skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google stores an unencrypted copy on their servers, so the NSA would just get it from them. No need to store the encrypted copy for perpetuity.
I highly doubt anything will happen to him. This is the same story over and over again.
Edward Snowden recently said on a live Q&A that:

"All I can say right now is the US government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped."

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/18/edward-snowden-l...
I like the kickstarter model but it does put things in the world of financial norms. How much work are you going to put in to an open source project when the other guy working on it is getting paid by kickstarter money?

That said it's a great way to let people actually get what they want most from a project by putting something on the line to make it happen. For single person projects or small teams who are all getting funded I think it's nearly perfect. Certainly very exciting.

The only thing worrying is that it's much more likely for those funded projects to stop development when the money stops. Who knows if that will be an actual problem or not.

For larger projects, when everyone can't get paid from the pot, it's a bit tricky. I'm pretty sure that we'll see some successful projects completely implode from the internal arguments and demotivation resulting from allocating crowdfunded money.

Anyway, I could dream up fun scenarios all day but it's just predicting the future so it's probably all wrong. I think kickstarter type models are really promising for all sorts of things so people should go for it.

One thing to always keep in mind though: A human will happily do something for free for all sorts of reasons, if you start paying them they will be even happier for a while, then will normalize to just as happy as before. If you stop paying them they will never go back to being happy doing that thing for free.
I'd like to suggest a new mantra: 'Make Sure It Works First Then Ship It'
Yes, I read that part. But the Sixth amendment says nothing about where the defendant's employer is headquartered or the convenience of the prosecutors, judges, etc.

To me, the choice of Virginia as the original jurisdiction is clearly unconstitutional.

Also, Rule 18 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure states:

Unless a statute or these rules permit otherwise, the government must
prosecute an offense in a district where the offense was committed.
Him or the Jury?
The non-print, non-mobile version:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-cha...

This actually seems to be a pretty big problem with the web right now. We've been balkanized into mobile and desktop versions of sites, to the point where sharing one with the other inevitably pisses someone off. This article is all but unreadable on desktop, and I suspect the same would be true in reverse.

The point of the web is to have multiple clients getting the same info from a single source. This doesn't work if mobile and desktop clients are served different versions of the same site, and in effect are barred from sharing with eachother.
Someone is already profiting off this?

All proceeds should go to his defense team, Goldberg.
On the other hand, I am incredibly annoyed when hosting companies give me personal phone calls to ask how I'm doing or tell me about their new service. There's probably a middleground but I just don't really like talking to salespeople.
Parallel events in a few places, maybe? Requires a bigger turn-out, of course...
Not if your a whistleblower. What if instead of a domestic spying program he leaked a secret program by his bosses to round up every red haired and freckled person and put them in a concentration camp? Then would you still have to charge him with a crime for revealing a 'secret' program before he could be pardoned and treated as a hero? Of course not, thats ridiculous and so is this.
his name
No. Most of the major polling organizations call cell phones now, except for automated ones like Rasmussen. This was from Pew. From http://www.people-press.org/methodology/our-survey-methodolo...:

"The typical Pew Research Center for the People & the Press national survey selects a random digit sample of both landline and cell phone numbers in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. As the proportion of Americans who rely solely or mostly on cell phones for their telephone service continues to grow, sampling both landline and cell phone numbers helps to ensure that our surveys represent all adults who have access to either (only about 2% of households in the U.S. do not have access to any phone)."

Here are the full results: http://www.people-press.org/2013/06/17/public-split-over-imp...

And just because it is interesting:

"People under 30 are the only age group in which a clear majority (60%) says that the release of classified information about the NSA phone and email data collection program serves the public interest."
It seems there have been major updates.

Note: I've posted it almost 3 months ago [1] and it received quite a bit of interest, thus this update.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5481954
My understanding is that there've been other such cases, too, though obviously lower profile.
This is a fallacy. Just because a bug was exposed in a library you used does not mean your software will be exposed in the same way. Your use of the lib may not even overlap with the bug exposure. And I seriously doubt you carefully comb all the libs you select on a project for "security" before you release something.
Free One-Time Pad Encryption Software
If Hong Kong grants the "provisional arrest warrant" it could mean that Snowden will spend years fighting extradition from inside a jail cell. And it could be the end of any hopes of asylum in Iceland.
Though of course, people who are deeply concerned about their privacy are likely to be under-represented in any poll.
Not so much manufacturing - the chips/cameras/flex/cases/etc are all made somewhere else.

Foxconn is an army of cheap Chinese laborers who perform the final assembly and testing.
That didn't work out very well for Thomas Drake.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Andrews_Drake
I'm not sure I was able to get my point across to you. Let me try another approach.

The improvement I'm talking about occurs upsteam of the distributions, even though it is caused by the distributions' packaging policies.

Libraries are upstream from projects, and projects are upstream from distributions. If the distributions discourage projects from bundling libraries, this policy will encourage project developers to talk to the upstream library developers to get desired changes into the libraries, rather than go the customize-and-bundle route. This improved coordination and patch-flow benefits the users of the libraries and the users of the projects, regardless of whether those users rely on any particular distribution to get the software. Users are, as always, still free to pick whatever distribution best suits their preferences, or no distribution at all. Still, they benefit from the distributions' debundling policy.
Most of the regular statues, yes. But the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act specifically covers the national security establishment.

I will grant you that it's not the greatest law and I'm not sure I would avail myself of it if in his shoes. It does exist, though.
Those petitions aren't terribly high-profile: they're sitting at 6619 and 8249 signatures each, versus nearly 100K for the Snowden petition.
Paris Air Show’s Slowest Plane Could Have Biggest Impact
How LinkedIn penalizes its users
The title sounds like it's saying that the consensus is cooling, not that there's a consensus that the planet is cooling.
It lets the government keep lying itself into corners.
Portland, OR: Startup Douchebag Free
exactly; it's a play on words
However, espionage != theft.
The only civilians executed for espionage in the US were the Rosenbergs in 1953 and that is widely seen as an overreaction that occurred in the context of the hysteria of the early Cold War. Only three people have been executed by the Federal government for any crime since 1963. It is incredibly unlikely that Snowden would be executed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_by_the_Unite...
division by zero is undefined. c/x as x approaches 0 from the right is infinity.
It does sound insane to have so many packages, but it also follows Fedora's policy of staying as close to upstream as possible. The entire package building process is automated since TeX Live provides the packaging metadata with the source.

They also include the meta packages [1] so you don't have to install every package individually if disk space is not an issue.

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/TeXLive#Benefit_to_F...
You're kidding right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Manning#Detention
Has any whitehouse.gov petition ever led to actual action being taken?
This is about as bad as "I'm sorry you feel that way."

It's the complete opposite of an apology.
> Version numbers only appear to be folly because proper engineering discipline has not been applied when managing the stability and/or backwards-compatibility of shared interfaces.

Encoding intelligence (beyond, perhaps, simple sequence) in version numbers for software is fundamentally folly.

Encoding intelligence about compatibility in version numbers of APIs is only folly to the extent that "proper engineering discipline has not been applied when managing the stability and/or backwards-compatibility of shared interfaces."

Confusing what makes sense with software and what makes sense with APIs is as problematic as any other confusion of interface with implementation.
No amount of begging to any government will solve this problem. If you believe that the government can or will help, you are the problem.
If you are a scientist, especially one who deals with statistics, and you don't utter the word "uncertainty" on a daily basis then you don't deserve to be a scientist.

Using that as a criticism, especially given the word has very technical meanings in terms of distributions and fits, is silly.
"...said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the case."

Leakers leaking about another leaker.
To where? No one wants them, not home countries and not stateside prisons. This was well publicized at the time, it's not as simple as a little money to move them. Politics isn't that simple.
I don't think Virginia allows the death penalty for espionage:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Virginia#...
> Asking consent comes at negligible cost.

In all the scenarios I’ve provided, the girl will have given dozens of non-verbal cues for the guy to act. If the guy then still feels he needs to ask, there’s a real possibility that the girl gets turned off.

If the girl didn’t want to make out, she wouldn't have repeatedly have gone on dates with you, she wouldn't have invited you to her place, she wouldn't have lit candles, she wouldn't have sat on the couch with you, she wouldn't have asked you whether you like the perfume she's wearing, etc etc.

And on the off chance that all these things did happen but she doesn't want to make out, she will have told you by then. She knows way better than you what kind of signals she's giving off.

And lastly, if you misinterpreted her signals and you reach for a kiss, all she has to do is not lean into it. This can happen if you think you’re on a date, while she thinks you're just good friends (she may have thought you were gay). Trying to kiss her clears all that up, and it's better done sooner than later. The longer you wait to kiss her, chances increase she thinks you're not into her.
Well, sort of. All the charges against him were dropped except a single misdemeanor. He got one year probation and community service. A very different set of circumstances than Snowden, though.
The executive has a duty to examine the situation and decide whether the NSA's activities were wrong, and whether Snowden was acting in the national interest when he leaked.

Now every law is legal, that's why we have a Supreme Court. Ergo, not every lawbreak is illegal.
But he didn't do that.

Are you a whistleblower if what you reveal isn't illegal?
Perhaps not. In the same poll, 63% said that if Snowden's claims were true, they would feel that their personal privacy has been violated. It just doesn't translate into the public wanting him to walk free.
Fun with your friends!

http://penismonster.neocities.org
Thanks. I'm glad you have implemented it; I've hoped for it since you guys told me in so many words in a campfire chat I was doing it wrong because I needed deferred capture, which I remember finding quite arrogant. That said, it's great to know you take on board user feedback when iterating Stripe.
I think we're saying the same things.

The purpose of libraries is generally to provide an API to one or more consumers.

I'm talking about versioning as applied to the library, as a representative of a set of interfaces provided.

Not as some sort of runtime detection mechanism.
There's a significant space between "deeply concerned" and "unconcerned."
Yeah, ok, makes sense. Thanks.
The White House Honey Ale recipe was released from a we the people petition... So, no.
Gandi's contracts are an 11/10 on the BS scale; the "no BS" thing is marketing. You are agreeing to enforce their moral and ethical code upon yourself and your site visitors, and should you or your site visitors violate it, your domain can be confiscated.

Some excerpts:

http://www.gandi.net/static/contracts/en/g2/pdf/MSA-1.3-EN.p...

> By accepting Our Contracts and using Our services, You agree to abide to Our code of ethics which consists, in particular, of ... protecting and respecting minors, human dignity, public order and good moral standards, the fight against abusive and/or deviant uses of the Internet...

> You also commit Yourself to ensuring that any third party to whom You would ... grant any access or ability to modify any published Contents, will fully abide by the terms and conditions herein, and that You are able to effectively guarantee this commitment with regards to Gandi.

> You acknowledge and accept that the use of Our service is expressly forbidden for use in any way that engages or participates in practices that are deviant, abusive, illegal, or prejudicial...must be appropriate to the age and sensibility of each of the individuals that any of the content is destined for.

This kind of agreement is ridiculous for commodity domain registration. Nobody else asks that of you. You cannot reasonably run a blog with comments without breaching this contract (you can't enforce the code of ethics on commentors, which you guaranteed); don't even think of running a "hacker news" type site. Discussing hacking is one of the "deviant uses of the internet" you agreed to not only abstain from, but to actively fight.
Majority is not how criminal issues are decided, so that's not an appropriate bar for public opinion.

For example (similar, but exactly the same angle), a conviction requires a unanimous vote, not a majority vote.
Please Stop the Madness
The past few months I've been seeing a trend in websites. And that trend is to display a popup (or two) asking users to become a member, take a survey, like them on facebook, twitter, etc.

It's happening on so many websites that it almost seems like a conspiracy. Are you web developers doing this on purpose? Is there some kind of group think going on that we need to be aware of? And lastly, can you please stop the madness?
I use my browsers password store only for harmless profiles, like here and other blogs. The issue I run into most is that a slight url variation, common with webmail, toggles its asking to remember.
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/ale-chief-white-ho...
You are wrong. Tor does not include any latency, so a passive global adversary who can watch every packet can correlate your input to the Tor network with the traffic between nodes and the outputs of the exit nodes, and thus break the anonymity property. The reason this does not apply to anonymous remailers is that they randomly permute the messages they receive, sending them out in a different order than they were received; this creates far too much latency for use with HTTP or IRC or other common protocols, so Tor sacrifices security against a global adversary.

http://www.cs.usfca.edu/~ejung/courses/f11683/lectures/tor.p...

http://mice.cs.columbia.edu/getTechreport.php?techreportID=5...
Virginia can not forcibly prevent a Federal captial punishment.
You're making the assumption that that proof-of-concept behavioral tracking solution is anywhere near as effective as what google already does.

Google doesn't want the profile to be stored privately in your browser because then they can't use it to target you in other situations.
> I don't think Virginia allows the death penalty for espionage:

I'd be surprised if espionage, per se, is even an offense under Virginia state law, but it really doesn't matter what Virginia law is since he is being charged with crimes under federal law in federal court that happens to be located in Virginia.

There are times when federal courts, for a variety of reasons, hear state law claims, and in those cases the remedies allowed by the state are relevant. But when federal courts hear federal claims, the state law of the state in which the federal court happens to sit is irrelevant.
For those who don't live in Brisbane. The brisbane times is a free paper put in peoples letter boxes, best known for it's local restaurant reviews and fashion. I wouldn't take it's views on overseas IT procurement very seriously :-)
If we get that to 300 million, they'll have to do something.
> Application uninstalls are as trivial as dragging the application to the trash bin. No, this will not eliminate the application's data from ~/Library, etc, but 98% of the time you don't want that anyway.

When uninstalling an application, you usually do want to remove all of the application's components. How often do you say, "You know, I'd like to uninstall 25% of this application, even though the remaining 75% will just be dead weight without it"?
I generally don't answer my cell phone unless I know who is calling. If I did answer and it was a poll, 99% of the time I would just hang up.
It's not illegal for journalists to possess classified info, because espionage laws only apply to those who are authorized to possess such info and disclose it without authorization to a third party; the third parties themselves are guilty of nothing (except perhaps "conspiracy" as the DoJ is trying to do against Wikileaks, allegedly.)
If it's a Federal charge, Virginia law doesn't matter.
Meanwhile people in Brazil take to the streets to protest about increases in public transport fares...
WikiLeaks published many secrets that were not whistleblows. It's an anti-secrecy site.
I found it amusing that customers were annoyed with the author for charging for "nothing". If the author didn't solve your problem, or if you could have done it yourself with no help, why did you buy it?
the argument that that word is aimed at is not a scientific argument but a political argument. FTA : "This isn't a crisis for climate science. This is just the way science goes. But it is a crisis for climate-policy advocates who based their arguments on the authority of scientific consensus."
Well put, and this particular problem can easily be handled by having a prominent doc section called "Information for packagers" that outlines all this stuff. This isn't a new problem and seems to be best handled by engaging with the packagers and putting a small amount of effort into helping them, it's easy and pays enormous dividends.
> ... the sentence of death shall not be imposed unless the jury or, if there is no jury, the court, further finds ...

Why even pretend it's a gov't for the people anymore?
Facebook security glitch affected 6 million users, shared email and phone data
"I know you have all these rules that try to make packages consistent so sysadmins don't have to give any extra thought to each individual one, but I'm a special snowflake that you should treat differently."

I care about having a system with hundreds or thousands of packages installed on it that all work consistently.

Linux is not OS X, and packages are not .dmg files; I want your package using the system version of libfoo, not your own fork of libfoo. If you have awesome changes to libfoo, then you should either get them into upstream libfoo, or go all the way and actually fork libfoo into libfooier upstream to allow packaging it separately.
Google isn't forced to rely on stockpiling personal data as a business model. It could create the exact private service that you are looking for, but it intentionally does not.
Sacramento better or worse? We could charter some busses...
Previous discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5796539

and some previous articles:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22567023

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/science/earth/what-to-make...
Don't you think that maybe they leaked the most interesting stuff first? This stuff has started to fall out of the news. It's past time to keep the story going.

Perhaps there was a limit to the documents he was able to scavenge.
> it's a pure joy to read the ruby source

If you like it so much, here's a copy-paste from the project for your edification [1]:

def new_tags=(tags_string)
tags_string.gsub! /[^a-zA-Z0-9, ]/, ''
tags = tags_string.split ','
tags.collect! {|c| (c.match(/^\w+\s\w+/) || c.match(/^\w+/)).to_s }
@new_tag_strings = tags
end

I don't mean to pick on this project in particular. In fact, this project as a whole is quite possibly the cleanest Ruby code I've ever seen.

That being said, Ruby's syntax makes me want to gouge my eyes out. There's equal signs, unquoted regular expressions, exclamation points, absolute value bars, and at signs all over the above code. You can't even sort-of follow what this code is doing without searching through the manual every third character. Ruby syntax is worse than C++ and almost as bad as Perl.

Someone tried to explain Ruby syntax to me last week [2], and I'm not sure if I understood it more, or less, as a result, because my conclusion was that Ruby's syntax is so bad, the language shouldn't even be able to exist! I.e., there are a large number of syntactical ambiguities, so writing a parser for it should be completely impossible!

[1] https://github.com/kyledrake/neocities-web/blob/933c3549264e...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5872899
I was thinking of something similar for blogging for a while now.
Hello HN,

I wrote FreeOTP about a year ago. With the recent privacy concerns in the news, I wanted to share it with others and get feedback and suggestions.

An acquaintance of mine, who is a professor of math at Virginia Tech and who teaches cryptography, reviewed the code and encrypted and decrypted some messages, but we didn't do much with it after that.

It's alpha software, but it seems to work OK on Windows, Mac and Linux. I post test messages on twitter (user FreeOTP) with pads so that anyone can decrypt them. Would be neat if others would encrypt something and send me the pads and encrypted messages so I could experiment more.

Let me know what you think. Would really appreciate any feedback with regard to the crypto implementation.
The thing is that people have different ways of learning, some are good with reading and understanding, others need hands-on and others like to hear it. The bad part is that our education system is currently tailored to an specific type of learner. Reminds me of the quote “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” So if you want to be a good teacher you have to understand that students are different, have different learning mechanism, different motivations and a preference over a certain type of thinking.