skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Puzzle Palace and Bamford's other books are among the best about the NSA.

His Wired article on Connecting the dots on PRISM, Phone Surveillance, and the NSA's Massive Data Center has his most recent thoughts -- http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/nsa-prism-verizon-s...
There is nothing illegal, immoral, or unethical about collecting information or paying someone to collect information to give you an advantage in a trade. Nearly every trade that happens has some information assymetry associated with it. It is not a secret in any way that there are tiers of access to reuters data. We could enact some sort of law that makes this illegal, but that seems heavy handed and unlikely to have a positive impact on the market.

We have decided that it should be illegal for public companies to give information selectively for the purposes of trading. We could easily change this law, but history has shown us that it isn't heavy handed and does have a positive impact on the market.
And aren't signed.
they're reporters, not clairvoyants. their job is to tell you what the docs say. they told you, and they were right to tell you, because the information looked very interesting. you jumped to conclusions. and so they now have to apologize because you weren't as careful as they were?

they did their job as well as they could. they had what appeared to be interesting data, but instead of just saying, "wow, XXX" they were very careful to not go beyond what was said.

i jumped to conclusions too. but then i realised i was probably wrong. it happens. but i don't then blame the reporters who did their job reasonably well. i made the mistake, not them.
This a great study about social networking and the relevance of the six degrees of separation. History tends to repeat itself, regardless of the technological advancements. I have recently been looking into the concept of weak ties. Studies have proven this idea to be extremely effective from a networking standpoint, especially when searching for new jobs. People tend to have less of a fear of asking someone they sort of know for a favor or connection, as opposed to asking a good friend. Attached is a Slideshare that digs into the mathematics of this concept. I also think that www.atthepool.com does a great job of helping people connect offline through the use of these weak ties.

http://www.slideshare.net/maksim2042/10-strength-of-weak-tie...
If you love your idea, let it go
Or because their entire business differentiation from the beginning has been privacy.

This does not mean that it is not compromised, of course. But its why people would believe it isn't compromised. And its a much better reason than your sarcastic imitation.
Maybe I don't completely understand the distinction. Care to elaborate?
Show HN: I'm Building a Step-By-Step Guide to Learning Programming
www.CodeConquest.com is a site I launched last September and have gradually built it up since. I don't believe there's any other site like it, and so I want to turn it into the Internet's go-to resource for beginner and would-be programmers.

I plan to keep it up-to-date with extensive scope and depth, covering everything a beginner needs to know to get started in programming. In other words, I want it to be her "overarching" resource - the place where she finds the right training, learns what to do next when she's got it etc.

Ultimately, I hope to get it to the point where it’s so useful that programmers and educators will be thankful for it and will want to recommend it.

I don’t think it’s at that stage yet, but that's why I'm posting it here. I want to get YOUR opinion and suggestions. What's missing that needs to be there? What do I need to do to make it a website that you'd recommend?

www.CodeConquest.com
www.CodeConquest.com is a site I launched last September and have gradually built it up since. I don't believe there's any other site like it, and so I want to turn it into the Internet's go-to resource for beginner and would-be programmers.

I plan to keep it up-to-date with extensive scope and depth, covering everything a beginner needs to know to get started in programming. In other words, I want it to be her "overarching" resource - the place where she finds the right training, learns what to do next when she's got it etc.

Ultimately, I hope to get it to the point where it’s so useful that programmers and educators will be thankful for it and will want to recommend it.

I don’t think it’s at that stage yet, but that's why I'm posting it here. I want to get YOUR opinion and suggestions. What's missing that needs to be there? What do I need to do to make it a website that you'd recommend?

www.CodeConquest.com
Assumption: 15 - 22 age range would be the majority of users.
Some I.T. policies also disallow chrome frame. Google had provided a policy loop hole which helped ie6 look like a legitimate option. Its not anymore...

I think its time enterprise I.T managgers update their thinking, and I think the less comfortable backwards compatible tools that exist, the better.
Apart from WWII, which was a biggie, didn't Italy win everything else since the unification? WWI, obtaining several African possessions, occupation of Albania?
NSA memo pushed to 'rethink' 4th Amendment
Like irahul has said, the issue is the Flask extension ecosystem and documentation lag rather than Flask itself. Which basically means YMMV depending on what you need to get done :)

If you are writing most of your own code and not using Flask extensions then you could well be fine (unless, like the linked post says, you discover a few months down the line you _do_ need a couple of extensions and they haven't been ported yet!).

Also worth pointing out that lots of other great python libraries now fully support python3 so you can get a lot done with just Flask on its own and those e.g. requests, redis-py, psycopg2, pytz.
Bank employee accidentally transferred $295M when he fell asleep at his computer
What makes you say that? (source?)
That older version wouldn't get security updates. And if it were to get them, but no new features, future web devs would forever be stuck with that old legacy webgl ;-)

But you are right that they should be praised for the past work.
I really like the how the goodies have improved (or at least the discoverability). There's some really useful / geeky stuff in there.

https://duckduckgo.com/goodies#Science

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+much+magnesium+is+in+43+cubic+...
I think many people find comfort in the idea of a central authority that they can address with their grievances even if it is mostly futile.

I saw a documentary on "cyber bullying" some years back and parents were calling for more oversight, more censorship and more monitoring "people shouldn't just be allowed to say mean things on facebook!".

A centralised facebook can at least ban members, block imposters , anonymous troll accounts and cooperate with law enforcement if necessary.

Under a federated model this becomes much more difficult, if anyone can run a node on the network then the 4chan nodes can connect to the nodes used by people to share their baby photos.
> There's no crazy stuff and few convoluted pieces

I dunno, I've recently started getting into it and "convoluted" is one word that has occurred to me more than once. Handlers vs signals, application and request context, context locals, local proxies, etc.. Probably there's a good reason for all these and the docs make a decent attempt to lay them out but overall my unscientific first impression is that it's not exactly a pinnacle of simplicity.
>>Valuable for blackmail, but not really useful
>>for anything else; the commercial value of
>>information rapidly degrades over time.
>>Knowing I want to buy a new fridge today is very
>>valuable, knowing I wanted to buy one last month is >>nearly worthless.

I think that blackmail is already bad enough. Considering which topics somebody might want to learn about on the internet, various diseases for example.

>>I hope that ISPs do not release personal
>>identity or billing data to arbitrary third parties.

I hope that too. But this information is gathered and stored somewhere in flawed systems which are operated by humans which might decide to follow their own interests more than the interests of the customers. I know of at least one story where an employee of a search engine has been using his privileges to stalk other people.
Way to go, this completely describes Azure (and MSFT web) development. We've been using the MSFT stack for the last 4 years and this is 100% consistent with our experience.
What I Learned In College
http://browserstack.com ?

I'm not affiliated with them or anything. Just started using last weekend and liked it a lot.
Not that this is going to help. The NSA is probably tapping the fiber at the ISP's backbone in front of Google.

Why do you think it is called PRISM? It's probably named for the way they are splitting the fiber and recording everything.
Perhaps you make it clear to them you fully understand how to process raw files and that they're for archival purposes, you want to 'future proof' your wedding. Also add that you don't intend to buy prints. I'd still ask for a higher res set of jpgs too, I think you'll look through those most frequently in the immediate years.
As long as you don't remind anyone that uses it implicitly that he is wrong, feel free to use it as you wish.
I've been using DDG for nearly a year now, and have rarely turned back to Google. I only do so when I really cannot find what I'm looking for on DDG, and I try to tell DDG about the bad results (which I've actually seen get fixed). Getting bad results happens infrequently though, so the benefit of using DDG really outweighs the occasional inconvenience.
Another possibility is that people ages 0-24 haven't realized they can and/or need to get paid for being creative.
Good suggestion, I may try this. Forgot to mention that I'm doing front-end engineering work as a freelancer. Not confident enough in my Ruby skills yet to offer those services. :)
>A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on. This story made it 1/3rd up the front page; stories based on the most extreme possible interpretation of what seems to be Greenwald's own extreme interpretation of a slide deck covered the entire front page for days.

There's definitely some extreme speculation going on--both from those trying to maximize as well as those trying to minimize this issue. It will take some time to get to the truth. This article is a perfect example of an extreme attempt to minimize this issue.

This article seeks to minimize the Guardian's original story by saying the Guardian is "walking back" their claims. That doesn't seem to be the case. This article cites a paragraph near the end of a minor story published days later as the passage where they "walk back" their original story. The intent of the paragraph seems to be to illustrate that both the "direct access" claim from the NSA and the "no direct access" claims from tech companies can both be true. The original article doesn't seem to be changed.

Beyond that, the Guardian never claimed the NSA had "direct access". They claimed that the NSA slides stated the NSA had direct access. The Guardian has not stated they read too much into "direct access" in the slides, and the original article is pretty clear that "direct access" is simply the NSA claim in the slides, not the Guardian's verdict.

There is another remaining issue: the original article claims access to "live communications", which has yet to be supported by a slide, but it would pretty much rule out the SFTP-only possibility that some people seem to be accepting as fact at this point. Maybe there is direct access to live information from Skype and Apple, but Google insisted on SFTP? We still have a lot to find out.

It could be that the Guardian did exaggerate. But it is far too early to conclude that with so many questions remaining. Not all the companies have described their systems.

One thing is certain: the Guardian does not seem to be walking back their claim.
Valuable for blackmail, but not really useful for anything else; the commercial value of information rapidly degrades over time. Knowing I want to buy a new fridge today is very valuable, knowing I wanted to buy one last month is nearly worthless.

That depends on what they can get out of the data, besides the obvious. I'm thinking of the story about Target knowing that a girl was pregnant before even her father did[1]. Even longer trends can probably be derived, regarding personality traits, income, etc. That information is worth a lot even months or years after it was captured.

[1]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe...
Cool -- shoot us an e-mail to the google group (https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/rethinkdb...) we'll be happy to help you out any way we can!
The headline made me think this was about the security 'features' on the original Xbox.
Why would anyone believe his own computer isn't already penetrated?
3 Habits that Kill an Entrepreneur's Potential [video]
Meet the Itsy-Bitsy, Teeny-Weeny Galaxy ~ 1000 stars
100% of my income comes from freelancing. I build web apps and APIs in Node.js. I charge an hourly rate and I bill once every 14 days. I only take on projects that are going to be at least two months in duration and I give my clients 14 days to pay after being invoiced.

I don't usually have much spare time, although it's not because of my billing practices.

If you're doing projects that are only going to last a week or two, just get 50% up front and 50% on completion.
Why every college student NEEDS to do a STARTUP internship
The Problem with Facebook right now, at least for me is that it is getting very boring. Nothing seems happens on it. Only very few posts appear and I think it is because they only show you your "closest friends" or people you have stalked etc or I don't know what parameters they use. Even if I sort by "more recent" only very few posts appear. I have over 950 friends. I used to wake up in the morning and login into facebook just to see what my FB friends did over the night or what happened with my friends in other continents. Now it takes me 5 minutes to be up to date. Besides, everytime I login I have to read again the same old posts (Even from the they day before). I don't know why facebook judges that I have too see that same post again and again everytime I login. WTF Facebook.
Widespread AWS DNS issue. Status dashboard is green
I think cool and hip is 16-25 year olds, not 10 year olds.
Something isn't quite write about this article. I have a close friend who works at Wells Fargo in the HNW (High Net Worth) department. A large portion of her day is moving around large sums of money for customers (say, when they are trying to buy a yacht or jet - seriously), and, when they are investing in very short-term instruments (in which the timing of the withdrawal/deposit, down to the hour, is very important).

The process of moving more than $1mm of money around (as she describes it) is byzantine, ludicrously manual, and involves advance planning as well as lots of layers of oversight. She actually will know a day in advance if such-and-such a customer will be sending money from one account to another, and almost has a flight plan laid out for all the things they have to do.

Either this German Bank allows individual employees, much, much more autonomy (and not just for $1mm, but $295mm!) than Wells Fargo or there is more to this story...
How do you learn to fix a mistake before you make one? You may have a weak notion of what you need to do... but you don't know until it happens and have a need to git dirty. Further, In my opinion of course, these features are great... but someone is going to make git easy while retaining its power. Git is a nacent technology and while Github is dominating now... there is always room for disruption. They, the people who make git easy, will be the winners. Don't make me think.
Ask HN: What's the best desk/chair combo for developers?
Feel free to mention other things that you rely on for your setup.
"That’s the way it’s done in the U.S., and that’s the way it’s done in Russia."
When I interviewed at Google this was running on a large LCD panel in the lobby. It was EXTREMELY laggy on that panel for some reason but it looks great now.
Hum, neither NoScript nor a search in their source reveals such scripts. Can you point me to them?
Yup, we're seeing massive connectivity issues across EC2, SQS, etc behind 99designs.com.
TOR is not that safe. If the exit node is compromised you’re f*cked for good.

As for Google the thing is that they’re also an advertising network so basically they track you all around the web.
My services are working in us-west. What issues are you seeing?
The main difference between, say, Disney and Facebook is that the former is engrained in culture from a very young age, whereas the latter officially is targeting those aged 13 and upwards.

Four year old children aren't signing up for Facebook accounts - they are, however, watching Disney on TV. Because the core Disney brand (versus the Disney conglomerate) is so heavily focused around childhood it engenders goodwill across most ages. People in their twenties and thirties respond to Disney because it reminds them of their own childhoods.

But Facebook doesn't have this luxury. Tweens and teenagers are typically brand sensitive, and coolness does matter. Your brand can be old (Nike, Apple, Adidas, etc), but it must have credibility with its target audience.

What I'm trying to say is that Disney doesn't need to be cool, because the brand is indoctrinated at an age where coolness doesn't matter. Facebook, on the other hand, targets brand and culture-aware tweens/teens. It's all about cool.
1. The NSA isn't the only threat to privacy on the net.

2. DDG is SSL, so there's some hope that the traffic is not visible to a passive observer, even the NSA.
Seems limited to us-east.
Just playing around a bit, even with soft durability, insertion speeds seem to be pretty slow (<100 inserts/s from ruby using bulk inserts on a i7 Macbook Pro with an SSD).

Also: All the ruby driver doc seems wrong. 1.6 changed a lot of the APIs?
Or it could be an API for issuing FISA warrants and collecting the requested data.

(The NSA may very well be doing both.)
There's the signs of an early housing crisis (i.e lots of apartments being built, but nobody's buying). Entires cities stands empty, without occupation. That seems a bit like an economy that's heaving trouble maintaining itself.
I love targeted advertising because it is so blatantly obvious and hilariously over-optimistic.

I search for a lot of random crap with more curiosity than intent to buy. I looked up the price for several windmills , the late 19th/early 20th century style, (~$1000, by the way). For weeks or months afterwards, I saw windmill ads on a sizable fraction of the websites I visited.

To be fair, it's far more likely that I am going to by a windmill than a random ad viewer, but the probability is still staggeringly low. There had to be a hundred other products I was more likely to buy than the windmill, that would be more valuable to show me. But no! I had viewed their product and I! Must! Be! Targeted!

I really wonder what the set of products that do well from targeted ads looks like.
you can integrate any search engine into chrome by right clicking in the search field and picking "Add as Search Engine".

Then you can go to Settings and make it your default.
not quite the same ballpark, but many years ago I helped write testing code for the backend of a states drivers license creation system.. there was a back door for feds/cia to make any license they wanted. I imagine all states probably have that..
The Bob Cesca item this mediaite post is building on makes the case that Greenwald saw what he wanted to see:

I’m going to put it all out there and let the chips fall where they may: I’m increasingly convinced that Glenn Greenwald’s reporting on the NSA story is tainted by his well-known agenda, leading him to make broad claims for the purposes of inciting outrage.

http://thedailybanter.com/2013/06/greenwald-sticks-with-his-...

See also:

http://www.rants.org/2013/06/11/epic_botch_of_prism_story/
Supreme court certified: Money is speech. The very best kind.
What's the point of this article? Sometimes it isn't about being cool, it's about being really useful to a ton of people. Driving a car isn't "hip" or "cool" (unless you're driving a Tesla) but it sure as hell eases the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

Facebook's mission isn't to be a "cool hangout" place, it's to make the world more open and connected. If they developed their product in such a way that it was only used by younger folk then they'd be excluding 75% of the population which is not connecting the world.

I'm really sick of these articles.
I would suggest asking some tough questions to the CEO/founder like this:

- What is the burn rate of the company?

- How much money do we have in the bank?

- What kind of revenue are we getting (you may already know this, but it could be worth asking anyhow)?

- What is the current horizon for fundraising?

All of this adds up to whether the company is tightening its belt in anticipation of lean times. It's happened before to many companies (for startups I've been involved with, it was the end of paid happy hours and the twice-weekly bagels disappearing) and it will happen again.

It's a panic response to a shortening cash runway that often doesn't help extend it very much. Be aware of the situation and prepare yourself for the worst, if necessary. It may be what others suggest here (a salesman suggesting a lower cost alternative) or the CFO trying to clamp down on expenses based on what they see in the next quarter or two.

Control what you can, be prepared for the rest.
Not patentable:

1111000010101010

Patentable:

0000111101010101

But don't worry, it's OK because you're only patenting the XOR of the original information string with a string of one's, not the original string itself. That's _clearly_ different. Someone please come in here and tell me why I've got this all backwards and this isn't actually a disaster built on an intellectually dishonest distinction without a difference. I'm not a biologist nor lawyer nor judge by any means, but this is what the ruling looks like to me.
< 100 inserts/s with soft durability is far too low. Shoot us an email to the google group (http://groups.google.com/group/rethinkdb) and we'll see if we can work this out!
I have, in the past, worked for government - both local and national; as has my wife - (also in the "third sector"). Our collective experience suggests that the public sector is filled more with cynicism than aspiration - the rot that corrodes all long-lived deep hierarchies having long corroded any goodness; any hope; any generosity away. The third sector is a little better; but is so frequently counterproductive; feeding nothing but networks of dependency that one easily despairs of being able to do good in a straightforward way. The world seems designed to frustrate our ambitions and thwart our plans -- we must instead approach doing good sideways; social enterprise being the current great hope.
System76:

* Heat management and fan noise -- manageable, and generally run cool without too much fan noise.

* Keyboard feel and trackpad feel -- marginal to average at best. A Clevo keyboard is absolutely dreadful if you've been spoilt by ThinkPad keyboards and only slightly less dreadful if you've been spoilt by Mac keyboards. The trackpad is absolutely dreadful if you've been spoilt by the TrackPoint, and just as dreadful if you've been spoilt by a MacBook trackpad.

* durability -- definitely solid. The materials don't feel as great, but they're just as durable.

* display color-fidelity and brightness and contrast -- Should be pretty good; but if you need color calibration, shell out the extra for an OS X machine.

* light-sensitive display -- No.

* backlit keyboards -- Not sure, will have to recheck.

* battery life -- Marginal. 2-3 hours is usually what you're going to get out of these machines, although Haswell might change that in this particular model.