skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I live in Hong Kong, and can verify that it is absolutely a technologist's paradise and an extremely easy place to move around in.

Phones are incredibly cheap; the cheapest functional Android knockoff smartphones will run you about $50-80 (all prices in USD for simplicity), maybe less if you get it in Kowloon. "Burner"-style phones can be as low as $8. SIM cards are essentially free (usually about $8-10 deposit on the card) and minutes are as lower than $0.01 each[1]. Data is about $5/GB prepaid. All cash, no credit cards, no checks. You don't even have to give them your name.

Coverage is completely universal here because the density is absurd. It's a cell phone carrier's dream; one tower can potentially reach nearly a million people. Taxi drivers here regularly have half a dozen cell phones in their cars. One for personal use, one for work, one for less savory work... who knows, there is always a lot going on, especially in relation to gambling.

Additionally, the broadband is great (and cheap) - I regularly get as much as 250mbps or more to the US from my home connection. I can say with confidence that I browse US sites more quickly from here than I could from my home connection when I lived in the states. The ping is of course higher but it is not as bad as you'd think (150-180ms).

There are great technology centers like Cyberport[2] that will rent you a desk or tiny office with gigabit internet for very little money.

It is easy to disappear in HK because it is so dense. While housing is not cheap it is available and some landlords will take cash. Being white earns you stares here, it is well known that the Chinese suffer from the same problem we do; it is difficult to tell white people apart, much like we may find it difficult to tell some ethnic Chinese apart. I am speculating but it could be used to his advantage: with a hairstyle change and contact lenses it would be difficult for a US citizen to identify Snowden, going only on the news photos. It would be even harder for a foreigner. That is, if the novelty of seeing a young nerdy white man doesn't arouse suspicion alone.

Members of the expat community have been setting up rallies for Snowden and they have been getting decent attendance. The South China Morning Post has been very favorable in their framing of his actions. I think the populace here is very sympathetic to his plight.

As for the legal system, I can't comment; I just work here, man.

[1] Keep in mind, prices are in HKD - 1USD = 7.76 HKD. http://one2free.hkcsl.com/jsp/prepaid_sim_card/o2f_local_pre...

[2] http://www.cyberport.hk/en
No, it's not; you can only use a compromised CA cert to MITM traffic, and if you do that, the Chrome users who have Google's actual key identity pinned in their browser will detect you doing that.
Several of the chapters are available as pdfs from the site
So what's PostgreSQL in that analogy?
I like the idea but it makes me feel queasy :/
> the author is refering to algotithm memorization, where the exam is testing your ability to reproduce the process of solving the problem.

and none of the higher-level courses I took in math or CS rewarded that either
Linux: Limit IPv6 connectivity to specific programs
My overwhelming desire to join the club of ones and zeroes
US signals intelligence is also described as "absolutely critical" to Australia's diplomatic campaign to win a seat on the United Nations Security Council.

"Without intelligence support, overwhelmingly provided by US capabilities, we would not have won the seat," one Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade officer recently said.

Spying on other countries is something Australians want our government to do when it can't be avoided, not just because they can and Stalin did worse. Doing it to win an election is wrong. Here's another reason to make these activities as transparent as possible: it's obvious to everyone in Australia, except for Kevin Rudd and a few DSD agents, that we have always gained more by not doing things like this than we could possibly gain from some diplomat sitting on a committee in New York.
Is this for cheating at cards with Google Glass? :)
I said something in another thread of his; he posts stuff like this all the time. He has some posts that really SCREAM amateur.

I recently blew a 6 figure inheritance on a startup which failed due to medical problems
http://www.techcofounder.com/ads/view_ad.php?id=769

As a customer, that would concern me, especially when it's a one man show. As a business owner, I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole. You would be more of a liability than anything.

If I were in his position, I'd prove the concept by reselling DigitalOcean. They do low cost SSD VPS. That way it won't cost 5k just to see it flop (or not)

Apparently based on people I've talked to who are familiar with the tech startup scene, there aren't any dedicated server providers specifically targeting the tech startup market

You mean B2B? There are thousands of them. I am having trouble thinking of a webhost that doesn't target the tech startup market. Geocities or Angelfire maybe?

In fact, MediaTemple gives free hosting to a lot of tech startups in exchange for their logo appearing in the footer.

I don't know what to say really. There seems to be a huge disconnect from reality. Probably not anymore than most teenagers, if that makes you feel better.
It depends. Coal, charcoal, wood. The house where my father grew up vented smoke/exhaust from the fires in the kitchen under a hard clay bed built into the house to keep the family warm in the winter.

You can see the effect of years of exposure to soot on the faces of people who live in rural China (and, I daresay, anyone who lives in similar circumstances). These people are not living particularly environmentally clean lives right now (although, to be fair, they probably do consume far fewer manufactured goods than their city-dwelling brethren).

Something of interest is the prevalence of solar water heaters, both in urban and rural areas. They are surprisingly common, much better than heating water using fire or electricity, and affordable even to those outside the cities.
You're entering an incredibly competitive market with a small budget (and very expensive costs). If I were you, I would spend as much time as you can learning from the forums at webhostingtalk.com and trying to sell to that crowd first. They will quickly tell you if your product fits a niche.
I actually don't think Hong Kong was a great choice, as it brings up the whole question of foreign intelligence service involvement. He absolutely should have picked a common law jurisdiction (like Hong Kong), and probably not US/UK/Canada, but NZ would have worked pretty well.

He's not "in hiding" from the intelligence services. I suspect even second tier countries know where he is.
From Ike to “The Matrix”: Welcome to the American dystopia
Zamfoo Critical Security Vulnerabilities
I feel like your article is just a not so subtle ad for your game.
Would you consider spending half of it on a 2 week vacation somewhere exotic? :)

If it makes you happy and energized after, it might be even more helpful than the infusion of cash...
What was the excuse for 9/11 then? I seem to recall it was nothing more "terroristic" than having U.S. forces deployed in Saudi Arabia, at the request of that nation.

But let me guess, victim blaming is OK, as long as the victims are Americans?
You're forgetting how much money people outside of San Francisco spend on their car. That makes expensive coffee, eating out, and computer upgrades look like pocket change.
This looks like it would be an excellent addition to CyanogenMod. Also, for any CM users that might be lurking: Have any of you been able to get SEforAndroid (http://selinuxproject.org/page/SEAndroid) running? I haven't spent too much effort researching this, but would be very interested to hear some anecdotes/experiences.
> The API provides a simple isIncognito() call which will tell you if incognito is enabled for the process (or the calling process). Third party applications can honor the feature using this API, or they can choose to display pictures of cats instead of running normally.

Does anybody know what the logic behind this is? I assume "incognito" modes in browsers don't expose something similar. Is the idea that if this is provided, then application programmers will be less inclined to attempt to subvert the system?
While I find the premise of the blog post to be potentially interesting (2nd post since 2011), I wonder if this is much more than a thinly veiled advertisement.
And he was reportedly caught because an investigation into Paula Broadwell's email address, as the sender of threatening messages received by Jill Kelly, led back to David Petraeus.
Show HN: Weekend Project, Tornado "Trails"
Hi, this weekend I have put together a tornado 'fast tracking' suite which should help you to build awesome tornado applications in even less time.

Enjoy!
Yeah, but even that is wrong. It isn't fundamental changes in our laws; it's fundamental changes in the way we interact with our governments. And that's far too much to ask a privacy advocate to do.
Its this sort of uneducated, a-historical crap that makes it impossible to read HN lately. If you think the government was less scary back then, in the grip of anti-communist paranoia, you're insane, deluded, or just plain uneducated. Saying that MLK could count on a fair shake from a justice system that didn't give any minority a fair shake back then, much less political radicals, is the height of ridiculousness.
Yahoo and the Secret Court
| The ping is of course higher but it is not as
| bad as you'd think (150-180ms).

I've had higher pings while trying to ssh from East Coast to West Coast. I'd wonder if those pings were to sites mostly hosted on the West Coast, because crossing the Pacific is mostly just travel time, and doesn't include 10-15 hops through various routers/ISPs.
Intercepting messages doesn't violate the First Amendment.

Intercepting messages with either "reasonable" means or "unreasonable means + probable cause warrant" also doesn't violate the Fourth Amendment.

So I wouldn't necessarily make your sole complaint about the legality of the program, as it may very well soon be both legal and Constitutional.
You don't need to resort to insults.
Sure, I agree, but when you refer to the distro if you're going to go to the lengths of specifically calling it GNU/Linux, then specifically call is an open alternative rather than a free alternative.
My current stance is that I'm fine with using any device not internally linked to an online identity. I.e., not associating my user account with an apple ID.

I still think of OS X as an open platform since I can use entirely free software alongside Apple's amazing apps. I also still trust that the Mac's limited market share makes known backdoors less valuable to the powers that be, and more dangerous to Apple's reputation if discovered by anyone else.

Using iOS, on the other hand, necessarily waives the right to privately install software. That's one I won't give up.
Soon, they will apparently add yottabytes of storage with their Utah's data center (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center).. that doesn't say how much they can analyze but probably many more then 300.. (1 yottabyte = 1,000,000,000,000,000GB)
I don't find it all that different from the BBC or US network news in that respect. TV news substitutes drama for actual journalism most of the time.
This post is a mischaracterization of why tech companies as basic coding questions. Or at least Microsoft, where I learned to interview and coached my own team of interviewers over several years.

1) Basic coding questions are a nice filter. If you can't remove an element from a doubly-linked list in C on a whiteboard immediately after graduating, what were you doing the last four/five years? It's like the height signs before an amusement park ride: "you must be at least this competent." These are not intended to be hard problems. You should not be crippled if you "think differently" or "form important theories." Further, dropping one on the floor is not a deal-killer; you just have to get most of them.

2) Do you really understand how a computer works? If I give you some inputs (or you come up with them), can you walk through your program and describe the execution and memory state in some detail? You'd be shocked how many 4.0 GPA CS students from Stanford/etc. cannot. I am willing to teach new graduates how to work at scale. At a top firm, I am not willing to send them back to school to take Operating Systems and Architecture again.

3) Can we have a discussion about your code and the problem without you breaking down completely? More edge cases, expand it to a broader domain, increase perf (MSFT), scale it to web size (Google), etc.

None of these are raw IQ measures. If you want to see such measures, look to the finance industry where, for example, my wife had to take the Wonderlic Test during one interview, which is definitely more a measure of "raw sprinting smarts."
What moron decided Bloomberg (a city politician from another state, and general troll who violates campaign rules, takes uninformed positions on issues, etc.) would be an appropriate commencement speaker? (uninformed on a lot of issues; I personally have looked into the gun issue more than the others -- just watch his interview on Nightline: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsnPpWAiNQA -- I'm fine with people having informed viewpoints on either side of the issue, but being and remaining clueless and trying to legislate is just a sign of stupidity and unfitness for public office.)
If I were you, I would use your $3000 to continue to invest in the time machine you have invented. Or, at least, I assume you have invented, because it looks like you went all the way back to 1994 for your website.
"No 9/11 and there would have been no costly invasion into Iraq/Afghanistan which has cost trillions of dollars and an obscene number of lives"

I have some doubts about us not going to war had there been no terrorist attack. Perhaps it would have been in a different country or continent, but there has been military action under every administration since Eisenhower. I have this sneaky suspicion that the war in Iraq would have happened regardless of any terrorist attack. I would even go as far as to say that the war in Iraq would have happened under a hypothetical Gore administration.

"So out of all the things the government does protecting its citizens seems like something that will always be "worth the money"."

Assuming, of course, that this program has accomplished anything. We are still waiting to see what details will be declassified. It is not enough that supporters of the program claim terrorist plots were stopped; we need to know (a) if the program was actually important to stopping those plots and (b) if those plots were realistic to begin with.
But as systems become more aware about the profiles of their visitors - it will become easier to ascertain who the specific individual is that is accessing your site. In some cases, this is already a possibility.

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/a-fb-ad-targeted...

Now imagine a marketplace where Google, Facebook (or somebody that can connect an authenticated user to a digital "fingerprint" of their machine based on browser metrics, installed fonts, ip address, etc.) can answer the "who" question for partner sites willing to buy that information. Visitor-identification as a service.
Its not already?
The economic numbers you're listing are pretty clearly dwarfed by the amount we've been spending on anti-terrorism.

And nobody can take you seriously trying to shovel the excessive amount of money spent on anti-terrorism (or, as for Iraq, not on anti-terrorism) into the cost of a terrorist act and then trying to use that as justification for spending money on anti-terrorism. If we spent half the GDP on anti-terrorism after 9/11 you would be claiming 9/11 cost us half the GDP and that therefore justifies spending half the GDP on it. It's circular logic.
This is actually counter to what I've been told by several high ranking friends I know in the military. I have a family member who is a full bird Marine Colonel and he said they won't take GED candidates anymore. I also have a good friend who's a Senior Master Sergeant in the Air Force and said the same thing.

Here's an article from 2009:

http://www.nodropouts.org/blog/bad-economy-bad-news-dropouts...

"Army recruiters now tell potential recruits that their chances of getting into the service are not good if they don't have a high school diploma. And even a GED won't cut it in most cases."

I did notice the "in most cases" language, so maybe he got in on a pass from someone?
As a vim user, what is so special about "chrome tabs"? I thought SublimeText already had very chrome-like tabs. Am I missing something?
Can you please list the free software you use on OS X?
Ignoring the not-so-thinly-veiled-advertisement. The premise is wrong. Companies optimize for a lot more than raw IQ (company fit, engineering skills, response to criticism and pressure etc.)

Humans can also get better a solving problems like he presents. It's not about memorizing test cases, it is about developing heuristics and noticing patterns - something humans are actually very good at. If you practice you will get better.
Spanner, I suppose.
For all we know, nature is a very slow, serialized computation.

http://xkcd.com/505/
I don't think so. China has so many problems, it's government always preferred the status quo, anything new like this is considered a threat to political stability: imagine if a few Chinese decided to go Snowden way?
The idea behind "swapping SIMs" to avoid being tracked assumes that the phone itself can't be identified and tracked (regardless of the SIM card in it). Once one of your SIM cards can be identified as belonging to you (maybe you break down and call a relative), it can be linked to the phone. If the phone can be tracked, then all of the other SIM cards that you use with it can be linked together, regardless of the whether or not the original purchase of the phone or SIM cards can be linked to you (cash vs. card).
You're right about most of what you said, except a few things.

Do not hire a designer for $1,500. It sounds like you don't have much money to get started, and you're going to need every penny in reserve for problems. You need to be doing those things yourself, despite the time and effort it will take.

Don't spend a single dime on Facebook ads, or any other ads. Set up an account on WebhostingTalk.com and spend hours there every day, with your information in the footer of every post you make. Also consider posting to the deals section to get your first customers, to the extent you can afford to. By virtualizing your dedicated host, you'll have a guaranteed margin, erode that to provide deals.

Front as little money as absolutely necessary. Do not set up a new box with your provider until you get an order from a customer.

Once you have enough customers and are making a little money, you can begin messing around with custom hardware hosted in whatever situation you think is ideal.

You're not a real web hosting company, and you can't afford to be for a while yet. You're a customer service layer that rides on another hosting company, you differentiate yourself by being extremely hands on. Then when the time is right, you can try fronting the capital needed to begin your own host.
Tech Talk: Apache ZooKeeper and the Fallacies of Distributed Computing
Apache ZooKeeper and the Fallacies of Distributed Computing
There is no pixie dust that will magically overcome inherent distributed systems limitations. ZooKeeper simplifies the process of implementing distributed coordination but it does not eliminate the core issues - so why has this system become so popular over the past few years? In this talk I will explore what ZooKeeper is, how it was originally developed, how projects such as HBase, Hadoop and others are using it, what it can (and can't) do for you, and what's to come.

About Patrick
Patrick Hunt is a major contributor and PMC member on the Apache ZooKeeper project. He joined Cloudera more than three years ago and currently leads the Cloudera Search team. Previous to Cloudera he spent five years at Yahoo! where he specialized in large-scale distributed systems architecture. During this time he also drove development of the critically acclaimed Delicious firefox extension. Prior to joining Yahoo, Patrick worked on enterprise software, founded a startup, designed high performance network software, and dabbled a bit with rocket science (NASA). He has a bachelors degree in Computer Systems Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Dinner, prepared by Airbnb's Executive Chef, will served at 6pm.

https://www.airbnb.com/meetups/9j9ykz5je-tech-talk-patrick-hunt
The most effective way to filter on raw IQ would be to... filter on raw IQ. But that's illegal.
Nobody has to be vile
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n07/slavoj-zizek/nobody-has-to-be-vile
While I think this mode is useful, what I'd really like to see is Cyanogen integrating OpenPDroid [1,2]. OpenPDroid allows for more fine-grained permissions which, I think, is what we need. Because the real problem is not running suspicious programs completely sandboxed from the private data. It's running the otherwise useful apps that request too many permissions that we'd like to keep in check, but still use (which would require allowing them to access some of our data).

[1] http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2098156

[2] https://github.com/OpenPDroid
RESTful API server in Go
Given that Pres. Obama would be operating under his military authority as Commander-in-Chief if he did order such a drone strike, then it might very easily still be considered a war crime.

The U.S. Constitution doesn't explicitly talk to homicide but U.S. legal code does, and there's no requirement that your victim be a U.S. citizen. So even with the drone example it's not clear-cut that Pres. Obama has the legal authority to kill any foreigner he wishes.
While Object.observe will be a welcome change, that basically means that your app can never be as performant as possible due to the design of the framework that you use for browsers that don't support Object.observe (dirty checking is NOT optimal). Using .get and .set so that all operations happen in a run loop seems like a small price to pay.

While I'm with you and love being able to write my own simple classes and POJOs, ultimately I'll value being able to support users who won't or can't upgrade their browsers.
Silicon Beach Sunday: Silicon Beachfest Kicks-Off With One Awesome Hackathon
How Napoleon's semaphore telegraph changed the world
What Snowden did is, arguably, treason. Whatever you believe about the righteousness of his cause, or the evil of the programs he exposed, or the corruption of the government pursuing him, that he's being pursued is in fact a case of the system working as intended.
I wonder if casinos will start banning people from wearing Glass. I guess you could write some CV software to keep track of cards and then automatically display your probabilities, kind of like the graphics they show on TV when broadcasting poker.
>Intercepting messages doesn't violate the First Amendment.

What about all that stuff about chilling effects and anonymous speech?
How did this get pushed up so far? Not much content or explanation here...
Day trip to Macau might fix that. I bet he can get a special accommodation though.
>freedom has a cost

May be the single most depressing thing someone has ever used as a defense of their own freedom. Lay off the propaganda.
What makes you think the _small_ guys will protect your data _better_?
It's so bad, you could easily join the OPD or SFPD (as a presumably fit young male) and be making more than an avg. engineer in a year or two (overtime incl.)