skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a person coming from a former soviet republic, I am very familiar with the saying "show me a man, and I will show you the crime he is guilty of" - which basically meant that if KGB wanted to charge you with something, they always could find a paragraph for you, because there were so many and so vaguely defined.
As an outsider, to me it seems that the USA is not a "free" country and I honestly don't see any difference between what the US and Russian governments are doing to journalists and people who disagree with them.

Edit: Oh, and we already had massive surveillance back then. If you wanted to travel out of your town - you had to register that fact with the nearest police department. Wanted to travel abroad - had to apply for a passport, which was only issued for a strict number of days and had to be returned upon return. If you were placing a phone call, it would always start with a warning "This call is being monitored. This call is being monitored". The post office would open your parcels and letters. There was book censorship on a massive scale. What the US government is doing has already happened. "Those who don't remember history are bound to live through it again".
13 Landing Page Mistakes That Can Heavily Impact Conversion Rates
Which sadly doesn't mean that they have a lot of experience in the algorithms involved when handling datasets.
Teaching that "if you steal, people won't like it" is not a commandment with a death sentence attached to it. It's just teaching how things work in society. But making a commandment or a law, and forcing people to obey it, in most cases is just a shield for violating this very principle by someone else.
Fundraising is a Means Not an End - Steve Blank
> Her site is fun. I remember a while ago, you could go to the site map and it'd been laid out like a concentration camp. The visitors at various pages/camp locations would be little humanoids with the relevant browser logo for the head.

"Fun" and "concentration camp" are two words that should never be used in the same context.

> She sells cars for a living; she's not an elite hacker, just a curious one.

Well obviously. I wasn't complaining about her abilities as a hacker though. I was commenting about how I preferred her site when I thought it was a deliberate ploy to go viral.

> Also, being a speaker of British English, she would never design her site 'ironically', because irony in British English precludes intention.

I'm British English too - and few people here know the correct term for "ironic" let alone use it accurately. We've truly adopted Americanised term there. However if you follow "The King's English", then the term simply refers to stating the contrary to what is meant. Since I was referring to her site looking like it was meant to be amaturish but in fact being deliberate, that could be argued as being "ironic". But regardless of it's usage, you're just arguing semantics and thus missing my point entirely.
This, plus the fact that android has so many display resolutions to support, it would be surprising if apple cared to cater to it.

My point was simply that even apple got it wrong on their own device and browser.
This is... impressive:

He betrayed the privacy of us all. If federal security agencies can’t do vast data sweeps, they will inevitably revert to the older, more intrusive eavesdropping methods.

Wow.
iOS is definitely playing catch up to the other OS's. Competition is good for everyone though :D
Agreed I have a strong distrust of Sony practices based off my experience friend's experiences with ps3 and my own with the sony vaio laptops. Unfortunately it's hard for me to forget the image of the NSA tapping into my xbox because of its association with Microsoft. I wonder if Sony would be as firm about tampering by gov't agencies as it has been to it's customers.
You're welcome. I'd be happy to read more on the same topic, if you stumble upon anything of interest.
This platform started in the 80's with NeXT (NextStep). I don't think they have to worry.

TDD is more often than not a waste of time.
Yandex Mail
Most companies don't collect nationality information, so there is no question in my mind that the program (if it collects more than metadata) has spied on Americans, in violation of the law.

If I sign up to Yahoo France, while in France, and give my French address, I assume the NSA (or Dutch AVID, in this case) would assume I'm French and could spy on me. But this may be incorrect, I could be an American... Yahoo never asked me nor verified my identity, let alone my nationality...

Even if they did, some people are dual nationals, and some people are nationals of the US and the US doesn't know about it (Children of Americans born and raised abroad, who have a foreign nationality as well, have no US birth certificate, never lived in the US, have no SSN, and have not yet asked for a passport). These unregistered people are Americans, too, the law says they cannot be spied on without a warrant...

The NSA would have to be able to prove that accounts do not belong to Americans (impossible, for many reasons).
Hi,
just nipticking: you wrote

> Google Chrome, the open source browser from Google.

Google Chrome is proprietary software. Chromium is open source.
Did you actually read the message from Buffet to convince people to buy jewelry?

--> http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/message.html

Fine jewelry, watches and giftware will almost certainly cost you less at Borsheim's. I've looked at the figures for all publicly-owned jewelry companies and the contrast with Borsheim's is startling. Our one-store operation, with its huge volume, enables us to operate with costs that are fully 15-20 percentage points below those incurred by our competitors. We pass the benefits of this low-cost structure along to our customers.
"you never hear anyone advocating for GM."

My perception is just the opposite: it seems like the advocacy is overwhelmingly in favor of GM.

EDIT: For example, here in America, we can't even get laws passed requiring the labelling of GMOs. I'm not talking about a ban; just a law that would allow people to know whether or not they are purchasing a "Roundup Ready" crop.
This paragraph is the ultimate in irony:

He betrayed the Constitution. The founders did not create
the United States so that some solitary 29-year-old could
make unilateral decisions about what should be exposed.

Founders weren't interested in the rights of the individual, protecting him from his own government? Frankly, I find that view deeply cynical, far more so than anything the author points to in 'dem youths.

I think that this author's viewpoint boils down to: Whisteblowing on the US government is fundamentally immoral. Young Americans are restive because they are at the core antisocial, being raised in a newly flawed society that fails to make clear that the status quo, the hulking paternalist nation-state, serves the common good.

Frankly, it reads like an old defense of Royalism.
IOS7 at a glance
I was following The Verge because my live stream cut out on my AppleTV. Sorry about my confusion...
He betrayed the cause of open government. [...] He betrayed the privacy of us all. [...] He betrayed the Constitution.

Really? It's like a parody of a bought opinion. Surely there must be better ways of discrediting him.
Last time I went in there I was impressed that they had now invested in a few tables around their counter area.
Russian, if I'm not wrong.
This is a mind-blowingly atrocious read.

It's an opinion of this unfortunate writer that poor Mr. Snowden is an outcast, a loser, someone who is a victim of this age of solitude. Why else would he throw everything away? David Brooks goes on to attack this leak, saying that it will further decay society, and lead to even more surveillance.

David Brooks: how stupid do you think we are?
The strain of wheat I was eating already has hereditary homogeneity that my digestive tract is already accustomed to and countless numbers of my peers including my parents were already exposed to in the first place.

What we have here is a massive overdose of "engineered", and that's the operative word here, homogeneity of a new strain which, besides being abandoned by this company for reasons they claim is a lack of market, could have unforeseen effects.

My original line was "Was it studied with the same scrutiny of the FDA?" As in people are fallible and new medicines, like new breeds of wheat, can have unexpected effects on the human body regardless of how emphatically the investigators of said products claim they are safe for human use. "New" anything takes time for such a claim. We haven't spent enough of it.
It's nice how they posted the website opening hours on the website. Really good stuff.
Works in Opera 12.15 too. Is there a hope for fix in it?
Russian, by looking at the Quick Start page: http://redis-v8.com/quick-start
I think you have a good point when it comes to metadata. But I'm not at all convinced that's all they're monitoring.

Snowden is quoted as saying:

>> “I, sitting at my desk, had the authority to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president if I had a personal e-mail,” he added.

http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2013/06/10/on-first-glance-...

The IRS reportedly thinks it has the authority to read the contents of emails, not just metadata:

http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-national-sec...

The NSA reportedly has fiber cable taps at AT&T:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/04/70619
"Flat" is simply an aesthetic style.

To me, it does not require any more or less skill to produce compared to other design trends (Web 2.0, Skeuomorphism, ect). Flat design not new and it is not a cop-out.
I'm inside and I find it straining to read the labels of the four dock apps. Of course I know what they are, but I always find low-contrast, Helvetica Superthin designer porn very insulting to the user. Either show something or don't.
Why can't the middle ground just be that we have spy agencies that obey the law, and the limitations as defined by the Constitution of the United States?

I don't think anybody is suggesting curtailing all intelligence gathering, but even if they just cut the program back to deal with extranational phone calls, you're now spying far less on your own citizens, and are indeed spying in a way less likely to generate as many false positives and that are more easy to justify an express reason for.

I'm not suggesting that's a valid fix, because I still wouldn't find that acceptable, but definitely it is preferable to what we have now.
I coped it from https://code.google.com/p/v8/...
It is about Russian civil servants, not Russian citizens. Citizens should be able to use whatever they want.

In this context, it makes sense.
Because hardware varies significantly. What's optimal on some systems is sub-par on others. Thus it takes a sysadmin to set up the server optimally.

Also, most web farms these days are built with multiple nodes that serve ~500 concurrent requests (even multiple VMs performs better than one instance of Linux on the same hardware running bare metal) and load distributed across each node. So a 500 concurrent default is entirely reasonable.

However all of the above is moot because she's running Apache on Debian - which does not default to 500 concurrent connections. That is a setting she's applied herself (or paid someone to set up).

And for the record, I'm all for amateurs rolling their own web servers - I'm certainly not elitist in that regard. But the fact remains that some of this stuff is rather technical, so complaining that it isn't easy is like saying cars should be self-servicing and that we shouldn't need garages and engineers.
Exactly what bad things happen when you put logic in the database? At my current employer, most business logic is in stored procedures.
Yes, it seems fairly clear now that Roundup Ready crops have lead to increases in pesticide use which is only going to worsen as weeds become increasingly resistant

http://www.enveurope.com/content/24/1/24/abstract

Herbicide-resistant crop technology has led to a 239 million kilogram (527 million pound) increase in herbicide use in the United States between 1996 and 2011, while Bt crops have reduced insecticide applications by 56 million kilograms (123 million pounds). Overall, pesticide use increased by an estimated 183 million kgs (404 million pounds), or about 7%.

Contrary to often-repeated claims that today’s genetically-engineered crops have, and are reducing pesticide use, the spread of glyphosate-resistant weeds in herbicide-resistant weed management systems has brought about substantial increases in the number and volume of herbicides applied. If new genetically engineered forms of corn and soybeans tolerant of 2,4-D are approved, the volume of 2,4-D sprayed could drive herbicide usage upward by another approximate 50%. The magnitude of increases in herbicide use on herbicide-resistant hectares has dwarfed the reduction in insecticide use on Bt crops over the past 16 years, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
But, as it has been proven time and time again - any EU country can(and has) disregard any EU law if that is what they want to do. EU can then try to punish them for doing that, but that never really worked.
Oh sure, people make up national secrets that will put their life at risk all the time.
That's a great question and was something I looked into for this but ultimately went without. Being able to charge money directly to a user's phone bill is known as "premium" messaging[1], but unfortunately, it doesn't seem like Twilio supports that yet[2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premium_SMS#Premium-rated_short...

[2] http://www.twilio.com/help/faq/sms/can-i-send-money-through-...
I'm sorry, but the app you seem to describe has existed for quite a while. Actually, there are several of them. I installed them on my first iPad (the original) way back when.

This is one of them:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/weather-live/id464770748?mt=...
So the argument is all handwavy bullshit?
When does establishing a good defense (for an ally no less) become an act of aggression? Certainly it's not a purely passive act, but it's also a far cry from aggression seen by both Russia and the US in the past.
I like this theory. Up until now I've been viewing the media reaction with skepticism because the interviews, denials and official statements seem to contradict each other. And much as I dislike conspiracy theories this particular theory seems too 'tidy' to be dismissed out-of-hand.

The fascinating thing, for me, is whether this catastrophic blow to our privacy will actually even register with most users of the services that are deemed to be 'tainted'.

And if they don't care, at least not enough to stop using those services, then we have accepted these intrusions as a necessary consequence of modern technology and modern life.
What iOS7 Could Have Been
Background Negotiation of a Venture Investment
Ah, very cool! I'll see if I can reach out to them. Thanks for the tip :)
I may sound paranoid and crazy but it smells horribly of gunpowder these months (excuse me if I am not contributing new information)
Ask HN: Question Regarding Recent Events
Hello Fellow HNers,

Would it be a stretch if the data, stored by the NSA, serves some other purpose? Like higher level statistical analysis? I know government wouldn't, but it seems most of our fear is based on potential for abuse. Could this undeniable potential be utilized for the good? Not "good" in the sense of fight terrorism... But good in the sense of extending our awareness? Who knows what could be gleaned from such a mountain of data?
I'm pretty sure you can't drag slides over in Powerpoint either. It's a tool for the presenter, the guy giving the talk, not for you, guy on the Internet. It's HTML 5, so it's easy to share with you or with the audience, but he is the user of the tool, not you.

/edit: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-nuts/X9z59NxSvtg/Sj0C...
>Any independent country would, when all of a sudden someone dumps the anti-ballistic treaty and then decides to build a defensive shield along your borders.

Look at this from Poland's side. Not building the defensive shield means that Russia has still the right to pressure the country with missiles. Russia wouldn't need to object the defense shield if they didn't want that. Pressuring your neighbors with weapons is still cold war tactics. In this case Russia was clearly the bad guy. Russia is also the bad guy when it manipulates the energy prices for Europe, but it seems that wasn't enough for them.
http://davmail.sourceforge.net/
The context you've mentioned is important. I'm not a fan of Rand's overall philosophy (sympathetic to parts of it, perhaps, but that's not terribly important), but surely one can appreciate this quote in the appropriate context, even if they reject the greater body of her work.
Opera stores mails in mbox-like format natively.
The author neglects to mention that "family, neighborhood, religious group, state, nation and world" have all but been destroyed in today's world, to the point where national identities barely exist in my generation. We are not weird, just the product of our times. We are more taxpayers and consumers than citizens, this is actually more prevalent in europe than the US at the moment. I don't know how strong the American national identity still is, but seeing how they literally need to spy on everyone to keep the congregation from breaking apart is pretty alarming.

Maybe the author should wonder how it came to be that people trust facebook, google and other corporations(!) more than they trust the government they elect and its institutions.
Well, this is a typical link bait, peppered with the eerie "cold war" overtones. Let me clear up a few things.

Firstly, the proposal is covering specifically military and state employees. No one is going to shut down Gmail or Facebook countrywide. This is ridiculous.

Secondly, it's not a ban, but a request to develop a set of instructions on handling in-house data for the employees.

Thirdly, the proposal calls for encryption of all sensitive data sent over the internet.

A little less sensational, is it? :)
Yeah, sounds like he thinks Snowden should have organised a coup d'etat. And that would NOT have been treasonous....
Hobbes made a case for that in Leviathan. It's certainly not a new idea.
You know there is a redis fork that uses LuaJIT right? https://github.com/neomantra/redis
why don't they ask the NSA how this happened?
I pay for private GitHub hosting.
My point is not that the U.S. "deals well" with military excesses. Like most other nations we have a hard time coming to grips at the time of an atrocity with the blood on our hands. We do usually come around though, such as My Lai which is now considered a massacre even by the U.S. Army, which now uses My Lai (among other notable crises) as a case study in their officer training curriculum at West Point. The massacre is taught as a "massacre" in our history books, and our guilt is not shirked or avoided.

On the other hand you'll even today see people claim that the German Heer (Army) wasn't so bad during WWII, that they were simply a professional army that wasn't involved in atrocities like the actual villains such as the Nazis, the Waffen SS, and the Gestapo. It's not actually true; senior German Army officers were just as involved in atrocities as the rest, even if they didn't participate in the worst extremes. I won't say that the current German Army training curriculum and senior leadership don't look at that aspect of their own history (in fact I'm sure they do), but if more armies had been like America's over the past 100 years world history would have been very different.

My point instead related to the comment about Anwar al-Awlaki. He was playing a military game and was treated as such, nothing more or less. If he didn't want to be treated by military rules then he shouldn't have joined a quasi-military organization that ended up at war with the U.S. But once it became a martial conflict different rules apply, including the Law of Armed Conflict and the Geneva Conventions.
Well, politics. And public approval. Nothing new really.
Linux discovering Plan 9 ideas, only 20 years later.
Official PlayStation Used Game Instructional Video
My theory is that NSA's ability to crack the Bitcoin hashes might be better than we thought.
Not especially.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_Investigatory_Pow...
As a non-US citizen or resident this is a great concern to me (and I feel it should be to you too).

The NSA is not allowed to spy on Americans.

ASIO is not allowed to spy on Australians.

But what if the NSA gave the PRISM tech and data feed to ASIO so ASIO could spy on Americans and answer any question the NSA asks (and vice versa).

Now neither intelligence service has an 'illegal wiretap' on their own citizens. They just receive 'foreign intelligence' from each other.

Now mix in every other 'friendly' state and there's a massive worldwide mesh of data gathering that's all legal .. in the strictest sense of the word.

(I feel like I should put my tinfoil hat on .. but since this has broken I'm fairly sure they're futile)
When the only thing that prevented war for 50 years was the concept of mutually assured destruction....
I read that book when it came out. The title is sensationalist garbage -- the book shows how some people get snared by some fairly stupid federal laws and have their lives messed up by willfully malicious prosecution, which isn't good, of course, but nowhere does the author demonstrate how an average person commits three felonies in a YEAR, or in a LIFETIME, let alone in a day.
> He betrayed the privacy of us all. If federal security agencies can’t do vast data sweeps, they will inevitably revert to the older, more intrusive eavesdropping methods.

The problem with this argument is that it assumes these methods are used to the exclusion of other eavesdropping methods. In fact, they are used as a precursor to them - and increase the total amount of invasive eavesdropping that goes on.
If you live a life unshaped by the mediating institutions of civil society, perhaps it makes sense to see the world a certain way: Life is not embedded in a series of gently gradated authoritative structures: family, neighborhood, religious group, state, nation and world.

It's pretty presumptuous to take humans' current social structure and say it's the best possible structure. The concept of hierarchy itself is directly opposed to equality and fairness, and it's perfectly reasonable to believe that equality and fairness are more important.

I personally hold just one level of hierarchy: humanity. We're all so similar in the grand scheme of things, we might as well be family and fight the universe instead of each other.

Also, he used two colons in the same sentence. Gutsy.
2) Faster than LUA-JIT? Since when?