skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
AFAIK the NSA was not informed, the FBI was. They investigated and concluded that there was no firm evidence of intent, case closed. Due process at work in our police state, strange.

Also, a student with a naturalized American brother who travels to visit family and speak with radical Islamists at his old home is not the kind of thing that either collecting phone call information or using Facebook Open Graph^W^W^W Prism is going to work well against. There are other types of terroristic threats, Prism/phone watch lists will work better against those.

If anything Maj. Nidal Hasan would almost be a better example, except that the NSA system worked perfectly... it was only in the follow-up investigation that it was decided that Hasan was just making innocent probes, so it was the investigation that failed and not the NSA system.

Arguing that monitoring every communication on the planet makes no sense... even with contractor augments there are not enough U.S. citizens to monitor all world communications, and the pool of available analysts quickly drops when you consider security clearance issues, training required, pay available, the qualifications needed, etc.

So no, it doesn't follow that you could perfectly foil terrorist plots even with interception and monitoring of worldwide communications, so the fact that NSA is as successful as they are can't be waved away by saying "anyone could do it". They can't monitor everyone even with their Utah data center, so apparently they've been doing a good job at focusing their resources at the mission at hand.

Any either way there's always a tradeoff. You wouldn't accept a 9/11 in your country every day to ensure absolute privacy as soon there would be no one left to be private from, so let's not act like the priority value is ∞. The staggering success of Twitter, Facebook and Google reveal how much people truly value their privacy.

Even the Constitution is in on the act, as both warrants and "reasonable searches" are explicitly mentioned as limits to Fourth Amendment rights, and people don't seem to freak out about those.

So while people may have different answers about where they fall on privacy <==> security (where a given program has a tradeoff between the two), don't act like the extreme choice is the only one; even the Framers didn't think that.
Petition to end the debt based money system
Yeah, my initial reply failed in a sense because there's no distinction between italicized and plain periods. The first that you quote above was entered as double quote star dot dot dot star double quote, but rendered the same as the second without the stars (asterisks).
> Those warrants are beyond the power of the President.

Aren't all warrants beyond the power of the President? Isn't that the point of warrants in the first place?
Can you explain what each slide of the document means and how the program was actually implemented? I still have no idea despite reading a variety of different articles.
I saw the original announcement of Typescript at JSconf EU last year. It was an interesting moment: everyone was expecting another Dart, or less (there's a sea of Macs and most professional JS devs experience of Microsoft is IE) but stayed to listen to the presentation out of respect for the creator, who also made Delphi and C#.

Pretty much everyone came out impressed. Typescript is just JS with type hints, and neat warnings if you send a function something which its signature doesn't expect.

You can make a JS project a Typescript one immediately, adding type hints as you go, which for large projects is damn useful. The output, however, is pure regular old JS.

It's just like a CSS preprocessor, but for JS - transparently adding some optional awesomeness.

It works on Linux/Mac and SublimeText (albeit you don't get all the VS Intellisense stuff IIRC) too. I'm looking forward to trying it on a new project.
Looks like he won the seat in a gerrymandered district. This manipulation of district boundaries takes advantage of people who vote along party lines regardless of an individual candidate's qualifications.
Would be great if commute could be either public transport or by bike - I don't have a car, which in Denmark isn't very uncommon for city people. Otherwise great app - now I just need a way for it to be on my TV when i eat breakfast :D
Drawing waveforms is a neat approach to visualizing music, but we decided to take a different direction for more casual users
What you mention on the UI front is why I've been leaning more towards just using a nice base like bootstrap, and building from there. Once you are reliant on a full-featured toolkit, working on edge cases becomes much more complicated, not to mention maintenance and support. Things have been evolving fast since very early on... it's nowhere near as bad as the v4 browser days (IE4 & NN4, not HTML4)... Things will get more diverse, but I do think we will see at least some consolidation and reduction in popularity in the next 5 years, as many apps using the various frameworks start to retire.

Personally, I would like to see jQueryUI's widgets ported to use Bootstrap as a base theme. I think the interfaces for it are decent from the JS side, but the markup leaves little to be desired.
There's a perfectly valid use case for using the Dropbox site to get to your files. A huge benefit of Dropbox is the ability to access your files anywhere, including a computer that does not or even cannot have the client installed. I'm thinking of a library machine at your university, your grandmother's computer, a friend's computer where you don't want to sign them out of their own desktop client, a work laptop where you're not allowed to install your own software, etc.
Why do they reject dashboard apps?
Now that EFF broke the barrier in filing with the FISC, I have a feeling we'll see a lot more of this. And that's a good thing.

I expect Google's filing to show up here shortly:
http://www.uscourts.gov/uscourts/courts/fisc/index.html
You clearly are not Dutch or Danish.
You can't leave out the crucial bit that it's all about border searches, for people who have recently crossed the border.

Are you suggesting that if I haven't recently crossed a border, I'm somehow immune to these searches, or have a right to refuse them?
Flames in Microgravity
I would find it really interesting if some employees at companies like Google, Microsoft, etc would come forward and corroborate Snowden's claims as well. At some point, SOME engineering work was involved on their side to make it happen, and there is likely documentation. I would love to see design documentation on how the collection systems work so we can confirm exactly the government has automated access to.
thanks for the feedback, we'll take a look into making that clearer
using it for years, it's ok and clients like it so not sure what's the problem.
I've fixed that now! Sorry about the slow load times.
I've been seeing it massively for much longer than the past couple of weeks. Think of things like Flat UI for Bootstrap.
And I still can't triforce
Thanks! Happy to hear people like it.
What drives your ambition?
If you were to describe one thought or one question that keeps you motivated and inspires you?

For me, it is "Why not me (us)?". Meaning, if other people can make something out of nothing, have fun doing it, and be successful along the way, then "Why not me?"
Thoroughly enjoying your book, thanks for writing it! It was also great to get a DRM-free copy through O'Reilly. Please write more :)
In the US, "probably" is probably an understatement.
The first one is beatable if -- and only if, I believe -- a square with two three-in-a-rows in it counts as both an X and an O. If this is the case, then O can win one round before X has a chance to it. But otherwise -- as you have it configured, where the first to get a three-in-a-row sets the larger square to either an X or an O -- it's unbeatable.
Does vagrant apply in this situation? I thought it was only for dev machines
After that it's pretty easy to force a win. Whatever square they send you to, you just send them back to one of those two squares.
Had fun playing with it. Trying to play http://i.imgur.com/ArXK5rW.png didn't go so well, it exited after one or two notes.
Unless we start spending less than 1% of our GDP or so on Pentagon Inc, I don't mind this. What's the point of having a $12 Billion aircraft carrier if a Chinese hacker can hack it? Or having a $700 Billion a year military if a kid with telnet can hack your power grid? I mean to say that war has been shifted to computer networks and we need to be ready.

I just think it can be done without tracing all the phone calls my aunt makes.
See chrisdone's comment above. For more details on how GHC began life, check out SPJ's book:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...

You might also take a look at GRIN. Here's a quote from the GRIN paper:

"For a lazy language like Haskell, compilers typically compile one module at a time. At first sight, this might appear as a good opportunity to optimize several procedures at once. However, it seems as if this does not apply very well to low level optimizations, like those presented in this paper, where the actual dynamic control flow is important... In a lazy language, a function that is local to a module in the source code might very well escape from the module at run time (if it is built into a closure) and then be called from somewhere else."

I'm very interested in your thoughts on frameworks, but this isn't really the right forum. It's usually pretty easy to catch me in #snapframework on IRC.
Also, if I had a unicorn.
I hate vacations
This data could probably also be analyzed to help predict the stock market.
"The rule required that anyone copying data from a secure network onto portable storage media does so with a second person who ensures he or she isn’t also collecting unauthorized data."

Don't mind me over here by myself, I'm not copying anything...
It seems to be very close to CoffeeScript, but without this ugly Ruby syntax (for me).
GitRec: Your personalized GitHub repo recommender
But even in your example the content of the pages is what's important, and that is data, not metadata. Metadata might be stuff like "the search for '$FOO' was done from IP address '$BAR' at time '$BAZ'". And you could even argue that $FOO itself is really data, not meta-data.

Likewise the contents of your receipt is data, not metadata. It's literally the bill of goods that authorizes you to take the named items from the store and (with your additional purchase creds) authorized Kroger to charge your credit card $X.XX. Kroger may have inferred more than you wished, but they did it with the data.
Oracle Patches 40 Java Security Holes
Launching So.cl - A totally different social network
Similar to how the VIP feature works but in the consolidated view that you've created. I want to see everything in one place.

It's too easy to get distracted by other emails once I open Mail.app or, in my case, Mailbox.
How do I check the canary on a storage array?
Personally, I think Binney has a difficult time speaking and, if he had written out his response, would have chosen a different word than "traitor," just based on the way he stuttered and struggled to complete that sentence.
> Google should cut the crap with PR moves and stop hoarding so much data about everything we do online.

I like that Google has a lot of data on me---it makes their services much more valuable to me. I don't like that the government can access it secretly.

These are distinct opinions and both can be reasonably satiated simultaneously if there are proper checks and balances in government.
I experience the same on a 15" Mac Book Pro running Chrome when I show the bookmarks bar and have recently completed a download.
In another thread some Google employees were saying that it's unlikely that Google has a secret backdoor system, since keeping products of any size online requires a lot of collaboration amongst the different teams, and the infrastructure changes so often anything that was at one point installed would be broken by now.

But that's just hear-say.
Depending on what precisely they do with the data, they could do things quite a bit more damaging than turning off your Gmail account, though it certainly wouldn't rise to the level of sending you to gitmo. The worst would probably be some kind of financial and/or career blackballing, if they sold data-mined information about you to credit agencies, lenders, private investigators, and/or prospective employers, and something particularly damaging were contained in it.

I believe their privacy policy currently says they won't do that, and it's especially clear that they won't do anything except target ads using information mined out of your email. But I don't think there would be anything illegal about it, as long as they didn't do something like outright blackmail (offer to let you pay to expunge negative information or something).
Yes, the URLs were long and unruly to the blog posts, and my natural reaction is to de-clutter. With the down votes, however, sufficient negative feedback has been received to alter this behavior :) That said, it's too late to edit the offending post, unfortunately.
How instructive is it that the EFF was able to file a brief with the FISC and be granted a motion on a federal lawsuit? That seems pretty similar to the powers of a typical federal court. Note: I'm no lawyer and did not stay at a holiday inn last night.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/public-first-secret-co...
As someone that bought and thoroughly enjoyed the "Land of Lisp", is there a point to also buying this book?

Is Racket so much better that it's worth learning compared to Haskell, Erlang, Go, etc. ?

Can someone comment on what unique insight or benefit I might gain from learning Racket and from this book?
Now Sunday's oddly worded press release makes more sense:

"The statement that a SINGLE analyst can eavesdrop on domestic communications without proper legal authorization is incorrect"

http://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/191-pre...
"wouldn't they HAVE to store your email password in plain text?"

No, they would only need to have the plain text for the brief period when they're using your password to log in to your e-mail. So they could store it encrypted in their database and decrypt it when needed.
Typescript is in my peripheral vision so far but that really makes me want to look into it properly.

How do you think does it fit in with ES6? I feel like we're coming to a point in time where there should be a major shift in how we write javascript in a modern way -- so far my thought process has been that Coffescript is a nice stopgap before ES6 and the dust has almost settled enough to write ES6 first sorta..

Bit of a ramble. Interesting times.
I would argue differently.

Take a look at Rohloff hubs.

Take a look at belt drives.

Take a look at disc brakes.

You've already dismissed everything to do with materials, oh well.

Sounds like you just mean: bicycles are two triangles and two hoops... and you would be right.

Strangely that's because the UCI restricted the development of bikes to ensure a level playing field, recumbents were banned in races, as were Moultons with their small wheels and pylon frames, as were the monocoque carbon frames, as were the bikes with farings.

Ultimately, being restricted to two triangles and two hoops means that the manufacturers can only really innovate with everything else.
I had a friend who once speculated that if the government wanted to discourage driving, they could mandate that driver wear helmets.

Considering how dangerous and destructive driving is, maybe its a win-win.
It's just for fun, it isn't really able to detect dumb asses. Kind of a preview to the upcoming Dumb Ass Cam app.
http://dumbasscam.com
What set of facts would the NSA be required to show before those who oppose these surveillance measures in general start saying what the NSA has done is reasonable?

Is 50 threats stopped that wouldn't have been enough to justify the intrusion of privacy? Would 100? Maybe 1000?
I'll give you that, I know a few Jobbik myself and they're exactly as you describe. And I also remember the party official who discovered last year that he himself was ethnically Jewish and was forced out.

But fair's fair, I haven't personally been at any such demonstrations - but I'll bet you haven't been at any knife fights, either.

As to the media - after 25 years of marriage to a Hungarian, and now a year living in Budapest, my Hungarian still sucks. I can keep up my end of a conversation if I've had enough sleep and I can read text fine, but I usually have to ask my wife what any given news story is about. Most of my exposure to current events consists of her watching the news while I'm finishing up one job or another on the laptop. So I'm not 100% up to speed on detail.

The media here honestly seems less slanted than in the States, but that is a really vaguely anecdotal judgement. It would be nice if a study were actually possible, but such is the nature of media that it isn't, really.
Realm of Racket (ROAR) is not a translation of Land of Lisp,
but it is heavily inspired by LOL. Our emphasis is on readers
who have done some programming, possibly in Racket-based
teaching languages but not necessarily so, and who wish to
see the beginnings of Racket. You may wish to check out the
sample chapter on Hungry Henry and compare ROAR to LOL
before you buy. Or borrow the book from a friend to see how
ROAR ends in a chapter on #lang.

The author team really consists of eight students and two
'old' people: David Van Horn and myself. As is tradition in
my lab, young people go first and 'old' people come last on
an author list. Everyone knows us already anyway.

Enjoy! -- Matthias
Ah, but you can also fill in the blank with "the well armed populace".

Maybe not anyone you know, but at least half of the nation, 300+ million guns and more every day. Heck, 2/3rds of the nation lives in shall issue concealed carry regimes, with well over 8 million licenses granted.

This puts constraints on a would be out of control government. Let us hope we don't have to file a claim on this insurance policy.
It does. He can now force you to now place pointless moves in the center square.
The Roman republic actually did have a copresidency (two consuls).
Researchers using lasers find long-lost city dating 1 millenium
Meet People for Coffee through LinkedIn (prototype)
Amazon's information is incorrect. According to WorldCat and Google Books, the book is 513 pages, not 650. Also, its copyright date should be 1980, not 1979.
I'm sorry, but what's so totally different about it? At first glance this looks like a Pinterest clone of some kind.
Google Now is basically the same idea, but even more interesting/extensible. Maybe not quite as "Morning" oriented UX-wise, but it satisfies the same needs for me. I can look at it in the morning and see the weather, commute time, tasks, calendar events, etc on a dashboard. Works great!
RFC: Low-overhead profiling for LuaJIT 2.1
codecademy, treehouse, codeschool
Of course, it was actually called the Department of War until 1947.

Calling it defense is just semantics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_War...
It's not copying data being transferred, it's copying data sitting on-disk (which does include sending along updates to that data on-disk). NSA was getting that data even before PRISM, but companies were compiling it and sending it manually.
Yeah, my point is, we don't really know what the scope is -- we have Snowden's word and some slides that mention direct access to servers. But the engineers who worked at the companies and performed the integrations know and probably have evidence if it was just standing up a box they scp'd data to manually upon request, or a more elaborate automated system. If some of those people would step forward with evidence, we could could confirm or refute Snowden's claims.
They are aiming to bring ES6 into today development so they looks into ES6 specs very often.
Right. When you find a way to magically control the bits read from one hard drive and can ensure that same sequence of bits isn't "copied" and written to a different storage medium... without a "second person".... well, you let me know.

I guess with some right group policy settings, a TPM and BitLocker, you could get close maybe. Still going to be challenging to keep me from booting the machine, logging into it and catting that file... somewhere. Give me `wget` and a script and I could transmit data using only GETs.
> So by revealing the number of FISA requests they receive and what sort of data is being sought they hope to clear this "direct access" mess. As even FISA orders are much more acceptable than wholesale access.

Not necessarily. As another commenter pointed out [1], a single FISA order doesn't have to correspond to a single citizen. One order can encompass millions of accounts.

> their denials address that, they clearly say that is not the case, instead they sftp the data after being served with court orders or warrants and such, including the secretive FISA requests.

While I think it's reasonable to doubt the claim that the NSA has true direct access to servers, I haven't been given a reason to doubt that information can be requested without court orders, warrants or FISA requests.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5901811
The article doesn't provide much citations for "Bicycle helmets do an outstanding job of keeping our skulls intact in a major crash." which is the premise it starts out with and builds its case off.

Obvious questions arise... like why are motorcycle or pro-sports helmets so radically different in design (full head + visor), even for scooters that barely go faster than bicycles, and how many "major crashes" result in head trauma as opposed to other kinds?

And if bicycle helmets are so great, why don't we require car drivers to wear helmets too? Surely then they would also do an 'outstanding job in keeping our skulls intact in a major crash'?
I am reminded of something someone* said about leaks in 2006:

The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive "secrecy tax") and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption.

Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.

In other words, in an increasingly digital world, its gets easier and easier for large scale leaks to happen, and although you can take measures to try and stop that, overall those measures will damage your effectiveness even more. Some leaks are 'good' and some are 'bad', but over time, in a leaky world, the overall long term effect should be positive - a move towards more openness.

* its pretty obvious who, but I don't want to derail.
There were derailleur type things then, but nothing at all like the wide range of gearing that post WWII bicycles have.

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