skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think Snowden's distinction between "policy protection" and "technical protection" is ultimately meaningless and naive

I think you should see this in the context of his other statements. He's not making a distinction between policy and technical protections (he just mentions them both together as equally ineffective) - he's making a distinction between policy/technical protections and law - policy can easily be changed - e.g. the filters in place are loosened periodically, whereas law (public law at least) can be policed and enforced, regardless of the particular policies in place (or in spite of them) - e.g. the filters in place are inadequate and thus exceed the NSA's mandate, therefore the program should be shut down. This is what he means by the rule of law as opposed to the rule of men in another response.

All checks on government power are not policy protections, if they have the force of law and the judicial branch is not subverted (as it has been with FISA), they have a real force which policy protections (simple internal rules of an organisation) do not have. I think the difference in concepts is useful and productive, provided you believe in the rule of law of course.
AppBrain blog: More ad mediation options with the AppBrain AppLift SDK
"Consciousness is not solely a matter of computation."

How do you know that?
There is nothing preventing a cyclist from wearing motorcycle gear on a bike. I would never do it though because it isn't practical. But this is precisely the point I am getting at and in fact I do not wear a helmet at all.

As for saying "you might as well ride a motorcycle or a scooter" - you're missing the point entirely. As a cyclist, I don't ride for any other reason than I prefer it.

If you want to say that a car is slower, I would beg to differ. In normal commuting traffic, I blow past the parking lot that urban streets effectively become at rush hour.
...NSA seems to be transitioning from a role that was principally involved in nation-state intelligence to a role that is inextricably bound up with law enforcement.

Any organization will act to grow its responsibilities and thus its resources. The USA has no real enemies anymore, and yet these agencies keep growing. Organizations will grow until they encounter some sort of limit.

Is the problem that those who would previously have overseen these agencies and curbed the over-extension you cite no longer want that oversight role, or that they are no longer capable of that oversight role? Barrack Obama talked on the phone all his life just like all other Americans do. His predecessors were the same. What kind of President would be able to cut the NSA budget?
Also, it's widely known that the US president is a Muslim.
KeepUsHere - Tell Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform.
Hmm, I think memristors failed. The devices HP is promoting as "memristors" now have nothing to do with their original memristors. I don't know why. Maybe the devices started to fail after 100 write cycles or something; totally plausible for physics that depend on ion migration. Maybe someone will invent a new device that does what their original memristors did, but in a form that can be brought to market.
I'm a lawyer, although not one that regularly practices First Amendment law. That said, zachrose is right that strict scrutiny applies here. Usually, to restrict truthful speech based on the content of the speech, the government must show that (1) there is a compelling state interest and (2) that the government's restriction on speech is narrowly tailored.

National security is pretty compelling, but it's unclear how prohibiting disclosure of the number of requests is narrowly tailored to that interest. Without knowing more details about the nature of the program, it's hard to say why the number matters. But if the NSA can't demonstrate how disclosing a specific number, as opposed to an approximate range, has a noticeable impact on national security, the law would likely not be in their favor.
Of course it is a non-starter. I agree, and I would never wear a motorcycle helmet on my bike. I don't even wear a helmet. My point is simply that the degree of protection a bicycle helmet offers is oversold.
I currently have a OpenVZ vps on the internet to host my projects and I chose it for its better performance in comparison to a real VM (xen,kvm,etc) but my what I'm still to find it's a provider that offers OpenVZ containers (or virtuozzo containers) that can scale programatically, like the VM's on Amazon EC2.

I think it should be possible, that I could program if my container cpu load is over 70% for more than 40 seconds to launch a new copy of my container in the same or other machine..

This lack of a service to scale containers it's the first thing that needs to be done to compete with common VM clouds.
Pizza (programming language)
But they could pass a law prohibiting the covering of your face like in France. "The French ban on face covering (...) is an act of parliament passed by the Senate of France on 14 September 2010, resulting in the ban on the wearing of face-covering headgear, including masks, helmets, balaclava, niqābs and other veils covering the face in public places, except under specified circumstances.

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_ban_on_face_covering )
Very nice.

I would love to have an API I could push information to. If I could have our systems send dashboard updates it could alert me to system issues. That would /own/.
Show HN: Vine WebApp in Backbone
How Google Makes Millions Doing SEO
I seem to remember watching a documentary of the Berlin wall in which soldiers in the guard towers were not in casual communication with soldiers walking the wall/fenced area. None of them were there to keep people out, but in. Watchers monitoring watchers... Wish I could remember which documentary it was.
The common law process is by its nature an appeal to tradition. If there is a governing principle in our society, it's "this is okay because we've always done it this way." Yes, in a way it's ridiculous because we end up arguing about what people thought about border searches in 1789, but that's the nature of our society. We don't come to a consensus to solve problems, because we never agree on anything. Instead, we litigate them and grudgingly accept the outcomes. That's why court cases feature so prominently in our culture (Brown v. Board, Roe v. Wade, etc). Non-Americans, understandably, usually find it utterly bizarre.

Re: border searches, I'm not well-versed so I'll just point you to the wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception. Long story short, it still has to be reasonable, it's just that the bar is lowered because you should expect to get searched at a border.
>Google was caught pants down spying on everyone

If you're referring to the whole wifi thing, tell me, what information do you expect the street view car to be able to pick up in the 10 or so seconds it would have been associated with the AP? Their engineers have basically come out and said that was a fuckup, and I'm inclined to believe them because I find it hard to imagine what use that random data would be.

And to be honest, I'm more likely to believe a Google engineer rather than a namecalling troll who's virulently against them for no good reason.
> we seem to just be taking more of a MAD-style first strike approach to things

But that actually worked during the cold war. I mean MAD prevented it turning hot. Sure, it wasn't the most pleasant or elegant solution but it worked.
In fact, while I'm here, any other comments you have on the interface are also very welcome. Possible topics: Order of commands as printed here, or the names of the commands and/or arguments, order of the arguments, whether arguments should be optional or not, etc.

If you have ever been annoyed at an inconsistency in git, and wished you could have had a say when it was being designed, then now is your chance to possibly affect how this tool matches your ideals.

The tool is not yet anywhere near releasable, but will most like (A)GPL.
EMET 4.0 now available for download
Humble Bundle with Android 6
Sun glasses have the disadvantage of standing out indoors. Polarized glasses is an interesting idea though..
Downvote him all you want, but foreigners buying up the country really is a serious problem here. It's very unfortunate that the only politically coherent party questioning it happens to be antisemitic, but it's still a real issue.

And friendly_chap? I hate to break this to you, but we have bought your country. Who do you think owns Gyõri Keksz now? Wholly owned subsidiary of Kraft Foods - I just noticed that label last week. Sorry, man. I've stopped buying Gyõri Keksz in protest, but I don't think it's going to help.

Also, they're made in Slovakia now. I'm sure they work cheaper.
Is that leading image of skybox employees waving in the parking lot taken from 500 mi up?
Only brainless frogs get boiled…
For the first time I gave everything to the EFF... I wonder why.
I think reasonable people can debate whether foreign terrorist cells are a real enemy. In the context of NSA surveillance I tend to think "yes", but in the context of airport security I tend to think "no", so it's fair to say I'm ambivalent about terrorism.

But we do have an unmistakable and terrifically serious security problem: proliferation. We spent decades in an arms race with a foreign power that built an arsenal that could end the world several times over. When we won, they disintegrated. Meanwhile, the technology to duplicate atomic weapons technology that we had in the 1950s is improving.

There isn't a lot of foreign surveillance I can imagine having a problem with allocating to the problem of nuclear proliferation.
A Pre-written Business Plans Is As Useful As…
"Nice!" ?
I think the key difference is that there's already a whole lot of stuff available in Verilog from opencores, and basically nothing for the GreenArrays chips beyond what comes with them. It might be feasible to compile Verilog to the GA chips, but sadly, they don't seem to be working on that.

But I don't think you can so easily make a "higher-level"/"lower-level" distinction between the two. On one of the GA cores, you could quite reasonably execute a recursive algorithm — as long as it doesn't need more than 64 words of RAM — in a few lines of code. You can do runtime code generation. You can execute extremely irregular algorithms almost as easily as extremely regular ones.

But I think their failure to be compatible with anything else has doomed them.
http://www.texasobserver.org/border-patrol-takes-no-for-an-a...

http://www.flexyourrights.org/faqs/my-rights-at-checkpoints/
Fowler declined to comment any further, including whether he would seek to reopen the case, given the government admitting that secret, and constitutionally suspect, methods were used to gain access to his phone records.

Well that's troubling.
> I would argue providing a bad solution for a problem you know exists is better than providing a good solution for a problem that doesn't exist.

I would argue that details matter here and there is no valid generalization here. Neither of these are good things, but which is worse will depend on the details, and specifically how you define "good solution" and "bad solution".
I'm already using LibreOffice. Is there a fork of VirtualBox that I should be aware of too? If I actually used any databases, I'd be switching MySQL for MariaDB right now.
I believe this was the kind of thing that Wikileaks has been shooting for all along--make the keeping of dirty secrets so cumbersome that it becomes infeasible to keep them. This chicken has already flown the coop: the next leak will likely come from elsewhere, and again the government will be forced to scramble and plug hole that already leaked.
Ouch. Can you give me some examples? A lot of companies have this issue: Google and Apple both dump tech left and right. If it's open source software and it's popular, though, there's a good chance the community will make sure it sticks around.
As a background: I'm a Las Vegas native who lived there for 18 years but moved to California to go to school and find a job as an electrical engineer. My parents both moved to Las Vegas when they were young, ended up going to school at UNLV, and they are still working and living in Las Vegas to this day.

---

The reason states like California attract the worlds best and brightest engineers is because of its institutions of higher learning. Would Silicon Valley exist as it does today without the Stanfords and the Berkleys, I don't think so. Much of the rest of California benefits in the same way:

* San Jose - 5.8% employed are engineers (http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_41940.htm#17-0000)
* San Diego - 3.0% employed are engineers (http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_41740.htm#17-0000)
* Los Angeles - 1.9% employed are engineers (http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_31100.htm#17-0000)
* Reno, NV - 1.3% employed are engineers (http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_39900.htm#17-0000)
* Las Vegas, NV - 0.9% employed are engineers (http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_39900.htm#17-0000)

At UNLV, less than 5% of all students are engineering majors (https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/college-university-search...). Compared to the major California schools (and the University of Nevada: Reno) that is a pitifully small amount of students and it mirrors pretty closely the percentage of the population as a whole:

* UCSD - 14% engineering majors (https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/college-university-search/university-of-california-san-diego)
* UC Berkeley - 12% engineering majors (https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/college-university-search/university-of-california-berkeley)
* UCLA - 8% engineering majors (https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/college-university-search/university-of-california-los-angeles)
* UNR - 8% engineering majors (https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/college-university-search/university-of-nevada-reno)

For Las Vegas to compete as a technological powerhouse we need to work on retaining local talent from the high schools because as someone who has seen many friends (including myself) leave Las Vegas for a better education (and a better overall experience), I think this is one thing that cannot and should not be ignored.

Projects like the Downtown Project will only help retain smart young people in Las Vegas, it then becomes a process that keeps building on itself.
I don't want to judge your dad, but does he actually read links before clicking them?
Secret Agent - Randomize User Agent to Suppress Device Fingerprinting
I'm not mad about it because I pay taxes. Minor children, tax-exempt institutions, those with no income: they all deserve to be free of unjust government surveillance. Conflating the issue with the paying of taxes in a progressive tax system may introduce the rationale that those that pay the most taxes are the most deserving to not be watched.

In fact, some of nation's largest taxpayers (in the black corporations) are actively cooperating in this endeavor, so making this about taxes would seem to argue that the "taxpayer" has already spoken.
That's what the Iranians claim. We obviously claim differently.

But even if they were correct, or honestly mistaken, why is shooting at an aircraft a good response to it intruding on your airspace? When you're not in a hot war with the intruder nothing good can come from it. In fact, this brings us right back to KAL 007....
Unfortunately the Pakistani government seems fairly complacent about that one. It distresses me that even a nuclear power like them seems to tolerate so much of our shit. I think that nuclear deterrent is not as strong as we would like to think.
Our government wasn't using _Nineteen Eighty Four_ as a guidebook back then....
Without endorsing spying, there's a large moral gap between eavesdropping on someone's telephone calls and killing people.
If memory serves right, anyone contributing to MySQL (before the acquisition, probably still so) had to sign a contract giving up any copyright to them or it wouldn't even get considered. This is rather common in corporate open source projects, but I think the Free Software Foundation has similar rules for contributing, so it's not necessarily a corporate thing. Still kinda dodgy though.
Creative usernames and Spotify account hijacking
You can also be thusly legitimately violent in Texas if you pay a prostitute and don't get laid. It doesn't have to be illegitimate violence.
I read the transcript to this interview a few days ago, before Snowden did his recent Q&A session. In that session he seemed to directly address the charge of being a traitor, he said:

"Second, let's be clear: I did not reveal any US operations against legitimate military targets. I pointed out where the NSA has hacked civilian infrastructure such as universities, hospitals, and private businesses because it is dangerous. These nakedly, aggressively criminal acts are wrong no matter the target. Not only that, when NSA makes a technical mistake during an exploitation operation, critical systems crash. Congress hasn't declared war on the countries - the majority of them are our allies - but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people."
Firefox only plugin. Is there something comparable for chrome?

For reference, this page is unsatisfying: https://panopticlick.eff.org/self-defense.php
Yeah, that's right according to the Supreme Court, corporations now have citizenship, so they should have First Amendment rights too. Wouldn't that be ironic if that ruling actually did some good for our nation.
The Macs are designed to run this way as far as I can tell.
Tor has an unfortunately seedy underside, where data scrapers and online scammers (two of several use cases that I know of) use the service to obfuscate their actions and avoid crackdown. "That's why we can't have nice things."

For those who are still somewhat paranoid, consider getting paid proxies for a much more reliable service while still maintaining IP anonymity.
Actually you can drive a vehicle all you want without a license as long as you don't do it on a public road. The license doesn't allow you to drive a vehicle; it allows you to use public roads that have certain rules, for safety mostly, associated with them. Your license proves that you understand said rules and will obey them while on the public road. A lack of a license shows you cannot be bothered to follow the rules and are a danger to everyone else on the road. Therefore, you must be removed from the road for the safety of the others. Preventing an unlicensed driver from using a public road is more about the other people on the road than the single driver. Your freedom doesn't allow you to be a danger to others.

For instance, in many US states you are not required to have a license to operate farm equipment on a public road. There's likely many reasons for this but the rules of the road in those areas do not restrict you in those cases.

If I had a large enough tract of land that a shortcut going through the middle was beneficial to people around the property I can put up a sign at the entrance that states if you wish to use my road on my land then you follow my rules. It's the same principle.

Also, many a young teenager legally learned to drive a vehicle, cars or motorcycles, on private land even though it would be illegal for them to do so on a public road.
I'm not a terrorist; I'm a law abiding citizen of the U.S. Can I opt out of the PRISM thing? All I'm doing is adding unnecessary noise to their data. I want to do the patriotic thing and help my country, and in this case the best way to do that is to shrink the pool of data that they must monitor. (And no, I'm not kidding!)
My thoughts exactly while reading the article.

I also wondered if allegations against Huawei were falsified (assuming they were) not because they posed a security threat from the Chinese government, but because they would make it more difficult for U.S. surveillance programs.
> So who holds the copyright on these man pages? Did MySQL get copyright assignments from all contributers before Oracle bought them? If not, how do they have the authority to relicense the content?

As I recall, MySQL had a firm requirement for copyright assignment for contributions to MySQL because they dual-licensed it, using both GPL and commercial licenses, and without assignment they wouldn't have the freedom to do that without owning the copyright.

So, yeah, I would expect that they own the copyrights on everything in the man pages and can release them exclusively under closed licenses if they choose.
Thank you for your contributions to Clojure, it's a great step forward among all the other procedural languages around.
But preparing food is.
I wish there would be other ways to encode text, even phrases.

I once put a lot of time to gather a very short list of the most used english words.

Why not encode a phrase with its grammar ?
Microsoft is no different than any other commercial vendor in terms of tooling.
JackDB introduces Teams and Organizations, A Better Way to Share Data Sources
So, this is the actual substance:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_the_legitimate_use_...

There is a lot more nuance there than the party-line recitation suggests.
Parent's business provides virtual servers to the general public (disclosure: I'm a customer). With Xen, guests can run any distro kernel, self-compiled kernel with custom patches, or even BSD -- any guest kernel with Xen patches should work. The guests can update their kernel on their own, and the only the guest that's updating their kernel needs a reboot -- the host, and guests which don't change kernels except during major upgrades, can have months or years of uptime.

So if you have a business where some of your customers want custom, bleeding-edge kernels, and others mainly value stable systems with high uptimes, and everyone wants to run a different distribution's kernel, then containers aren't for you.

I guess I'm trying to say that VPS will always have a niche in the market. The parent lives in that niche. Containers offer fundamental resource-efficiency advantages and may capture large markets from Xen and Xen-like technologies over the next few years, but I disagree with the article's implication that Xen will eventually become extinct. As the parent notes, RAM is cheap, and the difference in costs between container and Xen will give the former an advantage, but never be big enough to drive the latter completely out of business, since the difference is small (on an absolute scale) and Xen can do a few things that containers can't.
Do you disagree with the studies showing that helmets prevent injuries?

> A 2012 re-analysis of the 16 studies in the Attewell meta-analysis, by Elvik, found that, compared to helmeted cyclists, unhelmeted cyclists were 2.5 times more likely to sustain a brain injury; 2.3 times more likely to sustain a head injury; and 4.3 times more likely to sustain a fatal injury.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_helmet#Science:_measur...
Does this mean that they will be swappable like a propane tank and you only "rent" the battery or pay a deposit and get that back when you buy a refill? If so this is a pretty big game changer. I hope it's easier than going to a dealership and it means service stations can swap the battery quickly.
I'm not all that interested in how the information was acquired, but metadata goes both ways. 'We acquired important information by reading ChuckMcM's HN posts' tips off other people involved in conversations with you such as FamousActress and myself, so open discussion of the details is tricky.
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