skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Keep in mind that 1975 was before FISA, which wouldn't be passed until 1978. Believe it or not, despite its current reputation (thanks to modifications made in the last 12 years), the original FISA was actually a huge step forward as it actually created judicial and congressional oversight of intelligence operations where there was none before. It was passed in response to the abuses of the Watergate era.
Are you really implying the NSA is trying to sabotage a WhiteHouse.gov petition?
And my point is that there's about a zero percent chance that the person making that decision, or even giving significant feedback about it, is going to be within 20 feet of the people in question who will be implementing it.

Or more practically that they would do a roll-out release (as they did) and increase capacity as they go. All questions for devops, the product manager or some type of an "Architect" working with analytics to estimate demand and volume.

To imply that a single engineer in a room with no information about Gmail's infrastructure is supposed to know that without (any information about: technologies, storage, indexing, user volume, mail volume, etc) seems absolutely fucking stupid. If they want to hear me think aloud about these things and know that I can be cognisant of them... well... there are better ways of doing that than asking me stupid questions that it's stupid for me to even try and answer.

As someone else said, simply changing the question from "How many gas stations are there in NY" to "How would you estimate the number of gas stations in NY" makes it entirely different, IMO.
> they could even make ad targeting work by moving their mail-reading bots to the client

Gmail ad targeting isn't a bit of JavaScript that can run in real time in the background. It's a series of huge map reduces touching data sets larger than any client computer could store. Just indexing a pre-prepared list of mothership ads would result in a horrible user experience (far poorer ad targeting).

Google has a vested interest in only showing you ads you might be interested in; it doesn't work as well as it should, but it works magnitudes better than the state of the art 10 years ago.
Airmail: Awesome Sparrow Replacement for Mail on a Mac
On the contrary, the people maintaining packages in the distribution are firmly on the side of shipping solid, tested code. That hacked up duplicate of a library that you copied into your source tree? It does not have one hundredth of the testing that has been applied to the version of the library which every other package on the system uses. You have to think about the system as a whole, not assume it is a bootloader for one application.
The national security establishment is more or less exempted from the whistleblower statutes.
From the Bradley Manning link: "the White House may decline to address certain procurement, law enforcement, adjudicatory, or similar matters properly within the jurisdiction of federal departments or agencies, federal courts, or state and local government."

This is a petition to pardon, which is solely the power of the President. They can't - with any legitimacy - claim that commenting on this would be stepping on someone else's toes.

Apparently, they "[do] not comment, however, on individual pardon applications," according to the Marc Emery. I hope they will make an exception in this case, as this instance speaks to much broader policy. Regardless, sign the petition!
From the article:

The complaint was filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, a jurisdiction where Snowden’s former employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, is headquartered and a district with a long track record of prosecuting cases with national security implications.
That would depend on the definition of "country" used (its leadership/government or its citizens), and whether or not the jury can be convinced that the secrecy of the leaked programs was in the citizenry's best interests.
The real problem here isn't that the government is going to haul away random people, though that can certainly happen. The problem is that the situation described in the article, combined with prosecutorial discretion and plea-bargaining, creates a situation in which no one actually has constitutional rights.

If the prosecutor or someone powerful doesn't like your speech, they don't censor you, they just find one of the laws you've no doubt broken and threaten to charge you. Either you stop saying the things they don't want said, or they throw the book at you. Or, it can be even more mundane, maybe they just lock you up or ruin your life and let the speech issue go unsaid, but nonetheless communicated.

In a world where everyone is, in fact, a criminal, and criminals have no (or limited) rights, no one has any rights.
How Misinformed Ideas About Profit Are Holding Back The World’s Poor
The title is inaccurate. From the first paragraph of the article:

There is no serious doubt that our planet continues to heat, but it has heated less than most climate scientists had predicted. The consensus is that the planet continues to warm, not cool.
All the more reason to run and use anonymous remailers.
Show HN: SalonPulse is TripAdvisor Meets OpenTable for Hair and Beauty Salons
Who do you think is reading that petition? I would postulate, only the signers. You also make it sound like that is the only way to get your voice "heard".
FWIW, and it's different from trademark,
the Addeco.com website is showing "© 2011 Adecco"

At least they are consistently not paying attention to details.
Then one day somebody finds a critical bug in zlib and you need to go and fetch an update for every single application you have ever installed on your system. Then it turns out half of them don't have updates.
Going to NSA IG or the PSCI's in Congress are protected (the whole point of NSA IG is internal malfeasance, it's not just for stealing cafeteria trays...). The problem is that route of reporting may be ineffective, and once you start, you'll lose all future access, come under suspicion, and may actually still be charged (the whistleblower stuff helps more with not getting convicted).

I was originally thinking "he should have gone to IG/Congress rather than the press", but seeing the Binney/Drake/Wiebe interview where they all had gone through the IG/Congress process themselves, recognized they'd accomplished fuck-all, and supported Snowden's decision to go directly to the press/public, kind of convinced me.

I personally might have considered going to someone else in government, other than IG or H/SPSCI -- like to Udall or Rand Paul or maybe even a judge or governor -- as more effective than the "official" channels, but less illegal than a journalist.
You can't mix up "public property" with "private property of a public entity." The former is something like a river--it's public property and you're entitled to swim in it and cannot be excluded arbitrarily. But the latter is the same as private property in any other hands. To the extent that anything would change (and I don't think anything would), it would not be because the property rights are in any way different, but because the actions of public universities are "government action" and might be constrained for other reasons.
I had no idea that the "authorize but don't capture" and "capture" buttons in Shopify were fake when using Stripe, their default payment integration. I guess I gave someone bad advice when I recommended he only authorize orders and capture them when shipping; if Stripe didn't support authorizations only, he's been capturing every sale regardless of what Shopify said. Oops.
You're right, I've wasted 30 seconds of my life. I am now filled with regret.
namecheap.com - absolutely no problems in the 2+ years I've been using them.
They really don't.

This is part of the reason for the plethora of Linux distributions. Some deployments can afford the rapid pace (and consequent instability) of the short term Ubuntu releases or Fedora. Other deployments really do require the longer term stability of the more methodical Ubuntu LTS releases or CentOS / RHEL.

Any improvement requires change, but not all changes are an improvement.
I'm there (Jabo)
Excellent article. I've worked in product companies ranging from startups to the top 5 over the years, and also spent a few years in consulting organizations so I can really appreciate the insights here. Product companies (in general) create cost centres while consulting companies are profit centers. So the attitude toward cash flow is quite different. Consulting companies tend to "invest" their money while product companies tend to "spend". What else, product people tend to take their time to build things that they feel the customers will need, instead of building exactly what the customers need. Sense of urgency is a trait that a product company can learn from the consulting business. Consultants work with customers directly and they always possess domain knowledge learnt from experience while product people rely on research to pick up a subset of the knowledge. Imagine the power of a large product organization that can run more like a consulting organization!
Window Shopping Goes Literal
That's not what I meant.

The state is run like a corporation. Singapore does not have a FEMA because it has never had to deal with natural disasters or an ecological crisis of this magnitude. Thus the government and its people are ill-prepared for what lies ahead:

1. Serious long-term health effects

2. Political and diplomatic tensions because this slash-burn cycle will repeat in perpetuity

3. Economic impact from declining revenues in industries like tourism, food & beverage, construction etc.

The government has yet to articulate a plan that involves displacement of its population should the situation persist (almost a given) and take a turn for the worse (possible). I'm not going to rely on it or any other higher power when it comes to the health and safety of my family.
I think you're talking about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
The role of the prosecutor is to prosecute the interests of the State, which in this case they have done.

I’m wondering how grand juries play into this—the Fifth Amendment states that “no person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury” (except for those in the military, which I think he wouldn’t classify as).

There’s a great article here which describes the power which Grand Juries used to wield in the indictment process, specifically the ability to act on their own, investigate, and actually challenge the federal prosecutor rather than just rubber-stamping each case: http://constitution.org/lrev/roots/runaway.htm
To be fair, what he did could be in the interests of his country and still be considered espionage, depending on the details of the case. I think a very likely opinion would be, yes, the programs he exposed were wrong and yes, he's a hero but also a traitor.

I only say this because I expect the bulk of comments to this post to suggest the reason Americans might find him guilty would be narrow-mindedness or some sort of fascist tendency, but that's not necessarily going to be the case even if they do. Anti China/Anti-communist bias definitely would play a part, but the charges could possibly stick on their own merits, even if Americans are uncomfortable with the nature of what he exposed.
Don't worry, they're not fake :). They've been beta testing the functionality for a while.
My Interview on Bitsplitting
Agreed - the articles and the commentary are fascinating.
No, this is outrageous. This guy was not suspected of a crime, he was suspected of talking to someone who committed a crime.

This is identical to the feds now slurping up all personal email (and probably facebook accounts, and whatever else) belonging to Washington Post and Guardian employees under a gag order, because they talked to Snowden, who "committed a crime".

It doesn't matter if it's widespread or wholesale, it matters that they can do it when they want to.
ᐊᑕᓇᕐᔪᐊᑦ (ᐅᖃᐅᓯᖅ ᐊᑕᐅᓯᖅ ᓈᒻᒪᔪᐃᑦᑐᖅ)
What about on the 4th? Not ridiculously soon, but seems appropriate, gives us a little time to plan something, and this case isn't moving at a breakneck speed anyway.
what is "diminoten"?
Usually, in this context, one uses a wink face to indicate sarcasm and a smiley face to indicate you find something amusing.

Also, I wasn't under the impression that he thought bumble-bees can’t fly, but that he is of the belief that at one point in time, scientists couldn't explain how it’s physically possible and that that is where this factoid came from.
What warrant did Jefferson serve on the Barbary Pirates?
the title is very accurate; the consensus on how much it was supposed to heat up is eroding (the use of the word 'cooling' is a play on words). FTA "In the end, the so-called scientific consensus on global warming doesn’t look like much like consensus when scientists are struggling to explain the intricacies of the earth’s climate system, or uttering the word “uncertainty” with striking regularity."

and

"The moralising stridency of so many arguments for cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, and global emissions treaties was founded on the idea that there is a consensus about how much warming there would be if carbon emissions continue on trend. The rather heated debates we have had about the likely economic and social damage of carbon emissions have been based on that idea that there is something like a scientific consensus about the range of warming we can expect. If that consensus is now falling apart, as it seems it may be, that is, for good or ill, a very big deal."
> So that would eliminate a kick starter, 30 day model?

You'd have to store the credit card number so that you can auth & capture when needed, rather than only store a temporary authorization token, which is exactly how those sites work now. Kickstarter gets your permission to charge your Amazon account, and Amazon charges one of your cards on file when the project is funded -- there's no long-standing authorization tying up funds for a month.
Elevated Gluten Antibodies Found in Children with Autism
Collecting feedback and opinions on a process management cloud app for SMBs
I'm asking for a feedback on the concept and the cloud app we are developing. It's called ProcessMate<p>It's a productivity cloud tool for small and medium sized businesses. It helps track progress of recurring processes, as well as manage documentation and improve in-process communication for businesses. It's a Business Process Management tool (BPM) of a new generation, that is significantly easier to set up and use. In contrast to other tools it does not require any IT or business analysis skills.<p>In essence, it solves the following major problems:
* Lack of visibility on progress of processes/cases, such as Legal cases, Financial processes, etc
* Excessive emails, unstructured document exchange
* Lack of insight on efficiency, including bottlenecks, points of low efficiency etc.
ProcessMate helps solve these problems.<p>Its major features include:
∙ Process Design – Easy-to use, does not require special expertise and skills in IT or business analysis.
∙ Process Execution – the system keeps track of actual progress and supports instant user notifications
∙ Business Intelligence – pre-configured dashboards, reports and charts (such as gantt chart and others) will give a valuable insight on trends and efficiency
∙ Collaboration – ProcessMate will help you replace the swarms of emails with the structured communication
∙ Document Management – helps structure your documentation (such as invoices, quotations or anything else) and link it to individual processes
∙ Cloud – it’s web-based, so no need to download and install anything, sign up and use in seconds!<p>If you have managed a business or a department, or was an employee of a business that ran recurring human-driven processes (e.g. legal, finance, HR, etc), I'm asking for your help of reviewing our product. Would it fit your organization? What problems would you envisage?
> The anti-secrecy group Wikileaks has held some discussions ...

What is an anti-secrecy group? It sound like something out of Discworld series, where a group is tired of being discovered changed the door sign from "secret group" to "not-secret group". In the world of Discworld, it would likely work too.

Is it so hard to write a group behind the whistleblower website WikiLeaks, or the more correct term: A group that runs a publishing website for whistleblowers called WikiLeaks?
So the developer wants to reduce their cost of properly engineering and documenting their application's usage of a particular library in exchange for significantly increasing the costs of rebuilding and updating every software package that uses the same libraries onto the OS developer and their customers?
> Someone needs to be charged with a crime before a pardon can occur.

Incorrect, see Gerald Ford's preemptive pardon of Richard Nixon in 1974.
Look at this ubuntu erlang package, it depends on 40 other packages, as well. That isn’t even the worst of it, if you type ‘erl’ it tells you to install ‘erlang-base’, which only has a handful of dependencies, none of which are any of these erlang libraries!

That package is a dummy package that depends on erlang-base and the rest of the base erlang platform. You would have to force dpkg to ignore dependencies in order to install erlang without erlang-base. I would love to hear how that happened.

Splitting things up into multiple packages makes distributions easier to manage. One person can take the lead on package-dev while another person can take the lead on package-doc. Splitting things up into multiple smaller packages also makes distributing fixes a lot easier. With a one line fix to one include would you rather send out the entire erlang environment or just the small package that needed the fix?

And yes splitting things up to save storage requirements is most useful for resource constrained devices, not new servers/laptops. But it means that a user who is comfortable with Debian or Fedora on the server/desktop can use their same trusty OS on their next project when the device places serious restrictions on system overhead.
Julian Assange helping Edward Snowden sneak to Iceland
Version numbers only appear to be folly because proper engineering discipline has not been applied when managing the stability and/or backwards-compatibility of shared interfaces.

If more developers cared about versioning their software appropriately based on incompatible changes or stability guarantees, it would significantly reduce the costs of maintaining OS software distributions and providing integrated software stacks to users.
In many local governments, car dealerships are some of the largest businesses and financial contributors.
Clients are expected to have no idea what they're doing. That's why they hired the experts, where such behavior is no longer dumb but disgusting.
Approved company usually just means a BPA registered company, This is a trade organisation made up of parking companies that has no government affiliation at all. It's so parking companies can make a formal set of rules they agree to oblige to self regulate with and avoid the government making real laws to stop these people.

It really doesn't mean anything.
The first thing I do with a new mac is install homebrew.
These are political charges, and as the governed we should stand up to the people who are supposed to be working for us and demand that they be dropped. Immediately.

Did or did not Edward Snowden leak classified material to the press?

Does or does not the government have a duty to attempt to prosecute him?

You make it sound like he didn't actually break any laws, when he actually did break a couple. Whether the charges brought can be proven remains to be seen, but let's not assume this is a sham and a kangaroo court because you consider what Snowden did to be heroic. It may have been, but that still doesn't make it legal.
Actually, it does have something to do with it.

When you don't pay for a service in money, the company providing that service has to find some other way of generating money.

Often they do this by collecting and selling data about you.

Now, that doesn't mean that just because you paid for a service they won't do the same thing. But they'll will have more incentive to protect their paying customers than some service which consider you and your data as the commodity.
"the recent issue is a disagreement over..."

Wait, there are no "issues", there is no "disagreement", not in any conventional fashion.

From the state, we have seen nothing but the boiler-plate propaganda that comes out when any large bureaucracy faces an embarrassment.

They sort-of say it's OK to invade the privacy of (any vaguely accused) terrorists, they sort-of say they can look at anything and it's not an invasion of privacy and they sort-of say they can collect anything and as long they don't look its not an invasion of privacy. But none of it matters, it's not a "debate", there are no "disagreements" in the sense of a dialogue.

These are just press releases arguments are clearly wrong to everyone but morons, and they are naturally aimed for the mass of the morons out there (or the mass of ignorant and prefer-to-be-ignorant if you want).
That's really not the case at Google (or, I would hope, at any company). The engineers would be very much involved with this decision, largely driving the ultimate conclusion.
He was not even suspected of talking to someone who committed a crime. He was suspected of talking to someone who was under investigation.

The really appalling part of this story is that Google was ordered to turn over all of this guy's email -- not just that email which was related to Wikileaks or Julian Assange, but all of it.
France plans to ban Amazon free book shipping, discounts
I don't think it's a smart idea to publish the source code to your site (especially while on the front page of Hacker News) until you've spent a significant amount of money on auditing the security internally to the point that others are comfortable with a public release.

Now it looks like something happened, and you've got no site, and thousands of people trying to access it!
>if your software needs lots of modified dependencies, you're not communicating with those projects properly.

This, a hundred times. The OP wants to bundle modified versions of other people's open-source software as part of their own without feeding the changes upstream properly, and that's just not the right way to do things. Distributions' rules discouraging bundled packages are there because even worse things happen if everyone does that. Sometimes the dependent package has to put off packaging a new release for a particular distro until their dependencies are satisfied, but then it's time to put on big-girl panties and move on. Managing dependencies and reducing version sensitivity are part of a developer's job.
no. Microryza only works with people at accredited research institutes. It's also not a 501(c)3.
The point of fizzbuzz is that it's so simple that behaving as if it was a pain is an indicator.
The federal government pursued the death penalty against Brian Patrick Regan in 2003. The jury decided against the punishment, however, and is now serving a life sentence without parole.
Just wanted to link to the old HN discussion about this article when it was first posted a yea ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3476016
"The same night two prominent Kadet leaders, Professor F. Kokoshkin, and Dr. A. Shingarev, were murdered in a hospital by a group of Bolshevik sailors. When Lenin heard of the ensuing protest meetings held by the Social Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks, he said cynically: 'Let them protest, let them bubble over with rage, let them rave some, sigh some, drink a lot of tea and talk until dawn; then they will surely soon fall asleep.'" - A history of Soviet Russia, George Von Rauch, Fifth Revised Edition, 1967

I can't help but think of that every time I read one of these threads. Especially when people ask for things like the dismissal of the prosecutors, in complete disregard that this agenda comes straight from the White House.