skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not normally in favour of "political" stories on HN but this one is an exception for three reasons.

Firstly, mass surveillance and the end-run around the Constitution is a technological as well as social and political issue that also touches on the hot button issue of privacy and how the legal system is increasingly at odds with the Internet (eg distinguishing between "US persons" and "foreign persons" is increasingly difficult and makes less and less sense in a connected world).

Secondly, most of these stories have been surprisingly informative if you read between the lines.

- Hong Kong (as a plausible deniability front for the PRC basically) stalled on the arrest warrant and essentially ignored the cancelled passport. When prompted by the US AG they further stalled by requesting more information. Basically they took the approach of "who is this Snowden guy?" and threw up their hands saying "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas; we're confused!" Make no mistake: this is the PRC making a stand against US policy;

- Russia likewise (it is reported today) claims it has no "legal authority" to detain Snowden and don't know where he is (despite him being contained to the airport as he has no valid Russian visa as far as anyone knows). This, too, is Russia taking a stance against US policy.

- Ecuador too of all countries is taking an anti-US stance. It's a strange country to claim to be supporting human rights (given its record and persecution of journalists who criticize the president). In a news article today it was mentioned that the US refused to extradite bankers to Ecuador. Are we seeing the true tit-for-tat motives here?

- Whether the US will interfere with a Russian commercial airliner that travels in or near US airspace (being the flight from Moscow to Cuba) is an open and noteworthy question. It seems unlikely but the very fact that we even need to ask that question says a lot.

- Obama's war on whistleblowers exceeds that of all presidents that came before him. "Justice" is not the only goal here. Making an example of these "traitors" is. That can be the only explanation for the disgusting behaviour (arguably torture) that applied to, say, the detention and solitary confinement of Bradley Manning (ostensibly under the guise of "suicide watch").

- the administration's adoption of the "Insider Threat Program" basically turns all Federal employees into informants on each other where you can be punished for not informing. This is straight out of the Stasi playbook and happening in the US in 2013. Not only that but different departments and agencies have leeway on defining what "sensitive" information is, which goes beyond "classified".

Third, nothing changes and nothing works... until it does. To take the fatalistic and cynical position that there's no point in trying is just... sad.

This issue matters and it's germane to HN on several fronts. If you don't feel the same, just don't click on the links.
It's pathetic the defeatist attitude the majority of americans have. We finally get a week or so of pushing these sort of stories to the front page and now people are complaining.

Ironically if you look at a list of recent submissions by this "peterwwillis", you will see a list of boring nothing-to-see-here content that should also be downvoted due to a lack of originality and new content.

Anchoring (wikipedia.org) - yep he linked to a random wikipedia article. I'm so glad we have people like peter to lead hn to a new promise land of link filled content to wikipedia.

Graph of BitCoin market price (USD) (blockchain.info) - Yes because what hn readers need is a link to blockchain.info as we were too incompetent to find it alone.

Ironic a poster crying about content submits such boring, shallow and useless posts.

But something that is actually relevant to current affairs should be flagged and downvoted? The guy who started this thread is a joke.

To all the foreigners claiming this is "american politics" and should be ignored, do you all really have such short sightedness you can't see this effects everybody in the world, not just americans?
On 2., if you have studied any economic theory, you would know that in the long run the real value of goods and wages stays the same, its only the nominal value that changes in the long run. So no, you have not been 'robbed' via inflation, and thats silly to say anyways because inflation affects everyone.
While I'm no fan of C++, I find it odd that people criticize languages as "ugly" because they are difficult to build correct parsers, compilers, etc. for. While obviously this is annoyance to the tool writer, I would think it is more important how useful (and clarity and expressiveness are important here) the language is to people who have to read and write code in the language, rather than how easy it is to write tooling that parses or compiles the language.

Seems to me that calling a language ugly on the basis of how it is to build a compiler is like calling a dish ugly because it takes skill to prepare it properly.

(That said, I think C++ is an ugly language, but not for the reasons stated in your post.)
You extrapolate from your own experience to "the English major" to "the humanities".

Studying a language (with its multiple aspects, i.e. culture, literature, linguistics) opens up a variety of uses, from a cultural planning and administration perspective, a way into publishing, academia, teaching, consulting etc.

If you think all of the humanities is bullshitting your way through by espousing hollow phrases about "the bourgeoisie's consumerism", then you, frankly have not gotten the point. The interesting thing isn't "what the author believes" or even "what the author meant". This already shows the fundamental limitedness of the insights gained, which are the insights of "having taken a course in literature as an undergrad once".

> "After you've mastered the pseudointellectual bemused sneer"

Maybe this is just me being pseudointellectually bemused and sneering, however, I think we should probably think more about the bourgeois consumerism and might even come to the point where we can make the leap from "once upon a time an author wrote..." to our own life and our own time and society.

Your use of anecdote is certainly well chosen for HN and will resonate with the "innovating crowd" here, most of which do not see that there is a difference in approach and method between "appreciating a book" and studying it. At the very least since the 70s (and arguably earlier, depending on place and orientation), a study of literature or language is a study of a culture. There is a good reason why many of the more eminent philosophers that are still regarded as meaningful today dedicated so much time to literature, music or the arts. Literature lets us gain a deeper understanding of the social forces at a given time, prevalent and deviant opinions, habits, everyday life and social experience.

What you know as English class is a class in close reading, which bears little resemblance to research and the knowledge gained.

I am well aware that this is going to be unpopular here, especially given your position. Yet I find it slightly worrying how HN brings together the arrogance of engineering with a wider disregard not just for the academy (which is fine), but cultivates a particular form of anti-intellectualism that is all to prevalent in the US (and also elsewhere, though the US seem to particularly stand out). At least I would like to voice my dissenting opinion and try to convey that things might not be quite so simple.
>Actually it is, because it means that since they provably have no way to coerce you, anything they do can be shown to be petty revenge, and that's really the worst way to support one's case.

Petty revenge is the bread and butter of lesser bureaucrats in government.
> If they paid them a "fair" amount of money, how did they get so fabulously rich? But even if I allow your dubious use of fair, did they really pay them all? Did they pay for the streets that they used? Did they pay a higher price for the fire department since they probably have a lot more, much more expensive properties than me? Did the pay the police more for similar reasons?

If police, streets and so on were funded from taxes, then yes, they paid much more. If they were built by private companies - the same is true.

>Did they pay their parents for raising them into privilege?

That's that pure luck, agreed. But you can't punish people for being lucky. You just have wrong understanding of the concept of people being equal. We can be considered equal in our basic rights, but we'll never be equal in talent, IQ, motivation, and so on. So if two people start doing the same thing they can have equal chances at the beginning, but will never achieve exactly the same results. One person will always be more successful than other, and there's nothing wrong with that.

It is like sprinters race on the Olympic games: you have to ensure that all competitors will start running at the same time, but forcing them to also cross the finish line at the same time is just ridiculous. And that's what you postulate.

> Chile was as close to laissez faire as has ever been tried on that scale. Where did their mass unemployment come from?

Stupid monetary policy (fixed exchange rate between dollar and peso), which was against liberalism philosophy that Friedman tried to impose. However Chile basically continues this liberal economical politics and their unemployment rate is currently 6.1%

>>In capitalism there's always more work to do that workforce available.
>Ideological dreaming. Nothing more.

That's not a dreaming, just a mere fact: people's needs are unlimited, we always want new cars, computers, clothes, exotic holiday journeys, etc. otherwise economical growth would have stopped once we had learned how to provide basic food and shelter for everyone (which was in late Middle Ages, i think)

>Anyway, even if that's true, how about you mind your own goddamn business and stop worrying about what other people choose to do with their lives?

That is just ridiculous statement when coming from your mouth: it is my goddamn business when someone tries to rob me from my money in a name of your weird understanding of "fairnes" Poor people can do what they want with their lives as long as they stay away from me.
java's http://docs.oracle.com/javaee/6/api/javax/ws/rs/core/UriBuil... is pretty good.
Actually this sounds like a viable business model
However, while it is in practice unenforceable, you are still legally obliged to vote. In Australia it is considered a bit of a crisis if turnout falls below 85%.
"Perhaps their driving motive is not politics at all, but something else"

Yes, it's called narcissism.

Having been involved in politics at one point and being around elected politicians and aspiring politicians (at least at the state level), I can tell you with absolute certainty that the overwhelming motivation for public office is narcissism. This is also the reason I abandoned my interest in politics - some of the worst human beings I've ever been around.
Thanks for clarifying !
Often, assets will be frozen before the trial (see Silverglate's Three Felonies A Day for more details), so even those with vast resources may be unable to bring them to bear.
Honest question: how are privacy-related topics not tech news? If Google, Apple, FB, and other big techs are being required to give up data to the US government, isn't that something that should concern our community worldwide?
Nice free service (AWS free tier and free marketplace ami) that let's you do some pretty fun things..

I am currently routing all my traffic up to the AMI and out the AWS edge (which happens to be at US-East b/c that's where I launched my gateway test). Running Viscosity on my MBP using the "clientpack" SSL credentials provided by the AMI and sending all my traffic over the VPN. Quick and easy way to appear to be anywhere in the world I want using the AWS distributed network as my edge.

Full Disclosure: I work for CohesiveFT who provide this image.
While I don't agree with the name calling, I do agree with the sentiment. None of the articles being upvoted are even close to as absurd as your examples.

The example I keep seeing is people complaining about his flight itinerary. It isn't irrelevant, not even close. The fact that China allowed him to leave is very interesting. The fact that Russia has allowed him to enter is very interesting. If they let him leave and eventually make his way to Ecuador, that will be interesting as well. This is a window into the relationship being the US and China and Russia, and it turns out those relationships are very important. If you think this stuff is irrelevant, you aren't paying enough attention.
I am admittedly an idealist. But theoretically speaking, this sort of behaviour seems highly suboptimal.
Apple dumps Samsung
Well, you could try to improve the language by hacking on the parser. That would be quite easy to do :)
I have to second this. Once Scott Steel started blogging as "Possum Comitatus" a few years back, Roy Morgan fizzled and evaporated like spit on a BBQ plate. It's just not very good polling.
I can't find any license. I wonder if the authors would allow someone to convert the book to epub or mobi.
"It means stuff that teaches you about the world."

I guess you do not find the story is teaching you anything about the world?

"But if this... was a sign of some bigger, underlying trend, then perhaps it could be."

Maybe it is, but you just are not seeing it?
I suppose it would be better if Greenwald presented evenly balanced quotes and regurgitated propaganda with no analysis. He might be lucky enough to get a job at NYTimes then.
After reading Ender's Game over the weekend, I want to use this.
The switch for this is always there, reachable by scrolling up past the top of the notifications panel.
Tricky one, I recently suffered from a stroke and now i can hardly use my left hand, it's a massive hit to the ego but you just bounce along. My right hand is typing at stupid speeds now, so I hope that when my left hand kicks back in I will be even faster than before.
Err, wait what?

I thought we're technical people here.
Are we talking about the judicial system reform? I believe the current system of choosing the magistrate is quite bad, but the alternative that's being suggested is rife with it's own problems. As such, I don't think it's worth changing the constitution. I really like the current composition of the Supreme Court, and I trust their decision. I do think there are ways to change the system for the best, and I hope there'll be a joint effort to come up with a better alternative to the current system.
So I clearly don't know you or what you do, but ou're definitely not wrong in the general sense.

However, Dick and I spent the last year working 60-80+ hour weeks while our company was stationed out of a pretty big coworking space. I can tell you that in our time there, I only saw a single person out of the (what must be at least several hundreds of other people) peers sharing our space with us at the gym, where as Dick and I went at least 3x a week every week.

I also lost 60lb while working more than I've ever worked in my life (by following Dick's program) and here's the punchline: 20lb of that was the weight I gained from my last start-up job.

I think the issue is the exact mindset Dick wrote about, of having to "pay off your credit card" by going and running hours and hours after eating badly (a mindset that I still default to sometimes and have to try really hard to stop myself from doing) makes it so that people who are already insanely stressed eventually just give up and decide to go into a default instead of "paying off their card", so to speak.

P.S. There's already been some lawyers, creative agency folks, and people from big government funded organizations applying to take part in the course, I think the difference between what they saw on the page versus what you saw on the page is that they (correctly) assumed being "in tech" meant "work really long hours" to the people that wrote the page versus "do you work at a company that has an AngelList page".
Tony Hsieh’s $350M plan to make Vegas an ‘entrepreneur’s Disneyland’
Somewhat off topic, but I was somewhat surprised that architect is a viable career for someone with an aversion to all things mathematical. Does she still need math, she just doesn't enjoy it, or does the modeling software these days take care of all the calculations necessary?
I feel like you are short-changing the very hard work done by Electronic Frontiers Australia and some ISPs (iinet in particular) to campaign against the worst excesses of this government and the government before it.
Live Analysis of Supreme Court Decision on Affirmative Action
It's important that it's written in 2012 because it means
a) It is not just another 'oh gawd, gotta cash in on this PRISM fiasco' article
b) It demonstrates that some level of awareness of issues and attempt at publicizing was always occuring. That is to say that it is a reminder that those of use reasonably well read/informed should not have been totally shocked when Snowden did his thing
c) It's important because some people will question 'Why no mention of current events?'
seems like a great idea, but knowing how older people can cope with change I don't see this going so easily and nicely for them as the article makes it sound?

Anecdote: 2 of my family members over 50 years old had XP running with Office2003. I gave them Lubuntu and it took them literally months to adapt. For an IT guy it's off course all alike, but actually it isn't. Especially not if it already took you years to master Xp/Office in the first place.

Apart from that, while I applaud them wanting to reuse old hardware, it seems most pc hardware lives for 10-15 years max. So I hope theay are prepared for that with appropriate backup systsems so they can recover all the systems that will eventually, sooner than later, shut down.
I'm with you. As evidently most of HN :)

We can't simply shrug it off. It's in everyone's home now. And not only in the US. If we dismiss it now, we deserve every surveillance abuse that follows.
You know what I mean. Them being centrists, or Statists, is my point.
Does Edward Snowden even exist?
Text-to-Speech API
Those with power have statist tendencies. This is "just" a matter of "power corrupts" - those out of power on the left and the right are both substantially more leery of government control. Of course, that we can explain it is not to say that this corruption is something we should accept.
Being an Internet amputee
My question is how in the world do they make ECC crypto run that fast in browser, if that is indeed what they are doing?
That these stories are upvoted so much only proves that it's an interesting topic to the community.

So your post is kind of senseless.
it also means v*gina.
Ansible can do the zeromq stuff anyway, that's what fireball is for.
Honestly, the timbre of this post implies a viewpoint which is fatalistic and frustrated with the issue, from someone who perhaps doesn't think the issue is as severe as others do.

I say, don't hide your opinions in a separate complaint, just because it is easier to defend. It is easy to criticize the headlines for being superficial, even if your issue is that you don't want to talk about Snowden anymore.

Keeping the headlines up keeps awareness up. Perhaps that is precisely what you don't like. Why do you think PRISM is inevitable? Why do you think his asylum requests in Ecuador are less interesting than the latest coffee script variation?

I think it is fascinating that Hacker News is having such a political reaction to this issue. That, to me, is deeply interesting in and of itself.
PlayStation 4 Will Be Running Modified FreeBSD
I'm only managing 24 machines with puppet, so nothing fancy, but I managed to do all of the stuff I needed without writing a single line of Ruby code.

That was handy for me too as while I'm somewhat familiar with Ruby, I'm no expert at all. I can read Ruby no problem and I can write ruby that's not-quite-idiomatic and I'm terribly slow at it.
The surface is simply connected, it's the outside that ends up not being simply connected. This works equally well with piece-wise linear embeddings. And the current version of the Alexander Horned Sphere is not actually interlocking - the embedding is contractable back to S^2.

It takes a while to get your head around what this really is.
Great feedback, @exodust. Good point about the versioning — we could do that better. Thanks for checking it out :)
As I recall, and it's been a while so things may have changed, Stack Exchange's Apple site has always been more forgiving of these types of "hidden features" lists, much to the consternation of the rest of the network (example: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/110611).
I see my error in these instances. Good critique.
the \|/+- chars are a bit difficult to read. Maybe unicode chars would be easier to read?
Wait... That's what I am paying my taxes for? That's where my money goes?

I am NOT against Linux being more widely used. And I like the idea that the city uses Linux to save money & more efficient.

But pushing citizens to use Linux is NOT government business
I think it's a great subtle feature when applications detect on first-run they are not being run out of /Applications and ask if you'd like to have the bundle moved there. Saves a few steps.
No it doesn't. If you can't actually get your money into/out of the exchanges then you can't execute on the arb. Just because you see crossed books doesn't mean you can actually make money on it.
Yet another un-googlable project name. Pretty much kills it for me.
How to Crush a Backlog
Mine? It sucks. I've noted that the 4-hour limit is pretty accurate for actual focused work, but I've drifted into some areas (technical translation) that don't always need a lot of focus.

It varies.
I'm always amazed and dismayed that this heap of junk has become the foundation of such a massive set of activities.

I mean, who thought it was a good idea to have different escaping for different parts of a URL? That's like having a car that uses a lever to turn right and a foot pedal to turn left.

Of course, the answer is: nobody. URLs weren't designed, they grew organically. The result is the ubiquitous mess we have now.

It does work. The organic, evolving web has survived and thrived while sanely-designed standards have withered and died. Maybe it's ultimately the best way to do things.

But it still bugs me that I have to deal with such weird, awful nonsense when I need to do something related to the web. TCP/IP, while certainly not lacking in quirks, is still a million times better. It's sad that we couldn't end up with something a little more consistent at the higher levels.
I'm still looking for a configuration management system that doesn't assume that the first step towards managing servers is to add a new "master" server. From the thread, ansible looks promising. In the meantime I'll keep using chef-solo until opscode kills it.
Agreed. Although I have seen some tabloid-esque articles get upvoted, it's important that the issue of NSA wiretapping (not necessarily the whereabouts of Snowden) do not fade from our mind. It's important here on HN especially, because as technologists we understand far better than others, politicians in particular, the gravity of collecting even the most trivial data. (See the great article "Using Metadata to find Paul Revere")
Where can I get more info on the strong elliptic curve cryptography and identity-based encryption behind this open source code?
Similar technology is available for several years now. Here are some local guys used it to actively catch bike thieves and made a video series about how it worked out in practice. Here's the episode detailing how they recovered a stolen bike in London: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obqEJVsWq8o
Vine video sharing drops significantly
Yeah we need to clear out this news about the most important case of domestic spying in the history of the world so that I can finally see some stories about which startup raised money...?

Perspective please.