skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course they are, they wouldn't want to make it worth less to sell that information to other companies. And, after all, AT&T has no obligations except to make money, and no public oversight. The best part is that since AT&T makes money off of this surveillance (even more information than NSA has out of AT&T, with less procedure) nobody is particularly upset about it. We are all just used to the idea that everything we do or say is owned by some private company which is empowered to sell it to whoever, and nobody wants to change it because there's money to be made.
> As those expansions were used primarily to take away from the citizenry, they subsequently eroded civil liberties.

Perhaps I have a different definition of civil liberties than you. I subscribe to the following definition, as proposed in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_liberties)

> Civil liberties are civil rights and freedoms that provide an individual specific rights. Though the scope of the term differs amongst various countries, some examples of civil liberties include the freedom from slavery and forced labor, freedom from torture and death, the right to liberty and security, freedom of conscience, religion, expression, press, assembly and association, speech, the right to privacy, the right to equal treatment and due process and the right to a fair trial, as well as the right to life. Other civil liberties may also include the right to own property, the right to defend oneself, and the right to bodily integrity.

What do you consider your civil liberties to be?
True enough. I guess every generation needs their reminder.

Still, the meta-point holds: centralized power lacks robustness (e.g. to corruption and/or the stupidity of a relative few), but has big advantages over widely distributed systems in terms of communication latency and bandwidth that enable efficiency. We're sloshing around dynamically trying combinations, but we should expect to always see some centralized (opportunities for efficiency) and some distributed (opportunities for robustness) stuff going on.
Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki, 16 years old, born to the "wrong father" and killed by a drone strike 2 weeks after his father was murdered. I say murdered because without a trial and imminent threat, that's what it is. And this is not a solitary incident either, just a rather poignant one. Next question?

edit:

http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/05/24/what-not-specifically-t...

In other words, it sounds like some in the Administration suspect that someone within the targeting chain of command may have invented the Ibrahim al-Banna presence as a way to get at Awlaki’s son.

If this doesn't make you throw up, what will?
Sorry, I just picked the first result on Google. I learned this tidbit from a previous posting on HN; apparently the CIA (or NSA?) recruits heavily from Brigham Young University.
I so fucking hope you are overreacting, but I fear that you are not.
That might be telling you that there isn't a good reason to do so.
Presumably this is because a lot of people think that other countries are involved in espionage and some are involved in terrorism and it's not actually clear that the US is doing anything that unusual or acting against the interests of its citizens.

I don't want to live in a surveillance state, but nobody is even discussing realistic actions. It's all just expressions of disgust and anti-us sentiment.
I couldn't stop laughing at the "yes/no" pie chart.
All of them. Google is mainly a bunch of "one applications".

Maps is maps, Search is search, YouTube is YouTube, GMail is Gmail etc. Those are not apps providing different views of the same data, in the way the parent describer enterprise apps.
I'd say $10,000 is a pretty good deal!
Another option is to use a small, cheap VPS or EC2 instance to host a "staging server". This is the end point for all your web services, email, etc. Then you have a "home server" which pulls down the info from staging server, backs it up locally and then deletes it from the staging server.

That way, your public staging server only has a small amount of information on it. E.g. emails for the last hour (or whatever your downloading job is set for).

For uploads you could set up a request mechanism which will deliver the requested file from home to staging.

For even greater privacy you could set up a self-destruct proc which will wipe all sensitive information from the staging server unless it get's a "keep alive" message.
I don't think so. To some of those countries the US is already 'the boy who cried wolf'.

If anything it will motivate latin american nations to work together on the issue. If they act together for Snowdon's safety, it's much harder for the US to bully any single nation that accepts him.
An individual quote isn't a problem, but they don't tend to come one at a time. For realtime processing, serialization costs are usually the biggest issue, as is cache locality.

On the other hand, for batch processing, memory can be a big issue (CPU less so).
> "little student loans."

You are correct on the "little" front. While it may seem astronomical to people in countries with different educational systems and people without career prospects, the median and mean student loan debt is under $30k.

So long as they are in a field with more than one major employer, then the NSA is hardly has significant power over them.
This is very wise advice, and has served me well also. Always give the benefit of the doubt and let them show why there should be no doubt- either way.
The above is a strawman, e.g. where did you get the "give you 50% of a company"?

This recruiter is throwing out a lot of red flags, from being in stealth mode (frequently if not generally a company killer, something I've observed first hand), to not having much respect for the recruitee, which suggests he won't get much respect if hired.

Although his apparent dislike of coding on a whiteboard is a red flag if I put on my interviewer hat; if he can't prove he can code one way or another, you don't hire him.
That would be excellent copy for their "Jobs" page.
“Our co-founders travel a lot between TED talks and angel pitches. You understand.”

I do occasionally wonder how some founders have the time & money to travel to every conference/meetup/event on the circuit. I suppose some of them are simply uber-talented and can balance that with the needs of their business... but between coding and talking to customers it's all I can do to find time to sleep or eat (and occasionally read HN ;)).
Might be a good opportunity to push your code to bitbucket.

It's come a very long way in the last 12 months including unlimited private repos.
It's certainly enough to warrant an open political inquiry and changes of policy, as well as resignations from those politically responsible.

It's not at all obvious that all the NSA staff should just walk away from their jobs. If the NSA is actually protecting people, that would be just as irresponsible.
Thanks for the bug report! In particular, what back button issues were you having? I can't replicate any issues just now, but feel free to submit a PR if you see a fix.

Shipping a customer site is way different than "shipping" the website for an open-source framework. Unfortunately, we don't get paid to work on Sails, and we're completely bootstrapped, so we only get to work on stuff like the public-facing website when we get spare time.
Been there, done that. I would only comment that you probably do not understand the workload of running a mail server. Web pages are one thing, but email is quite another.
You voted for a government that spied, tortured and killed people for you.

No, I voted for a government that would bring equity to the financial system and nationalize health insurance, create a jobs program, pull us out of Iraq and Afghanistan and close Guantanamo. I got a government that spies, tortures and kills for me, whether I liked it or not.
The European Union Explained*
Don't hire Newman. But we knew that already..
Hi! I'm working on the new rustdoc (the current one is horribly outdated and all-around crappy). Any other feature requests? I'm tracking them at https://github.com/mozilla/rust/wiki/Bikeshed-rustdoc
I get your point, but the difficulties startup founders have to endure are irrelevant to the value proposition they make potential employees.
As someone of Turkish Jewish origin, I am very aware of this.

I think perhaps my comment was misunderstood. My point was more broadly that democracy and the region are not compatible. For the majority of the last century Turkey was always the exception (albeit a weak one as the military was responsible for keeping secularism alive) to this incompatibility. But seemingly, even in turkey, that illusion has fallen apart. No one is more sad about this than I am.
To be a master of metaphor
You make valid points but his are more valid. Certainly the reward should reflect the risk taken but at present the reward is horribly skewed in the direction of founders + investors. Employees, who are extremely important, get much less in return. Founders + investors end up with ~ 85% of the stock while the first 10 employees have 14% at the time of an exit/ipo, despite the employees having joined anywhere from 3months to 1 year after the founders. This is ridiculously skewed. Where did you get the number 90%? If the founders fail, does that not mean the employees failed too? All said and done, at the end of the day, the founders can claim stuff like "founded something. got so far and failed" and they'd still be worshipped. What can the first 10 employees claim? "Wrote some code"?

Do not jump to respond aggressively without any actual thought.
This is an oddly defensive reply. I don't get the sense that this is an attack upon the basic premise of a joining a startup or startup life/risks. I think it was an attack on the approach taken to joining this startup. A fairly one sided dialogue laced with some posturing and arrogance. There are much better ways to do it.
Second time in a week. Still github is one of those companies that really have to mess up to make me hate them. It's probably a DDOS attack again, I don't understand what kind of people could do that to our octocat.
Not keeping up with the latest fashions is value destroying. Not buying a new car every 3 years is value destroying. If I could modify my vision to not show me billboards, brands and placards I would. While I still have a choice whether to be or not to be the product I intend to exercise that choice. I refuse to be a cash cow for the highest bidder.
"The founders are taking all the risk"
No, they're not. One could just as easily work at a stable job. Instead, they're taking a bet on the founders' vision.

"getting slammed by investors"
That's their job. They need to grow up. As an engineer, we get slammed by other engineers. Criticism is a good and necessary thing.

"probably have put in more hours and more capital than you ever will"
Capital yes. Hours is debatable. Early stage employees can surpass the hours a founder is putting in.

"Zoom out a bit and their chances of failing"
As are yours then as an early employee.

I think the line of risk and effort between founders and early employees is slim...and the tilt of rewards is heavily slanted towards the founders. That being said, it largely makes sense as they founders have done (typically) a lot of proof of concept work as well as handling a lot of the dirty work (HR, initial sales, fundraising, etc.).
This is a very good point that I keep coming back to as the NSA scandal continues to unfold. You may think that as an engineer your concern is the engineering and going heads down on technical issues is the end of your responsibility but it is not.

Nothing absolves you of your fundamental responsibility to behave ethically to the best of your abilities. There's a good article on this topic here:

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-architecture-...

There's no such thing as a job where you will never have to make an ethics based decision and you need to be prepared to do the right thing. Philip Zimbardo (sp?)(Stanford prison experiment) talks about the necessity of training people to be heroes before they face ethical conundrums to short circuit our natural instincts and take action. I think this is an important thing to do from time to time - ask yourself if you are compromising your ethics in some way. Look in the mirror and remind yourself that you're going to do the right thing especially when its hard. Make the decision ahead of time so its easier to follow through when it counts.

Here's hoping there are folks at the NSA and elsewhere asking themselves these kind of questions and rereading that oath to protect the constitution.
How many options are there for someone whose primary skill is conversational fluency in and syntactic mastery of Arabic, Russian, and English? We don't see many articles about a commercial shortage of translators.
"Am I just extremely lucky, or are you a little bit full of it?"

My own observations corroborate your data.

I've personally known about a dozen founders who have built a seven or more figure net worth from startups. About ~6 were upper middle class. That is they had parents wealthy enough to pay for a "good" school. But the parents did not have enough money to fund their kids startup or pull on VC connections. Around ~3 people came from well off parents, who might have had enough money for a small trust fund (I do not know whether they actually had a trust fund). One had parents with VC connections. Overall, the career arcs of the well-to-do founders were indistinguishable from the upper middle class kids. The founders from upper class backgrounds were just as smart and hard working as any other founders. The other three founders in my personal dataset were immigrants with very little family support and had to hustle their whole way up.

In my observations, getting VC funding requires at least one of five paths:

a) building a product via bootstrapping and/or seed money, and then either getting significant traction or have a prototype of genuinely novel tech.

b) developing a proven track record as an employee at a company. Maybe you joined a startup early that became big. Maybe you joined a big company and worked your way up to VP of Sales.

c) Having some specialized and valuable knowledge. Maybe you consulted for a particular industry, and thus have inside knowledge about a valuable product that industry could use. Maybe you a professor that just developed some new technology that can be commercialized.

d) going to business school, getting a job as VC associate, and then launching a company with some funding from that firm.

e) having started and exited a previous company

Getting VC funding requires connections. But building these connections is a trivial problem compared to the problem of establishing a track record via either bootstrapping or working your way up at a company. If you cannot establish those connections, you probably do not have the hustle it takes to found a company. If you have VC connections, but no product with traction nor track record of success, then you are not getting funding.

The world michaelochurch describes, "the VC-funded startup CEOs ... I know didn't take any real risk, because they're all trust-fund kids " is a very different world than the one I have experienced.
In my experience, the business-minded founder runs the circuit generating interest while the tech-minded founder keeps building, recruiting. Both are equally valuable when done properly.
Reverse-Engineered Robotron: 2084 Arcade Game on FPGA
confirmed working here in USA
If you have ever looked at a heatmap of where users scroll down to on a given page. It will clearly show you that the prime realestate is above the fold (before you start scrolling)
This article is a cheap shot, though my friends' anecdotal experiences suggest that this kind of thing is unfortunately grounded in reality.

The three biggest takeaways, I think, when seeking employment at a startup:

1. Money v. Experience is a false dichotomy.

2. It is worth your time and effort to quantify the actual value of things like free lunches and insurance.

3. Follow patio11's advice on evaluating equity:

Roll d100. (Not the right kind of geek? Sorry. rand(100) then.)

0~70: Your equity grant is worth nothing.

71~94: Your equity grant is worth a lump sum of money which makes you about as much money as you gave up working for the startup, instead of working for a megacorp at a higher salary with better benefits.

95~99: Your equity grant is a lifechanging amount of money. You won’t feel rich — you’re not the richest person you know, because many of the people you spent the last several years with are now richer than you by definition — but your family will never again give you grief for not having gone into $FAVORED_FIELD like a proper $YOUR_INGROUP.

100: You worked at the next Google, and are rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Congratulations.
And this is why technical solutions on their own are not enough. They'll just keep restricting and banning technologies they feel are too dangerous to their interests, whether by the legislature or the courts or by hitting up the payment processors themselves. Whether it's ITAR or SOPA or PIPA or ACTA or TPP, the net effect is the same.

Political action must be taken. All of the forward secrecy and TLS and onion routing and steganography and PGP and AES in the world counts for nothing if they'll just declare such technologies illegal and harass the users.
UNSW publishes detailed cloud/data sovereignty toolkit
It depends on the specifics of the situation, but it can be a sign that the person doesn't actually like programming. This isn't always the case -- e.g., we've had alumni who had stopped programming to raise families -- but it's frequently true (e.g., for people who study CS and then get an MBA. When they apply to Hacker School it seems more often than not they're looking to find a cofounder or learn enough to hack together a prototype and aren't interested in programming as a craft, which is totally cool but not a fit for Hacker School).
They are still trying to recruit a diverse, capable group of patriotic employees, so that the workforce has the full range of skills and opinions for it to do its proper mission, and identify and correct any abuses.

If the armchair-ethicist standard is: "if you have any qualms, you'll quit" – then the type of people doing recruiting, and being recruited, and staying in the agency, all become even more self-selected for total devotion to total surveillance than may already exist. Whatever oversight or shame might remain as an internal check would decay. Whatever hints/leaks we get would dry up even further.

That isn't necessarily any better of a result for us. It doesn't necessarily bring reform/correction any sooner.
I think Rob Pike was trying to make a language to build web services. Pike, Griesemer and Thompson are all at Google, you know, where they're kind of nuts about the web. :)
+1. It is very important always to keep in mind that the person you are talking to is a human being. And if you're talking to someone at a recruiting fair, they don't make policy. They're just trying to do their jobs so they don't get fired and they can continue to pay the mortgage and put food on the table.

Which is not to say that you should not call them out, just that you should do it respectfully and with compassion for a fellow human who might be in a very difficult position.
It's a high area of local utility attack via the social layer. In other words, only showing me the things I care about already limits my aspirations and serves to further separate me from the rest of humanity. Indeed, if you have a good enough read on me, you can tell whether I'll be vulnerable to having one specific thing advertised to me excessively that's going to exclude other longer term higher value to £ ratio payoffs.

The most obvious examples of this sort of behaviour are people who spend all their time in front of the TV rather than developing deeper interests, or people who are vulnerable to drugs, but you can hook people on almost anything provided you make it look desirable and people don't have much contradicting data. So, if my algorithm decides that the people behind your IP address have no interest in formal education, and so doesn't market anything to do with learning to you, is that really good for you? Is it really good for your daughter or son?

It's like being search bubbled, only from the push end of things rather than the pull end.

Edit: Freshhawk's phrasing of it as extracting maximum value from the user is a good way of putting it, I think. Getting the most for the least doesn't necessarily work out in your favour unless you have a very good degree of self control and foresight.
Yes, ironically I didn't figure this out until I had already beat the game.
I completely agree with this and anyway many of the caching programs are starting to understand that nginx is out there. I am pretty sure w3 total cache does.

However since using nginx I have done away with caching as it is so much faster than apache + caching that I don't really need it.
Doug Engelbart
Many of us are going to miss him.
Make no mistake, the article is dripping in FUD. It's a real flaw, and it's interesting, but I'm surprised blackhat was convinced to let it be the subject of a talk. The blog post contains no useful information and is entirely self-serving to shamelessly build hype.
Murdered by the NSA? Or is this a reason to bring down the entire US?
No. The Constitution prohibits religious tests as a condition of office, and allows either an oath ("so help me god") or an affirmation[1] to be used.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmation_in_law
Maybe you could have live competition between villages on other worlds? For example, if you and I start at the same time, we can each see the number of villagers of the other person and houses, etc. built so far.
this is awesome.. i'm a student in the social sciences and name disambiguation for ethnicities is something I deal with quite often. i've just checked it out. thanks for this brilliant piece of work!
What higher level language offers you the high performance computing you desire?

Scala and Haskell both strike a nice balance for my uses. They aren't quite as fast as C, but give me decent concurrency primitives and performance.

(You might be surprised to discover that my use cases are primarily the realtime event processing systems described in the article.)
Does anyone have a list of VPNs banned thusfar? I run a proxy provider right now, and am branching into VPNs in the coming months. But I will be actively filtering against torrent traffic since it seems to be such an attractor of negative attention. I wonder if these bans apply mostly to torrent-marketed providers?

Also, is it possible they were banned for other reasons? Eg high chargeback ratios? I can tell you from experience that chargeback ratios in the anonymization industry are very high, for obvious reasons.
I feel this is what a lot of people forget -- or ignore -- when they come on HN to proselytize for this week's armchair activist crusade. 99% of the time, this shit is used to stop legitimately dangerous people. It's manned by people who aren't out to ruin your life; they just want to live theirs with as little shit to worry about as possible.

Reddit, HN, and the like are collectively patting themselves on the back and talking about revolution as though they're going to do anything other than click those little arrow icons next to posts. The third top comment here is talking about DDoSing the post office -- with absolutely no hint of irony. It's ridiculous.
Pentester's Guide to IPMI
Are you perhaps confusing "amoral" with "immoral"? "Amoral" means without moral consideration ("pragmatic", "calculating"), "immoral" means in violation of moral consideration ("evil", "malicious").
You "cheated" by using zip. You can't easily implement zip using only internal iterators but you easily can using external iterators. If you look at a slightly different problem that doesn't precisely fit the special case of zip you'll see the difficulty involved with using internal iterators.