skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The slides claim NSA has access to company servers. It does not claim they have free access to whatever they want. A system of "dropboxes" coupled with a system to get specific sets of data onto them - whether reviewed by humans or not - could fit with that.

That would not contradict the Guardian reporting, or even what the NSA's slides claim.

The rest of what you state also does not contradict Guardians reporting: They make specific claims about specific subsets of these companies data.

You keep arguing about an expansive interpretation of the reporting even when faced with much more restricted alternative interpretations.

When comes to relying on press releases with denials, I'm clearly more cynical than you - I assign them pretty much zero value as evidence. I'd expect these companies to issue denials whether the claims are true or not, so I don't see the press releases as containing any useful information to draw inferences from.
It was all for naught though, if I interpret this passage correctly:

"Then-NSA Director Michael V. Hayden was not among them. According to the inspector general’s classified report, Cheney’s lawyer, Addington, placed a phone call and “General Hayden had to decide whether NSA would execute the Authorization without the Attorney General’s signature.” He decided to go along.

The following morning, when Mueller told Bush that he and Comey intended to resign, the president reversed himself.

Three months later, on July 15, the secret surveillance court allowed the NSA to resume bulk collection under the court’s own authority. The opinion, which remains highly classified, was based on a provision of electronic surveillance law, known as “pen register, trap and trace,” that was written to allow law enforcement officers to obtain the phone numbers of incoming and outgoing calls from a single telephone line."
Most of those facts weren't from my questions :-D I asked a few, but there were lots of others asking questions too, so I did a lot of listening.
See, even if it's perfectly legal.. if the wast majority of the population is against it, there likely is a problem with the law, not the majority of the population. At least that's the theory of democracy the last time I checked.
For me, the worst thing about django is it's source code. Every time I have to dig into some problem, I see really long functions with multiple abstraction levels mixed, a lot of strange names and other code that is really hard to read (ok, it's still python, so you still can read everything after a bit of tryings).
How not to handle a critical security vulnerability (zamfoo cpanel plugin)
Didn't I read South was being rewritten to be included in a future Django?

Also, how about defaulting to bootstrap for the homely-looking admin app?
"The other mile-high club"? Together with the brokeback mountain cover, this is pretty pathetic.
Being a good lawyer and a defensor of good principles does not imply living a good life. At all.

Also, do not think they understood slavery exactly as you do. As a matter of fact, what they wrote probably paves the way to where we are today.
Can you back up your impression that there are stupendous efficiency issues with numbers?

I would have thought that the cost of hauling food and water up 60 floors was self-evident? While I could go invest time finding numbers, to be honest I find it a bit rich that you ask me to provide sources while making equally unreferenced, sweeping and IMHO dicier claims in response.

For example, claiming the carbon footprint of city dwellers is low might be possible if it doesn't consider the cost of hauling the products they routinely use and throw away at rates far higher than other people on the planet... but that doesn't make it a realistic or truthful stance on the matter.

I am not surprised that NYC is low on obvious evils when considering this form of skin-deep environmental statistic, because it produces very little of... well, anything. As the center of finance, NY derives a great amount of wealth from achieving effectively zero of utility to the rest of the world.

For something more concrete, let's try measuring garbage. (I'm not going to get in to the interesting question of Wall St.'s facilitatory role in greater evils.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_issues_in_New_Yo... In September 2012, Travel+Leisure named New York City the #1 "America's Dirtiest City," from the results of a readership survey rating 35 "Favorite Cities" in the United States. It continues: In 2006 Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed legislation establishing a new solid waste management plan, which will use barges and trains to export 90% of the city’s 12,000 daily tons of residential trash. I can tell you that country people don't generate that much trash, and they can often dispose of it in a decentralized fashion (eg. via compost). Even Mexico City only produces 10,000 tons per day (random stat online), and its population is far higher and they probably actually make some tangible goods. But I'm not going to go build a well-referenced numerology of truth here. I hope you might be motivated to research further yourself.

The bottom line is that nature loves decentralization, and 'taxes' centralization. Cities are unnatural conglomerations that abhor nature. While we can sustain them, it's not the smartest thing to do in a finite world. Society is just beginning to learn from and invest in this with concessions to green architecture, urban design, public transportation, public communications infrastructure projects (Australia, China, France, New Zealand...), decentralized energy generation, etc.
Astronomers create 3-D map of known universe
Do you have some numbers? All the ones I know point to rural populations having significantly larger pollution footprints than urban populations, despite those advantages.
Everyone's asking what changed him? What changed his mind? But I think the simplest answer is that he hasn't changed very much. Obama is and always has been a gifted political opportunist. In 2007 he found it politically expedient to oppose Bush's surveillance programs. In 2013 he finds it politically expedient to oversee programs that are orders of magnitude broader and more intrusive.

The man does not have principles. He never had them.
You're overcommitted to the hypothesis that Google is completely uninvolved based on their own denials which carry close to zero informational value.
This seems to be the peer-reviewed journal article: http://diabetes.diabetesjournals.org/content/62/5/1665.abstr...

From reading the abstract, it seems that inhibiting the mentioned pathway prevents islet cell transplant rejection. Arguing that the same mechanism is "the root cause of type I diabetes" sound like sensationalist speculation.
I hope we see a lot more of this soon. It's disappointing to see so many hackers using proprietary OSes/editors/etc. to build systems based on free software.
Download Latest Free Virtual Machine For Cross IE Browser Test
A sub-select is not a recursive CTE; think more along the lines of "find me all children of this Hacker News post #" where the scheme is simply "id | parent-id | poster | text": to do this requires recursion. I could totally be misunderstanding the reason you bring them up, however.
> but we also want people to be able to run smallish installations for themselves or their friends and family as well

So, what's the problem in running PostgreSQL or MySQL in small installations? They really need small amount of space and memory to be installed and operated.
I disagree. What about the direct access issue that has so pervasively affected our discourse?
Stereotypes exist for a reason, they are convenient (and sometimes, highly accurate) generalizations. You are a prime example of another type of stereotype.

In my experience (and I am somewhat older than you claim to be) people who declare themselves insightful, aren't. People who declare themselves intellectuals are usually full of it ("most in my generation are shallow and passive").

You may think you're bright but for now, you are just another type of stereotypical teenager with very limited life experience pretending to know things you simply do not comprehend.
There was a problem with the server. It should work now.
That's what I thought when I was 15. It's probably what most academically gifted 15 year olds think.

Go back and read some of your stuff in another 5 years, and then another 5. And tally the face palms. It's a good exercise in humility, something that is often hard to appreciate as a 15 year old
It doesn't seem to notice punctuation errors, either.
Modeling Data Relationships in MongoDB
https://github.com/twoscoops/django-admin2/
Agreed. With just a bit of tweaking I have my x220 using around 8 watts with average use, getting 10+ hours. Windows only gets around 8 hours on the same system.

This looks like a post from years ago. I'm suspicious that this guy is just a windows apologist looking to spread FUD.
whereas the first is the norm

You mustn't have used linux in quite some time. It is not 'the norm' for things to have no linux drivers these days, unless you're using bleeding edge hardware. Yes, you'll run into more driver issues if you're using a philosophically-restricted version of linux like Debian, but for the most part, stuff just works these days.

especially for any multimedia etc work

Tell me, how well does OSX do with the latest nvidia and AMD graphics cards? Linux does a decent job of them, though the bleeding edge ones usually suck (especially on AMD, though there are proprietary drivers). If they're not latest-gen, then they definitely work fine. Linux supports a much wider variety of 'multimedia' gizmos than OSX does.

I mean, nvidia offers drivers for Solaris for download and yet not any for OSX.

Or were you just picking and choosing to make OSX sound better? If we're talking about stuff people like to use, then GPUs are far more popular than ADC cards (of which there's plenty of linux support anyway).
I agree with what the article says about outsourcing things that aren't core to the business. I was responding to and disagreeing with another point the article tries to make about the use of employee time (which prioritizes the short-term over the long-term).
> So basically the probiotics had nothing to do with it, and it was actually the dairy product? Or something else entirely? Lactic acid? Who knows.

Lactic acid as in "lactic acid that builds up in muscles and makes one's legs hurt when running fast for a long period of time"
Direct PDF link: http://www.mindcontrol101.com/pdfs/How_Cults_Seduce.pdf

(Please leave scribd as an option, not as the source).
Algorithms from the “Book”
What kind of tweaking you suggest?
How to optimize your posting strategy in several social networks
"Disciplined Minds" discusses how to apply anti-cult techniques to your workplace's brainwashing. (http://disciplinedminds.com)
A phone call can be compressed to 10 kbits/sec or less given a good speech codec and still be understandable, if not of very good quality. That means that if you are on the phone 20 minutes every day, it will be around a half a GB per year.

If every American is on phone that much, it will be bit less than 143 petabytes a year, or about 36000 4GB hardisks. That is a bit, but the datacenter in Utah presumably have a capacity of a yottabyte, or nearly seven order of magnitude more than what is needed to record all phonecalls for a given year. They would have capacity to store all phone calls for nearly a million years if the yottabyte figure is right.
Great idea, but why another new language? Why not just pick a subset of C#? (or Java, or D, but subjectively speaking, C# is the most "friendly" language from that list)
> "It doesn't matter if they were us citizens or not."

Yyyyes and no. It depends on what you're discussing, and in what context. Medical experiments like Tuskegee and MK Ultra, I agree with you entirely.

Wiretapping, it's a little different. I mean, non-Americans who're being spied on the by US government should be offended, maybe, but not quite the same level of outrage.

It seems reasonable to demand that your own country follow its own law. If/when they break that law, there's an extra type of outrage that's appropriate. And American elected representatives purport to be agents of the citizens of the US (and they do not purport to be agents of humanity at large.. well, not as literally, anyway). If/when they act against the interests of the US citizenry, there's an extra type of outrage that's appropriate.

Further, the harm that the NSA can do to a random citizen of, say, Germany, by spying on them, is modest. The harm that can be done to Americans, by being spied upon by hypothetical corrupt agents of their own government, is much steeper, I think.
Promo page for the new technology (called "Ultrarope"): http://download.kone.com/ultrarope/index.htm
The author mentions installing Ghostery, which appears to be nonfree.
I don't think it's realistic to lump all rural populations together. For example, the unabomber's woodsman hut style existence probably had effectively zero pollution footprint. Whereas, the also American example of a large scale industrial farmer with a four bedroom house, two cars and a family, large scale farming equipment, and expectations of 24x7x365 electricity, water, sewerage, cell phone signals, non-local products and in-school education for his children is going to be worse than an urbanite.

If you are ever lucky enough to get the chance visit some more traditional cultures, you can see for yourself just how slight an impact they make on their environment, with houses, food, and clothes alike built from nature. It's amazing.
The chain of command relies on trust, trust that officials will tell the truth to those who oversee them. It seems to me that the chain of command is broken.

NSA officials lied to the public.

They lied to Congress.

If the allegations of procedural abuse are true, they have lied to and deceived every single mechanism that has been set up to oversee and control their operation.

They have gone rogue.

If this supposition is true, their actions go beyond simple criminality. This is treachery; treason and mutiny against the people of the United States.

Let us raise the hue and cry! Traitors! Traitors in our midst!
Or lactic acid, as in what is found in dairy products. Though that would make saying dairy product and lactic acid sort of redundant (outside of being more specific). Same lactic acid though in either case, just how it manifests itself in the body.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactic_acid
I went back recently and read some of the stuff that I wrote when I was 19 or 20. I came to the sad conclusion that I am getting thicker and more ignorant with age.
The NSA directly spies on Americans in every way they possibly can. They're not supposed to, is the actual situation.
It was actually me that suggested to the TextMate guy to do the fuzzy lookup in this way: matching significant characters in side the search term.

AFAIK Sublime, Ctrl-P and friends all followed and improved from TextMate's version.

It was originally a feature in LaunchBar which was on NextStep and was ported to OS X [1] QuickSilver and Spotlight were also influenced by LaunchBar.

[1] http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/legacy.html
Speaking of ECHELON, I saw a recent map of US intelligence assets around the world (Can't find it now, but will keep trying) which had a few sites in Australia, but was glaringly missing Pine Gap. [1]

Apparently the current foreign minister Bob Carr, when recently asked about this "...did not respond directly to a question about whether the Pine Gap facility is being used as part of the PRISM program."[2]

Considering that one of the primary concerns of Pine Gap is monitoring "transmissions intended for communications satellites; and microwave emissions, such as long-distance telephone calls." I'd find it hard to believe it isn't a fairly major part of the PRISM system for the southern hemisphere.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Gap
[2]: http://www.zdnet.com/au/australian-government-to-assess-pris...
Up 60 floors perhaps, but getting it there required only bringing it a few miles from the nearest depot (having been brought there en-masse) rather than a giant star (or worse) network, replicating the same effort 1000 times to transport said food and commodities and to provide infrastructure to every one of the many parties in the decentralised model you propose as more efficient. :/
Hey now, be fair. "Look out for Number One" is a principle!
Running Linux on my eee gives me longer battery life than Windows. Yay, anecdotes!
Interesting, it seems to have a way to go to match the quality of feedback that http://www.afterthedeadline.com/ gives though.
> I'm pre-pledging $200.00 towards fixing the problem

Nice idea, but wouldn't he have to find about one hundred other pledgers to make this financially viable?
Obviously I'm not a marketing guru... because 'logic' said, very few are going to see it and even if it does get some airplay who's going to really look and soak up some propagandising goodness, i.e. will any sales be gained from it - mostly likely no, so 'what's the point?'.

So, yeah, I won't be making any grand announcements like that again, I'll leave it to the shiny people with impossibly white teeth and raging coke habits.
On the other hand, the data is presented in a pretty objective manner, including the size of the sample ("small study"), and the connections to industry are correctly highlighted. Definitely not a conclusive study, but interesting nonetheless.
Unless there is a guarantee where the network traffic is going through, this is worthless even with encryption.

Secret service agencies have the ability to pose as whatever they want, even using "legit" certificates.
> where we let the Occupy protesters linger in front of federal buildings until they were nothing but de facto homeless encampments

https://www.google.com/search?q=occupy+protests+violence+usa...
I'd say it's more like 'ci' (sounds closer to 'ty') in Italian 'ciao' and less like 'ch' in 'change'.
Mmap and the Rust Foreign Function Interface
Not true. It's a proper noun, like "McDonald's". It just happens to also sound like a descriptive phrase. You'll find that, inside the agency, it is just "NSA" and not "the NSA". This is true for most "three letter agencies".

Don't believe it? See what the agency calls itself on its website: http://www.nsa.gov/
Migrate from FeedBurner
I tried it on some decent-looking HN comments. I'm impressed that every "problem" it has found has been plausible, but disappointed that all of them have been wrong. This thing has one hell of a false positive rate.
Meh - your comment history is relatively sophomoric.
I also don't get the issue, being Portuguese and lived all my life in countries with national ID cards across Europe.
If I had to guess, this could be related to our internal feedback loops mechanisms. Many emotions create peculiar sensations in our guts - that is an experience we all have - and those sensations are nothing else than signals to the brain.

It isn't a stretch of the imagination to think that the status of our guts could amplify or dampen the sensations, and thus the feedback to our brain of our emotions, especially the feedback to our conscious mind: If I remember correctly from my studies in psychology, we actually feel our own emotions mostly as physical reactions.
I used the word "Premise," which is apparently British, and therefore wrong.

Avoid using British English. (replace with *Premize*)

Premize?
Which is why they are keeping the interpretation secret.
If you want to give more weight to matches of consecutive characters, or do other fancy things, a sequence alignment algorithm could be useful:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith-Waterman_algorithm
Incompleteness in the natural world
Wow, that's a hell of a false positive. "Premize" isn't even in the dictionary. It must be a general pattern-matching rule for things like realise vs realize.
That quote IS Greenwald walking it back, while saying he's not walking it back.

Greenwald is saying, in effect, "Well, I'm not saying the NSA does or doesn't have direct access; I'm just telling you that I saw a powerpoint slide that says that." Uh huh.

Basically I'm agreeing with tptacek's downthread point: the slide deck claims "direct access", but other than that slide deck, there has been no evidence to support this, and some evidence against it.

As I've said before, I think we should assume that slide deck is a little hyperbolic. This is a deck that claims you can real-time monitor all communications in the world for only $20M. I'm not saying it contains no truth; I'm saying it's a _slide_ _deck_.

Also, btw, the Greenwald article you quote is not his finest. From what I've read in the last two weeks, I respect his agenda, and I respect his efforts to air this story, but some of his self-analysis is seriously lacking. If you're interested in my extensive dissection of that article, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5884619
Testing the mass-energy relationship
I bought Samsung's 900X and installed FreeBSD on it. I could tweak it and get 4+ hours of play on it. But it involved tweaking with the config params a lot and worrying what I'm about to run, will it have enough power, what settings to turn on, what to disable.

So yes, I'd like to have a good laptop, with a long battery life that supports open source/free software OSs but I'd also like some convenience too.
> We live in an age where flatter, more consistent UI designs are a necessity.

Flat vs "3D" user interface elements are just a cycle of fashion.
AutoRun security flaws. Reloaded
What else is left? Maybe there is a network of civilian spies, and half the americans are on it? A Flu virus that turns you to an informant?

I 'm not sure i like this tv-series-style unraveling. If it was something the planet depended on they wouldn't tease us with it for Guardian's page views, right? Anyway, i have no idea what is coming, truly
The NSA ate my question mark :]

Thanks for clarification, I am now surfing Wikipedia on a sunny Sunday morning.
.. or you use a real database engine that support schema changes in background transactions, like postgres.

Also, it is good to remember that not all production databases will grow large. Many stay small with a limited number of rows, but will still need to be updated as the product is updated.
Parsing the difference between the Internet and the Web according to Alan Kay
The legalese in the "Important information – read this before flashing alternative firmware" section on http://developer.sonymobile.com/services/open-smartwatch-pro... seems to me to try to discourage people from modding the firmware.

Feels totally half-assed to me, after reading this. Either I want people to hack & play and support them with it or I don't. How can you damage the hardware of this simple device with a hacked Android? What do these lawyers think?
That someone hacks a version of Android that makes the SmartWatch go up in smoke and every kid that has bought one and got a scratch on their glass will load that up so they can claim warranty on their device? Seriously?
The complacence of the proles in 1984 was carefully engineered - they were fed mindless entertainments (songs, novels, porn) and ruthlessly culled of anyone who appeared to show political awareness.
If he waits too long, nothing will come.
Just to pick a nit, I assume by "Chief Architect" you mean Yonatan Zunger. He's the chief architect of Google Plus, not of Google at large. While I do value his public statements, he doesn't really have responsibility for the great majority of the systems where we-the-public care about surveillance.

Your point, though, absolutely stands.
have you already looked at http://processing.org/ ?
although i don't like java i think it's quite cool, because:

- good documentation

- many small examples you can start from

- all built in (video/sound/grafik)

- you can extend it by using java