skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Senator Wyden has been remarkable in how far he has been willing to legally stick his neck out while so many other politicians either quietly cower in fear or hop on the mass surveillance bus. He'll be getting both my public support and campaign contributions for as long as he's in office.
From an outsiders view, that's my interpretation too. Have to wonder just how many people are under gag orders for various secret things. An uncharitable view would be that the democracy bit is just to keep the public from realising they have no control.

I often wonder how the US will be seen in history books, and it's quickly slipping further into the evil section.
Just as they are imposing a policy of severe economic austerity (with little or no results, I may add) to many countries in Europe in order to safeguard the investments they made in those countries ?

Mind, I'm not blaming them. They are doing their own interests, as they should (and many of the countries affected are in that situation by their own faults only), but let's not pretend they are somehow different.
Or it is rather 99.995? ;-)
Since you have 2 identical parties that enact the same policies and follow the same course for many years I see no reason for anyone on this planet (both inside the US and outside) to actually care about the outcome of any future primaries or elections in the US.
They still don't know the source of the communication. Running an exit node means they can see where traffic is headed as it emerges from Tor, not that they can magically determine from whence it came.

The problem here is that the destination can identify you. You, after all, are the one paying for that VM instance at that IP address within AWS. Who else would be connecting via SSH?
It's hilarious when these days, Google is the one sticking to their guns despite public outcry (Reader) and Microsoft is listening to their users in some regard (Xbox One DRM). I really feel like Google is missing the forest for the very intricately engineered trees.
Swipe to navigate is a terrible design antipattern. I can always tell when I'm reading a blog on blogspot because it'll dump me to the adjacent article when I'm scrolling or trying to zoom in on an image. I dumped chrome on ios because they didn't get it right either.
Three Planets in Habitable Zone of Nearby Star -- Gliese 667c
> [..] it has existed for only 237 years since the Declaration of Independence.

That doesn't matter too much. Humans live for much shorter times, and their can learn not only from their own compatriots. The US's current continuity of government is actually pretty old at 237 years. Russia, China and India's current incarnations are much younger. And especially India was almost never a unified country before the British came along.
Yup. The advice is sound regardless of who it is. In fact, if he's as good as we think, we should get something good out of it!
What about something as simple as reusing IMAP for RSS?
No URL shorteners on HN please. They obscure were the URL leads to.
Do you know something we don't?
> The NSA has NO super-human abilities.

No, but they do have a larger hardware budget than you. And a larger budget for crypto research.
If Google were smart, they'd open-source Reader and let the people who love it maintain and run it (It's probably much too dependent on their architecture for this to actually be a viable option).
Steganography is hard. You need a large amount of cover text to hide the plain text.

Many steganography systems use images or video or sound, but are 'proof of concept' - toys for learning - rather than serious tools. This, unfortunately, includes many of the steganography systems described as serious tools.

One of the problems of hiding text in text is persuading people not to re-use the cover text.
I took some political science and philosophy courses in college which exposed me to him.

Among philosophers, his 1970's Theory of Justice is considered the greatest work of political philosophy and ethics of the 20th century, and the first real attempt at a foundational political ethics system since the 19th century with utilitarianism and Marxism. I linked to the shorter, updated book intended for a mainstream audience, as the original is a bit heavy going.

Nozick's book can be said to be the definitive rejoinder to Rawls, and the ethical foundation of much of American libertarianism today.

Most US political ethics debates still to this day boil down to Rawls vs. Nozick in my view, though many still harken back to 19th century ideas of utilitarianism and liberty as they go more "extreme" (eg. hard Marxists, or hard anarcho-capitalists). Rawls and Nozick at least attempt to deal with history and disadvantaged peoples.

As usual, its hard to separate politics, justice, and economics, though we often try: the end result is intertwingled.
wireLawyer – Linkedin Meets Elance for Lawyers [video]
AES is approved for use in a type-1 system.
The US doesn't have the strong hand it had a few weeks ago: catching China redhanded breaking into US servers. That was a bigger trump, until the US got caught doing the very same thing.

The "you didn't give us Snowden" card isn't going to be as impressive, especially in an international context. With the US treatment of Bradley Manning, that card isn't really a playable one. The humble pie of being outed as hypocrites over hacking - that setback is going to take a while to overcome.

It's possible China have no real involvement in this - plausible deniability. Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region, meaning they are largely left alone in legal matters (except perhaps in exceptional matters - which Snowden, for all the news coverage, isn't).
Hear hear. Although, I don't remember needing to swipe with chrome on iOS.
The Future of Internet and Cars
I'd like to see a simulation of how this system's orbits work. Amazing
This is answered directly in the article where they suggest you take advantage of their encryption offerings.

> If Amazon faced a subpoena that required it to keep the order secret, such encryption would be useful to customers. “If the data is encrypted, all we’d be handing over would be the cypher text,” he said.
Senator Wyden and some others have been doing a fabulous job during this issue and over their terms. My only thought or concern is if they will still keep their senate seat during the next election. Compared to some things the NSA is doing, rigging elections seems to be simple.
These organizations are requesting either 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(6) exemption in order to collaboratively develop new software. The members of these organizations are usually the for-profit business or for-profit support technicians of the software.[1]

[1]http://democrats.waysandmeans.house.gov/sites/democrats.ways...
This is an amazing discovery! The star is only 22 lightyears away, and it's got three potentially habitable planets. That's astounding. This is probably going to be one of our first destinations, when humanity starts building interstellar craft. Of course, the discoveries are still very early right now and we'll probably find all sorts of Earth-like planets quite close. But three Super Earths in the habitable zone of a close-by star? That's almost as good as it gets.

Edit: And surely this will be a focus of searching for life as well. A high concentration of life-capable planets in the same radio direction? Yes please. Also, I've often wondered if having a high density of habitable planets in the same system as your species would increase the chances and speed to becoming a spacefaring species. If you have a lot of places to go that are quite inviting and not that difficult to get to, you'll probably go.
Automatic persistance of node.js objects in database
It's really chilling when you realize this is your government you're talking about. It sounds like some dystopian future where normal citizens have to hide from their government's eye, but it's here and now.
well i was told these oem parts were being ordered from china from the same factories making them for apple. so maybe its all "unlicensed" or not apple certified, yet these guys were passing them off as such?
Yes. That is my biggest hurdle in software development. I can't ever seem to come up with an idea that I feel will be worth the time and resources to bring to life.
What if some percentage of the torrents there were used to transmit secret information?
95% would be nice, but a few percent should be good enough, if there's enough traffic overall. (And even 100% would not be enough if there's almost no traffic, like in the beginning of the internet.) Absolute numbers matter more than shares, here.
I guess you do not understand my formula...

Given z a non-zero integer, either z=2n or z=2n-1 or z=-2n or z=-(2n-1), for some natural n>0... f(n) is defined according to each case. Uhu? And AFAIK f(f(n))=-n.

This should not be too hard to express in 32 bit arithmetic. With bitwise shifts etc.
As a non-US citizen, I'd like to support him too. Although I suspect that would be seen by the NSA as support from 'rogue foreign interests', which would be used as a stick to beat him with.
Jobs gave millions to charity, publically criticised for not doing enough
Referenced in the article is an NSA PDF. See this instead:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:xiyLnPk...

The actual PDF can't be requested at the moment.

http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/press_releases/section...

Internal Server Error - Read
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
New musicians have to sign "360" agreements with record companies, which means the record company gets a share of merchandising, concert receipts etc.
True. 316 million US citizens and 117 thousands of them signing the Snowden petition yields a first approximation of 99.96 %.
The idea that one needs to choose sides reduces every part of this debate to a binary decision which I think is foolish.

It's completely possible to question or dislike some of this guy's decisions and/or motives, and also be thankful of some of the things that he has revealed and the other disclosures that have followed (via government leaks) due to it. It's also not a contradiction to think that some of his leaks were useful to the American public and some were harmful. You can be glad at the outcome some of his actions have brought about (such as the increased knowledge we now have) without having to label him "a hero" and reserve your skepticism or judgement for other things he might do or will do.
For one - I would rebuild these pages and focus on LARGE DEMO IMAGES rather than something small I have to really focus to figure out what it is you do. Focus on not just pitch but WHY you are doing this and how it can help save company X time and money.

Take a look at some of these sites:
https://www.theprintful.com/
http://www.getharvest.com/
https://www.uncover.com/

In terms of marketing - I would start by focusing on the pain points for people, e.g. HR or startup founders. The people who have to do this stuff day in and day out. Leveraging things like LinkedIn compile a list and start reaching out to flush out the sales funnel and answer any common FAQ.

Setup a Remarketing Campaign (http://www.google.com/ads/innovations/remarketing.html) to increase your chances of a conversion post visit.

Build some content that you can promote and pitch at events or even on your site to generate potential leads. Harvest did this with http://www.getharvest.com/field-guides/pricing/ - think about a guide for managers around hiring, etc. Maybe even do a email drip campaign - 10 tips for whatever, send one every Monday for 10 weeks and then just put them in your "MASS EMAIL" list until they unsubscribe.

Find some Joint Venture people in the space either on hiring or job seeking side to KNOW about your product more. Maybe something like http://www.salarytutor.com - See how you could work together to target larger companies.

Lastly - target twitter and CONVERSE - http://wefollow.com/interest/hiring - there are a TON of HR people out there, reach out and ask them what THEY need help with.

Good Luck!
A surprise is that they don't mention his "Homage to Catalonia", which tells Orwell's experience of fighting in the Spanish civil war. It may have been the first time that he encountered the ugly face of the Soviet Union's totalitarian system, making him question the ideology behind. "Animal Farm" and "1984" look to me like they were heavily influenced by Orwell's experience in the civil war.

The big brother surveillance part in "1984" is really only part of the story - there is a lot more in the book, and it wasn't science fiction either.
Before you spend money on marketing I'd recommend spending some time improving your landing page and the sales funnel.

The Copy Hackers ebooks are a good place to learn about this stuff: http://copyhackers.com/

I'd also recommend you read this article to learn about the kinds of metrics you should be measuring in your SaaS project:

http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics-2/
While it is disappointing and frustrating to watch what the American government has been upto these past few years, I would still say the US is, and shall remain for years to come in a league above the country's you mention.

There is a good indicators to measure this, and that is the lines at the visa counters of American embassies the world over. Those numbers aren't shrinking.
Wyden probably has 'nothing to hide' then. That's the chilling/scary part of all this. Soon, anyone who's anyone but a perfectly boring and average Joe Normal will have no desire to speak out against the gov't.
Why, if this is version 5.0, does the document it downloads say version 4.0? Am I the only one seeing this? The details also mention previous version 3.0 on the webpage.
Please remove this garbage from HN. Terrible biased article.
Illegal Drone Business Thrives in US
I loved PHP at first too, but the more I started to do serious work in it, the more I grew to hate it.

I can second that. It's great to get into quickly and just hack something together.
But it has lots of problems. Admittedly the devs have begun addressing a lot of issues - like the database access one, where you had just a bunch of functions that didn't even offer auto-escaping and resulted in a lot of unsafe sites - but the old stuff is always kept for backwards compatibility, which means that a lot of sites just continue to be unsafe.

I think a lot of those problems are stemming from the fact that php doesn't have any sort of built-in module system and everything is just on the root level of the language. There are optional namespaces, but even for those they use "\" (like \parent\child), which IMHO is just about the worst choice ever.

Then you have issues like the devs just pushing out a new version even though like 99% of their tests failed (but hey, apparently they at least have tests).

And of course you have the never-ending story of bad php-developers which came into the field because you can just hack stuff together with copy-pasting googled code-snippets and not understanding anything. Seriously, if anyone thinks this issue overstated - it's not. If anything, it is understated.

I have seen productive systems over which money in the tens of thousands of Euros came in which had hidden fields in the HTML containing complete SQL queries which even included the price (apart from the obvious downfall of enabling someone to just POST a 'DROP TABLE' statement, etc.). I have seen systems with something like static 5-digit user authentication tokens that would show up in the URL; You could just sit behind an admin, note the token and be an admin forever. And of course I have seen the ugliest, completely unmaintainable mess of code that would be humanly possible, with no documentation whatsoever (of course).

I also heard from a friend who had to fix something in the C-code making up php about hundreds of lines of codes being copypasted to different locations twelve times. While I haven't verified that for myself, it's not something I'd be surprised about.

Then of course there's the issue of php's design. For one your complete software has to be loaded for every single page view, which is just really fucking inefficient. But having the application not run continuously is also a problem if you want to write any sort of real-time application, which are going to become more and more frequent. You can do stuff like long-polling, but that's just another ugly hack. You might of course be able to have another hacky solution with continuously running php-cli with FastCGI or something like that, but even if that would work in principle, some php script would just die within a few minutes and the site'd be dead.

TL;DR: For small projects that may be hacky and potentially insecure, php is fine - For everything that is supposed to be proper, secure or highly performant I recommend you stay away from php as far as you possibly can. Everything else will just result in huge frustration.
To be fair, the Miami Heat are essentially the U.S. Olympic basketball team at this point, who won gold last summer, so in that sense they are the World Champions.
Great list. You missed a few. Feeder.co (my preferred alternative), Stringer, and probably a few more. Check out Russell Beattie's blog post here: http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/readerpocalypse-the-alter...
The problem with that is that what might be considered safe today might not be it tomorrow, whether it is some undetected flaw in the encryption implementation or even in the algorithm you are using, or if someone builds an effective quantum computer.

edit: That was odd downvotes. Anyone care to explain?
Oh, I was talking about personal liberties (often guaranteed by the German constitution), not about current fiscal policy.
Well, it looks very good and reads very good on my ipad and on my tiny screen on my notebook. Otherwise I would've to zoom in, not a big deal though, do you think?
Those prime numbers aren't staying unsolved forever. Then again, with quantum computing still a ways off, I think we're good.
Just in case people forgot, he was also the primary Senate opponent of the PROTECT-IP Act (the Senate's version of SOPA)

http://projects.propublica.org/sopa/W000779
It would seem that you're conflating open source with free software. It is not the case that we can call all programs with readily available source code "Free Software", so we need an ability to make a distinction.I don't agree with Richard Stallman on a lot of things, but the necessity for a distinction between Free and Open is one of them. Frequently, people say "Open Source" when they mean "Free Software", and certain corporations say "Open Source" hoping you'll think "Free Software".

I would say Java is a good example of Open, Non-Free software. Oracle has made it very clear that anything Free in Java is only a Sun legacy, they would rather it weren't, and they'll chase down any lead they can to stop people from using the Java source in their own projects.

Given that the Windows source code is nowhere near as hard to obtain as you seem to think, I think it is more convenient to consider it as Open, Non-Free as well. You don't really need to be a partner or a large customer, just about anyone can get it with an MSDN subscription. A friend of mine had access to the Windows source for a research project he was doing in undergrad. He discovered a memory leak in the VC++ runtime and was able to patch it. He wasn't doing anything with operating systems specifically and he most certainly did NOT pay anything for this access. Their system for building set-top boxes and the like is completely based on recompiling the source code with your personal configuration of kernel modules you'd like to include.

I would contrast this with Adobe Photoshop as an example of very-Closed, Non-Free software. I'm not aware of anyone outside of Adobe receiving Photoshop's source code post v1.0. I've worked with a few 3rd party libraries, developed by one particular government agency, that I could not get the source code to as an employee of another particular government agency, no matter how hard I tried and how bad of a memory leak it had that they refused to fix.

I know it's cool to bag on Microsoft around here, and I'm not terribly fond of them myself anymore, but I'm not going to let myself be deluded about what one can be capable of on their software. You almost certainly have competitors building software on an MS platform and you should not make the mistake of assuming they're doomed from the start.
What is quite telling (at least within US media coverage) is that it is apparently only controversial that the NSA is spying on those in the US. The complete disregard for everyone else in the world seems almost casual, as if it isn't an issue at all.

But indeed, let's keep using encryption. It is, after all, the US government that has a long history(1) of trying to keep encryption out of our non-American hands.

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_in_the_U...
It may be possible, and it may be childish.... But it resonates.

I work for a giant oil and gas comp in Houston and we did this awkward dance of trying to figure out where each stands before i blurted out, "I'm rooting for Snowden."

That simple statement communicated a lot into my co-workers mind of what my values are especially deep in the heart of Texas.
$ HEAD http://1phads.com/%C3%B2%C3%9ANI%15%C2%B5%C2%81y%1E?%82%98%AA*P%FF%CC%E4\%A3%A4%D7%E4%B4%F6%C0%87%A4%BC%85TF
404 Not Found
Connection: close
Date: Tue, 25 Jun 2013 12:52:46 GMT
Server: nginx
Content-Length: 162
Content-Type: text/html
Client-Date: Tue, 25 Jun 2013 12:52:46 GMT
Client-Peer: 78.140.173.147:80
Client-Response-Num: 1

Perhaps it is paying attention to the User-Agent header, and only provides content if it has an exploit for that browser. Or perhaps the url was only active for a short time. I'm not interested enough to investigate further.
From what the CIA officer who was operating out of the US embassy in moscow had on him when he was caught by russian authorities recently, that makes sense.
Thanks for the tips on the sales funnel and metrics.

The pain points is good advice - it's not something I've put a great amount of thinking into. The app was created because I could do it and thought it would help those wanting an in-expensive/outsourced job ad solution.

In regards to metrics in particular, it's an area I don't know a huge deal about but I'd love to learn. I bought 'Web Analytics: An Hour A Day' which was recommend to me to start with.

Thanks.
Perhaps he's starting a new TV project he's pleased about, has his meds well in order, and is feeling strong & stable enough to discuss this now?

Or should he wait until nothing's happening in his professional life? Then the cynics would say look, it's been 6 months since he's done anything important, and so he has this suicide "revelation" to get back into the spotlight. Coincidence?
At some point, hopefully one of them with enough information will walk on to the floor and exercise their Article I immunity.
When the Exoplanet Explorer app gets updated with this data we're going to be in for a treat. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.burlock.ex...
The absence of DTrace in Linux is ultimately a licensing issue, because the CDDL and the GPL version 2 are incompatible.
Its a pity that those who want to get the NSA and GCHQ revelations out of the news are succeeding and it make me wonder about these sorts of pieces. Defending Greenwald/Snowden has merit but it shouldn't be swamping the more valuable NSA/GCHQ content as much as it has.
WebRTC comes to Firefox - now in an official release
I remember my parents had a joke book from the 70s where one joke had a punchline of "No, U Thant." That did not age well.
Shoot the messenger! No, nuke the messenger! Torture the messenger! Message, what message?
No, but finding the right idea is.