skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This looks interesting, valuable, and fun and I certainly signed up.

Your clean page, and the design and colors of your icon led me to think at first that this was a google project.

Compare your logo to that of google play's logo.
Did I miss anything? Why is Germany supposed to be pissed off? I think Obama only visited last week?
New NSA Leaks show how US is bugging its European allies.
Is this something like the Internet Defense League's Bat Signal?

http://internetdefenseleague.org/
I was about to say, doesn't this scream for a container? i.e. docker.io
The problem is this can be more of a hassle for you. I've been pulled over as a teenager and when I said no he decided to search my car anyway. Saying no doesn't always help, in fact sometimes it makes them give you more trouble and search harder.
Looking at the source (userDB.js) it seems that passwords are stored as plaintext. A major disappointment.
China is arguably the current engine of world progress, and there, state surveillance is ubiquitous and lawful, and a policeman can send you to jail without trial.
The ground assumption in all of this is that we have some comprehension of the technological end-game / plateau. I.e. that a civilization far more advanced than our own will still care about solar energy and EMR communications. Who is going to build a Dyson Sphere for fun? We could be totally wrong about this. We probably are.

The other possibility is that there's not much more technology for us. Can we build self-replicating probes that can operate, without maintenance, for thousands of years? No we can't.

So we have this wacky set of assumptions -- that alien civilizations will be more advanced than us in certain peculiar ways (able to build self-replicating probes and/or Dyson spheres) but not in others (having the primitive needs and side-effects that we do). This is a tiny corner of a very large set of possibilities.

Maybe the aliens simply build new Universes to order and leave their birth universe behind because it's (a) less hospitable than their new "air conditioned" universe, and (b) it's unethical or boring or pointless to colonize a universe full of new potential civilizations.

Folks need to read some less mainstream SF. I like Clifford Simak's "City" where the vast majority of the human race emigrates to Jupiter to live as hunter-gatherers (because Jovian life is so much more pleasant than human life) leaving Earth to the dogs, robots, and ants.
So for the second time in a row Ecuador is not actually serious about granting asylum. They are happy to pay lip service, but when it comes to action, they are not so willing.
The world record for quantum factorization is, what, 27?

RSA is more threatened by conventional number theoretic advances than by quantum computers.
TBRSS: A Feed Reader for Readers
"the surveillance of Germany by the US spy service NSA is more extensive than heretofore assumed."

So they knew about it already but made a poor assumption. It would be interesting to know how poor that assumption was.
XenServer 6.2 is now fully open source
What do you mean by "what he's really trying to do"?

Anyway, I'm pointing out that he's making/repeating a technically incredible claim. I'm ever so slightly surprised and saddened that scrutiny of that claim isn't the focus here.
> As far as I can tell, Gmail is 100% accurate.

I can confirm that that is not correct. Google regularly flags internal ticket email as spam for one of my larger customers (mail that is sent within GApps). I also see about a 10-20% false positive rate on our various mailings (account setups, billing notices, etc).
Yeah, let's replace them with someone we know can be trusted with technology. How about Google.
How are the means of production coming back to the people? I'd like to know, because that's where the hope is.
Hack 0 should be to find a good motivator to learn the language. Only then do tools matter.

I got bored learning Kanji. Had I known that 300 of those were enough to read a food menu -- and what they were, I would have prioritized them and learned them in a month. Instead, I stopped after thinking it would take too much time to ever get to 2,000.
What I’ve learned from 1 year at a startup
We live in a panopticon, congrats. (Reflections on Prism + Privacy)
I find the definition of intelligent life, specially as given by astronomers, amusing. Looking for a second carbon-based lifeform, in a planet identical to Earth, beeping out on the radio spectrum, in the same time frame as us? How cute.

Meanwhile, we miss a bigger definition of life right under our noses. Unfortunately reductionism is ingrained in science.
https://github.com/wearefractal/holla
I am 'barking' at the person who chooses to live in the burbs.
I dont care where you live or what car you drive. Has nothing to do with you.
Among my friends, gay rights, abortion, the environment, wrongful convictions (of poor black kids in the inner city, not "patriots" like Snowden), taxes, social security, and healthcare all outrank "privacy" in terms of importance. Are they just brainwashed into this by the "established powers"?
Thanks for taking 1 tiny part of my point and trying to destroy it.

I chose the passphrase "The Brown cow jumps over the m00n!" as an example not "The brown cow jumps over the moon." which is a significantly worse passphrase, especially considering every word is available in a dictionary.

The OP had trouble memorizing more than 16 characters for a passphrase so I suggested something easier yet still solid yet you seemed to think I suggested just a plain english sentence of words.
> I don't have any evidence to support this, but I bet most NSA employees would rather see Snowden brought up on charges vs. using him as a lightning rod for revolt. The majority agree with what they are doing on a day to day basis, not the opposite.

On the contrary, I suspect a great many recognize, as Snowden did, that the work they are doing is morally questionable, but would rather turn a blind eye, keep doing what they're doing and taking home fat paychecks than express dissent and face the wrath of the state, knowing better than most the capacity it has to destroy their lives.
On the freedom to speak
I doubt the NSA would build such a sophisticated system without layers of security and extensive audit trails to prevent misuse. If not only because misuse of the system would be a disaster for the NSA and potentially be a bigger national security problem than what the system is designed to prevent in the first place.
How To Make Money Selling Drugs
(speculation follows.. feel free to ignore) I wonder if Snowden was aware his passport was canceled when he left HK. HK says they did not receive the cancellation in time to prevent him from boarding the plane to Russia. So it's entirely possible he left HK thinking he had a valid passport and would be able to leave Russia... only learning otherwise once he arrived there.
[video] Chomsky on "Can Machines Think"
How does a lawyer have any business being a CTO - this is just like hiring Jill Finney as COO for nominet (.uk registry) when she has zero technical knowledge about IT or the DNS system.

For non UK people MS Finny was involved in a dodgy cover up of mum and baby deaths in the NHS.

FFS I would make a better C level exec for nominet I have worked for a registry before.
Kraus's famous classic 'radio astronomy' textbook had some comments about this topic toward the end. If I recall correctly it was a couple light years for analog NTSC. Nice stable transmitter, satellite disciplined carrier freq toward the end, and the doppler as the earth rotates of a zillion signals gives the little green men something interesting to think about. Planetary radar, IF aimed directly at the target, had much better range, but analog NTSC television had much better coverage over the whole sky.

The radio detection of the earth by broadcast analog NTSC TV carriers has already ended. The article author specified it as a million years. We got about fifty instead. If the LGM are watching our analog TV carriers and the SNR is less than 20 dB or so, there is no way they'll see digital as a discrete signal, nor will they likely randomly guess the correct signalling types/codes.

The meta issue is as a species we're really good at thinking our time is special. 100 years ago watching a spectrogram of analog AM video carriers would have been unthinkable futuristic not even rational to discuss, 25 years ago it would have been a pretty good idea, today its ancient nothing but static, no body would do something so anachronistic.

This misbelief in the importance of your time is closely related to one of the funniest atheist arguments, which is so intellectually unthinkable its rarely discussed. Even the slightest gaze on religious history of the species shows that before the birth of a prophet or whatever, people really thought they had it all figured out almost as well as after. Because this mis-design-pattern has repeated itself with pretty much all religions in the past, I'm sure it will happen again in the future, so simply deciding to believe in nothing until the true prophet is born in 100000 years is the most rational decision. In fact over 100000 years we'll probably have about 100 prophets, all of which, however temporarily, being considered the last word in religion... Its sometimes called the patience atheist argument, or a few other things... Why, everyone knows the best and most important and most correct culture to ever exist, in the past, or more importantly in the future, is now, of course.
This is a good summary. One of the missing pieces is we don't know what the minimum set of combinational factors are to create "advanced" civilization.

The scare quotes for advanced here are that two incompatible definitions for civilization quality compete for the nominative "advanced." In the current context advanced means we've developed machines that carry us into space, we can create habitats to survive in even when our surrounding habitat is inhospitable and we leverage natural resources to create excess food. An alternative context for "advanced" is that your civilization exists in balance with the other processes on the planet, you don't create anything that that wouldn't be created by natural processes inherent in the system, and your resource utilization is at a rate that does not exceed its replenishment rate. Further you explicitly do not use any resource that is not naturally replenished.

In the context of that dichotomy, the question might be "Why didn't the Dinosaurs develop space flight?" They lived on the planet for millions of years before we got here, there is evidence that their cognitive capacity was at least as large as ours, and some species had the ability to manipulate matter at least as well as our paleolithic ancestors did. So why didn't they build giant Dinosaur cities, grow Dinosaur food, and build institutions of higher learning? Depending on your timeline we went from struggling ape to SpaceX in 3 - 5 million years. They had 165 million years to figure it out. Why were they even on the planet when the asteroid hit, and/or why didn't they do something about it before it hit? Using Dinosaur lasers or something.

Depending on how you count we've gone through 5 to 7 nearly total extinctions on this planet. What made this last one special? What is the key set of things that have to be true in order for life to go from being intelligent to manipulating everything around it in its environment to serve the will of that intelligence?

They are complex questions. Great fun to contemplate on camping trips, while under the influence, and when you've run out of other 'safe' conversational starters.
Life's soundtrack
Yah. I was very surprised when I heard he listened to them. He had a great plan, and should have stuck with it.

Wikileaks is using him for their own goals, which appear to be to snub the united states. (Their stated goals, and their actual goals do not match.)

And they have a rather poor track record at actually getting asylum. They are too public with the process. Instead of just doing it they like to talk about first, to make sure everyone knows just how much they are snubbing the US in the process.
For stuff like the example where you know you will be reusing the command, it's better to use an alias or script. Even if it's just a command you plan to run in a couple times in a row you can add a temporay alias with: alias foo = "!!" - that way you don't have to hit ctrl+r each time.

Still, it's a good tip in terms of adding comments to unusual/confusing commands so when you go through your history you're not like "wtf was I doing here?" or if you unexpectedly need to recall it.
Another argument I heard, compatible with life being a fairly easy reaction;

A loglinear graph tracing the genetic complexity of life reaches zero about seven billion years. Obviously this implies an extraterrestrial origin of life theory. But it would also say life came into existence half-way into the big bang expansion and has been gaining complexity ever since. We are the result of this. But there's no reason to think there are other lifes that have that much of a head start. Thus it is not surprising that the manifestations of other intelligences haven't appeared.

http://pacojariego.me/2013/04/21/life-before-earth/
Most of those books are useless now. They were all written pre-2001. And I would wager all the loopholes used have been patched up. I'd be interested to see what Neil Strauss does, I didn't realize he had a book out.
> Also, nonsense what? You never encountered sexism when playing online? Just consider how it's actually considered perfectly fine by many to call a decisive win "rape" :/

Consider how it is considered perfectly fine to joke about man-on-man rape. "Don't bend over in the shower", implying that some inmate is going to be some other burly inmates bitch/wife, etc. Man-on-woman rape is not something you joke about unless you want to be ostracised.

There are evidently issues for women in gaming, but this one is not a symptom of that.
We wiretap the hell out of their citizens.
OpenGL Vertex Buffer Object demo in Python/Pygame
I'm a country boy at heart, was born in coal-country appalachians. But I live in Brooklyn now and it's great for my love of software. Everyone here is a go-getter and it inspires me. I have met so many others I can work with on side projects, it becomes quite impossible to ignore everyone and it drives you forward. I've seen many idle conversations lead to great things simply through circumstance.
Yes. For instance, if i wanted to search for ways to compute a cross product in python, i could just type in "!numpy cross product" and directly search the numpy project page for an answer, without having to first navigate to numpy (I could also search stackexchange by "!sx"). I'm not saying this replaces the features of chrome entirely, but I have found it helpful for my needs. YMMV...
This subject was discussed extensively some time ago. You may be interested in the things the HN community said then:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3313570
New NSA leaks show how US is bugging its European allies
There are some nice puzzles there. There is some overlap between my favourite puzzle page, by Rustan Leino: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/leino/puzzles...., but both have a number of puzzles the other doesn't.

Edit: corrected Leino's name.
Post a bitcoin address, and I'll send you a tip.
Oh Boy! here goes...

"D R O P M I R E"

...in an air conditioned dark room, tastefully illuminated by flatscreens running really cool graphics, furnished with soft recessed indirect wall lighting, somewhere in Maryland, the `Treadstone', `Blackbriar' ALERT flags lite up and flash, klaxons scream...when I hit..Enter....now!

Matt, Will? Matt Damon?! ...Help!

'Blackfoot' ...'Wabash'...'Bruneau'...'Hemlock'...

Ask HN: a python script to concatenate these creepy `totenkopf' nouns and generate scary titles for sinister sounding ops? Blister-Pack and sell it to Booz Allen for six figures(1)?

(1)minus $140k to `git 'er done'
Much more likely is that wikileaks assured him "Don't worry, it'll be fine." Wikileaks is much more concerned with getting lots of publicity than with actually getting him someplace safe (otherwise why would they tell everyone in advance what they are going to do).

He had to know that canceling his passport would be the very first thing the US would do.
To be clear... this is my 'mostly joking' paranoia. I've got no evidence. The situation does seem like buyers are placing a whole hell of a lot of trust in the manufacturers.
I've used centericq/centerim extensively in the past, but switched to finch which works decently and seems more maintained.

You could try the beta of Centerim 5, relies on Pidgin's libpurple.
What is the Future of Commercial WordPress Plugins?
Or blow up Greenpeace boats in foreign waters killing members of the Crew.
Yeah, I know. I'm just pointing out that GMail alternatives should exist that don't involve a huge PITA.

I know how to configure mail servers just fine, but I still wouldn't do it for myself. That's what I mean by "normal".
My dad started three small businesses on his own over the period of 20 years: a restaurant, an upholstery business, and a long line commercial fishing boat. First, let me just point out that sales (or revenue) does NOT equal profit. I'm pretty sure everyone here knows that. If you count just sales, then the upholstery business marked with inflation would probably be doing $150-200k a year in sales/revenue for a single sole proprietorship. However, count in rent, materials, utilities, etc... my family was probably making about 70k a year in today's dollars. The fishing boat, though, is another story.

Although the fishing boat was incorporated as an S-corp with just my dad as the sole owner and 100% owner of stock, he did employ a crew of people. I mean, there was a boat captain, and at any given time, 7 to 8 guys on board. We had fuel expenses, salaries (which were a portion of the catch), food expenses. If you looked strictly at our sales, which I used to do the bookkeeping for, we would easily net 500k to a million a year in today's dollars. After all expenses were paid and done, my dad would make about $100-120k a year on a decent year.
This is partially true. I read that ddg does get a lot of its content from bing and other providers, but also indexes some content on its own. Ixquick is its own search engine but ixquick's "startpage" is essentially a google proxy (this is probably what you meant) but also includes their own content in search results.
As I understand it, Edward Snowdon revealed his identity intentionally as part of his action.

He did his actions with the view that being public and making this public was more important than the dire consequences that were very plausible.

And naturally, creating a false identity is much harder for someone who's had access to this information. They track people like that - constantly - it's not even the same as ordinary surveillance since anyone entering this world agrees to it.
I don't think Iceland was ever really on the table. Other than an MP from a small party making noise, Iceland hasn't officially said anything supportive Snowden, at least that I've seen. The only official statement the Icelandic government has made is that a person must be in the country to apply for asylum, and until he's in the country there is nothing for them to comment on.
One of the semi serious answers is you need a peculiar and somewhat unusual arrangement of land and sea to create a long series of oscillating ice ages every ten thousand years or so (to one sig fig), which is just the right wavelength to very strongly evolve intelligence and civilization. Without that intense adaptation pressure you don't get growth. With enough of it, you get us.
wow! looks terrible o.0

firefox (which is iceweasel) had an issue with font awesome. i hope i resolved this. clear your caches and retry. please email further issues to contact[at]starve[dot]io. thank you!
I'm not advocating or encouraging the hacking (I'd like to think I'm smarter than that). I'm saying for the case of the national discussion happening at the moment regarding government contractors carrying out national security jobs, I would be interested to see the response of folks like Feinstein, who publicly discussed limiting contractor access [1]. If contractors aren't trusted with secrets, the outcome plays right into Assange's theory of the locking down of information and subsequent paralysis of an authoritarian conspiracy [2].

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-14/feinstein-eyes-limi...

[2] http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf
Metasystem Transition
Most of those books are useless now. They were all written pre-2001. And I would wager all the loopholes used have been patched up.

It would be interesting to see. But even if all of the old loopholes have been patched up, I'd wager that new ones have emerged at the same time. It's just a question of finding them.
To be certain, I'm asking happimess how he differentiates between consciously removing an attachment, and abandoning the problems before solving them.

You said, "etting rid of attachments means to reduce the impulses that controls my actions "behind my back". It does not mean not caring, but it means noticing that you care, and noticing how that feels, and noticing what the impulses tell you, and then making a decision based on that information"

What role does the fact that you care, feel, and have impulses play in your judgement about whether to perform a given action?

Those facts by themselves do not reveal the matter connected to the cases that you are judging.

That's why I'm trying to confirm your standard of judgement that you apply.

"But we (or I am at least) are happier when we actively make that choice."

What do you indicate by happiness?
Maybe it could be the less of either extreme and they just quit and go work somewhere else? If there has been a mass exodus of NSA employees the last 5 years I'd believe it, but I don't believe that is the case.
Impressive for a quick hack. Will you be polishing it?
If you mean the original but from last year or so, no. I didn't even have it on my computer, and was kind of remote-debugging through my friend to figure it out. It only happened on 10.6, and I didn't have that handy, so I couldn't check it out locally.
>The chance to get in is low.

That's a very good thing for an art school. Mediocre artists shouldn't be taking up the limit spaces.
I see some flaws in this analysis.

- Point 1

26,744 had sales between $1 million and $2.49 million (up from 24,945 in 2010)

It's a 7% rise, in a year. Those who are in the $100k-$250k range, rose by 6%; not much of a difference.

When we talk (or at least from my perspective) about the rise of a group or minority, it means their growth is much faster than the average and they are probably doing some kind of disruption.

- Point 2

The author talks about the revenue. The revenue means little. Some solo-entrepreneur are selling their craft. A Software developer working remotely has almost no costs. Some are trading stuff. So their revenues are high, but not really their profit.
Maybe I'm projecting too much human behavior on unknowns, but we've pretty much come to the conclusion that we when run into an uncontacted tribe of humans, we try to stay completely hands off.

Perhaps we shouldn't discount the possibility that's a universal evolutionary stage, and that there's just some sort of 'prime directive' type thing keeping any life from contacting us yet?
I agree that it would likely yield an interesting discussion. The fact is federal contractors are responsible for almost all cases of espionage in the past 10 years.

Good links too.
A lot of pain, blood, terror, injustice, tenacity and bravery as far as I understand it.
Perhaps your friends are not able to prioritise?

Privacy is a fundamental human right recognized in the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

What good is it to have the right to abortion, gay marriage, immigration amnesty etc. if tomorrow you can be taken away and locked up for the rest of your life, without any due process, all because of an email you wrote?