skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Argh. Important subject material, crappy article, lots of confusion, argh argh argh.

TL;DR: everything about the WAY this story was reported is an obvious deception.

First, methodology. This is blogspam that adds nothing to the original article at http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=EF9BC1BF-34EB-41... (at least they link it). That article, in turn, cites no sources. So I'm basing the following only on those articles.

Also, let me be clear that I'm anti-immunity in general, and I think that the UsGov behaviour in Hepting vs AT&T is reprehensible, and no one should ever vote for any lawmaker who voted in favour of FISA, for that reason alone.

Okay, let's take it apart.

If you read TOA, it specifically says Alexander specifically claims he's not asking for blanket immunity. So the title is linkbait. Fuck you techdirt, for sabotaging the cause of freedom; now if/when Alexander/NSA replies to this article, he can avoid the issue by denying your false allegation. Don't muddy the waters.

Next, the context is not explicitly about spying at all. Not at all. Zero mention of spying. Oh look, the headilne is linkbait twice over. Fuck you twice over, techdirt. I can only conclude that Mike Masnick is either illiterate, or a liar.

ALSO, while Alexander is the head of the NSA, and while the NSA and the USCYBERCOM are deeply in bed, they is still some distinction, and this really sounds more like a USCYBERCOM thing than an NSA thing.

Next, listen, the only legitimate reason for cops to exist is to protect the populace. And if there's ONE thing that I trust Alexander about, it's the fact that at least some people want to fuck with US companies and US infrastructure (he's probably lying about the scale, and basically everything else). If SinoGov, or crazy terrorists, or AnonSecOfTheWeek, or whatever, attack US Companies, and private enterprise can't cope, it's reasonable for USGov to fight on behalf of Americans and American companies, and that might include giving them advice on cybersecurity, and that might involve giving them the equivalent of virus definitions, and saying "block all traffic that matches this signature and you'll be in better shape". This is legit. This is a strong argument. He goes on to say that if companies obey the NSA and turn out to harm someone with it, they should be immune. Okay, this part I disagree with. But seriously, of all the horrible asshole claims the NSA has made lately, this one is about as reasonable as it gets.

That said, I'd argue against such immunity. If the companies act in good faith with due diligence, what do they have to lose? And if they don't do due diligence, fuck them... what kind of moron trusts the fucking NSA?

As for counter-hacking, sooner or later the law is going to have to address it. And it's going to be difficult. And they should fucking get started, and proceed slowly and cautiously.

EDIT: slight touch-up on TLDR
Duke Nukem 3D code review
If the person can't understand how to use the thing, how would that person improve the documentation?
Except for the simplest kinds of unskilled labor, I can't imagine becoming 80% proficient at anything significantly new in under a month.

80% of the way towards very basic competency, perhaps. That still leaves you with years of practice to go to reach a respectable professional level.
Ask HN: What will life on Earth be like in 2030?
Just curious, this question has been on my mind a lot lately. Looking at recent world events and the pace of change in my lifetime (23.5 years), I just feel like we haven't seen anything yet. I wonder how we will apply science and technology to solve problems that affect the entire biosphere. I wonder how and when we will terraform another world/moon, when we will find life on an exoplanet, and when we will reach another star.
I should add, plenty of print journalists move into some form of TV journalism - not only for wider exposure, but for the greater salaries.
You guys are all hilarious.

If a secret service had wanted Hastings dead they would have had some hoods break into his house, simulate a robbery/ransacking, stab him and run off.

Extra credit when they ensure the hoods are later arrested and brought on trial, only to have the case thrown out because evidence about the murder weapon gets thrown out because an investigating officer "accidentally" broke chain of custody.
> ALSO, while Alexander is the head of the NSA, and while the NSA and the USCYBERCOM are deeply in bed, they is still some distinction, and this really sounds more like a USCYBERCOM thing than an NSA thing.

Keith Alexander is the Director of the NSA, Chief of the Central Security Service, and Commander of U.S. Cyber Command.
What does visudo do that nano -w doesn't? I've never understood this properly.
I also found https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5839553 to be super useful for actually getting started with AngularJS with no experience.

Then moving onto egghead.io tutorials.
Hastings ticked off some very powerful people in his short life. Ticking powerful people off is a good way to die in a plane wreck, a car wreck, a "fall" or any number of other accidents.

I'm not saying this is what happened, but it seems more likely than not that he was assassinated for his work.
How You Should Be Using LinkedIn - But Probably Aren't
This issue is unifying a lot of people
3:Democracy is self-rule by the people. If it's forced from outside, it's not a Democracy.

Besides, Democracy promotion wasn't even the original rationale for the war. That was "Saddam helped do 9/11". Then it was WMD. Only when those failed was Democracy promotion used as the final fallback rationale.

I'm not saying that Iraq cannot possibly be a legitimate Democracy, but it hasn't yet had the moment of national consensus that that real ones have had at their formation.
They collect data. They do not collect personal, identifiable data.

https://duckduckgo.com/privacy
mpyne, funny I see you a lot around these kind of topics these days :)

Anyway, you make good points. But regarding the Arab Spring, even if Manning was indeed a catalyst for these movements (which I highly doubt), having an uprising does not always lead to thousands of deaths. As you can see those who were responsible for the deaths in these countries were the government leaders who refused to listen to the crowd and sent the army and tanks instead of promoting dialog. The responsibility for these deaths is very clear and it would have nothing to do with Manning.

And your reference to the "invasion of Iraq" as "formation of democracy" is dubious at best. Installing a puppet Pro-US government is hardly anything democratic, and the elections process in Iraq have been showing many issues (threats on voters, fraud, etc...). Hardly a good example of a "democracy at work".
GPG/PGP Basics
I've been using Anki to get fluent in Ruby and JavaScript.

See the article, “Memorizing a programming language using spaced repetition software” here:

http://sivers.org/srs

I use some super-dumb examples on that page, but I hope the points above the examples help.

Also make sure to read Piotr Wozniak's awesome “Twenty Rules of Formulating Knowledge”:

http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm

(He's the author of SuperMemo, a predecessor to Anki.)
I'm well aware of the history of espionage, thanks. Lincoln and the Romans had no wires to tap, hence the "modern" national security state.
probably the last Peace prize awarded under an a priori illusion.
I was originally inspired to try it by this:

http://www.jackkinsella.ie/2011/12/05/janki-method.html

The trickiest part is knowing whether I am memorising trivialities and triteness or whether this will lead to deep understanding.

I've known about SRS for quite a while; I even wrote a project proposal to study whether it could improve academic performance of freshman compsci students.

It wasn't until I flamed out embarrassingly in a tech interview a few weeks ago that I decided that I really need to be mastering this stuff, not just bluffing my way through it.
YouTube: Internal Server Errors
IF you CAN attribute something to stupidity, THEN YOU MUST. That's what it'd be saying if you took it literally. It's not a statement about prediction or tendency.

It does NOT say "malice is plausible" it says "malice is IMPOSSIBLE, when you CAN attribute an act to stupidity."
It will be more polluted, and have more unhealthy people.

Terraforming worlds / moons? Not in our lifetime.
Integer Undefined Behavior Detection using Clang 3.3
I do not see how your points are relevant to my argument.

Not everything needs material benefit. Symbolic benefit can be as structurally useful and beneficial as a countable material benefit. For if a powerful set of companies acts, the power relationship with the government (and consumers, not always beneficially of course) then changes.

the whole point is that Google did't ask before, so the benefit is less than it would have been had they (and others) acted earlier. I am suggesting this is because of a lack of real stakeholder accountability. The benefit to users now is still appreciable, even though they weren't looking after their customers' interests as strongly as perhaps they might have in another era.

Relevance to what? This is a most pertinent issue with respect to the actions of executives of a large business. If executives are competent, then if their concerns are broader, they will act. And there is certainly no requirement for me to demonstrate this in conversation such as this. Your statement appears to commit a burden of proof fallacy.
After the tutorial I went off and built something that wasn't, based on my current understanding, a "proper" Angular app (paging all True Scotsmen).

These videos for example showed me that creating directives is actually a central thing you do in Angular. Not just a neat thing you can do occasionally.
Steve Jobs is so accurate and smart. I agree with what he said, nothing is constant but change.
It's an excellent example of the prisoner's dilemma. We are all better off if we all cooperate, but any one of us is better off if we defect.

When you start to iterate it, the equation changes. But it can be hard for people to look beyond the immediate lawsuit.
Well as a nuclear-qualified submarine officer I can assure you that whatever else you think about Voodoo, radiation actually does exist
Basically it's just saying that if you take a particular genetic sequence and introduce it into foreign cells, you can put them into a body where you'd expect an immune response (t cells), but in fact you actually see those cells die instead (apoptosis).

It's too bad it didn't turn out to be true as it would have been an incredible advancement in transplantation.
Wow, I thought the Run-DMC thing was going to be a gimmick, but this analysis has some depth. Thanks for the follow-along instructions. However, your writing needed more song lyric callouts.
I find it to be the direct consequence of institutionalization.
Contact them again?
If the 2003 invasion of Iraq was to establish democracy you'd have a point on #3. I'm still waiting for a leader of Iraq to be elected by its people.
I've done exactly this and it's shocking how many people simply don't care or don't see how wrong this is.
I've known Karen for a while now and just wanted to say that 6 months of learning for her is not the same as 6 months of learning for a normal person. There's a hidden layer of superhuman dedication and focus that made it all possible as well.
I don't think they exist anymore.
Absolutely. The obvious historical parallel is the co-evolution of Unix and C.
I can install my own OS on laptop, tablet, or phone. Or remove the microphone without anything breaking.
Agreed.

I actually started with Backbone and found the documentation sketchy. Nearly every tutorial had a different configuration than the last one. Backbone and Rails, Backbone, Ember and Mongo, Backbone and Coffeescript.

Nearly every one of the Angular tutorials was concise, took the same approach and used the entire framework, without any other dependencies. This made it easy to learn dig in and get going. In the few weeks I've been learning Angular, I've already built two CRUD apps and a pretty sophisticated navigation with it.

It just feels like a full fledged framework, as opposed to just a useful library.
That is basically my experience with them as well. I've assembled or performed significant maintenance on every printer model they've put out, except maybe the replicator 1, and I've never been impressed. Their extruders are especially nightmarish, even in comparison to the standard reprap setup.

I've also had the pleasure of looking at disassembled Stratasys machines, and the design and workmanship are pretty impressive.
How A Used Bottle Becomes A New Bottle, In 6 Gifs
It isn't a new one— it's the longstanding behavior with respect to information held in third party care.

Whats changing is how powerful a surveillance tool it is— especially with service providers intentionally blurring the boundary between local and cloud data for unrelated business reasons.

In 1787 there would have practically no reason for you to hand over your most personal papers and effects to a third party. Today its increasingly hard to avoid and can even happen without any real knowledge or consent.

The obvious fix isn't statutory: Keep your private data local, don't use software that will cloudify your data without your knowledge, and when you must use third party systems always use encryption. ... but this is complicated by the fact that there are multiple industries whos revenue is threaded by prudent behavior like this.

Hopefully they'll realize that taking the immunity only solves the lesser of the problems this presents and they'll provide the resources needed to create the legislative change to insure privacy for the data they hold in trust. But maybe it's just cheaper to convince everyone that they don't need any privacy?
I wish this plan of yours made any sense. Btw, IANAL.

First of all, I strongly disagree with "enough evidence now".

Next, to sue successfully, you need to prove that the thing happened (and that it happened in a way or in a place where the relevant law claims jurisdiction). How will your imagined plaintiffs get actual evidence? Subpoena the companies? Seriously, imagine you're a successful, law-abiding, US company. And imagine that a European court orders you to reveal facts XYZ, blah blah blah. Normally, because you're law-abiding, you try legal ways to avoid it, and then you obey the court. But in this case, the NSA has a gun to your head, and it's a legal gun (both in the sense that the gun is not illegal, and in the sense that the gun is made-out-of-laws). What do you do? You can't obey both laws at once. What you do is obey your own country. So the only way they'd get evidence (assuming your unfounded accusations are true) is if there were enough whistleblowers inside each sued company. If those people existed, they'd probably be coming forward already.

ALSO, not counting the UK, profits in Europe are pretty small, overall. Not small enough to ignore, but way way way too small to threaten US profits. Even all of non-UK Europe put together, actually, but especially if you're talking about individual countries.

And finally, you seriously have no clue how tax avoidance (not evasion) works. If big companies were forced to move out of Ireland, they'd move to any of the dozens of alternatives. Even the UK and France, for example, when they're not hassling big-corps, literally brag about how good their tax incentives are. There are LOTS of tax havens. Many countries would rather have 10% of a lot than 50% of nothing. You can disapprove or whatever, but that's the world the the politicians have created, when they're not pretending to be angry about that very same world.

The thing is, although I think nearly every sentence of your comment is ill-conceived, I wish your plan made sense. Because I would like to see the truth come out, whatever the truth is. If my company is innocent, I'd like proof. If my company is guilty, I'd like proof, so I can quit, and pressure fellow-engineers to quit, to send a message that would actually affect the bottom line. But your plan will never help me to learn the truth.
Yes, that was my point, though I may have been unclear. There's lots of describing him as the head of the NSA (both by techdirt and by politico), but I suspect that that was misleading, because I suspect that he made these statements as head of USCYBERCOM.

Maybe I misunderstand the division of responsibilities, but AIUI, the NSA limits themselves pretty absolutely to spying, and actually going out and doing things (like telling companies to block certain packets, which allegedly might cause that company to need immunity (ha!)) is not really an NSA thing.
Ask HN: Recommendation for an alternative to Intercom.io?
With the new funding intercom.io announced today they have changed their $50 a month plan to now be a source of leads for their company.

All communications on the $50 plan with your customers will have a promotional link to intercom.

If you want to use the unbranded service you have to upgrade to the $149 plan.

'Unbranded plans don’t include a “Powered by Intercom” link in your messages.'

I'm annoyed that they are using paid customers as a marketing channel, any recommendations for alternatives?
James Gandolfini, Sopranos star, dies in Italy aged 51
Can you link to your portfolio?
You if you can claim with a straight face that you'd trade 40,000 lives and a despot for a democracy, then what would your reasoning be to quibble about whether the results were achieved by local revolution or foreign aggression?

Do you think every Libyan who died was either for the regime or for the revolution? Many just wanted to live their lives and neither side spoke for them.

What does a "local revolution" even mean in a place like Iraq with sectarian tension all across the country? Most of the Iraqis who died were killed by other Iraqis, not by the U.S. So even if a local revolution had started the conflict in Iraq, do you think that local revolution would have been able to speak for every group with an interest in the stakes?
Kim's response:

Leaseweb says: "After a year of nobody showing interest in servers & data we considered our options." Data preservation emails say otherwise

https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/347417997901697024

Nobody should believe for a second that we haven't tried everything to convince #Leaseweb not to delete #Megaupload user data.

https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/347420452462931969

They probably should have had this conversation in public first time round...
I wonder if that 'garbage-eating' bacteria will help reduce landfill sizes. I'm an optimist but I wonder how will dodge the bullet of a few billion more people wanting to live like Americans. We dont have the resources to sustain that kind of growth without major consequences.
Pizza rolls in exchange for steak and lobster? My good sir, I will give you a fine deal, and trade you twice the weight in pizza rolls for weight of steak and lobster!
Yup, this is exactly right. Most of us don't necessarily have a problem with drones, or even wiretaps. We have a problem with secret drones, and secret wiretaps without any functioning system of accountability.
If you're browsing with chrome or a browser with the google toolbar urls will be submitted to google automatically.
The difference is that Dotcom has a long history of lies and fraud. Leaseweb, on the other hand, doesn't have any negatives I could find in the last few years aside from Dotcom's complaint.
So point the camera at a wall and duct tape the microphone. Problem solved.
Google claims uploading our entire minds by 2045
Agreed completely. Doing it right takes a lot of time.
@brackishlake your account appears shadow/banned and your comment shows up as dead to most users. I wouldn't know why, but that's how it seems to me.
Gerard Holzmann on The Setup
It's extremely difficult to remove the microphone from any of those things.
For some of our larger customers we can CName, also the files are stored in your S3 so you can get direct access that way if you need to.
Many new smart TVs do, and they have already begun to be exploited - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jA_2AiaAkvk
We use balanced for reddit and I'm wondering if stripe works similarly such that from one incoming payment you can pay multiple bank accounts?
From the quoted letter, and to some of your points as well:

"I would rather spend fifty thousand dollars on defense"

There are other costs, it's not just money. There is time (even if someone else is footing the legal bill), uncertainty, aggravation, stress for a process that can take years. Involvement in legal matters is not trivial. While I think that anyone who has been involved in the psychological aspects of litigation is well aware of the point that I am making I believe that it is felt by some that Microsoft's antitrust problems in the 90's caused them to miss many opportunities on the internet.

You really really need to understand the entire impact of decisions to litigate and it should not be taken lightly.
Warshak is only binding law in the Sixth Circuit, and I don't think it's good law in the face of the third party doctrine.
MegaUpload had about 25 pentabytes... so that's a lot more than $100K USD. And a lot more than just one drive per system. You more talking about a BackBlaze Storage Pod type configuration.
LowEndBox is great for non-mission critical servers. You aren't going to find many top tier providers on there, mostly smaller companies. I got a dedicated box (quad Xeon, 24GB RAM, 500GB) for $49/m.
As a Yahoo, I can say a lot has changed in that regard during the last year.
Think of it though, if I set a bomb somewhere and someone else tells you to walk over near it, that person bears some measure of responsibility as well, because they know the consequences that must result from a bomb detonation. If Manning is to take some of the credit for the Arab Spring then he must also bear some of the responsibility. You don't topple despots without bloodshed, so by all means take credit for your good deeds but don't try to weasel out of the negative effects you should also have known about. Of course, I don't know if Pfc. Manning himself even knows that people are making this claim for him, so I don't ascribe it to him personally.

In fairness to your latter point, we also call the U.S. a democracy despite the threads on voters, fraud, etc. ;)
Apple and Netflix Dominate Online Video
If your friends can play your games at any time, it means that the game is not tied to a disc, it is tied to your account. That makes it more like Steam. How does one sell a used Steam game? The answer (for all current digital services) is that you don't- there is no used market for any game that requires Steam or Origin or any other digital service.

Microsoft wanted to change that. But in order to implement something resembling used games, you have to remove access to the game when someone sells their copy. And the only way to do that is to have the console verify licenses. The easy way to implement that is with a license check every time you start the game. Microsoft tried to be nicer than that by only checking once every 24-hours so you didn't always have to be online.
I'm not sure if you've heard about this, but I heard that Microsoft created a near-ubiquitous OS that was so insecure that it allowed rootkits to be installed via music CD!
The NSA has a contractor position open in Honolulu.
Don't get me wrong Ray Kurzweil is very brilliant, but a bit strange. He take more vitamins a day than I think your liver can handle.

P.S. Thought Police.
Actor James Gandolfini dies in Italy at age 51
Yup. See https://stripe.com/blog/send-payouts-with-stripe for more details.
Isn't it a 200M earn out after 12 or 18 months and 400M in stock right away? 200M cash is likely more money than Stratasys has on hand right now given their balance sheet.
How delightfully optimistic!
That's what you get when the government mandates a monopoly for a private company.

If the buses were free, and the governemnt payed per bus, not per passenger, we'd probably have empty buses here too.