skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a story of a hacker, a sysadmin, one of us, who made a choice that could very well cost him his life. He is now being pursued all over the globe by the world's largest super-power, which has yet to catch him. His story directly addresses the role of technology in anonymity and privacy, and the details of his story are full of lots of fun technical details. In addition, he's carrying notebooks that have even more stories about technology, spying, privacy, and such.

Yeah, sure, I don't care what he had for lunch or whether he's sitting in the aisle or window seat, but as far as getting attention on HN? What else would you expect?
That's why you need the "taste for truth". It's not controversial in the business world: I am perfectly capable of giving an unbiased presentation of the pros and cons of Git over Mercurial, even though I personally prefer the latter.
If it bothers you, take the bigrss feed here and put it through an rss filter to remove the articles you do not like?

This doesn't solve the bigger problem, namely, that posting countless stories on Snowden is really killing HN. Seriously, we're one step away from having stories on what Snowden had for lunch on his flight to Moscow on the front page. I don't buy the "Let the community decide what should be on the front page" argument either. Communities tend to follow the same laws of entropy like anything else in this universe. Without a certain number of people putting in considerable effort to keep up the quality of submitted articles and discussions, they tend to devolve into places with a bunch of articles that bring nothing new to the table, and with discussions that are nothing more than long, tiresome rants or flame wars that have no real value.
This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia.

Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reason to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.

"Beyond Vietnam", A Time to Break Silence By Rev. Martin Luther King
It may not be current events, but as far as I know, very little has changed since he wrote it.
They're not good.
http://highscalability.com/ is also a great blog for those interested in scaling backend architectures, they have great use cases
Well, the Post gave us nothing at all. I'd rather take slanted information than none.
I'm not sure I understand the whole "The only exercise people should be doing is strength training" meme that seems to be going around at the moment. Can someone with more knowledge explain it to me?

It seems (to me at least) that some exercise is better than no exercise, and that more exercise (at least to an extent) is better than less exercise. It seems to me therefore, that people should find an exercise that they really enjoy (whether running, cycling, strength training, climbing, martial arts, etc) and do it. That way, they'll be doing something they enjoy and they'll do more of it.

It seems slightly disingenuous for "experts" to recommend that everyone drop everything else and just do one type of exercise as if everyone they're speaking to is exactly the same, has exactly the same goals and enjoys exactly the same stuff.

Are they targeting geeks/the HN crowd because geeks tend to favour the idea that there is one "right way" of doing something and are more likely to latch on to it?
Turbulence at Mt. Gox Creates Arbitrage Opportunities For Bitcoin Traders
> contradict yourself by first saing that rich "never want to contribute" and later giving example of people actualy doing this

its not an contradiction - i assumed it was obvious that "never want to contribute" implies true altruistic behaviour, where as doing it for "PR" reasons dont count.

IN any case, yes its true that the rich shouldn't be forced to give up their assets for those who didn't earn it. But for BI to work, this essentially _has_ to be the case! Lets say the total amount of money (however you want to count it) is M, while the total amount of goods and services produced in 1 period of time is P. If BI were instated, how could it be paid for? Either increase M (by printing money essentially), or by keeping M constant, but redistribute it from those who have more (the machine owners) to those who don't have as much. Increasing M simply causes inflation, since P didn't change in this case, and so after a while, shit just gets more and more expensive. Redistributing M is what you said above - forcibly taking the assets from someone and give it to someone else. Neither is going to work imho. You might say P would increase, offsetting the problem of increasing M and the inflation it causes. THat might happen, but i don't think the rate at which P increases will match the rate at which M increases.
You can disagree with his statement about PRISM, and that doesn't really have much to do with his original point.

He wasn't saying don't post thoughtful op-eds about PRISM (and if he was I think he'd get no support here at all), he's saying enough with the tabloid like articles about the people at the center of controversies, which have nothing to do with the larger issue.
Edit to clarify: Greenwald has never been a "journalist" in the modern conception of a totally impartial stater of facts. Personally I think people with opinions can be journalists too, especially with regard to legal protections for the press.
Ask HN: should I care about losing karma points?
So apparently my ideas are very unpopular and I always get down votes. Does this matter or should I keep speaking my mind?
For Snowden's sake I hope he's able to escape to asylum.

But for our sake, I also hope that he's caught.

If Snowden gets away, the public will forget about this whole issue pretty quickly (remember, we've known or strongly suspected this whole thing for quite some time). But if he's prosecuted, he becomes the martyr to spark dissidence and protest.

If the government lets the story end, they'll probably win. If the story is continued for additional chapters, then we have some chance to make the pendulum start to swing back the other way.
>No, it means that you understand current laws and enforcements thereof. If you want to have a philosophical debate about the appropriate limits of the state, then that's something you need to take up through the political process.

I certainly understand current laws and how they are enforced. I simply reject them.

Do you think that your own position is somehow not a philosophical position of some kind? We all have a similar obligation to either defend or not defend our positions. If your "side" happens to be the one in control, all the more reason to justify it, unless you prefer coercion and force to do so.
Yep, noticed the same. I guess most readers here on HN will go for the SF genre first :-)
>they used other's people work to get rich but they paid each of those people fair amount of money

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?

Did they pay their parents for raising them into privilege? And on, and on, and on. Anyone rich today got there on the backs of the society they lived in. Elon Musk would be nothing had he been born and raised in an Amazon tribe and you know it.

>Also, unemployment is an artificial problem that only exists in fundamentally sick, socialist economies.

Now you're just showing off ignorance [1]. Chile was as close to laissez faire as has ever been tried on that scale. Where did their mass unemployment come from?

>In capitalism there's always more work to do that workforce available.

Ideological dreaming. Nothing more.

> And if you pay people for doing nothing large part of them will have no motivation to find any meaningful job.

Reagan's "welfare queens" lives on. 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? I suspect we'd get enough Tesla's out of such a system to offset all your mythical welfare queens.

[1] http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secC11.html
He's not saying that Texas is necessarily well governed; he's saying that it's a good place to live and start a business.
> Why not let the others here decide what they think is interesting

Weird that you cannot spot the contradiction here.

Why not let others here decide what they think shouldn't be here instead of upvoting crap posts? Other people are abusing the upvote button by voting for content that should not be here.

> This is not Reddit.

The quality over the past week has been lousy.
Yeah, but it is also far far easier to unravel the washing of bitcoins.

Every transaction in BTC is recorded in the public blockchain _forever_. A good enough computer has infinite amounts of time to analyze the transactions of BTCs after the fact.

I dare say it is impossible to properly launder money with BTCs as it is. (ZeroCoins or other protocol extensions notwithstanding)
The "producer" role in the 1960s was very different from what it is today. It wasn't until Dub Reggae was developed in Jamaica that the producer became more of a creator than someone sitting back and making sure the track sounded good while the band played it. A music producer and a television producer had similar levels of creative control, for example. But when Dub was created, that all changed. The producer became the focus of the track, because dub is just basic reggae that's been re-sampled and bathed in reverb, with some cool space sound effects thrown in. In this paradigm, the producer was also the DJ, sometimes (like in King Tubby's case) running their own soundsystem. Dub created the framework by which hip-hop and EDM are created and performed. But that didn't happen until the late 1970s.
It would be great if this works, but there is a lot of noise in the book world. Even with good filtering I find myself putting down a lot of drivel. This said, if it opens up the variety of what we're reading, it can't hurt. Sometimes I wonder if Amazon and friends unduly cut down on the variety of what I see. The browsing ability of bookstores has been lost.
I just released a open-source package which enables you to create a Django centric stack on Vagrant with the help of Salt. It was indeed very easy to write. You can check it out here:

https://github.com/wunki/django-salted
One of fellow geeks had chosen to risk everything which he had - whether it was recklessness or courage is a different thing - and publish classified information, shedding some light on the topic of people being monitored by the government.

As much as you might be irritated by the amount of information related to him which is being published here, personally, I'm curious how the story will unfold. I presume that there are others who are curious and others who are irritated as well.

In most of the cases you are right - hn is not the place for gossip about famous people. The thing here is that we are not discussing what did Kardashian ate for dinner and why it's bad for her cellulite, but following a story of somebody who is not giving a shit and trying to if not defend, then at least shed some light on our privacy, as it's being taken from us.

Please don't get me wrong, but I'd strongly advise using some filtering tools (there are dozens) for hn in this specific case.
For signaling, nothing magic with OStel - we are using standard SIP over TLS. The TLS certifcates are based on the standard Root CA trust model. We are looking into pinning as possible feature for the Android CSipSimple app. We are already supporting features like pinning and trust on first use (TOFU-POP) in Gibberbot, so we understand the importance here of those advanced features.

Ultimately, our focus with OStel (and the larger Open Secure Telephony Network) is to build best-practice based secure voice systems built on free software, that work like the Internet does. This also means apps like Jitsi, Groundwire, SFLPhone and other compliant clients can work just as well with our system as the primary Android app we focus on.
It seems like one of those certifications you would grab if you were insecure about not having a CS degree.

"Look, I can write compilers!"
Flagging != downvoting. We should upvote things we find interesting, and flag things that isn't appropriate at all.
Resetting Facebook: Expectations & Priorities vs. Procrastination
Not to mention that something subjectively (or even almost objectively) fringe or crazy immediately becomes exactly 50% true if one major party endorses the view.
The only thing Greenwald has done wrong is be overconfident in his ability to report accurately on technological specifics he doesn't understand. And I don't see how the resultant errors have hurt much of anything.

The main impact of his reporting is to get people out of denial about what they sort of knew anyway, namely that the NSA has access to lots and lots and lots and lots of otherwise-private information. EXACTLY which kinds of information the NSA has, and which kinds it's still a few years away from securing, hardly matter from a public policy standpoint. Little practical harm is coming to innocent people from the snooping right now; the risks to liberty over time are horrific, and so something must be done to rein them in; those things are true under any reasonable theory as to exactly what data the NSA does or doesn't already have.
Security risk blocked for your protection

Reason:
This Websense category is filtered: Potentially Damaging
Content. Sites in this category may pose a security
threat to network resources or private information, and
are blocked by your organization.
Oh man, I remember this book. My university uses it for a sophomore level CS course.
Cool, but doesn't work on Firefox 14 which is roughly a year old. Fair enough, you've stated "next generation". So I updated to version 21 and it worked.

The thing is, it was broken in Firefox 14, no error message or browser detection or feature detection, just a broken game. It's still a rough experience these HTML games compatibility-wise. I remember detecting older versions of Flash 10 years ago for games I was making then, and warning users they needed to upgrade. I wouldn't have been allowed to deliver a Flash movie that broke on earlier versions.

Needing to create an account to save progress shouldn't be needed what with offline storage, or even just a cookie to save where I'm up to.

The social media vibe is slightly overdone, I didn't expect persuasive sign-up prompting just to play. But there it is.

7 / 10
Or symptom, anyway.
Did Amazon just forbid affiliate links on responsive websites?
Awesome book. I think we used this book in my CS days, but would have to check my notes.

Well timed post as well: We're adding more on programming fundamentals to our course at http://www.thinkful.com/
BI’s Next Frontier: Marketing
People keep suggesting that his flight itenerary and whereabouts aren't interesting. This is simply not true. This is extremely important and could have much larger implications. China and Russia are essentially spitting in the US governments face by allowing him to move in and out of their countries, and if that isn't interesting to you maybe you should spend more time on reddit or imgur.
How do you brake?…
After writing around a 200 LOC toy program, a friend of mine posed a question to me:

"If someone offered you this deal, would you take it: You get $1,000,000,000 if your program runs perfectly on the first try. If it doesn't run perfectly, he chops your hand off."

This got my thinking a lot about what being a hacker would be like without a hand. I can bang code near 100 WPM, and I get thrills from flying around Vim like a wizard. Reading this article has definitely strengthened my position that I would not take the bet.
says the non-native speaker who firmly believes that such mistakes are contagious

In that case, you should know that the comma in your first sentence shouldn't be there. To understand why, consider this sentence with a similar form:
"I have to wonder whether this is an apple, or an orange."

I know it's pedantic and doesn't add anything to the conversation, but there are lots of people in here and we wouldn't want it to catch.
Haha that's an awesome book, thanks for sharing!
Seeing as the random from the fantasy genre always gives me item 220, I feel as though it is not very random.
Let's not restrict it to people relevant to controversies. Let's stop all the tabloid articles and blogspam.
And of course we, the general public, are not free of responsibility

Right. Hacker News has been dominated by Snowden stories (particularly over the weekend), and far fewer NSA stories.
> If you don't have some kind of solution for the poor

puts on tin hat

these NSA/illegal surveillance is a ploy to gain control of information, such that when time comes for the poor to revolt, they will have no privacy with which to organize their actions. Their every move will be monitored, and the smallest spark will be snuffed out before it spreads, leading to a state where each citizen is too afraid for their own personal safety (or safety of their loved ones) to really commit much, and such is a way to end revolutions before it starts.

Don't agree to laws that might seem benefitial now, but will be used later to enforce laws you don't agree to later.
It does not mean more people writing about the actual issues, it means more people writing about irrelevant details of these people's lives like Edward Snowden's girlfriend's blog. That's the point.

Nobody's saying don't post thoughtful opinion pieces or details about legislation or court cases or anything else actually having to do with the issues.

You can claim that most or all of the posts that have appeared on here are relevant, but they aren't all relevant. That's why this post that we're commenting on exists and has gotten upvoted; the quality of those posts has been abysmal.

And your response is not to argue the point but to basically tell us to shut up. Thanks for contributing.
Custom Models in Ember.js
I don't think there's a need for this: "For some insane reason " it doesn't sound very professional.
This depends on the "crime", and whether unwilling parties were harmed by the transaction. If two parties conduct an exchange of products or services, where both parties were not coerced, then this is not a crime in my opinion.

On the other hand, if I actually do injure someone, then that person could lay a claim against me. They are the ones entitled to any property of mine at that point, as compensation, not the State.
Show HN: Chance – Random generator library for JS – my weekend project
I don't have a problem at all with the volume of stories, I just think that we need to honor Snowden's wishes. He explicitly asked that focus remain on the content of his leaks rather than about him personally. Let's talk about his leaks and how we are going to create a future without the need for them rather than about the man himself.
"Salt’s approach was far simpler."

Funny, that's how I feel about Ansible compared to everything else including Salt.
It's called misdirection. Leak that you're leaving Hk, via Russia, via Cuba. That take a completely different route. Tradecrafty.
It's not actually that bad. Your consumption is basically flat as you go from $0k/year to $20k/year earned income.

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/why_the_poor_dont_wor...
Saying voting is compulsory isn't 100% accurate. The actual requirement is that you attend the poll, there is no way anyone can enforce that you cast a vote. You can simply turn up, get your name crossed off and walk right out the door without voting, or as many others choose to, cast an invalid vote.
>a company would have to stand on it's ability to solve a marketplace demand.

This is the libertarian hand waving I complain about.

As long as you have a group with guns, companies will be paying that group to use their guns to enforce the rights of those companies. That's the most rational thing for a company to do. You can't out-innovate your competitors forever, you can't undercut their price forever and you can't provide better quality forever. Doing any of these things is very hard work, can be very expensive and you will lose eventually. It's a safer approach, once you win in a market to use those winnings to buy government-created barriers to entry against you're biggest enemy: new competition.

>Are you against voluntary society?

No, I assume it's inevitable given a large enough timescale. I have simply read enough to know that such a society is incompatible with capitalism.
Escucha me!
This is a struggle, for sure. We want to keep them consistent but we also want to make sure we're keeping things moving. They shouldn't be a checklist, but actual features, too. Timeboxing work is the only workable solution I can see.
Sorry but either you're badly ignorant or being deliberately disingenuous.

Snowden has gone far beyond simple whistleblowing about US citizen's information being collected. He has specifically detailed hacking attempts by the US against Chinese universities and cell phone companies. This is clearly a different form of leaking and it is something the majority of the public is strongly against.
Could I use Salt to replace Chef and Fabric? Not yet.
You misunderstood him. He's not saying "only cocoa exposes gl", he said "cocoa only (as in just) exposes GL, but other cross-platform libs also expose it for you if you prefer not to deal with cocoa".
> but as far as getting attention on HN? What else would you expect?

No-one is calling for zero Snowden articles.

What people are asking for is for a reduction in the flood of Snowden trivia.

"Snowden Does X" will be reported by the twelve different news sources, and each of these will be posted to HN. Some of these will have blogpost reactions, which also get posted. An hour later some politician will respond to "Snowden Does X", which will be reported by 12 different sources, and blogged about, and etc etc.

The submissions are tedious and very repetitive.

But, worse, so are the comments. It's pretty much "The NSA is bad, and what they did is bad"; "Snowden is a traitor" or "snowden isn't a traitor".

Some of it was mildly interesting but now there's very little new "deeply interesting" commentary.

Snowden stories are, now, a good example of "intensely but shallowly interesting".
I will complain because I wasn't paying because the rich weren't paying. What could my pennies do if they won't contribute? Seriously, this has to be the most naive nonsense I've ever read on HN.
I like that they share the lecture notes too. http://i.stanford.edu/~ullman/fcsc-notes.html
Come on. We should never, ever make a post asking the community to reconsider what's been going on? That's ridiculous.