skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Obama on spying accusations leveled by European nations:

We should stipulate that every intelligence service — not just ours, but every European intelligence service, every Asian intelligence service, wherever there’s an intelligence service — here’s one thing that they’re going to be doing: they’re going to be trying to understand the world better and what’s going on in world capitals around the world.

If that weren’t the case, then there’d be no use for an intelligence service.

And I guarantee you that in European capitals, there are people who are interested in, if not what I had for breakfast, at least what my talking points might be should I end up meeting with their leaders. That’s how intelligence services operate.

If all nations seek "intel" and they have their own - manifestly and understandably - little NSAs doing the snooping for them, then where are their Snowdens?

Let's ignore the totalitarian regimes of Russia and China for a moment.

No one expects those states which routinely engage in horrible human rights violations to tolerate a Snowden of their own.

What about the freer republics in the West?

The Northern European nations which laud themselves on their human rights records.

Britannia? Scandinavia? The Allemagne?

So the Gauls are surveillance-free? Really?

Do Europeans pause to ask when their own Snowdens might emerge? Do they care?

Why isn't there an uproar by their own indignant peoples against their own surveillance states?

London has orchards of "crime fighting" cameras. Do Londoners know if their movements aren't being identified and archived possibly for decades to come in a secure repository, somewhere?

Are Londoners okay with this?

Have they struck a gentlemen's agreement, over clotted cream and scones, with their state about the extent of its surveillance operations and their implications?

So, the MI5 or whatever two-bit agency runs their mom-and-pop surveillance shop reveals the extent of the surveillance
to its peoples?

Isn't surveillance/espionage by its nature supposed to be discreet?

So why does the Guardian not invest in digging homegrown cases of gross privacy violations?

Do the Der Speigels, Le Mondes, la Repubblicas and the El Pais actually give a damn about privacy issues
when the culprit isn't from across the Atlantic?

Source:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/obama-says-...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghqxuos_MWk
Basic
$5 per month
1 website

I prefer having my own server for $5 and use Jekyll to admin not one but several websites.
Build a startup without the risk with Hipster CEO.
Yes, keeping a webservice running takes time. Especially one that's being hit millions of times a day.
Aha, so the bible, quran, torah etc then?
Most RNGs that generate numbers from 0 to 1 actually just generate a random 64-bit value, and divide by 2^64; which means that they do underflow relatively easily. (This is relatively easily to overcome using a better (& more expensive) random bits -> double algorithm.)
My passport states:

"This passport is the property of the United States. It must be surrendered upon demand made by an authorized representative of the United States."

Title 22, Section 51.9 is the law it references, but I haven't read it.
With over 300 million people, extreme things can happen to .0001% of the people any day, and that's still 300 people affected. 300 stories to choose from a day makes for lots of sensational news.
How do you make that distinction before you've read the book?
My First Pluralsight Course Released
"I'm not really on the side that believes we're any more endangered with this information coming out"

I don't know about endangered, but we are now having to field all kinds of demands from our allies, wanting to know what was bugged, assurances that they won't be bugged in the future, reputation damage, etc.

We have to deal with the hypocrisy issue as well. It would appear that we've been doing all of those things that we've been accusing China of doing. We've lost all credibility here.

Also, American Internet companies are having to deal with a backlash of the government's actions on information routed through American companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook. That in itself is an economic harm. Some companies / governments will now make an effort to not route their data through US-offered services in order to avoid the US government's signals intelligence efforts.
If you had read my words, you would know I obviously "plan" to live around 85 years, and the verb «think» would have suggested to you that I don't have an infallible way to know what the people of the future will enjoy reading.

I thought you were asking sincerely, but it seems you're either trying to start a flame with your sarcasm or just not reading through my words.

If I want to read good sci-fi or fantasy I'll pick Bradbury, Asimov, or any other brilliant author I _think_ will still be read in 500 years.

Go and read whatever you like, I couldn't care less.
Russia wants to have him as a possible tool to press the USA in the future - that is why they want him to stop the leaking now - when all is leaked he'll be of no value to them.

By rejecting these terms Snowden shows character - but he is now in a really bad situation. Requesting asylum in Poland (where one of the secret CIA prisons was located) was an act of desperation.
AngularJS directives and the computer science of JavaScript
I was asking sincerely, you gave me a non-answer.
Goodbye, Google Reader
incomparably better writeup
http://www.spaceflight101.com/proton-m-block-dm-03-glonass-l...
Hey Gexla, thanks or asking.

You get to stay at Startup Getaway (startupgetaway.org). Living costs, food, and room cleaning are all covered by Contenga.

Take a look at that website, and you'll see the advantages. If your inn it just for the paycheck, this definitely is not the gig for you. But if you wanna live and learn from successful entrepreneurs, live in a paradise, and work entrepreneurially (you choose hours, projects, etc.), then that's who we're looking for.

I'm sure you've heard of the "5 people you spend the most time with" quote. That the biggest advantage here over working on your own.

And, of course, you can build you own businesses while here, and get help from the entrepreneurs living here with you.
Also drive a car (16), sign legal contracts, get yourself in tens of thousands of dollars in debt...
Do we have the money for a manned mission to Mars?
On average, it's not that bad. Yes, there are assholes everywhere (police and otherwise), but for the most part the stuff you read about is few and far between.

That being said, knowing the proper way to deal with people in authority positions is incredibly important. In this case, she should have asked for ID (yelling at them through the window if necessary). If they kept insisting that she roll the window down - and for some reason her car is unlike every other car out there, requiring the engine to be on, she should have tried to explain that through the window.

(Seriously, what cars require the engine to be running for the windows to roll down?)
Thanks for bringing this up!

I considered the same point before posting the link, but decided that it was appropriate considering (imo) that it is a product of the same 21st century paranoia and police culture of "shoot first, ask questions later".
Because this is one of the more interesting books of recent years, creating an interesting story, showing the tragedy and comedy of a very logical and rational boy who tries to interact with chaos of humanity, and the book manages to work in many discussions of science, rationality, politics, Bayesian statistics, and the potential and limits of each. If this book had used an original setting with renamed characters but was identical otherwise, it would be hailed as a modern genre classic.

If you have any interest in fantasy / sci-fi / or the original Potter setting, this book also deliberately sends up or subverts many of the tropes common to this setting. The application to the fantasy settings is particularly interesting due to the main character attempting to apply the scientific method in a world where people can perform magic and do so without questioning where it comes from, and the book therefore tries to take Clarke's old maxim to its limit.

Is it literature? I personally think so. Will it be read in fifty years? I have no idea and care little. Do adults need to only sit down with incredibly serious books which have been approved by a set of gatekeepers? No. You're missing out on a world of weird and wonderful things if you limit yourself in such a way.
Keep in mind that stories like these are pretty rare and the US is a big place. Even if the police in the US were generally as good as you'd hope any police were there would still be the occasional story of someone abusing their power or making egregious mistakes just due to the sheer size of the US. That's not an excuse, it's just a reminder that you need to temper your judgment of a place that you might have formed based on stories of the most freakish and abnormal events in that place (like, say, imagining that Pakistan is full of terrorists or some such).

Additionally, for various reasons you don't hear reports of equivalent stories like this happening in, for example, Europe, though such things are not exactly significantly less common there.
Edward Snowden has nowhere to go
Seems like most of Europe will require asylum applications to be left in person inside the country. That will make Snowdens life bit more difficult, especially as his mobility seems bit limited atm.
Disagree utterly, but upvoted anyway.
If you were asking sincerely whether I was planning on living 500 years, you've read way too much Harry Potter.
That's because everything in Australia can kill you - guns aren't necessary

</sarcasm>
> I am trying to imagine what leverage we have over Russia.

It's not about leverage, it's about the rules of the game.

Russia and the US manage to be on fairly good diplomatic terms whilst both spending large amounts of money spying on the other. Because it's important to both countries that the diplomatic channels don't collapse completely certain 'expectations' have evolved around intelligence gathering and espionage.

Case in point: if you happened to work for the CIA/FBI and walked into the Russian embassy to try and defect there's a very strong chance the Russians would shop you back to the US (this happened to Robert Hannsen after the fall of the USSR - it was only because of a FBI screw-up he wasn't caught).

It's just not worth the pain for Russia. They almost certainly already have better intelligence on the NSA than Snowden could provide. It's naive to imagine they don't have any human intelligence already in place on that front.
The reason I'm posting this is because after digging around for some time, I don't have a clue. Sure, it seems we have less money relative to the 1960s, but it's not orders-of-magnitude less. I would love someone else chipping their opinion. Thanks.
Don't forget, you can enlist in a military branch at 18 - so its conceivable you could fight and die for your country before being able to legally enjoy a cold pint at the local pub.
Out of interest, how many people recommending this usually read fanfiction? Because I gave it a try a good while back but got a bit frustrated with it. It seemed to read more as a parody (albeit a good one) rather than something more faithful to the characters.
Fuck google.
Seriously. Really? Couldn't keep it running?
Bastards.
London tech startup www.what3words.com being pretty innovative in mapping - more accurate and memorable than postcodes?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_This_Horizon:

One sub-theme of the book is the carrying and use of firearms. In the novel being armed is part of being a man; otherwise he wears a brassard and is considered weak and inferior. Women are allowed but not expected to be armed. Duels, either deadly or survivable, may easily occur when someone feels that they have been wronged or insulted, a custom that keeps order and politeness. A defining quote from the book which is repeated throughout Heinlein's work is, "An armed society is a polite society," is very popular with those who support the personal right to keep and bear arms.
Focus is about saying no
Not quite fitting into the literature category, but I've read the Bible out of curiosity and interest for the origins of our culture.
Quick poll:

Where do you stand on this?

-> Focus (1...10) Keeping the product

I´m a bit conflicted.. on one hand they lost user confidence by discontinuing Reader, on the other I completely get the approach to focus on a few things and really do them well.
I don't get the point of Opera anymore.
Well , there is no freedom of speech in russia , but there is none in most European countries neither. He should chose carefully where he wants to go. I'd suggest him to avoid France and UK. Dont know about other european countries.
I can't recall ever being in a car with power windows that would work with the car completely turned off (key out of the ignition). You can turn the key backward or partially forward in most cars just to engage the battery and operate the windows, but she may not have known about that.
This has so many missing features that I would expect from an Opera browser. Lots of seemingly little things that add up (where's the mouse chording!)

Where is this bleeding edge Opera Developer version that they mention in the post available for download, so I can at least see if the little things that have kept me on Opera for 9 years are in the pipeline?
The launch of Firefox OS – my thoughts and some history
The "goalposts" haven't "moved".

Asm.js is still just JavaScript. Emscripten isn't currently production-grade software, and it still just compiles down to JavaScript.

I hope you understand that either of those options is still a case of using JavaScript. Are you seriously disputing that?

We can develop production-grade applications using Java, C, C++, C# and JavaScript for Android. We can only do a very small fraction of that when using Firefox OS. Firefox OS clearly provides far fewer viable options than Android does.
It alienated me. I like Opera 12 very much. But the things I like are missing in 15. Tab-screenshots for example.

And the overall look and feel is just Chrome. So I think people will skip Opera 15 and download Chrome instead. Or they will stick to Opera 12 like I will.

Strange. The new mobile versions doesn't get a lot of positive reviews and now this one. I hope Opera didn't loose track.
I know this is old aand well known among many on HN. However, I saw that people are still debating the death of Google Reader so I thought I would remind people that saying no, even to good ideas, is important in great companies.
You don't need DDG for that, when you can use Firefox (or Chrome).

All you need to do on a website with a search box is to right-click on that search box -> Add Keyword for this Search... and then add a shortcut.

The cool thing about it is that it is extensible. You don't need to settle for the fixed "bangs" that DDG provides. For example, I have a "dex" shortcut for searching an online dictionary of my native language.

Also, it takes less time to add a shortcut of interest than it is to read the DDG documentation page to find out the right bang for you.

If you care about privacy, then this is also a no-brainer, since you don't go through a third-party server anymore.
What blocks Ruby, Python to get Javascript V8 speed?
These days, as an anarcho capitalist, I just feel like the entire world is continuously handing me ammunition to justify my position, and I have had plenty for years.

Both amusing and sad.
I don't know if there is a study or theory to support this, but it seems that the longer any two opposing sides (like the police and criminals) face each other, the stronger is the influence of one over the other.

To a point when both sides have picked up significant good/bad behavior from each other. And then the very same police looks both aggressive and distasteful to the rest of us - i.e those who were not in the loop ever.

Wait, quantum entanglement?
Meet Zynga's New CEO Don Mattrick
My startup revenue just doubled in 1 week WTF?
free weev
If you go to the London hipster map. I live square dead in the middle of it (the Shoreditch triangle). Granted I've only lived here for 4 months but the only 2 bad things that I've seen were:

1) Someone puked in the alleyway that leads to my door. I walked around it.
2) One day when coming home at 11pm, there were people smoking weed in front of my door and one guy was pissing against the building close to my door. I went inside and everyone minded their own business.

Yeah those are not the nicest of experiences, however I'm rewarded every day by incredible access to art & culture (and amazing music gigs I can walk to by foot) and -- plainly -- I love people who step outside normalcy in terms of how they dress & express themselves. It's fun to see and makes me push my own boundaries :)

EDIT: Shoreditch is by now also an incredibly safe & affluent/expensive area. Never once have I felt threatened here, I feel safe carrying my phone on me at all times of day/night. This might be different in the cheaper-but-also-hipster areas of Hackney like Dalston.
Well if true then the move makes no sense. Why would he ruin any chance of getting out of the airport if that's where he is? Also, if he really is there then why have no photographs of him been taken? Surely there is at least a couple (sarcasm) of people that go through the airport each day? Where is this guy and why don't we see his face anymore?
That's what GMVault is for.
Yep, the accessory setting (key turned on click forward) should do the trick - providing power for windows/radio etc.

Upon further consideration, I wonder if she had a push-button starter. Having never driven a key-less car before, how the heck does the accessory setting work (if at all)?
Cloudant Accelerator Program
More than likely he is holed up in a special area of the airport, detained or guarded by Russian special services.
The RSS area was pretty damns sparse outside of Reader. Were you just not using one?
"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened."
Since machine learning and A.I is pretty much applied stats, there has got to be quite a lot of cs grads with good stats skills.
SR-71 Blackbird: How to fly the world's fastest plane
Understanding the position you are explaining doesn't make the shutdown of Google reader any less regrettable or irritating.

It's my impression that it's a little bit cliché and borderline to trolling: every time a "free" product is shutdown and people complain or discuss about it there is a good free-market capitalist soul coming with condescending comments about how people shouldn't expect anything when given something for "free".

We know it. It's still pissing users off. Deal with it.
Politeness, courtesy, generosity, prudence... need I go on? It stands to reason that those secrets would stay secret out of respect for Edward and genuine concern for his continued existence.
Google isn't charging its users. But it couldn't make any money if it has no users.
Which one of my words is it, I wonder, that led you to to think I was taking about happiness and fulfilment and not simply about the way I choose which books I want to read? :P
> My own opinion regarding the matter is that there are plenty of mind and body altering effects that we encounter every day. I'm a chemical engineer, and anyone who is involved with chemistry or biology can tell you that all but the simplest mechanisms are difficult to understand.

Yeah, some people even have experiences without drugs that they interpret as revelations from God.
At first I thought this was funny and thought about following up with more sarcasm

but then it hit me how much this is sad, USA seems 100% psychotic to me these days... I honestly feel like stopping following US-related news because it's all so depressing goddamn
I was just thinking the same thing. Unfortunately Australia was a very different environment to that in the US at present (very small hunting/sports shooting culture given an almost entirely urban population, broad public support, a parliamentary system such that the executive branch could easily pass the required legislation - although I recall it had bipartisan support, lack of a constitutional right to arms etc.)

At the core of it though, I do believe the pervasive culture of fear in the US and the media that supports it renders any progress on serious gun control nearly impossible.
You can pretty much blame MADD for that. Originally it started out as an organization with the best intentions but over time it's turned into more or less a modern temperance movement.

The key was figuring out that if you pressure the federal government enough you can get states to fall in line. The federal government doesn't have the ability to set a blanket drinking age for every state. But it does have the ability to withhold federal highway funds from states that refuse to set their minimum drinking age at 21.
I still fail to see how revealing intelligence actions by the USG against other countries helps hold them accountable, especially when it is the same sort of thing every other country takes part in.
Can Snowden fly by private jet from Moscow to Ecuador?
Hm. They managed to lose me as a G+ user by discontinuing Google Reader, since Reader was the centerpoint of all my sharing activity.
GLONASS
When I read that title and the source, to me, it just looked like NBC trying rally the general public to defame Snowden's character and view him as having his own interests at heart.

I agree with you that Snowden's actions was to reveal what the administration was doing and overreaching in its power. How do you protest our government's action without evidence, reputation, and without being dragged in the general media....it's not possible without looking like a conspiracy theorist.

This is why I respect Snowden. He gave up everything... safety, great pay, family... for what he believes in.
95% chance of troll but whatever. Yes, find a good therapist. Compassion for your suffering. On the other hand 1.5 million is more money than the majority of Americans will make in their life, combined. Could try giving it all away?
I certainly don't want him to be left isolated, but I disagree that speculating about him or his motives keeps him safe.

I think it becomes far easier to demonise him, spread confusion about his motives, and engage in baseless smears of his character or competence, if we allow speculative articles like this one to direct the debate.
I had no idea there were age limits on gun ownership in America. Looks like you're right though (except in Vermont the age limit is 16).
Yeah latency is more important but wouldn't you cache most results in a real app.

I think 37 signal's showed us that a rail's app is capable of delivering low latency responses. In some presentation David mentioned most responses are sent out in 20-50ms but he didn't mention the hardware involved.
The index page looks really interesting, the kind of index page that would lead me to read the book. Can someone give a gist of what this fanfic is about?

(I loved the Harry Potter series and I love Nassim Talebs works if that matters)
The way it's been trying to monetize all its products, really.