skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Does PRISM make you more or less interested in working for the NSA?
After 9/11, I thought if 2 planes could hit the towers, the government obviously doesn't have the sort of super-secret technology I thought they did. Then, we learn about PRISM; so maybe we do. And more importantly, given the nature of big data and technology, maybe I could help...but should I. Since I couldn't answer the question for myself, I thought I'd put it out to you all.

What do you think?
Please refrain from statistics that are complete bullshit.

Thanks.
I laughed out loud at this bit. Translation "Maybe we would have helped but seeing as you're monitoring our networks without our say so - we won't"
Mr. Snowden apparently cares about people, not just americans. The fact that you count that as a negative is so american (and reprehensible).

He could have remained in the US yes, in prison for the rest of his life.
This seems to be more symbolic, since he still is able to travel, but I would expect a very different symbol from the US: I want that you delete all the data you have collected about me and I want an official apology for all the spying. Furthermore I want you to stop the distinction between US citicens and citizens of other countries when it comes to human rights. How do you justify that? Of course I expect the same from every other government with similar behavior. Let's start the 21. century now.
I wish Snowden good luck, but I wouldn't like to be in the same flight with him. I would be that such flight would have a higher risk of "an accident".
Thanks for highlighting this; I took it out for a spin and wow it's fast. I normally find myself working on projects with tens of thousands of files and I've never really been happy with the few seconds it can take ctags to locate a definition or to tab-complete something. Though it seems like gtags is missing a couple of output-related options, the speed of lookup is a significant improvement.
So if I want US military secrets, all I have to do is hire someone to infiltrate, dig them up and then transmit them in the clear for me and my friends to read - and then it is not espionage, because it's "only a revelation"?
What else can you do when your own country vilifies you?

His country betrayed him long before he fled to Russia. He owes no allegiance to a country which has forsaken him and apparently rescinded his passport.
Ask HN: tech ebooks explained for non-developers
After writing my first Introduction to Amazon Web Services Ebook (shameless plug - https://gumroad.com/l/HGlv ), I've been thinking of writing a series of tech ebooks for non-developers. In particular for account managers and project managers.

The book would be focused in explaining things in plain speak. There would be additional information on the complexity of a topic, and how time it might take for a developer to explain something.

Some ideas that come to the forefront

+ Introduction to enterprise architecture: An overview of mvc architecture, what a server is, and basic enterprise concepts (the 'ilities)

So any ideas or thoughts on this?
* There is customary to make a check of the 54% of the vote stations. This was done the same day of the elections, before publishing the official results.
* There is not customary make a "recount" of votes in Venezuela.
* Nevertheless, the electoral council accepted a request made by the opposition to check the another 46% of the stations.
* The opposition welcomed the new audit... for a few hours.
* Then they added a lot of new requests and refused to participate in the audit.
* The audit result confirmed the original result.
Michael Hastings Sent Email About FBI Probe Hours Before Death
>For the past 10 days we have been hearing non-stop reports of the infamous extradition process that will drag on for 10-15 years in HK,

That was an optimistic assessment, best case. Either Snowden has received advice leading him to reconsider his course of action, and/or HK has expressed to him that they are not confident in their ability to, or haven't the will to resist the US/China in a diplomatic battle over his extradition, or maybe they just aren't confident that they can assure his safety. If one of the latter is the case then it is gracious of them to provide an opportunity for Snowden to leave unmolested.
Heads up that since Vagrant 1.2, Ansible is supported by Vagrant without the need of a plugin. I created a gist similar to the one we're using at work to show how to use Ansible on Vagrant: https://gist.github.com/baalexander/5845528.
Students play video game with their minds
At this point, it's the only way I would still be able to justify not being disappointed in him. My hope is that given the obstructionism he's experienced over the last four years, he's trying a bit of jujitsu to use his political enemies' weight against themselves. His base complained that he wasn't doing anything on DADT (i.e. an executive order, which could be overturned under a republican administration) and he had to basically keep quiet until he got the permanent repeal behind the scenes.

That being said, I'd be surprised if that were the case here. But a man can hope.
Maybe they did. Maybe they didn't. But I'm pretty sure whoever wrote that press release immensely enjoyed being allowed to write something so, by diplomatic standards, incredibly crass.
Why is it "Hacker News" that someone who is not physically harmed is being examined by a doctor? I thought this website was about startups?
In practical terms, what does this actually mean?

I assume that only US entry/exit points "scan" US passports to determine whether a passport is valid or faked etc. (Or maybe European partners do too?)

But for entry and exit in most of the world, a foreign passport is just the physical object itself -- a foreign passport may be scanned, but just to record its details for domestic purposes, not to check its authenticity against any kind of international database. I assume that, in most countries, entering on a false foreign passport is a local crime, but do most country's laws or procedures say anything about foreign passports that have been "revoked" by the home country before their expiration date?
And Fischer had brought world attention to Iceland during the famous chess match; in contrast, Snowden lacks even that tenuous connection.
China is an enemy? When last I checked, there was no embargo on Chinese goods, no risk to US planes flying over China (nor Chinese planes flying over the US), no risk to US vessels in Chinese waters (at least from the Chinese government), no risk to our satellites from the Chinese army, etc. By comparison, look at Iran or North Korea -- there are embargoes, swords rattling, occasion bullets flying, and so forth.
There is plenty of information about the law but I can find very little specific information about the actual incident besides a news report stating that "police believe it was fired straight up within a mile of Shannon's home."

This doesn't tell us much unfortunately. From Hatcher's testing done in the 1920's he found terminal velocity of a bullet fired straight up which does not destabilize is about 300fps, which with a fairly heavy .30-06 bullet results in about 30ft/lbs of energy. He noted that it was typically accepted that 60ft/lbs of energy was required to produce a disabling wound.

Of course, even at 30ft/lbs is it possible though statistically improbable that a falling bullet could strike in such a way as to cause serious injury or death.

It's very hard to get good numbers on injuries and deaths from this phenomenon, but the evidence points to it being an extraordinarily uncommon occurrence despite the fact that some cities, such as Dallas, report up to 1000 complaints for celebratory gunfire per year.

Note that I am not claiming it is a good idea.
It has happened before. I think one of the original digital cash (e-gold, digicash) executives was arrested this way but I can't find the story now.
As an immigrant taxpayer in Iceland, I am so sick of the BS about how Iceland is an economic wunderkind and how it did not bail out the banks but jailed the bankers....

An Icelandic economist on the truth value of common myths:

http://icelandicecon.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-economic-truth...
We don't know yet what his destination is. Some people claim Iceland or Ecuador.
Also, by making his identity public, he made sure that "Booz Employee dies in car crash" does not happen, its hard to make a public figure "disappear" without a fair trial.
Why Tipping Should Be Outlawed
rdiff-backup-fs: a userspace filesystem based on rdiff-backup
In that case, I suppose that your reasons for believing that HN moderators needed your advice were insufficiently articulated in your original post - unless your belief that they need your advice presupposes that the dominance of a single topic on the front page makes that need self-evident.

It's hard to see how you can hold onto the idea that things need to change while simultaneously asserting a belief that the moderators are aware of what is happening, without presupposing ignorance or apathy on the part of moderators - that is so long as your position precludes the possibility of the moderators simply having a different value system.

To me, it appears that your purpose in seeing how people feel, is just an emotional appeal to encourage unproductive complaining, e.g. your acknowledgement that this subject has probably been brought up many times.

There's a simple and tested way to move HN stories off the front page. Submit something better.

In my experience, meta-complaints about HN content rarely distinguish themselves as better. YMMV.
Or, alternatively, "You jerks have a lot of nerve, expecting favors from us after being caught with your hands in our pockets."
Ellsberg was a civilian, employed by the RAND Corporation [1] when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, which was a political report commissioned by a politician (Secretary of Defense McNamara). [2]

Manning was serving in active military duty when he leaked actual military data (albeit historical). There is a huge difference there. When you do something like that in the military, you get court-martialed, which is a different set of rules than civilian court. I do think that 4 years of solitary confinement is beyond excessive, but the military has to court-martial him. I'm guessing it's all spelled out in the military handbook, and I don't think anyone would have expectations otherwise.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_papers
> There may be situations where you want the entire history of your development to be included on your live server, but often this just isn't appropriate.

Are you concerned about being wasteful with disk space? Or is there some other concern here? Some security issue perhaps?
Show HN: WiseCash, cash flow forecasting for small businesses and freelancers
JP Morgan’s Man in the White House: Barack Obama’s Legacy of Ashes
Perhaps that's where he won't get hung, shot, locked up in solitary, disappear in a car accident etc for telling the truth?

Calling treason on him is as bad as the original act the government committed.
The worst bit is the one that says that you are supposed to turn yourself and others in for failing to report reasonable suspicions.

Let loose a directive like that in a large bureaucracy, and the guaranteed result is a lot of CYA behavior. Which, ironically, will lessen how much information flows.
So where do you register as an independent? Not at the democratic or republican party offices, I imagine.

Does it grant you rights to vote in primaries of all parties? Or none? If the latter, what's the point?
Google could easily create a secure email client. There's no need to, since Thunderbird already exists, but they could if they wanted to. That wouldn't help at all with the problem of email security.

False. The problem is not whether or not secure email clients exist. The problem is that people don't use them. Google has massive strength in both marketing and usability that existing secure email clients do not have.

What you're asking for is for Google to create its own proprietary communication protocol, then force all Chrome users to have it, then force Gmail users to use it. Can you imagine the reaction? Apart from flagrantly violating "don't be evil", it would lock out every alternative browser and prevent Gmail users from communicating with non-Gmail users. It would be XMPP->Hangouts all over again, except even worse because people actually use email.

False. Nobody said that the protocol had to be proprietary. Nobody said Google couldn't also release it as an open source module that anyone could incorporate to their clients. Indeed these would be prerequisites for the security of the system to be audited.

Your position appears to be that companies should not provide communication products for people who don't mind giving up a bit of privacy in exchange for a lot of convenience. That's not a reasonable position.

Why not? If it's unreasonable, you should easily be able to say why. I think it's a question of priorities. After our collective experience with cigarettes, we no longer think it's reasonable for companies to peddle addictive substances. Why shouldn't our attitudes to corporate responsibility for privacy also develop?

Google exposes data to the government because it is headquartered in a country where laws require compliance with search warrants. In theory Google could choose to relocate all of its employees to Somalia to avoid warrants, but that seems impractical.

False. Google exposes data because of the law and because it has engineered systems to collect the data for it's own business purposes. Google can't control the first but it can control the second, therefore it is responsible for the outcome (as are the lawmakers and enforcers).

This problem is not a technical problem, so no amount of technical expertise could solve it. You could set every single programmer in the world at solving this, but if their solution involves a user having to understand encryption keys then it would never be adopted.

False. Usability and marketing problems can be solved with technical solitions. This is a large part of what Google does. There is no need for users to need to understand encryption keys in order to use encryption, otherwise we wouldn't have ecommerce today.
The issue here is that there is still numerous web hosts who don't grant you SSH access, so you're not able to set up any git repository there anyway and are still stuck with FTP. Hopefully this will go away soon, or at least more in the direction of Heroku and the likes.
I'd be happy to contribute money to such an entity.

In the wake of the recent search-engine and web-service provider scandals, I think a lot of people would.
It's for hackers and things which interest them. Massive domestic surveillance programs are one such thing, and the ongoing Edward Snowden saga is part of that story.
A bit off-topic, but related: there's also a huge increase in the number of federal agencies who are outfitting their own SWAT teams. (This type of service, if really needed, could be delivered by the FBI or local law enforcement)

SWAT teams traditionally have been there to diffuse potentially violent confrontations -- to reduce violence. But in the last decade or so [correction: three decades], we've seen a change in the nature of SWAT. Now the teams are being used increasingly as shock police forces, bringing an escalated level of violence to a situation in order to overwhelm any possibility of danger to the officers or general public.

Seeing guys like the FDA, DOE, or EPA with their own SWAT teams is a bit unsettling, to say the least. One wonders where this will all stop.
Pelosi booed for saying NSA leaker Snowden violated the law
This is a service which I've been bootstrapping during the last 1.5yr (with my wife).

Questions and remarks most welcome!
Google "never outsource your core competency".
Right-wing propaganda? The libertarians are frothing, but the Tea Party doesn't seem to know what it thinks and the Washington Republicans are mostly keeping their heads down. The majority of the US population appear not to be all that concerned.

As propaganda campaigns go, this seems high cost, low pay off.
They don't exactly have a lot of authority of foreign soil. It'd be like Greek agents going to Canada to try to manhandle a Greek citizen onto a plane without the support of local law enforcement, and even that's very tricky. They just wouldn't have the authority to do so and would probably be in violation of local law. It would cause an even greater media circus.

There's no such thing as pre-approving extradition. You couldn't, say, get the British government, a government that is quite amenable to extradition requests, to do so because he's not there. Extradition takes some time and is subject to local laws and its judicial system. It's not an easy or trivial process.

Snowden's wise to make things public for his own safety and transparency.

The US is showing no signs of letting up on attempting prosecute him under their laws. I'm not sure why you think it's unlikely he'd be prosecuted, especially as there seems to be more public apathy than backlash.
Like I said, it's just my opinion dude, so don't get all worked up. And if you're not getting worked up, my apologies, but that's how your replies seem to me.

For instance, it seems like common sense or widely accepted practice that sensitive materials should be stored on machines that should be air-gapped, and common knowledge informs legal decisions about what is gross negligence or not.

For instance:

http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Gross+negligen...

"If one has borrowed or contracted to take care of another's property, then gross negligence is the failure to actively take the care one would of his/her own property."

Obviously this is open to interpretation and maybe the contractors responsible leave their own private affairs open willy-nilly to the world, but I would suppose they shouldn't have security clearance then...
Made me laugh. Thanks. :)

It's time for someone to step up and write an article that says the conscious choice of tools (or medium) most adequate for the particular problem is what really matters.
Does that tie in to the recent stories about the Feds buying so much ammo? So many indicators lately that are disturbing.

*edited to add link

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ralphbenko/2013/03/11/1-6-billio...
Denmark cannot arrest him in Russia, but the Danish Embassy is legally Danish soil. So here he could be arrested.
Which web hosts are they and what advantages do they have over web hosts that do grant ssh access?
Snowden isn't an Eichmann. And believe it or not, but not everybody even wants to be Mossad.

If the US does get Snowden, he will go to trial for his charges. There is not a special class of highly classified secrets which the government thinks is OK to disclose. HN is not representative of people in the US
>Question: when does exposing secret crimes of the US stop being patriotic?

Never?

>Question: when does dumping secrets of the US stop being patriotic?

When the US' conduct approaches the conduct it professes?
Classify: Python API Reference Tool
Not really. During the cold war the vast majority of "democratic" countries were either allied with, or close trading partners with, the United States. This lead to the increasing strengthening of ties between both countries foreign intelligence services and judicial systems.

Given that the US has a burn the fields type of policy with all but their largest trading partners, only the very large countries are able to use the case of Snowden to their advantage. Hong Kong was especially good, since it provided the best of both worlds: Very liberal media, with Chinese backing in terms of political pressure.

The only reason that some small countries are able to afford long term sanction to Snowden and Assange, is that they are already antagonistic towards the United States, so there is nothing that the US can really take away from them.

Iceland is a bit a strange case since it is generally aligned with the west, but it hasn't really taken steps to integrate as closely as other countries, partially because of its isolation and Norway being a proxy for these decisions for so long. Ultimately though it isn't in Iceland's interests to take in Snowden, it will cause too much of a backlash.
I hope you are trolling. A US passport means nothing to a man in this situation. The country he wishes to enter can decide if they want to let him in or not. Its got nothing to do with passports.
Ask HN: Startup-friendly web hosting companies
Which web hosting companies are "startup-friendly"? By that, I mean which ones regularly provide startups with hosting, services, or add-ons that are free and/or discounted?
I believe that there are lists of stolen and revoked passports that are issued between countries for just this purpose.
That's total bollocks.

I work for a large company with a big web presence. Most of our attacks come from Brazil, the US and rooted VPSs in Europe.
You have to be registered with the government as a voter in order to vote at all. When you register, you list your party affiliation. If it is one of the major parties, that information also adds you to the party's list of members, granting you the ability to vote in their primary elections. If you register as an independent (e.g. unaffiliated) voter, it depends on what state you're in, but sometimes you can vote in either primary and sometimes none at all. Note that there is also an Independent Party, which is different from lowercase independent, meaning no party affiliation at all.
Do you travel in Europe? I am pretty sure there are a few intelligence and domestic security operations there as well. You seem to be demanding a stop to all of them (but selectively the US, as if you don't believe anyone else is doing them).
Your local voter registration office, when you register to vote, will allow you to "declare" for one party or the other.

The idea is to prevent people who would vote for one party no matter what to go and vote in the other party's primary. Some states have written this into law. Some states you can register one way and vote in all the primaries if you choose.

Remember that each political party can, and does, make decisions however it likes. The Republican party recently changed its rules midstream during the convention just to keep attention away from Ron Paul.

The other purpose of declaring for a party, if you choose to do so, is that then they can pester the living shit out of you to raise money. My wife registered under one of the parties. They call dozens of times each year looking for cash.
Rackspace runs their Rackspace Startup Program, which provides $1,000/mo of free services for 6 months.

http://www.rackspacestartups.com
It also gives cover to the Russian government. They could rightfully report that he did indeed have a ticket to Cuba but leave out the fact he also has a ticket to somewhere else, or maybe the plane on its trans-atlantic journey is forced by circumstance to land briefly in a friendly country somewhere along the flight path. We should know soon enough :)
State money transmission laws are very strict, requiring, among other things, a bond to be posted to protect the public.

Accoring to FinCEN, anyone selling units of a decentralised virtual currency to another person for real currency is a money transmitter--so, for example, if you operated a business exchanging U.S. dollars for Bitcoins, you must be licensed. I don't know if the Bitcoin Foundation did this in California; perhaps there is some other wrinkle of state law at play here.
If you find a post offtopic, you have the option to flag it. Personally I think every single detail of these disclosures is relevant to the HN theme, especially the high-tech whistleblower's attempted escape from persecution.