skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Snowden overstated his salary... by a lot

It's possible that Snowden was including reimbursements, a medical/dental plan, a pension, a company car, life insurance, that sort of thing. BAH may also be reporting his pay after taxes.

>He reportedly left his home on May 1

Why does this matter? Has he ever claimed that he went straight from his house to HK?

>Snowden didn't have 'authority' to wiretap anybody/He might not have had the ability to do so, either

How do we know? If he had root access to a mail server, or a single-sign-on server, he could have leveraged that into access to much more of the network. You're not supposed to send passwords over email, but people do it all the time. I don't think he's saying that he could have also gotten away with it, merely that he had the capability to, in contrast to earlier NSA testimony that the NSA did not have the ability to collect those communications.

>Snowden's résumé is fishy

Why does it matter that Snowden is a dropout? He clearly worked for BAH. The only question is what his capacity was there:

>and that the terms Snowden used to describe his agency positions did not match internal job descriptions.

What does this mean? Does it mean, literally, that the job title that he had didn't exactly match what he said in the interview? Why aren't they stating what his actual job title was? Privacy concerns?
Emacs + org-mode + remember/capture does all of this and much more. The system is very powerful and because I synchronize my calendar with org-mode I can also quickly capture TODOs, EVENTs, notes, bookmarks, ideas, TOREADs, journal entries, etc...

Plus you then have all of the amazing tools in Emacs at your disposal :) Custom Agenda views is one of my favorite pieces about org-mode; linking to other org files, the list of amazing things in this software can go on for quite some time.
Unless my little spreadsheet here is wrong, if we assume you can invest at 3% above inflation, saving 50k per year will get you a million dollars in 16 years.

The second million only takes ten more years. Nine years after that, at year 35, you get your third million, at which point you might consider retiring and living indefinitely on your $85k annual investment income.
Imagine 3 burner sim cards used by three individuals used to call each other with call durations of 5 seconds. Such a scenario would probably light up on the NSA's dashboard like a Christmas tree.

In the investigation of the Hariri assasination such analysis was employed by painstakingly looking into millions of phone calls in Lebonan. If I remember correctly, the UN investigation team identified 4 rings each color coded (red, blue, yellow, and purple) each ring would only call phones in their ring and the ring leaders talked to each other. So you had nodes that talk to each other and one single node would talk to one other node outside of each group. They also correlated the timing of the calls and locations in relation to where the Hariri convoy was on the day of the assassination (eg. a green call made as Hariri left his palace.)

I can't remember the details but the report was a very interesting read.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2089420,00.htm...

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2010/11/19/f-rfa-macdonal...
Does ChatSecure handle conversations moving from desktop to phone?

I have an android phone with gibberbot, so its an academic question, but that very scenario has been a pain for me.

Do you think the up coming work on multi party OTR helps solve this problem?
> Oh, please, not this outdated crap. As long as you don't choose a particularly hostile machine, nowadays GNU Linux distros don't require almost any manual driver installation, and even restricted drivers can be installed with a couple of clicks.

That a user is expected to know what restricted drivers are--that the user is expected to know what drivers are--is the core of the problem.

When my mom turns on her Mac, she is never bothered by that.
The Patriot Act is a precursor to worse things than these. We are just beginning to see their manifestations. It is still early...
And http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org-velocity.html which implements nv on top of org mode :)
I disagree. Since when is money classified as free speech?
You'll have to renounce your US citizenship to escape the long arm of the IRS. In practice this requires gaining an alternative one first if you're not a dual citizen.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2013/04/29/americans-abr...
Apparently the CIA agrees with you: http://www.salon.com/2010/03/27/wikileaks/

From TFA: "the CIA sees Obama as a valuable asset in putting a pretty face on our wars in the eyes of foreign populations."
Oops, turns out that some readers used the guid instead of the link if it was a URL. Fixed?
Another advantage is that celebrities, by definition, aren't in politics to acquire fame and fortune. This has the potential advantage that they might be less able to be bought off.
The difference between 2013 Obama and 2006 Biden is that 2013 Obama gets briefings on what exactly they uncover with that metadata and who they are catching with it. That's what he means when he says it was worth it.
For the last few months I have been trying to get an inactive username from Twitter with no luck.

Today I decided to try something a little bit more creative, so I wrote twitter a poem hoping to get their attention
Why not term-limit the bureaucracy?
> say what the government tells them to say.

While it might be, this is not necessarily true. If Snowden were to win the Nobel peace prize, there would most likely be US newspapers describing him as an evil man and a traitor. The same newspapers would probably describe a Chinese whistleblower as a hero. All of that without government intervention. Just like in the US, a lot of people in China blindly support their government without having a gun pointed at their head. This might somehow be related to the Stockholm syndrom or simply a strong sense of nationalism.
(fyi: approval voting is simpler, comparably effective, and probably easier to accomplish)
This has been my experience as well for "real world" tests, although I'm still excited about the project. I think once they get a graphical annotate in place akin to `cython -a`, this will help quite a bit in terms of figuring out what is going on.
"that's not an attack against the cryptography of the system"

I am not sure what you mean. What do you think this is an attack against?

"you can't use a polynomial-time algorithm to spend coins which belong to me."

In some situations I can. If, for example, you received your money from me, I can take the money from you and transfer it to someone else. The attacker can also stop you from completing transactions and stop you from receiving rewards for mining.
Realistically, it can't replace most uses of concrete. Roman concrete takes years to reach full strength. The stuff we use is close to full strength in days.
I agree, the publicity now may be bad, but the focus is mostly on the government anyway. I have no doubt that the companies would prefer transparency and keeping the data to themselves (Google has been pushing for that all along), but perhaps they aren't making it front page like sopa* because want to draw the bad publicity back to themselves.

*except Mozilla I guess, but they weren't targeted in the NSA slides
The text is definitely clear about it if you read everything, but the chart could easily be misread as saying that Numba and Cython are 2x faster than hand-written Fortran. That's my main objection. I also think that writing a simple C version of this code would serve as a much better baseline than f2py-generated Fortran code.

That was definitely an inappropriate labeling of the Python benchmarks on the Julia home page. We fixed it as soon as it was pointed out and I'm grateful to whoever did point that out. I'm just doing the same thing here.

Dahua's explanation is very cool and he's really created an incredibly high-quality, comprehensive package for distance calculations. It's great work.
I think he is being incredibly careful and deliberate with his words here, there is a pattern and speed to his typical rhetoric that is clearly gone here. He knows that there is certain words or phrases he must avoid (privacy instead of civil liberties) or else he takes a moment in which he is trying to defuse a tough political spot and magnifies the problem.
God-dammit, why couldn't they put a photo of the rock in the article? Maybe even instead of that video, which is mostly useless.
You can setup a quick hack (add Explorer to the Start Apps folder) that switches to Desktop on load. Granted, you'll have an Explorer window open as well, but...small price to pay.

Oh yah, I like Windows 8 on desktop as well.
Evidence Based Scheduling [2007]
USA also said they advocates freedom and human rights.
I can only imagine that what he saw when the curtain got pulled back and he started receiving the PDB shocked him to the core. This is a pretty radical swing on a fundamental issue, there has to be a root cause for the change.
BMI sues Pandora over its attempt to lower royalty rates
"Mr. Mohammed was a victim of his own sloppiness, said a senior European intelligence official. He was meticulous about changing cellphones, but apparently he kept using the same SIM card."

It seems weird that a leader in an organization capable of executing the 9/11 attacks could have lacked such basic understanding of how cellular technology works. There wasn't a single guy in al Qaeda who knew that a SIM card was a unique identifier?
Interesting idea, but this is a bad poem. The (lack of) rhythm makes it really hard to read.
I'm still skeptical. Kriesi is one of only 2 author's on the site who've earned more than $2MM and <$5MM[0]. He's been consistently adding and updating products for 5 years, so maybe he's breaking $100k/month now, but it's probably closer to $50-80k/month(amortized). Though he'll probably continue to grow and get closer to that.

There are only 11 (of 2492) authors who've earned more than $1MM.

There is only one author (http://themeforest.net/user/ThemeFusion) that really looks like it's near the mark of $100k/month, with between $1-2MM, in just 15 months.

[0]Those numbers are before the network takes their cut of 30% (at that volume). So it appears that nobody on the network is making much more than $60k/month at the top. Of course, that's nothing to scoff at though. But it's certainly not short in time or effort, to achieve that.
Just as an anecdote, in one of my university classes we had the assignment of writing and optimizing a memory allocator. When I switched from using structs to using pointer arithmetic in macros, I gained a significant performance boost, even though the in-memory data was exactly the same.
I guess this adds a whole new meaning to the phrase "bit bucket" :).
The spoken languages aren't mutually intelligible, but if you know one then the other is probably a little easier to learn. He'll probably have the time (at least, he hopes he will).

And the writing is all pretty similar (Japanese Kanji, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified).
Ask HN: Best Post-NSA debacle Dropbox Alternative?
BitTorrent Sync? Other options?
How You Can Make It Blogging?
But they are mixing FISA requests with normal ones. They could say there were 1000 requests in 2013, but the FISA requests could be for tens of millions of Americans. Doesn't exactly help the transparency cause.
This gave me a good chuckle. Im definitely not an expert poet, I just attempted to rhythm the last words of every sentence.
It doesn't necessarily require a central bank, which everyone must be compelled to use, it just requires a banking system. If someone wishes to pay you, and happens to use a different bank to yourself, then your bank (whom you, admittedly, have to trust) can work on your behalf, directly with the sourcing bank, to claim the funds. There's quite good reason to trust in this system because our bank knows that the sourcing bank can identify double-spenders.

The plus side of such a system is honest bank customers still get complete anonymity, even if the banks conspire against you. The downside is you can never know if your bank is conspiring against their customers as a whole i.e. by not operating in line with their inflation/reserve policy... which of course is one of Bitcoins best features.
As I recall they got something like an 8000% return on investment from all the money that went into PARC from the invention of the laser printer at PARC alone.
Where can do you draw a line between supporting a cause and supporting a candidate?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchurian_candidate
LIVECAST: Police invading #gezi in Istanbul. (Timcast)
CBoppert: you are hellbanned.

Your posts show up as dead to us. We cannot respond to your messages. And you cannot private message users.

Check for yourself using incognito mode or private browsing mode.

Get a new HN account.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hellban
These seem like orthogonal issues, though. Even with the most simplistic tax code conceivable (say, a flat tax) a tax authority would have to examine your self-reported financial data and financial data relating to you reported by third parties.

And if you're suspected of misrepresentation, they'd still have good reason to go rummaging through your publicly or legally accessible info to make their case. These steps appear independent of the details of the tax code.
Speaking of people behind the scenes, who are those two people standing with Obama in the San Jose conference?
What I've been wishing for recently is a site that has a superficially simple interface: a grid whose rows are members, and columns/subcolumns show votes cast or not cast. The votes wouldn't be just bills, but every action that they voted on, including their working arrangements.

For legislation, the columns would have gross bills, whose embedded decisions and regulations could be broken out at will. For example, the Clothing Improvement Bill could be shown on its own (great, my guy voted to improve clothing), and its internals could be broken out to show that, for example, one effect is that citizens and residents of Canadian descent are only allowed to wear red socks (oh, feh, my guy hates Canadians).

You could also ask for just the breakouts from all bills that are concerned with socks, for example.

Which would be hard, because big bills have lots of individual effects. But it would show exactly what your guy supported, on purpose, unknowingly or as a compromise. Heck, they might even like to see that, they could learn what they voted on after the fact. I'll bet a lot of them still don't know in total what they voted for in the Affordable Care Act.

Each vote would also indicate things like if the member had more responsibility than just being a member, like on the relevant committee. A no-show here should be embarrassing. Or if the vote specifically impacts his region.

Bonus points to do this analysis all the way back to the beginning of the Republic.
Facebook, Microsoft Disclose Government Data Requests, But Google Balks
Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambit
Same article was linked on Reddit; the top thread there points out that the meeting must have intentionally been scheduled to make this happen. It's common knowledge in DC that Congress is in session from Monday afternoon to Thursday morning, because Congressmen and Senators have duties in their home districts (listening to constituents bitch at them) that they have to take care of on Friday/over the weekend, and it takes them at least an afternoon's flight to get home.

Don't blame the reps for not being there, at least not too harshly. Blame the asshats who WANTED the meeting to be underattended to provoke exactly this reaction rather than actually letting their arguments speak for themselves.
Golang Diaries I
Show HN: Binary Deep – a sexy iOS app for Digital Ocean
how was a guy who was a high school dropout get a gig at the NSA?

He enlisted in the Army and got a security clearance, which is the credential that's really crucial for CIA/NSA/contractor jobs. The Army is willing to accept a GED, which you can get in an afternoon.
As a big TI fan (I love hacking on the MSP430, Stellaris, BeagleBone, etc), the Chronos would be great if it weren't so incredibly 1970s/early 1980s dorky looking. I mean, I'm not particularly fashion conscious, but I wouldn't wear that thing.
This is a poor headline that does not accurately reflect the situation. Microsoft and Facebook made deals with the government to include NSLs and FISA warrants in their total disclosure numbers as long as they kept them grouped together, but Google had already made a deal in the past to disclose NSLs separately from regular law enforcement warrant numbers and accepting the new deal would've forced them to lump the NSLs in with the rest, reducing the usefulness of the overall numbers. Instead they seem to be pushing to be allowed to disclose regular warrants, FISA warrants and NSLs all separately. This is a good thing.
A sexy app for iOS to monitor the status of your droplets, and if need be take action (like reboot, power cycle, or open an SSH connection).

Please, share your thoughts.
IntelliJ and friends are great, but the default keymap is a train smash on most common Linux distros. Whoever thought ctrl+alt+right arrow was a good navigation shortcut?
Can you send me an invite?
I think 99.8% of us have seen this, but perhaps you haven't.

http://xkcd.com/538/
Two key problems with the current system:

1) The financial sector of the economy attracts away many of America's smartest and most charismatic, while simultaneously making a career in public service, especially by comparison, very unattractive for this valuable group. Thus an escape to lucrative lobbying (and gov't contracting) positions becomes the only economic redemption for those experiencing such injustice (as they might call it).

2) There is a school of thought that believes, and aims to show, that gov't can't do anything well. In the U.S., a significant proportion of the time, people who espouse this attitude hold powerful offices -- it's no surprise, then, that they don't instil in their subordinates a sense of civic responsibility and pride. Neither should it be surprising that they behave cynically.
Nice library, haven't seen it before. I'll check it out, the USB libraries seem to be a bit more bearable than the usual stacks I've seen.
Annotations are in early alpha state: https://github.com/numba/numba/tree/annotations. Feedback/pull requests more than welcome!
How about this: all web browsing history for everyone (that is not a paranoid computer geek) all over the world - gathered through 'safe browsing' from chrome, ie and also firefox (possible to disable in firefox: https://support.mozilla.org/pl/questions/922449). All 'just metadata'.
ThemeFusion has only one theme. This is a lot different than having a bunch of themes (support and marketing wise)
Exactly. Medical records are a great example. If you get a new doctor, you have to give them written authorization so that they can get your old medical records.

They can't just say "look I'm a MD, give me the datas", partly because that would be a felony!

Same sort of regulation, albeit more complicated, applies to NSA.
That 100' extra space has most probably been used to house cable laying equipment, where they can take a cable to the taps and have that real time feed. If they spent $3.2B on that sub, there is no way I'd doubt their willingness to spend tons on using it to lay NSA dedicated optics.
aletheia(Gk) :=

"... I’ll see what I can uncover.”

From this one could get the impression that the F.B.I. was in effect working as a private detective for Stratfor and its corporate clients.
Map of American Rivers
It's fascinating to see how well Google has branched out. It started as just a search engine competing with Lycos, AltaVista, & Yahoo and yet they didn't just stop, they kept going.

This project is not a branching out. This is what happens when it's cheaper to expand your market (create the pie bigger) than trying to cutting into market share (take a bigger bite out of the pie).

Driverless cars is no different.
The thing about that plan is, you get taxed and you pay land rent like someone who makes $120k.
How conservative is 3% above inflation?

Also, who, even in the high salary brackets, can save $50k/year?
Or they could be single issue candidates, a particular form of corruption IMNSHO, like Clint Eastwood as the Mayor of Carmel. His restaurant then finally got its liquor license or expansion permit or whatever his issue was, I forget the details.
Startup-unfriendly country launches site to promote "unique startup culture"
The more pressing problem is that many tough solutions aren't solved by committee, they're solved by leadership and expertise, a point where Congress fails, the executive branch fails, and where the roots of government (e.g. Constitution) start to fail under the stress of lobbying and corruption.
Despite Microsoft and Facebook being allowed to release data, Google is refusing. Google claims "Lumping the two categories together would be a step back for users,” the Google spokesman added in the statement. “Our request to the government is clear: to be able to publish aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, separately"

This strikes me as bullshit. One, more data seems always to be better. Two, google already releases some data on non NSL/FISA requests[0]. We'd have some idea which is which and not just lump it all together.

Microsofts numbers were odd too: they only gave requests, not effected accounts (a marked contrast to the rather complete info Facebook gave out). Why the discrepancy ? Did Facebook not get many request, so they were allowed to release everything? Did Microsoft batch requests and so those mere 7k requests did give out huge amount? Did Google actually make them file individual requests -- which would be inline with their denial earlier this week?

It seems the DOJ/NSA is only letting people release (accurate) statistics that might understat the problem.

[0]http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests/?m...
Your post implies that Obama has been forced to go along with this surveillance program, so it wasn't directly his fault.

Being a liberal myself, I'm shocked to see how much Obama has been getting the benefit of the doubt by liberals on all the crap that has been happening lately. The same liberals that qwew quick to criticize and blame Bush on everything, and never extend him the same courtesy.
It seems feed items are back to normal now.
I believe that data covered only NSLs and explicitly didn't cover FISA requests. In fact, Google's spokes person makes this clear in the article:

" a Google spokesman said the company has 'always believed that it’s important to differentiate between different types of government requests,' referring to requests for data in criminal cases, and data requests stemming from national security-related, classified orders.

'Lumping the two categories together would be a step back for users,' the Google spokesman added in the statement. 'Our request to the government is clear: to be able to publish aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, separately.'"
Hipster or neckbeard?
And now if you want to depress yourself, tick the "Forecast" checkbox on the right.
And by the way, voice votes for a candidate would show a match with how the vote went, regardless of official position. If you hide behind a voice vote, then you're recorded and responsible and accountable for the winning result.
The US Government Uses Invalid HTML on Their Takedown Pages