skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I liked this, and it brings up an important point: details matter.

I'd be careful, though. After TIA was destroyed a few years back, all of these ideas just got new codenames and continued on. My point being that NSA runs a huge bucket of programs that all get stuff from all over. Yes, for Google or FB, we can speculate that maybe there's a ticket system. Likely, even.

But that's missing the point. As Snowden himself said, he could get anything he wanted to know about people simply by placing the right intercepts. Want to see what they type? Go for the telco records. Want to get all their personal details? Fetch that from the credit bureaus. Sometimes you might have to send a real, live person to attach a physical monitoring device. The pathways here are myriad.

This isn't some single system that somehow is massively accessing every scrap of data. It looks like an asynchronous system that interacts with a platoon of other systems, already developed, to provide a total view of anybody you'd like. In some cases, auto-generated FISA requrests or NSLs are probably created. In some others, not.

There's a danger here for we libertarians to go around like their head is on fire. That's the way it's always been. But I'd be careful with oversimplifying the actual nature of the discussion also.

Secrecy really sucks, because all we end up doing is speculating about what might be created and what might be happening. Meh.
New Kickstarter campaign a bit below the belt
As exemplified in the movie when they take shelter in the building with all the sharp and pointy things...
The usual culprits are scaling and versioning / config mgmt; however, anything can be misused (and there's no one size fits all). I've seen it done well once. Once.
In Soviet Russia, your mail reads the KGB.
We saw this already with Skype.
FSB: we are not able to eavesdrop Skype calls and Skype is controlled by US, so it must be banned.
And some time later: we reached an agreement with Microsoft, Skype is OK.
Many people have software that isn't totally licensed.
But could they get through the coding interviews?
Two men have guns. One buys a bulletproof vest. Now he can bully the other one.

So, more defenses can lead to more conflict. Also, more offensive weapons can lead to less conflict:

One man has a gun. The other one buys a gun. Now there's peace.

So many people don't get game theory...
You're probably guilty of having violated the Lacey Act (16 USC §3370-3378) at some point in your life.

It is unlawful for any person to import, export, transport, sell, receive, acquire,
possess, or purchase any fish, wildlife, or plant taken, possessed, transported, or
sold in violation of any Federal, State, foreign, or Indian tribal law, treaty, or
regulation.

What's interesting is that, under the Lacey Act, if possession of a given substance is illegal anywhere (even in another country whose laws we do not respect), then you are guilty of it. For example, if you've ever held a piece of ivory, and ivory harvesting is illegal in Madagascar, then you have violated the Lacey Act. If you've ever eaten a small lobster that was perfectly legal where you ate it, but would have violated fishing code in Maine for being too small, you've violated the Lacey Act.
That's one more time than me :)
How to create Database Table using Hibernate
Linux is mostly about re-implementing old stuff, sadly I am yet to see many new ideas being explored, besides what commercial UNIXes and Mainframes offer.
Many USG agencies (Pentagon, NSA, Department of Energy/Justice/Labour/Education, et al) have their own police services[1].

Their training and expertise ranges from glorified security guards to para-military.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_law_enforcement_in_the_...
You can purchase firearms for cash from many dealers (at gun shows) without either a background check or a paper trail.
> But a lot of these limits could default to automatically adjust.

No. I do not want my server hardware attempting to guess optimal performance. I'd rather do that myself and know that it's set up correctly.

You wouldn't buy a sports car then moan that it's a manual gear box and lacks cruise control. Just as you wouldn't run an automated tool to master a studio recording before sending the master off for CD pressing. If people want guesswork then don't install professional tools (sane defaults are another issue though - I just object to pro-tools applying guesswork).

> And reasonable queuing behaviour for sites have been possible for well over a decade.

Apache does queue TCP/IP connection requests. "Sorry pages" should be configured on the load balancer rather than HTTP daemon as the whole point of them is to offload the work from the saturated nodes.

> There are certainly plenty of things that truly does require a lot of technical skill to sort out, but a lot of software have poor defaults and lacks relatively straightforward features that would make the out of the box experience tremendously much better for less technical users.

A lot of software does have crap defaults, like how Apache publishes it's version number and the underlying OS by default (the ServerTokens directive). However the examples given (concurrent connections and sorry pages) are not wrong (her concurrent connections is set to a non-default value and sorry pages don't belong on the HTTP daemon because they're supposed to bypass the load)
That GM wheat is someones intellectual property and there's extensive case law of farmers having their lives destroyed by being declared the equivalent of "software pirates". Its almost an exact analogy right down to small businesses being shaken down for protection money. This is not theoretical or sci fi but established case law and precedent.

Right now there could be an Ag website with a bunch of wheat farmers trying to figure out why anyone cares about a bunch of SCO source code discovered to be contaminating the linux kernel source.

The nightmare scenario isn't even one farmer having his life and livelihood destroyed, but everyone nearby especially downwind is probably shaking in their boots, or should be.

Also using plague language, we have discovered the first patient, but we have not isolated patient zero yet. This may (or may not) be a much bigger contamination.
My phone runs CP/M and already has all these features.
Show HN: a better news aggregator
The title of the mainframe page is "Fabricland fabric shops throughout South of England and mail order service". So, that's good and informative.
Nice deck, BUT this is Hacker News, so here's the customary negative feedback:

- the "what's the plan" slide is bad: it doesn't convey the original sense that other providers will join soon or have already joined. the tagline makes it look like it's a future plan, when it's actually describing the past.

- that "$20m" slide makes it look like it's a lot of money. The original clearly wanted to contextualise it and make it look cheap. ("just 20m for all these providers!")

- seriously? I got more data-per-square-inch from the original presentation.

- thin fonts are overdone and hard to read.

- VCs don't care about presentations anymore, I got in YC20xx by <clever social engineering episode>.
"...and jumped to conclusions"

You seem to know all about that.
Survata is hiring a full stack engineer
-- Overview --
Survata is democratizing the multi-billion dollar market research industry by making it easy and affordable for anyone to survey a target population (e.g., to ask 100 women in Oregon about grocery shopping habits). We gather responses through a unique means – the surveywall, in which respondents answer surveys on publisher sites across the web in exchange for premium content. We are a small, well-funded team based in the beautiful Bay Area. Our founders have been friends since childhood (almost 25 years) and aim to operate the team as a group of friends tackling fun challenges.

-- Position: full stack engineer --
We are seeking a full stack software engineer to lead the development of our surveywall interview system. On the client side, you will build a top tier third party JavaScript library that provides pan-browser and pan-device support for dozens of publisher websites while guaranteeing minimal performance impact and a quality user experience, even in the face of downtime or heavy load on the Survata servers. On the server side, you will tackle the interesting conceptual challenge of determining when a respondent is answering honestly. And you will help build a classifier to categorize answers as honest or not.

Required skills:
* JavaScript;
* Python;
* SQL;
* Unix script

Desired skills:
* client-side MVC framework;
* third party JavaScript widgets;
* web performance optimization;
* Amazon Web Services;
* machine learning (namely supervised classifiers)

-- How to apply --
Survata offers competitive salary, equity, health care, and other benefits. Most importantly, we offer challenging problems, independence, and the opportunity to learn and grow. We are looking for friendly, talented individuals to join the team. Send a resume, LinkedIn/Github profile, and/or a link to an interesting web app that you've built to jobs@survata.com.
"Extraordinary claims etc... etc... "

Yes, indeed, but I'd submit at this point that the idea that existing GM food is dangerous after being consumed by so many people for so long is itself the extraordinary claim. If it's so dangerous, we shouldn't be arguing about it, it should be here. Because we're already consuming it in quantities far, far greater than any possible scientific study could ever bring to bear, and while that does not prove it's absolutely, utterly harmless, it does put a cap on how dangerous it can be.

Arguments implicitly based on the idea that we haven't done it yet and we need to be careful about what we may do in the future are uselessly disconnected from the real world.

It may also be true that it was insufficiently tested before release (I don't know, really), but that does not change the fact that it's out there now, and people are not keeling over dead, and there doesn't seem to be an appreciable signal coming from the GMness of the food in general. Or you'd be pointing to it, instead of theorizing.
Couldn't this be handled with some conditional primitives like in ARM assembly adequately?

Actually that's not a bad idea ... writes it down...
Having been in many DoD related PowerPoints, this is par for the course. Bravo though, made me laugh.
Forking and Standards: Why The Right to Fork Can Be Pro-Social
Well, at least they got and only got the target. Drone strikes seem to regularly take out many innocents. Or are no A-Rabs innocent?
How we broke the NSA story
Since when does every use of a database involve handling datasets in a way that needs experience and "algorithms". A key value store can be used as... a key value store if need be. It doesn't need to be crazy science.
It's not about "attractive" slides, it's about slides that are to the point and don't obfuscate information (unintentionally).

Being an analyst and being able to understand the processing of data into visual display is not an orthogonal skill set. Often, PowerPoint slides are ugly and worthless because whoever designed them thought "Oh shit, I don't understand how to best convey this...time for some clip art" and/or "Faster slide animations!"

Obligatory link to Tufte's criticism of NASA and Powerpoint: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...
Another lackluster action by Anonymous. Let me know when they post something interesting; I have a feeling I'll be waiting a while.
Don't forget the forced repetition to drive the point home
He betrayed...He betrayed...He betrayed...He betrayed...He betrayed...He betrayed...He betrayed...
Wasn't the KGB dissolved in 1991?
Java's problem is that Jidigava idigis gididibidigeridigish
Every one of the millions of random mutations in a new generation of anything makes it "new". The only difference is that GM wheat has a targeted mutation, rather than a random one.
I'm russian. I've left Russia for good because of weather and politics. Now I'm laughing out loud.

All jokes aside it's interesting to observe politics and technology interplay. But I'm not too excited I have to take part in some of the events.
No, because it's entirely non deterministic and mostly an evolved shit-crock rather than an engineering tool.
The founders of America did no such thing. You should go read the Constitution yourself to verify, but I only know of the state of insurrection/rebellion or domestic attack as being mentioned explicitly by the Framers, and that was only in the context of suspension of habeus corpus.

If you look at the link you posted you'll see that the verbiage about "national emergency" was designed and implemented by Congress as law, not as part of the Constitution itself.
You could still have people go to voting booths. Let the booth generate a random address per user. Keep generated addresses in booths to enable paper trail of votes to the booth.
Nice slides, but I couldn't but laugh at the idea that the next time there's a leak at the NSA it would turn out to be the guy who was in charge of making the slides.
No, the amount of designed layouts is zero. The amount of hacked-together presentations is over 9000.

In fact, I don't understand why Powerpoint-Design-As-A-Service isn't a thing yet.
Once you start scripting your K/V store, its not a simple K/V store anymore.

I am not against databases with scripting capabilities and I do not think javascript/front end developers are per se naive, but I've far to often seen the naive assumption that just because its javascript, everyone can handle it.
Same here. I never used the mail part of M2 (other than for testing purposes), but I used love its RSS feed reader and IRC client. I want a browser with a deeply integrated feed reader which makes subscribing to and following content easy. I don't want to have to remember to launch a new website or an app to read the news I want to read.
Not really. Make sure it is an official assurance by the US government. Make sure that the press gets copies. Then return to the US. I don't think they can prosecute after giving official assurance not to in exchange for his return. Maybe even demand that they make the offer in a press conference by the Attorney General. My understanding is that such might actually be thrown out of court.
I am voluntarist who doesn't believe in convincing people, but believes in economics. If there are tools that benefit most of the people and keep risks low, people will use them. Crypto is one of such things. Politics and revolutions are not.
Yes - it was superseded by FSB: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Security_Service_(Russi...
Reddit in-jokes will get you downvoted here, just a heads up.
Understanding The Power Of Network Marketing
I think if people were willing to be violent within their in-group merely because of hunger, all of human history would have gone differently.

I am not sure Maslow is saying what you think he is saying, since after all he grew up in Brooklyn. :-)

I would suggest reading Meditations on Violence, which is a beautifully flawed book, including a great section outlining a theory of violence, and what precipitates different types of violent behavior.

http://www.amazon.com/Meditations-Violence-Comparison-Martia...
They are probabbly targeting Aedes aegypt. It's original location in Africa, so if they can eradicate it from Brazil they will restore the natural balance.
PRISM the bad son of the Patriot Act
PRISM is a tool born from the Patriot Act sign after the September 11 2001 attack.
This tool survey and register all electronic communication arround the world from mobile
phone to the WWW.
Same. It's funny because after looking at the original slides, I immediately thought... "yeah these are legit"
That's not because of genetic modification, that's because of commercial farming practices, which really aren't related. We've done a fine job of homogenizing bananas without any genetic twiddling, for instance.

I agree with you that it's a concern, though I'm more concerned by the fact entire crops and indeed potentially entire foods can be wiped out by one pathogen more than worrying about genetic diversity abstractly.
"You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it."

-- Scott McNealy: Eric Schmidt's old boss.
Initial Impressions of iOS 7
Surely, by discovering Monsanto wheat in the wild, their argument here weakens. Their original argument was that, since their wheat cannot reproduce, it must have been planted by the farmer. And, since the farmer was spraying it with RoundUp, which only Monsanto wheat is resistant to, it's probable that the farmer knew that he was infringing on Monsanto's IP (let's leave the discussion about how ridiculous patenting wheat is for another time).

If a mutant Monsanto strain is discovered that can reproduce, everyone can claim they might unknowingly be using that, and Monsanto won't have a case.
Experimenting with user interfaces for todo lists
"They're pretty tough, but jail sentences are less common "

-- huh? --
"No. I do not want my server hardware attempting to guess optimal performance. I'd rather do that myself and know that it's set up correctly."

Parent said "default to automatically adjust" - and I see no reason it shouldn't. You could still manually tweak all you want.
The layers are relevant if one of those layers checks that the request is valid and legal. Assuming it's true that email address in, [access check layer], data out, then we have nothing to worry about.
1. A few weeks ago, President Obama said he would discuss the issue of cyber-espionage during his meeting with the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping.

2. At about the time of their meeting, two separate stories of massive US Govt surveillance of its own citizens hits the press.

3. The individual who leaked the PRISM story is now allegedly in Hong Kong, his whereabouts unknown.

Encrypt that.
Horrible news. You know, M$ argues wrongly that the GPL is viral, but with GMO we have much more like viral, actually reproduces itself without anyone choosing to allow it — and it is PROPRIETARY.

GMO as a technology is not the problem. The problem is that it is PROPRIETARY life. That is insane. And like proprietary software, it isn't inherently malicious, but it MIGHT be!

We need to stop all GMO patenting. That's the first step.
IOS 7 Home Screen Redesign
So many times I've seen people picking up the pieces of a "We'll just do everything in SP's!" project architecture." Anti-pattern city. The typical answer to make it scale or maintain well is to just throw it out.
Shut the fuck up.
Or, you know, gag orders. The kind where you can't even mention such a gag order exists.
Sheesh. "Flat UI" now goes along with iOS 7?

It's been around much longer than yesterday. iOS 7 is late to the party.
A Contribution to the Mathematical Theory of Big Game Hunting
If you are a farmer the sue happy Monsanto, or the fact that foreign nations stopped wheat imports means the concerned step is filled in quite nicely. For the general populace GM fear maybe.
Eh, my Russian is as terrible as his English is.
It does put China's insistence on a local internet, surrounded by a 'fire wall', and serviced by local companies, in a very different perspective doesn't it.
As an engineer for a tier 1, I can affirm that such requests seem to enter the company laterally at the VP level.
If you assume that the whole world benefits if no one uses GM plants, which is almost universally true except for a handful of crooks who would gain, then if Japan is part of the world, they directly benefit from participating in a boycott. This is an example of the classic freeloader problem where people too lazy to participate in the boycott will be rewarded just as much as the more ethical people who do participate.

More people would understand why GM plants are evil if they were more properly called patented copyrighted licensed intellectual property, which happens to be in the form of living plants. Kind of like the renaming games played around certain ethnic groups. Another classic example of using name games to influence opinion is "He's not anti-abortion, he's pro-life", that kind of garbage.

You can also get a slavery vibe going. If you modify 0.001% of the wheat genome, the multinational mega corp literally owns that living thing. So if you genetically modified my grandma to cure her glaucoma using corporate intellectual property, then they'd own a human being, right? Maybe a more direct example would be a genetically engineered fertility treatment would clearly mean the baby would be the owned property slave of the corporation who invented the treatment, right? After all, thats the decision we've made with wheat...
> If you have zero physical security, that means that anyone can come up and just knock you down and take your things, your woman, whatever

Hodor. Own woman. Hodor. Hodor. Hodor.
Nah, you're more likely to never receive your snail mail due to incompetence of the goddamn service.

These are not photoshopped:

http://cdn.trinixy.ru/pics5/20121123/mail_01.jpg

http://cdn.trinixy.ru/pics5/20121123/mail_02.jpg

http://cdn.trinixy.ru/pics5/20121123/mail_03.jpg
This is really great! Fast thinking there.
It's a Slashdot in-joke, actually.
"Having said that, I'm not sure if anyone would trust services coming out of Russia."

It may be worth reminding people that if the US currently seems to be heading into a police state, that Russia within living memory has manifested one.

I'm all for holding the US accountable, but let's not collectively be idiots and think that this is all uniquely a US problem, and that therefore we can just stop worrying about everywhere else in the world and let them do whatever because they aren't the US, they must be awesome. We're still criticizing the US for heading in a direction that quite a few other major countries have already arrived at. It's great criticism, it's legitimate concerns, but don't get overexcited and give everybody else a pass.

Can anyone say with a straight face that Russia won't sniff Internet traffic with the same basic purposes and approaches, either now or anytime in, say, the next ten years? I sure wouldn't bet any money on that claim.
The NSA uploading their slides to slideshare would save everybody a lot of bother, I think that's the most brilliant bit in this excellent PR move. No more need to leak anything.
It'll be interesting to see what kind of restrictions they'll have on account access, networking, DLC and so forth.

Sony is infamous for saying things like this, then screwing people with the details.
fascinating to listen to Brooks wax poetic about authoritative structures. One would think he might be a little skeptical of them ... guess not.
You Face A U.S. Legal Problem. Where Should You Run?
This is a classic "hit piece" that Brooks has done. Find suspicion in everything the guy does and look at his whole life in a negative light. This is the epitome of an Ad Hominem attack. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
Brooks is the NYT's token conservative and fuddy-duddy establishment mouthpiece. He's there to make Krugman look more credible and Friedman look more clever by comparison. Pay him no mind, anyone who would actually agree with any of his opinions doesn't even read NYT in the first place, they read the WP instead.
I suppose the comparisons are to emphasize the new construction as technical achievement. That's consistent with other of the PRC's ways.
And ASM is faster than C.

Javascript strikes a nice balance between performance and high level usability.
Is the USA now a tyranny?
Red Hat opens OpenShift PaaS cloud for business
Four phases your production process needs when building websites & applications
I actually think Yandex is a good alternative. Assume that all countries have similar projects like PRISM. Which one would you rather have: your country spying on you or a foreign country?

If your country is spying on you, it can use the data it gathers against you in a court, etc. If it's a foreign country, what could they possibly do?