skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, let's not place their stated motives aside and presume their premise is simply misguided. Their premise is full bologna and a palpable excuse for the uneducated.

From the article: "...But if their purpose is to protect us, why worry?..."

If their motives were that genuine and honest, why are they not freeing American girls or otherwise from slavery? arresting cartel leaders or crooked politicians or perhaps crushing insider trading?

The answer is that the NSA/CIA/FBI and all the other "alphabet soup" agencies fear the public at large and are scared and want to protect themselves and their institutions only.

I know I over-simplified but the last nation to do this was the Soviet Union and they feared their public too.
This is a worse investment than color in my opinion. The founders have no track record whatsoever to justify a $25M investment for a product that has been stealth mode for two years running. I've heard several complaints from insiders about the company and its founder.
Do you have any tips on testing for deliverability? I have a hunch that if I try to send something, say to my gmail or one of my close friends' email, that the spam filter will allow it because it's a familiar name/domain, but I would expect that if I email a stranger's gmail, it might get flagged...
Are you married with children ? If you aren't: would you move too if you had wife and children ?
http://bling.github.io/blog/2013/06/02/unite-dot-vim-the-plu...
What's the difference between asking how to improve Perl code and Satan going to confession? The latter might have some chance of redemption.
putting your money where your mouth is
I don't understand how they can write that article without mentioning RapGenius or even alluding to that fiasco. Wired just lost some credibility in my mind.
Part of the process is to unify targets across communications mechanisms. That number would very likely mean distinct "individuals," although it could include people using multiple accounts that had not yet been associated with the same person/group.

It's easier when you can associate IP addresses with multiple accounts, of course, but there are a lot of traits (and I'm sure NSA has more than I am aware of) that can be used as similarity metrics to create a probabilistic hierarchy of account agglomeration.

Throwing clique analysis into the mix, which is of course where the most important analysis goes, also helps establish the probability that multiple accounts may be controlled by one person.
Melbourne, Australia, on the Telstra Bigpond network
--- 202.146.213.3 ping statistics ---
20 packets transmitted, 20 received, 0% packet loss, time 19028ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 19.950/25.286/51.303/8.962 ms
PING 106.187.98.41 (106.187.98.41) 56(84) bytes of data.

--- 106.187.98.41 ping statistics ---
20 packets transmitted, 20 received, 0% packet loss, time 19027ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 137.024/140.286/151.213/3.711 ms
PING 50.116.56.20 (50.116.56.20) 56(84) bytes of data.

--- 50.116.56.20 ping statistics ---
20 packets transmitted, 20 received, 0% packet loss, time 19005ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 232.608/235.623/249.223/4.021 ms
If you think any of the measures instituted after 9/11 could prevent another mass 9/11 style attack, you're in denial. Like people who want to ban semi-automatic rifles because of school shootings. The Bush administration ignored all the 9/11 warning signs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/opinion/the-bush-white-hou...

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/09/bush-knew-mo...
That's exactly why I went with Django/Python instead of RoR/Ruby.

I have no problem with keeping software up-to-date but I don't want to make that a main task because some "cool" kids easily get bored and keep phasing out stuff which break production apps and/or causes security issues.
"...Bitcoin promises to be different: everyman is own bank, we can throw of the chains of Wall St. oppression, fees, financing of wars, bullshit financial advisors whom pimp you mutual funds into your strictly enforced 401k, and a litany of other advantages that only a technology, no a religion could provide, and most importantly, we can trade with one another like free people are supposed too, or at least like they did in the 1850's on Wall St."

You only notice your shackles when you've new room to move.
There's gentoo/alt and fink which predates DarwinPorts. I'm sure there is even a pkgsrc user out there. I've occasionally used this one called make. It's sort of a meta language to homebeer. In fact it comes in two flavors pmake and gmake. =P
"The pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled." --Stevenson
If people were determined to blow up shopping centers in America they could easily. Pay no attention to the theater security that surrounds your everyday life. It means nothing.
It also helps eliminate the credibility of the government and its corporate collaborators when they disclaim participation based on subset x. When subset y, released the next week, points out that they were in fact aware, then the people who are exposed make stupid statements such as the lovely,"We don't spy on US citizens."

I'm wondering what this theatrical sleight of hand is keeping us from seeing elsewhere. We've probably invaded Iran or sent another trillion dollars to the banking industry.
I ran a set up similar to this for many years. It's not that hard, for those with a little unix experience. As moxie mentions, email is very forgiving—you have to break it badly and leave it broken for a long time before you start to lose messages.

What eventually drove me to GMail was spam. I tried a bunch of different filters, and never found one with good-enough accuracy. Finally I decided that the independence and privacy wasn't worth the time I spent fiddling with filters and dealing with misclassified messages. As far as I can tell, Gmail is 100% accurate. Problem solved.
What use is of the mini-map? Navigation is better done by search, and I cannot imagine it could be more than a cute waste of screen space.
Hi,

Sydney, Dodo, Australia:

202.146.213.23

Pinging 202.146.213.3 with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 202.146.213.3: bytes=32 time=24ms TTL=58

Reply from 202.146.213.3: bytes=32 time=24ms TTL=58

Reply from 202.146.213.3: bytes=32 time=25ms TTL=58

Reply from 202.146.213.3: bytes=32 time=25ms TTL=58

106.187.98.41

Pinging 106.187.98.41 with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 106.187.98.41: bytes=32 time=138ms TTL=51

Reply from 106.187.98.41: bytes=32 time=138ms TTL=51

Reply from 106.187.98.41: bytes=32 time=138ms TTL=51

Reply from 106.187.98.41: bytes=32 time=138ms TTL=51

50.116.56.20

Pinging 50.116.56.20 with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 50.116.56.20: bytes=32 time=243ms TTL=45

Reply from 50.116.56.20: bytes=32 time=243ms TTL=45

Reply from 50.116.56.20: bytes=32 time=242ms TTL=45

Reply from 50.116.56.20: bytes=32 time=242ms TTL=45

Hope this helps

D
Would there be any particular security problem with user accounts being system users, where logged in users perform as their user and non-logged-in users have a guest account?

Then make a noexec chroot which has just a /home for them all.

I'm not sure how you'd translate a http request with an authenticated session into a handler running as a particular user, but I don't doubt that it is possible with some fork(), setuid() arrangement.
That would require more resources on the server side than simply storing flat files in directories.
Inner workings of a top secret spy program
Q: What's the difference between writing Perl and taking a severe beating? A: Nothing. The wonder of Perl is that it helps you get the latter without needing any external assistance.
Not profitable? Hardly. Let's take a look.

On the free tier I pay $0 per month. I get a single dyno (which has poor performance), and a postgres DB with 10k row limit. I end up getting a few users per day, but my app doesn't perform well so it never takes off. Heroku gave me a bunch of stuff for free and never made any money off of it.

Let's say they offered a paid tier at $5 per month that gave me one persistent dyno and a 100MB postgres DB. The usage of my app is not drastically different, but Heroku is taking in $5 per month. If my app takes off I start cranking up the dynos and DB specs. They make more money. I stay happy.

Under the hypothetical scenario Heroku could be making $60/year off of me, with the possibility of future sales.

Under their current pricing model the cost goes from $0 per month to $44/month (2 dynos @ $35 and a 10M row postgres DB @ $9). I'm not going to pay $44/month for each app that I want to run just for the convenience of being on their platform.

I think they are making a huge mis-step by not looking at price points between $0 and $44. There are only so many RapGenius level clients in the world. They can make a lot of money by reeling in the long tail, but so far it seems like all they care about are the big fish.
to put all your resources where your mouth is
Article seems unnecessarily mean.

A $25m "seed" is generally not a good idea but I think worthwhile giving the benefit of the doubt at this point and waiting to see what and how they roll out.

The Yodlee thing is likely for verifying bank/card accounts, not offering Mint-like services.
To suggest that Palantir systems are not used in all kinds of defense, law enforcement, and counter-terrorism operations is to deny reality. Lessig, being of such stature in his field, surely knows who they are and what they do. Why he mentions them by name not only in the Moyers interview but also in an article one can only speculate. Via twitter he says he plugs "ideas, not companies" but didn't address if he knew what other business Palantir gets up to.

Can anybody show evidence of the "audit trail" Palantir uses to ensure citizens know what's being done with their data by NCTC, FBI and others?
Amazon's $600 Million CIA Deal Really Is For A Game-Changing 'Private' Cloud
Beware: Massive (fruity) spam attack on Instagram
Thanks very much both of you!
That's a great point. Reminds of the time I taught my friend to use PGP and sent him an encrypted email. Every single time, he would reply in plain-text, thus exposing my older conversation. When asked why, he told me it's too much of a pain to do it. So my being careful about my privacy doesn't help if other people don't play along.
If you do not call it AT&T C, please don't call it Google Go.
There's sshfs for linux, use whatever editor you want. I still hadn't find a decent client for Windows though.
I see encrypted connections to/from gmail all the time. Here's an example from a test I just ran:

Trusted TLS connection established to gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[173.194.79.27]:25: TLSv1 with cipher RC4-SHA

Anonymous TLS connection established from mail-yh0-f48.google.com[209.85.213.48]: TLSv1 with cipher RC4-SHA
You forgot bsdmake ... which up until OS X ML was still available on OS X.
Yeah, I've been following, with the point of view of someone explicitly not protected by your 4th amendment rights. (I'm assuming, possibly incorrectly, that you're a US citizen?)

As a "non-US person", I read all the "We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law" explanations from Google/Apple/Yahoo/Facebook et al - as saying "Oh, you want our data from that guy in Australia? Sure, that's 'in accordance with the law' - here's all his email… Anything else you'd like? His social graph? His contact list/address book? His Adwords clickthroughs? His Google Analytics enabled website visits? Oh look, it seems he accidentally put his GPG private key into his GoogleDrive folder - have that too!"

Do you really find it surprising that people outside the US see Snowdon's revelations and the US government's reactions to strongly suggest this is the only sensible interpretation? _All_ the denials/re-assurances we're seeing are of the form "in accordance with the law", then going on to talk about presumed protection against _domestic_ spying, and the 4th amendment rights of US citizens. None of which is reassuring from where I sit.
starting a company.
cannot agree more. in my opinion, regardless of the statistics drop in crime is primarily attributed to exuberant increase of the cost of living especially in the historically impoverished neighborhoods from the 1980s and on. (i.e. Bushwick, Williamsburg, Bedford-Stuyvesant etc...)
Yes it is easy to blow up shopping centers. Hence the Boston Marathon bombing. Hence the surveillance programs that ostensibly identify and investigate and stop potential bombers.

The existence of 'security theatre', the only example I can think of being the TSA, doesn't preclude the possibility that there are real threats.
MySQLgame - a game that just is a database
The Guardian article (which is listed as the source) has been "taken down pending an investigation".
Why not use both? I run my sites on NFS and put my media on S3.
Gr8 video
EU nations spy on the US. That's not up for debate. It is a fact.

That's how the world works.

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/30/world/us-expanding-its-eff...
There seems to be some confusion over this story. It did not originate from the Guardian, but from the Observer. The Guardian must aggregate or something stories from the Observer. They've taken down the story while the Guardian editorial board can investigate it. Greenwald has nothing to do with the story.

Source: Glenn Greenwald's Twitter feed. Make sure you select "All Replies" if you're on the desktop website.

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald
See my other comment in this thread for more information.
I lived in Austin, and did not like it, that is why I moved to Silicon Valley. Austin seems cool in theory, but it still lacks a lot of what Silicon Valley has. They say that VC is the problem, but I doubt it. The culture is there too, but it seems to me that the main problem is talent.

UT does not even compare to Stanford. It is all about people; if you don't have the right talent, no matter how much effort you put into culture, resources, or investment, innovation will still not grow.

Housing is about the same if you know how to look in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley might be cheaper depending on where you live; I do not mean East Palo Alto, I heard prices ranging from 500-800 a month in places like Sunnyvale and San Jose, all the way to Menlo Park. My place in Menlo Park is 560/month. Use craigslist/peninsula.

What about Google, Apple and other hi-tech companies moving there? I suspect that they use it as satellite factories for blue collar workers, while all their white collar talent is in the Valley. Taxes are low, wages are lower, so why not outsource all the no-brainer labor to Austin? Creative and engineering talent is still in the Valley and you have to pay a high price for it.

I know because I looked for jobs there for a year with no luck, when I moved to Silicon Valley I got 3 jobs instantly. Do not listen to media, they often have ulterior motives like promoting the state. The weather in Austin is too hot. Again, the main problem stays the same: NOT ENOUGH TALENT. That is just my intuition though.
you really believe NYC is taking in more low income residents? Exactly where are they moving into? Remember, they destroyed a couple blocks of section 8 housing to build the new Brooklyn Nets arena.
How to write benchmarks in Go
RTFA - this link appears in the first paragraph.
The NSA argues to fight terrorism, bugs EU offices, EU officials are terrorists?
This was known prior to the PRISM disclosure; they're (most likely) referring to the FAA 702 process, in which a court certifies a target for which multiple directives may then be issued. The certification establishing the target is reviewed in the manner of a FISA warrant, but the individual directives that flow from the certification aren't. Certifications have a 1:many relationship with directives.

The reasonable expectation one would have about statistics released by (say) Yahoo pursuant to this process is that they would capture every directive received by the provider, since providers don't get the certifications.

Just a quick reminder: the USG does not need and has never needed and probably will never need a warrant to spy on a foreign entity not on US soil. I'd be interested in hearing about any country that had a signals intelligence capability (Germany, France, Israel, UK, China, Japan, Brazil, &c) in which a warrant was required to conduct foreign intelligence.
You got me; I'd also like to ban semi-automatic rifles. Give those deer a fighting chance.
and way less effort to cluster or shard
It's implemented for almost everything, and has a good keyboard support. Guess it was there from the very beginnging.
hard; let's go shopping.
It would be foolish for a country to blindly trust bureaucrats from other nations

I don't trust random people either. That doesn't make me spy on them, since I couldn't care less what they talk among themselves, it's none of my business. Also, the second I start spying, I also would need to spy on even more, to see if they're on to me spying on them. Yay, there goes the whole afternoon!

It's just redefining everyone to be a potential enemy, because the objective is total control. Amongst individuals it's obvious only psychos or people with something (real fucking ugly) to hide would do that, to anyone but said psychos.

Why would nations be different? Because we're in them? Why is it so hard to accept that a lot of what we consider normal actually is insane, doesn't achieve the claimed objectives, and prohibits a whole range of actually worthwhile ones?
Just in case, one more.

Melbourne - Internode.

--- 202.146.213.3 ping statistics ---
15 packets transmitted, 15 received, 0% packet loss, time 14025ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 35.684/147.028/1011.345/270.898 ms, pipe 2

--- 106.187.98.41 ping statistics ---
12 packets transmitted, 12 received, 0% packet loss, time 11003ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 139.057/202.351/863.312/199.302 ms

--- 50.116.56.20 ping statistics ---
17 packets transmitted, 16 received, 5% packet loss, time 16027ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 254.239/419.566/1011.784/285.667 ms, pipe 2
the highest high and the lowest low.
building a sustainable business
install vcs-gutter plugin on ST2 and see the true retard :)
The only concrete thing I've seen is the information on Boundless Informant. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-boundless-in... Which shows that Germany was a rather large target of NSA surveillance.

The rest is pure speculation. First, is NSA surveillance in Germany actually disproportionate or did the leaked slides not account for population differences. Maybe, but according to the slides, there are on the order of as many intercepts in China as Germany. So lets assume its not erroneous.

Why does the NSA have a disproportionate interest in Germany? Are they of massively more geopolitical significance than their neighbors or does the USA have a dearth of insight into their foreign policy thinking via back channels? I'd say thats more likely to describe France with its Security Council seat and less strong working relationship with the US.

Is the NSA engaged in massive economic espionage? Possible, but I can't imagine that accounts for enough as that would likely be rather targeted.

So the last reason I can think of is counter-terrorism (one of the NSA's main focuses). Mohammed Atta was part of a cell in Hamburg after all. Ok, but why Germany and not say Denmark or France which both have similar populations you might expect(rightly or wrongly) to be under similar surveillance? As someone pointed out on HN a while ago, Denmark does extensive surveillance and telephone monitoring themselves. I'd guess France does too. Does Germany? I honestly don't know, but given the German's focus on privacy and the legacy of the Stasi, I certainly could see it being a problem and being easier to outsource to the NSA.
as mentioned, you can use a dalvik decompiler. I recommend JEB: http://www.android-decompiler.com/

It's like IDA but for APKs.
Hmmm, no Perfect Forward Secrecy on RC4-SHA...

Would it be considered paranoid to read anything into the fact that they offer ECDHE-RC4-SHA for https sessions, but only RC4-SHA for SMTP connections?
re: sinatra, please check JAX-RS :)
Apparently Israel is spying on the US as well. I get the impression that everyone is spying on everyone else all the time. What concerns me most about spies spying on spies and politicians is the cost to tax payers everywhere.

This thing doesn't bother me in the same way as when they're spying on me, because I care about my privacy and safety but as an EU citizen I don't care much if the US finds out something about EU negotiation tactics or whatever they're after.

That it's not between enemies is exactly why it doesn't matter much. It's just an expensive playground for a self-important security aparatus.
It's the codification of the parts of morality that we bargain & wrestle into a set of rules we decide to enforce.

Not all "morality" turns into law, nor is all law based on morale principals.
>I know I over-simplified but the last nation to do this was the Soviet Union and they feared their public too.

And this is why/result/symptom of the US collapsing. We've seen these things time and time again. An empire who has no enemies makes an enemy out of itself.

Interesting take on the US collapse preparedness from someone who experienced it in the USSR:

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2006-12-04/closing-collaps...
This is nice and everything, but why can't they just give up the charade and let people write applications for mobile devices in whatever language they like without having to jump through hoops like this? I should be able to write applications in Go (or C or whatever) and be able to use the official APIs in an officially supported way and without having to waste time screwing with shims and JNI.

And while I'm complaining about it, it sure would be nice if they would include POSIX support by default. It's not like the code to do it isn't largely already written and freely available.
I get your first statement, however If someone falls off due to poor sight/bad knees/inner ear problems or someone jumps off due to a temporary depressive illness, I see little difference. All relate to medical problems. It's not that I'm rabidly anti suicide - I am pro suicide rights - but I'd hardly call a net coercion. Can you explain this for me?
Grafton Bridge in Auckland has put up Perspex screens for suicide prevention (and the safely of those under the bridge) instead of nets. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grafton_Bridge
...putting other people's money where your mouth is
It's a replacement for VIM so good that in most cases the IDE becomes unnecessary, because the notion of 'project' and various GoTo and search commands solve all navigation needs. It even has a rudimentary build system support.

I talk about c++ and Python though, where no 'real cool' IDE exists. Not so for statically-typed reflexive languages like Java and C#, where your well-informed IDE can make code transformations of arbitrary complexity.
It is much easier to tell by context that you are talking about a programming language with C. Go is a common enough word that sometimes it is hard to tell. The full name reduces the chance of confusion.
It could be an artifact of my postfix configuration. Looking over a few logfiles, here are the ciphers I've seen recently (all servers, not just gmail):

ADH-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)
AES128-SHA (128/128 bits)
AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)
DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)
EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA (168/168 bits)
RC4-SHA (128/128 bits)
Red flag linux in particular... http://www.redflag-linux.com/en/ altho based on RHEL.
Encryption Has Foiled Wiretaps for First Time Ever, Feds Say
For anyone interested, here's the list of all the finalists this year - most of them much more impressive.

http://www.businessinsider.com/2013-google-science-fair-fina...
Ask HN: Did any browsers fix the localStorage bug?
As seen here:
http://feross.org/fill-disk/

HN thread posted 4 months ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5297229