skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The assumption that those with administrative power over HN content are unaware of the dominance of the Snowden story and articles about the NSA is almost certainly incorrect.

The far more likely case is that they are allowing the unfolding of the story on HN's Frontpage. The practical interpretation is that this is seen as less disruptive to the HN community than trying to suppress it. An alternative interpretation is that an editorial decision that the story has vital importance has been made. Both are far more plausible than the idea that HN is run by fucking idiots.
Who's enemy?

I have no enemies. My government says that I do though.
Am I the only one who finds it depressing that the main alternative to Google is Microsoft?

Why couldn't there be a search engine run by a non-profit, which does not treat its users like commodities, which respects its users' privacy, does not track them, does not advertise, and is run for the benefit of its users, not for its own benefit?
To be fair SE have made it clear that they don't want that type of question there, so at least they're consistent.

I'm surprised that HN hasn't spotted the market opportunity for a site like SE but allowing only non-specific discussion style questions.
Spying on the fact that the US spies on everybody?

Do you think people who keep their mouths shut as they and their coworkers do things like torture other human beings and build totalitarian surveillance infrastructure are good people?

Sorry to invoke Godwin, but the Nazis would have loved folks like that.
I think you must not have read the post all the way through (if at all), for Fischer's situation is specifically discussed.

Since you apparently did not realize that, you may also be unaware that the author, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, is Icelandic, and is in fact a member of the Icelandic parliament, and offered to try to help Snowden.

I expect she's better qualified to speak on this matter than virtually anyone on HN, unless we happen to have an Icelandic immigration attorney hanging around.
Kind of misleading.

1) This isn't "PoE" in any sense of being able to power a PoE-compliant device. It's hacking up an Ethernet cable to carry voltage on 2 pairs not used for 10/100 Ethernet.

2) The article recommends a 7805 power regulator if you need to step down 12V to 5V (as in the example). While this would work, 780x regulators essentially throw off the unwanted excess voltage as heat, and total heat output is going to be a factor of the voltage drop and current. 12V-5V for a router (could be 1A or more) could end up being quite a bit of heat. You'll likely need to use an adequate heat sink with it. There are more efficient (and still easy to use) switching regulators available.
So the Democrats are the ones to blame for making a big story out of Snowden?

That's a very interesting theory. And you follow it up with a long list of security state problems.

I don't want to dismiss you out of hand, but you have to acknowledge that not every person writing about Snowden is a Democrat, or manipulated by Democrats, or is somehow caught up in some tech celebrity hero worship.

I hate tech celebrity stories. I'm a registered independent. Voted with the Republicans a couple of times nationally, with the Democrats a couple of times, and with a third party a couple of times.

I find it strange to be accused of being manipulated by one party. Hell, it's both parties that got us into this mess. Why would the Democrats think they could control this message? They're going to lose as many, and maybe more, people from the center as the Republicans are.

And if you're seriously suggesting that we need even more access and control over information, instead of just cleaning up the bureaucratic mess we already have, I'm at a loss for words. I suppose once the hole gets deep enough, the only logical choice is to keep digging?

American security is in exactly the state that it deserves given the completely shitty leadership both parties have shown over the last 30 years or so. Nobody knows what their mandates are, nobody seems to have any idea of how to identify and properly assess threats, and there's hardly anybody in charge. This is a failure of Congress and the President. A good housecleaning would not only fix privacy issues, it might straighten the rest of the mess out. Maybe.

It might be just that we've created an intelligence and security apparatus that's too damned big. In which case, it's all going to need to be decentralized/privatized/deregulated somehow.

But all of that aside, your comment struck me as an attack on the readers and voters here, so I felt I should reply. Snowden is but a small story in a much larger tapestry of a security state gone to hell because of poor oversight and structure. I don't think the Democrats have any more or less to do with that than the Republicans. And I don't think they have much to gain by pointing out what a mess they've helped create.
you must be joking. it is a large (if not the biggest, compare with hp etc.) hw supplier.
I don't really think this post brings any constructive advice forward. And adding "not to make anyone paranoid" after that list of assumptions is akin to saying "no offense" after insulting someone.

It's good to be prepared for worst case scenarios, but to always assume the worst will just paralyze you with fear.

If things are really as bad as the author thinks, then we're all screwed. And if we're really all screwed then we're no more screwed by believing we may not actually be screwed. In this case our optimism is irrelevant in terms of influencing our outcomes (since we're screwed either way), but at least we might feel better about things.
so I guess they just forgot to mention or include the last paragraph from the HKSAR press release they quoted?

Meanwhile, the HKSAR Government has formally written to the US Government requesting clarification on earlier reports about the hacking of computer systems in Hong Kong by US government agencies. The HKSAR Government will continue to follow up on the matter so as to protect the legal rights of the people of Hong Kong.

sure doesn't seem impartial to me.
The constitution is pretty clear on the definition of treason:

"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."

We are not at war with any country right now (at least in the sense that Congress has not declared war), Snowden is not participating in armed attacks on this country, and China is not our enemy in any meaningful sense of the word.
If you work in infosec or even just maintain a popular website, 100% of your security problems come from either Russia or China.
Check out "Selectivity for HN"[1]. It's manual, but situations like these are rare enough (for now...) that it's not too much of a hassle to block stories yourself. I probably would've stopped using HN if not for it - the site is basically completely dysfunctional on days like this, particularly if you don't agree with the majority views on "hacker politics" topics.

[1]: http://swapped.cc/#!/iip
That is a HUGE deal. That is so much more a huge deal than another article about IOS7, or another article about how google's reign is over.

This! Over and over again. I hate seeing HN getting so politicized lately. But it is unavoidable considering the current state of affairs.

Each time I click the upvote button an an NSA article I am a bit concerned that it will just end up in another NSA bashfest. But even here on hn the voices of the apologists for the unprecedented war on privacy by the Obama administration are too strong and can not be challenged enough.
Seriously? Are we so hungry for opinions on this case that we rabidly up-vote clumsily written satirical blurbs (twice)?
…because the Swedish government can make no such promise, as extradition is a matter for the judiciary, and the judiciary cannot hear the case until they have an extradition request in hand. Having a strong separation between government and judiciary is good.

He never had any guarantee from the UK that he would not be extradited, and yet was happy to spend time there.
Isn't it strange that the "most democratic" countries are the ones that will be the first to offer him up to the US government?
The farebox already gathers this information in the case of buses; paper ticket and check-in/check-out systems are less precise (which train are you getting on?) but likewise gather this information. Most of the time this information is not passed along to a server. Duplicating this effort via a voluntary app doesn't seem particularly helpful.

Aside from the agoraphobics among us, most people are in way too much of a hurry to let standing-room-only transit deter them from making a connection. So your target market (people who want to ride an empty bus so much they're willing to wait for one) is already quite limited.

What this information is useful for (and is probably used extensively by some transit agencies) is planning routes, adding buses, trains, and train cars. Evidence (full buses!) suggests that many transit agencies could be doing a much better job coordinating larger bus sizes and more train cars during rush periods. Too bad there's not an app for that that the regular transit rider can employ.
>It feels a bit like TV crime shows. In reality you never talk without a lawyer present. On TV it's only the bad guys who lawyer up.

Maybe that's what they want the masses to think…
Simpson's paradox explained
Ask HN: How long before we are done with this Snowden fad?
Sure, the boy did and does some great things but in the end - maybe not today or tomorrow - everybody will forget and things will return to normal. There will not be any riots or any civil defense so how will it be different this time?
No, US did that to itself. Snowden just let everyone know what the US government was doing in their name.
I'm still waiting on Snowden to provide evidence of the NSA breaking the 4th amendment and illegally spying on the American people. For all the panic and the republication of old stories about the NSA, it is Snowden who has provided absolutely zero evidence.

What we do have is that Snowden copied a large cache of thousands of sensitive documents and gave them to who-knows-who. Suddenly countries that position themselves as enemies of the US are very happy to help him out, and he is happy to accept their assistance. In between, there was a public relations campaign to call him a "whistleblower" even though that is not what he did. The documents provided as supporting evidence do not say what Glenn Greenwald's reports say they do, while the journalists who have reported on these programs before are all facepalming at how wrong Greenwald's reporting has been.

So yes, it looks like the entire thing is a hoax and Snowden is a spy. YHBT by Glenn Greenwald and whoever else was involved. YHL. HAND.
I'm a huge Git fan and use it every day, but Git was never designed as a deployment tool. There may be situations where you want the entire history of your development to be included on your live server, but often this just isn't appropriate. Also, when deploying to multiple servers you have to invent adhoc methods to handle configuration differences. Even native ssh seems like a more prudent deployment method than Git. This smacks of using the closest hammer at hand, rather than choosing the best tool.
It's longer through Asia.
http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=HKG-SYD-SCL-CCS,HKG-DME-HAV-CCS

There's of course SYD-LAX but due to the circumstances...
The article doesn't mention any measures to escape particular search engine bubbles. It seems unfair to make a comparison without doing that first.

I'm more interested in projects like blind search (http://blindsearch.fejus.com/)
I wasn't trying to assert in any way that anyone was unaware of what was happening, or that anyone was a 'fucking idiot'. I was merely asking how people would feel if that content was in some way made separable when browsing top stories not suppressed from being readable.

I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know where you thought I said that because it wasn't my intent and I'll correct for clarity if needed.
Is this some kind of campaign to scare off people using privacy protection techniques? What's next, to force people to use credit cards instead of cash so that their spending habits could be easier to track?
And it's a Russian airline. Should there be a diplomatic incident, Russia has the means to carry out diplomacy by other means. A flight from Moscow was not chosen by lowest cost on Travelocity. Everyone is wearing big boy pants.
How I Met Your Model (Mathematical, that is)
I agree with gnosis...it is depressing. I guess the point I was trying to make is that Google is not the only player in this game, and from a dev perspective, it's important to pay attention to Bing and optimize your SEO for Bing as well. From a consumer's perspective, given the two choices - I think people would see some advantages from Bing. But I agree - it would be amazing to have a non-profit search engine, something ran by Mozilla maybe..
The constitution has been in trouble for a long time. There has been a consistent degradation. Obama absolutely did not set these programs into motion, most of these secret programs are relics from the war on terror that fear enabled. Do I see a degradation in the 4th? Sure as hell I have but it's been happening for a long time. Now your pissed about it because the media tells you so. This is the right wing fear factory at work.
I skipped page 1 today immediately after scrolling to the end for the first time ever.
Cheers, that may well be just the ticket for a day like today.
Very true! Seeing as you are a hacker like I am, it's not 100% accurate to say we are where our ip addresses are.
"just"? The BLA was shooting people and blowing up buildings, no scare quotes needed, they actually did that. That is why the police were after them: they were breaking the law in a serious way. How confused do you have to be to say that they should not have been investigated for these crimes because they were doing something else also?
Hmm? I am not a hacker. I design t-shirts.
Question: when does dumping secrets of the US stop being patriotic?
That's a nice site - if you just want to compare the search algorithms. (I chose Bing) But today for most people search results are more than just pure ordering of links - people want integration, people want easy-click access to content and social media. I realize that's not the case for everyone, but for a lot of users, these features matter, so stripping them away does not do the search engines true justice
How does this relate to text on the internet? Surely most text fed into big data systems is digital, so representation is a non-issue. If this is only to prevent optical-character recognition, can someone explain to me scenarios where such a typeface would be useful? For protest signs maybe?
(I still don't discard the joke hypothesis.)

It's a stone statue over a glass shelf, so the friction coefficient is probably low and it's possible that the vibrations make it turn around.

Perhaps before the shelf was inclined a few millimeters to the other side, so it didn't turn.

Perhaps it was formerly in a wood shelf, with more irregularities and a bigger friction coefficient.

Perhaps there was no camera, so when someone found that it was looking to the other side, they just assumed than someone else had moved it.
We've had good adoption but it is TBD if there's a big enough demand from the consumer market.

However, our architecture opened up other interesting opportunities which we'll be announcing soon.

Have a look at the University of Southern California Digital Repository. They have system for long term digital preservation. They discard any storage media after 3 years and continually check for "rotting" of files.
>Instead, he claimed Hong Kong had a treatment available for his epilepsy, which he used as cover to get NSA approval there.

Oh, that is the first I've heard of that. He never mentioned it in his Q&A.
Stalking world's biggest planes makes for photos that say 'wow'
This is a neat hack for 100mbit networks, where only 2 of the 4 twisted pairs are in use. Unfortunately, this wont work for gigabit networks, where all 4 twisted pairs are used for data transfer.
Snowden's passport revoked
I agree on the configuration issue, but you can export the working tree[1] in the hook to avoid including the Git history (and in fact it is a sensible choice).

The configuration can be handled in the post-receive hook too.

I advise against using Git as a deployment tool for serious development (you should use Puppet instead), but for quick hacking and personal projects it's perfectly fine.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/160608/how-to-do-a-git-ex...
Where is hard evidence of the US 'hacking' HKSAR? Is this industrial espionage like China has been doing?
Please show me where Snowden has exposed his coworkers torturing other human beings.

Please show me where Snowden has exposed his coworkers building a totalitarian surveillance infrastructure. Justify describing it as 'totalitarian'.

And for calling me a Nazi, go fuck yourself.
Are meta-discussions about the content of the HN front page becoming execessive?
I don't see why we need lots of Ask HN questions about the number of Snowden and NSA articles.

When a single story dominates the front page of HN, could we have a filter which aggregates the meta-discussions regarding that dominance?
The fact that this could be mistaken for a real NSA website really speaks to the sad state of affairs the NSA has put itself in.
Look, it's one thing to tell us our government is abusing its power, but it's another to go to another country, especially one that has a long history with us. Seriously, I don't understand the down voting, the guy is committing treason.
It will be much preferable, of course, to have Russia acting like the big boss around the world, or China.
I think the existence of large-scale, widespread business relations with China indicates that they are not considered an enemy. One would at least expect an embargo of some kind on an enemy (like the embargo on Iran).

This may come as news to you, but hacking is not an act of war. If it were, then the US has already committed an act of war against Iran with Stuxnet (which actually caused physical damage to equipment there), as well as having committed acts of war against the USSR on several occasions. Similarly, industrial espionage is not an act of war; again, the US does this all the time, even to our allies.
Embedded JSON database (EJDB) .Net binding now available
Um, and how is that sustainable to the high volume a search engine is put under; without a way to pay for itself?
What Is TubeRaider?
Get trolled much? HK isn't exactly the seat of the Chinese politburo. The fact that the guy needs to go to avail himself of un-friendly-ish hospitality such as flights through Moscow and Cuba ought to tell you something about nature of our government's conduct; or at least Ed Snowden's opinion of it. I can't fault him for expecting the worst. It underscores the need for nations to maintain their sovereignty and independence from the US. It ought to be possible to travel in the world against the wishes of any one country, or cartel of allies.

>I'm probably just as indignant as you are about the domestic surveillance

No, you aren't. Snowden hasn't (doesn't appear to have) revealed conduct that other governments were unaware of. Most of these thing have been leaked before. He's merely outed that conduct publicly, at a time when the press was under attack from the DOJ. If it weren't for that fact, and or maybe his flight from the US, I suspect we may not even still be talking about any of this.

tl;dr Don't be trollbait.
Looks awful on an iPhone due to the manual line breaks. If your goal was to let your words speak for themselves, you failed -- I was so distracted by the jagged text I couldn't make it to the end.
> I decided to create a typeface that would be unreadable by text scanning software (whether used by a government agency or a lone hacker)

It's pretty much unreadable to me too, so I'm not sure of the benefits.

I'm waiting for one of these fonts to use the Rapidshare cats.

The only useful version of these fonts are the oldschool "anti - tempest" fonts - fonts to help protect against van eck freaking. And even these were dubious.
If you don't want to be "bullied" with extradition requests and espionage charges, then you should avoid working in intelligence, then selling or giving away information that required clearance to get.

Incidentally, this rule also holds if you plan to work in Russian or Chinese intelligence agencies.
If a global system to capture the digital communications of everyone on the planet does not merit the term 'totalitarian', then that term has lost all meaning.

I didn't call you a Nazi. I said the Nazis would have loved people who were ok with that kind of thing. Isn't that fairly obvious?

Do you think they would have preferred a guy like Snowden?
I honestly try this every time and slow down before nearing the intersection. But often there are assholes who overtake and come in front and fill up the road ahead, making me brake and come to a stop as well.
Why would Mozilla do that when a large chuck of their funding comes from Google?
I think you have misread me. The protections in the bill of rights protect against actions which inherently overreach, because their violation had a people directly. Passive tracking of people only overreaches if it is used to harm.
First Chinese app on Google Glass : PM25.in
> I'm a registered independent

Completely off topic, but what does this mean? (I'm not American). You register your political affiliation in the US? What for?
Isn't Obama to blame for this too?
Time is Money - How to Automate Your Marketing
How I Hope to Improve Online Education (The Goals of Learneroo)
In defense of San Francisco's techies
Snowden is a sideshow, a freak biting the heads off chickens to draw the crowd away.

To the extent that there is any NSA story at all, it is that if Snowden can do this in his spare time, then China and Russia have been helping themselves to a copy of the intercepts for years. This is not about the 4th Amendment, it is about a de facto state of war. A state of war that the DNP is covering up with a blizzard of distractions.
History is full of examples of strange bedfellows as a result of mutual enemies. It is often the only realistic alternative when you face a massive strong opponent.

There's no contradiction in it unless you start providing support to said scum.

This also presumes that we agree with your assessment of who is the bigger scum. The Cuban government is easily more repressive to its own people, but the US government murders far more innocents, for example.
You seriously think the US will start a WAR with Venezuela? On account of Snowden?
When you Git push to a live server as the article in question suggests you're sending the entire repo history not just the latest commit. The remote hook only checks out the latest change, but the entire history is sitting right there on the live server. Which is silliness in most cases.

As is suggested in the SO article you link, it's more appropriate to locally export the version you want to deploy and use ssh (or whatever) to transfer it to the live server. Nobody ever seems to try to justify _why_ you would want to use git-push, they just go about explaining how you do it.
> “If this is done correctly, an organization can get to a person who is having personal issues or problems that if not addressed by a variety of social means may lead that individual to violence, theft or espionage before it even gets to that point,” said a senior Pentagon official, who requested anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the issue publicly.

Looks like there's some senior Pentagon officials who have a peer they can snitch on.
if your house burns down and they find that, goodbye insurance payout.
Mostly to vote in primary elections, which occur within each party to vote for who will be nominated as that party's primary candidate.
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