized coming up with the right questions was the way forward, and based on that info I suppose you could value your 200 questions at roughly $30k, since that's the extra bit journalist would have had to do otherwise.

On a side note, thanks for all your writings over the years, I've learned a ton and still use some of them for both personal reference and for referring friends & associates.
In 1995(?) I went to a talk by Chaum, and was convinced that e-cash was the way of the future. It was awesome.

Then, in 1996(ish) I went to a talk by Simson Garfinkel, and asked him about e-cash. This dashed my hopes for e-cash. He specifically raised an important objection to all the e-cash schemes of the time: the "risk" of the system was essentially essentially infinite. An e-cash mint could, if subverted by hook or crook, print an infinite amount of e-cash, thus disrupting the entire system. (Imagine terrorists with guns going into an e-cash mint and saying "Print us one quadrillion dollars of money". In the e-cash systems of the time, a few minutes later, they would say "here ya gone, one quadrillion dollars of untraceable unrevokable money".)

I think the genius of the bitcoin system is that there is no central mint, and the "proof-of-work" system eliminates the possibility of someone minting an infinite amount of cash.

P.S. It's Saturday night and I'm not entirely sober. If you want to call me an idiot based on the above, well, that seems fair. On the other hand, if you want to argue with either Chaum or Garfinkel, please research and read what they actually wrote rather than rely on my drunken recollection.
Not for someone seriously considering investing their time, personal savings, and opportunity cost in doing a startup in one of these countries.
What was the need for this?
Funny that you should mention moving goalposts. That seems to be the M.O. of the NSA apologists. First, the arguments is "It's not content. It's just metadata, which is no different from addresses on postal mail envelopes". That's already a terrible rationalization.

But, then, revelations come out that it is more than metadata being captured. It's actual call content and no warrant is required for a run of the mill "analyst" to listen to those calls.

So, now the goalpost is being moved to whether the NSA has "direct" or "indirect" accesss to gmail servers--a specious and inconsequential debate over some subjective semantics.

What will it take for the apologists to actually grow concerned about what's really happening here?
Jesus, as someone who has been interrogated by the US Secret Service, I thought this was real. It's very accurate, especially the psychological part.

I should write a blog post about this, but the short version:

When I was about 19, I was interrogated by the Secret Service for threatening the US president. I hadn't (ever) done this, and I didn't even know what they were talking about. It turns out that I was on an AT&T alliance (conference call, back then) with a bunch of phreakers (which I was). Sometime during the lifetime of the call (which could have been 24 hours or more), someone called the whitehouse and apparently did make some kind of threat.

I, being 19 and stupid, figured "I have no idea what they're talking about, and I have nothing to hide, so I'll just go in for their interview. It'll be fun." After about 5 hours of being grilled, polygraphed, good-cop-bad-cop'ed, I just wanted to get out of that room. Sweat was dripping off me. I wanted to tell them whatever they wanted to hear to get out of there. And they kept saying "look, we know you made the threat, why don't you just tell us?". Somehow I stayed strong enough to not give a false confession. They let me go, and eventually they charged some kid (a minor, it turns out) in Ohio for it.

If you have ever wondered about people recanting confessions, this is how it happens. The police are trained on how to break you down, make you confess, whether you are guilty or not. There are textbooks (for cops) on how to do it. In the US, they are allowed to lie to you. They can threaten to arrest your wife, etc.

If I'm ever questioned for anything again, no matter how innocent I may be, I'll always request an attorney be present.
For a new college grad, the main thing I look at is programming experience outside mandatory college classes. You say you have been programming since the age of 8. Surely you must have done something worth mentioning.

This is a competition with your fellow classmates. If all you show are good grades, you are the same as everyone else.

As to the format: forget transcripts. PDF format please, one page or two max.

[a former hiring manager]
"Today communism seems like a failed political ideology, a cute thing that hippies like along with pot and drum circles."

That's because today it's basically illegal to be liberal, so the only openly liberal folks left are super fringy. The reason why communism seems this way today has less to do with the fact that the US triumphed over communism, and more with the fact that the US triumphed over freedom.
"the properties of light" probably mean we won't have cameras as small as a speck of dust or a grain of sand. But a grain of rice is pretty big. Can you explain why you think that won't be possible?
2014 World Cup, who wins this match?
Is it really that impractical to put the motor in the car? The elevator anyway needs rails on the side, if for nothing else to provide something for the emergency brakes.

Use regenerative braking on the way down so you don't need a counter weight - although that does mean you need a much large motor, you might save on energy, but power requirements would still be high.
Nitpicker – an overly picky language style checker
Driver's licenses have been made to be like a national ID. We used to be able to get multiple driver's licenses from different state, but not anymore after the Real ID Act. Some states used to issue DL without photo but not anymore.
How many times are you going to make this exact same comment? Just upvote him if you think he's so right.
Is anyone at the Global Future 2045 conference in NYC?