skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just wanted to clarify: private sales are person-to-person and cannot include any sort of shipment.

Online sales such as all the sites you listed are required by Federal law to only ship to a licensed Federal Firearms License holder who in turn may only transfer to customers after a NICS check. So, online sales are as cumbersome as in-store purchases.

Anything with a NICS check or credit card purchase is potentially trackable.

Also, with a gun registry [proposed in various places], sufficiently smart data mining, and fast processing, it may be possible to detect an ammunition purchase [via credit card] in a caliber in which the buyer supposedly doesn't have a registered firearm.
>backups are only done in whole-file increments, not at a block level

OP seems to refer to how the Time Machine destination backup file is chunked when using a sparsebundle, such that individual chunks can be updated in isolation, which is how Time Machine came to support network backups. Previously, Time Machine's destination file was a monolithic disk image that had to be updated in whole, which would be unrealistic for network backups.

At a filesystem level, a sparsebundle is just a directory and the chunks are individual data files, which the OS coalesces into a single logical file. Sparsebundles appear as individual "files" in the Finder but you can right click to see the individual chunk files. A sparsebundle is effectively a "blob" as GP states, since it is designed to contain arbitrary data, and since it's implemented with the most rudimentary filesystem components it works across platforms as GP also states.

But when discussing network transfers it makes sense to think if it as a simple collection files rather than a "blob." (OP describes the chunks as "blocks" but that implies hard drive blocks which is not the case.)
I think "deceptive" is a poor word choice, but it was certainly confusing.

Considering the subject of this post, the resulting discussion, and the larger discussion that's been going on across HN and much of the media and the internet for the past week, exactly how the authorities learned about what she said is critical in understanding how his point fits into the broader context. That his point was about the reason they sent her back, and not how they learned it, was not clear to me until he responded.
Vague goals beget vague methods...
Honestly, this seems to me (German) like a very lurid headline. Article seems like more entertaining then a serious press release and does not belong on top of hacker news imho.
FlightCar illustrates the promise and pain of the sharing economy
This story reeks. None of it makes any sense (the messages were marked as SPAM?).

I'm filing this under the same rubric mentally as all those tea party lunies who suddenly swore their legitimate, random audit was caused by their membership in the Tea Party.
It irks me a little how everyone keeps dropping the "high-school dropout" bit. If you watch the video of him speaking [1], it is readily apparent he is no flunky. At any rate, he was taken under the wing of CIA/NSA/Booz Allen, who must have seen something in him, and given a highly specialized and job specific education.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yB3n9fu-rM
But also, party identification in these polls is self-reported and volatile, so the "Republicans" and "Democracts" aren't even the same people. Some people will just say they're whatever party the President is, if they're generally supportive, or whatever he's not, if they're opposed.

Another factor is that some people, I believe especially more recent immigrants, are suspicious that phone pollsters are not disinterested researchers of anonymous opinion, but rather testing loyalty or trying to identify people to persecute. (That is, are you sure it's really a pollster, and not the NSA/CIA/DHS/DEA/FBI/INS calling?)

Such people might be especially prone to identifying as the same party as, and refusing to complain on record about, "the powerful". This could throw in an extra few percent "Dem/OK-with-NSA" today, and would have thrown in extra "GOP/OK-with-NSA" then.
On the bright side, you can rest assured the NSA has heard you at least!
What phone are you using? How much system memory do you have left? There's a lot of reasons for lag beyond just a new OS. Some of those things could be exacerbated by the new OS, but for another datapoint, I'm running an iPhone 5 with 3.1/16GB used and I'm not experiencing any lag. The animations are a delight.

I am, however, not a fan of some of the graphical choices they made. A few subtleties like a thin 1px inset color on the NavBar text would do wonders for UI and contrast - but I'm not hired by them to make those decisions.
I agree that there are situations where the borrowing is much more blatant, and I don't think pointing out influences is a waste of time. Conversations along these lines tend to devolve into flame wars, however.
That's a configurable option (mount -o soft). On Ubuntu, the nfs(5) manpage has more information. This option is a good thing in a strict client/server scenario where the client should not lose data even if the server is rebooted. Years ago I watched an NFS mount in an old broadcast video setup recover unimpeded after its target system was rebooted.
Apple has been very consistent in its hardware and software designs over decades. It should be no surprise that people who want stuff to stay the same are using Apple devices right now. (Not exactly the same - but mostly the same, like the icon set that the author embeds.)
Ask HN: Where to incorporate free of the US?
Its a hypothetical question, but answers could be helpful to others.

I'm a US citizen. Suppose that I wanted to form a company providing a service that the US government conceivably might want access to. What would be some advanced countries (internet access, stable government and society, free market) where I could form a company and be free of US government shennanigans?
Governments can generally do what they want when it comes to foreign nationals, provided they aren't breaking any international treaties. And regardless of the spying involved in this case, the US is free to kick out anybody on a visa that it doesn't like at any time for any reason. It's not nice but that's how it is.
I assume they need to know what data to send; the "system" might refer to the database with FISA orders.
8 Simple And Best Practices To Get Out Of Financial Worries
I'm surprised that many of the little tweaks that Apple has added weren't available sooner. For example, on iOS 5 you could adjust the screen brightness via the double-click home menu on the bottom on the iPad, but not on the iPod, which was bizarre.
> Where it gets to be a concern is revoking a guy's visa because he's defending a terror suspect.

Except that this is speculation by the lawyer. Unless the lawyer's chats included, "Yes, I will help you smuggle something into the US," I don't see why the US would bother pulling the lawyer's visa. What exactly are they getting from doing that?

This smells to me of a guy trying to get fifteen minutes of fame by riding on the public outcry. I mean... is it even worth digging to verify whether or not his visa was actually pulled?
I quit Facebook around 2007 or 2008. I never got accounts on Google or Gmail.

This decision had nothing to do with government spying, but not wanting to become a customer of a big monopolist was one of my reasons. The article notes,

> When you have enormous concentrations of data in a few hands, spying becomes very easy.

Forget about government spying. These big concentrations of data are also juicy targets for hackers. And then there's the fact that you're at the mercy of the vendor when you let yourself be locked into a hosted product. Look at all the frustration people are having because Google is shutting down Reader. I use Thunderbird for RSS, and it works well enough -- and I know that I'll never have to deal with the headaches that Reader customers are going through.

HN needs more articles about decentralized, open-source Facebook killers.
Here's one scenario:

You can be identified that you are using Tor, at your ISP end. If it is acceptable for your ISP to provide information about the connections you are making (the metadata) to the authorities without warrant, then the authorities can gather a list of citizens who use Tor. They might then convince a kangaroo court that using Tor is enough cause to suspect criminal activity such that the court issues a warrant for further direct surveillance, or to seize your computers. Then you could be jailed until you reveal your encryption keys, or the direct surveillance could catch you in the act.

All this could happen even if you're doing nothing illegal on Tor.

Does this seem far fetched? Given recent events, it seems that potential adversaries don't have a problem with:

1) Gathering data en-masse without warrant (eg. this recent event).
2) Convincing courts that you're doing illegal things based on tenuous information that they've gathered, without any further oversight (eg. IP addresses participating in a BitTorrent stream).
3) Arranging for your computer equipment to be seized on trumped up charges, even if you're in a different jurisdiction (eg. Kim Dotcom).
4) Forcing you to reveal your encryption keys, under threat of jail (law in the UK; precedent set in some jurisdiction in the US, although AIUI the Supreme Court may eventually overrule).
Other than refusing to consent to letting the NSA wiretap your customers, what 'innocent' actions can be viewed as felonies? I didn't see any specific examples which applied to everyday life in the article.
Never has there been any dispute that the NSA can freely read what non Americans are doing without any sort of legal authorization. One would assume that access is given to Customs & Dept of Homeland Security too.

Even if that were true, she was exchanging messages with the father of the American family she was planning to stay with. I doubt they only read the messages sent by the German girl.
I think it's impossible to replace Excel en masse, so lots of folks are starting to pick off bits of it to replace. And hopefully in doing so they'll invest in making those bits a lot smarter than they are in Excel.

Examples from the S12 YC batch alone:

. VBA isn't great, so DataNitro is letting you use Python.

. Grid is (mobiley) replacing the basic list-making use case of Excel.

. (Stretch example:) Financial modeling of big personal finance decisions is a nice use case of Excel, but too hard for most people, so SmartAsset bakes those kinds of models into an on-site calculator.

. Statwing is replacing pivot tables, which are clunky, devoid of statistics, do no error checking, etc.; in a few clicks Statwing will automatically choose, run, and interpret a statistical analysis, all the while looking for and alerting users to outliers or (some) other data issues. [I'm a cofounder. Also: https://www.statwing.com/demo]

I'd expect that soon someone will come along soon and pick off the financial modeling use case in a way that's a bit more generalized than SmartAsset. Really tough UI challenge, but I think doable.
If anyone's interested in learning a bit more about the Stasi, The Lives of Others is a great film about a man who works for the Stasi, tasked with spying on some influential people.
I actually think the homescreen icons look kind of similar to the one in Symbian (especially Safari - Ovi Maps).
I like when people post a perspective like this. It's a lot more bold than to criticize every single thing. Stay humble, stay happy folks.
Finally, I have a replacement for my NeXT Cube!

They've clearly studied their core markets - Graphics and viz work. I'm in line to buy one.
It's no more distracting than talk radio or some blaring annoying commercial which doesn't stop talking if I need to focus. When you have a handsfree device, just say "Hold on" and do what you need to do. You can always ask them to repeat themselves I you don't hear.
I'm not at much risk (except for
maybe some of my HN posts!)
and am not very safe, but I'm
safer than I would be trying
to be a public figure speaking out.

At times I have heard suggestions
that I should start a blog,
but then I'd be closer to being
a public figure and more at
risk.

Again, if my business is successful,
then I will be less anonymous
and sometimes have to hold my tongue!
It's extraordinarily difficult not to be pessimistic when you see the abuses initiated by one party continued and expanded by the other, after bleating on about their supposed opposition to such programs.

I'm convinced that the Democratic Party is the biggest roadblock to accomplishing meaningful change in the US. It exemplifies the mushy, frightened middle in the worst possible way, and should be reviled by anyone with principles.

For example: http://www.people-press.org/files/2013/06/6-10-13-4.png
Easy JSLogger setup for Javascript errors logging in the browser
omg, the new designs look hideous! steve jobs would never have approved these ... looks like apple is now following the footsteps of microsoft, so sad.
Well he did flee to Hong Kong of all places. So clearly he isn't the most learned person around.
For patent purposes: and perhaps English language I would look at New Zealand. I don't know the NZ view on National Security though. Singapore is a tax haven but looks real bad if your not very wealthy. Other options I ignored because of language issues or other uncertainties associated with countries like Venezuela.
Nobody wants another world war, don't be silly.

But... but... what about childish power fantasies and world conquest?
Isn't the entire purpose of PhD to struggle with a topic until you understand it so deeply that you become the world's expert on that tiny piece of academia? Will this lead to lazy uninformed researchers?
Yes, this is well said and what I was trying to express. "Deceptive" was a poor choice of words and I think "confusing" says it better.
If you know nothing about whistle-blowers, don’t cover them
Everyone should see this as Apple copying. That's what they're blatantly doing. It shouldn't be viewed negatively so long as it improves the product. There's no possibility that Apple is going to lead 100 times out of 100 on design trends.

They're living up to the motto of great artists stealing. It's done in every industry, and it's done by great designers. It's a myth that great designers don't 'steal' constantly, of course they do. Ditto great musicians, and any other artists.
Yes they are privileged, but that doesn't mean the gov't can intercept them, it just means they are inadmissible as evidence in a trial.
I'd guess polshaw wants to sell/distribute an appliance containing proprietary software (hence the reluctance to use a GPLv3 licensed component), not just install it on his own device.
SNL does portray Biden as a caricature. Jason Sudekis played him as a quick talking ex-fraternity asshole who takes upskirt pictures of Hillary Clinton and then proclaims "You've been Biden'd!". SNL isn't doing him any favors - to them he's a lovable buffoon.
Not at all unlikely, but routine. TechCrunch previously wrote about what these Facebook comprehensive account reports to these "lawful" requests look like: http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/06/heres-what-a-facebook-respo...
Massive hyperbole. I guarantee you its not the first time in history Americans have been killed on the battlefield while fighting for the other side. The executive branch has been given no power to indefinitely detain Americans. See Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. The people who have been detained are not Americans.

The scale of proxy wars engaged in then versus today can scarcely be compared its so different.
Democracy Now! is often too lefty for my tastes, but they do a terrific job on stories where the MSM is likely to be biased. They're particularly good and independent gov't leak stories.
Yeah, this is something everyone needs to understand. Intent is very important when entering countries on visas. If you enter the US with a non-immigrant visa such as a visitor visa with every intent to remain in the country indefinitely, a finding of visa fraud may be made against you and you could receive a long (multi-year) bar from readmission into the US.
Ask HN: I want to launch a real time q&a service
I'm thinking of launching a question & answer service where you can ask questions, and then it will search the network to answer the questions.

The network will consist of people who registered with a profile with things they might want to answer.

In the beginning I would start specifically with people who would like programming questions answered. Maybe the rails community to start off. An example of a quick question would be maybe how a line of code works.

This would be similar to the now defunct aardvark.com, but would allow people to connect to each other to create answer networks.

Thoughts, feedback, or ideas?
So private conversations i have on facebook can be "flagged inappropriate"? And thus likely checked over by a real human?

forget the NSA, why should anyone aside for me and who i'm talking to be able to flag (and likely checked by a human) private messages?

Private messages on facebook are well, not private it seems.
I agree with you on moral grounds, but technically human or natural rights are not the same as legal rights. In particular, they cannot be guaranteed by any document the UN produces, unless embodied as legal rights within a functioning judicial system. Instead, these rights are more like ideals.
The whole story doesn't seem to add up, I have a feeling that some crucial information is missing.

Apparently, the reason she was sent home was that she gave wrong information about her reasons to enter the country. That's why she was confronted with contradictory information in her messages (she claimed she wanted visit friends of her parents, while she was really going there to work). So was she actually trying to enter illegaly and was sent back because of that? That sounds like a visa issue to me (tourist vs. work visa).

Certainly the NSA or Homeland Security or whoever weren't reading every facebook message just so they could check if the girl would state a matching reason for entering the country.

To me it looks like something else must have triggered all of this, something that is not mentioned in the article. I understand that the main point here is that Immigration had access to her facebook chats. I just wonder: at what point in time did they decide to access her chats. Was it when the girl was already at Immigrations? Was it as a (random?) background check when she applied for her visa or ESTA? Or was it after something, e.g. keywords, in her chats triggered a check?

(Please understand that I'm not in the slightest trying to defend that customs had access to the FB chats, I just find the article a bit lacking.)
Right: "Chilling effect"
Just Don’t Call it Big Data
That's your bias in wanting to believe that people like you are more honest and true to their convictions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5864729 ... looks like Republicans and Democrats are pretty close in their consistency. Small sample, but usually what you see on most similar issues.
Tahoe-lafs: Secure cloud storage
Surprised no one has pointed out the worst of Brooks' warped logic:

> If federal security agencies can’t do vast data sweeps, they will inevitably
> revert to the older, more intrusive eavesdropping methods.

and

> He betrayed the cause of open government. Every time there is a leak
> like this, the powers that be close the circle of trust a little tighter.
> They limit debate a little more.

This is exactly like something a friend from the former Soviet Union told me a few years ago. People in the community would self-censor, and moreso censor each other by saying explicitly: "If we don't censor amongst ourselves, the central authorities will be forced to step in and impose even tighter and more strict measures than we are under now."

This goes beyond a simple fear of consequences. It's a pervasive acceptance of the aggressor's malevolence in which the victim ritualistically cowtows in order to appease it.

This is ICD-9 code 995.81 "Battered person syndrome". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battered_person_syndrome :

* The abused thinks that the violence was his or her fault.

* The abused has an inability to place the responsibility for the violence elsewhere.

* The abused has an irrational belief that the abuser is omnipresent and omniscient.

EDIT:

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome "a psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors or abusers, sometimes to the point of defending them. [...] One commonly used hypothesis to explain the effect of Stockholm syndrome is based on Freudian theory. It suggests that the bonding is the individual’s response to trauma in becoming a victim. Identifying with the aggressor is one way that the ego defends itself. When a victim believes the same values as the aggressor, they cease to be a threat."
Interview with Michael Ficarra creator of CoffeeScript Redux
uh.. "need to"? rather keep my money and my pretty icons instead of the microsoft cloned ones :)

also, it will still be some time until all the 3Gs are gone from the site i use this phone for testing to. (not in the USA)
WebRAW:Using Emscripten and asm.js to Process RAW Images
"How would you call it there were almost half a million fully armed German troops stationed in the US?"

That would depend on whether they were there with U.S. government permission, wouldn't it?
Something like "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" following would probably be reasonable, if a bit hefty.

The Nazi's managed to document things exhaustively, so it serves as a jumping off point into a bunch of other places you will very likely find interesting books and articles about most of the aspects of the regime.
I'm in Porto, Portugal. We are going through a financial crysis and the economy is on hold right now. I'm starting to look on other European countries.
Didn't know about Brad Feld, thanks for the tip!
Unless I'm missing something, there is nothing in the article to suggest that his conversation had anything to do with his visa being withdrawn.
Only a potentially spurious time correlation.

In fact, it seems unlikely that anything in his conversation that legitimately would have resulted in his visa being withdrawn. And if the government doesn't need legit reasons, why not just deny his visa outright? Or deny it because he was representing a terror suspect.
Poll Finds Disapproval of Gov't Record Collection, but Little Concern
Tim Cook is a great CEO
Badly written websites or plugins can easily cause that to increase. On my rMPB at the moment, Firefox is in the background and using 10-12% CPU. Chrome has Silverlight running for some reason (probably from when I used Netflix earlier), and that is using 8-10% CPU.
Its also worth noting, in addition to the point gojomo makes that party identification is self-reported and volatile (and the further, related, point that people both enter and exit the sampled population over time), so that the populations of "Democrats" and "Republicans" in the 2013 poll aren't the same as the population in the 2006 poll, that the questions in the two Pew polls that are the basis of that "metaanalysis" aren't about the same thing.

The 2006 poll question asked about warrantless wiretapping by the NSA (it specified both "listening in on telephone calls" and "without a warrant".)

The 2013 poll questioned asked about asked tracking call information under "secret court orders", which is neither listening in on calls or done without a warrant. They are two different things; it is a mistake to treat them as the same thing and consider different reactions to them as inconsistent.

(Though, given the specific differences, shifting from supporting the former to opposing the latter is something I find odd, but I suppose it could be consistent and not based on pure partisanship if it was grounded, for example, in a strong ideological opposition to the idea of judges overseeing executive national security actions.)
Only then do we sign our work