skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Encryption provides a good way to keep secrets. This has nothing to do with privacy. Privacy is minding my own business without anyone watching me or judging me.

If you need to rely on encryption to protect your privacy, then you have very little privacy, because everything that is not encrypted can be snooped on: where you are, who you talk to and about what (because GPG doesn't protect the username and subject), who are your friends (because you can't trust them to encrypt properly).

If you want to escape surveillance, encryption is just one tool. What you really need is good opsec habits. See for examples http://fr.slideshare.net/grugq/opsec-for-hackers
Ouch. That was unnecessarly rude.
Not a good analogy I agree.
Also using PGPool in production on one of our more complex projects here; it's been reliable over the last couple years with varying amounts of traffic. We haven't gotten what I'd call a lot of it, but what we do get generates fairly high DB load at times, and what problems we've had have not been due to PGBouncer.
http://railsinstaller.org/ Made my life less of a headache when installing Ruby and Rails.
Ah OK - somehow I didn't register that as "news" :-)

Edit: Why the downvotes? As a kid, 30 years ago, I would frequently pass by the Echelon antennas. I was told they were for spying on communication. So I thought it was a given for decades that the US (and others) are spying on German businesses. The technology might have changed, but not the facts.

Wikipedia on Echelon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
Amazing what you can accomplish duct-tape, bailing wire and WD-40.
> One of Kafka's best-known works, it tells the story of a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed to neither him nor the reader.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial
Has Twitter Screwed up the 'National Conversation'?
How so? Someone asked about the dog whistle, and I translated it. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the poster, etc. etc.
Reducing your JavaScript load
I'd rather fight in HK for months/years, then be very publicly turned over to USG (so they can't just disappear to Gitmo), ideally close to election season, for a public trial, than be in the direct custody and control of Russia or China (or Iran or North Korea or a few other countries...).

He should not have taken Wikileaks advice and support; sticking to Hong Kong lawyers, EFF, and maybe other whistleblowers like Binney would have been a lot better for everyone (including US national security, which is helped by ending illegal spying and by not compromising legitimate (to the US) spying on foreign governments).
>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.

You maybe. But when there are multi-trillion dollar trade agreements in order, and the top dog (US) wants to push a weak bureacratic constellation of nations (EU) in it's favor, then the thing changes.

It's even worse to any trade agreement with lesser nations (think Mexico, Latin America, Africa, etc).

>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?

Well, if the objectives are "get the upper hand on the negotiations" (including "bribe/blackmail individuals involved in them to rule in our favor", then it very much achieves them.
The flip side of that is that full rides are more easily available at some very good schools than most people realize; Harvard expects zero financial contribution from any family with total income of $65,000 or less, rising to 10% of income at $150k. (And while $65k ain't much by Silicon Valley standards, US median income was only a bit over $50,000 in 2011.)

Harvard's policy: http://www.fao.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k51861&pag...

Median income: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...
Just curious - do you ever fly? The environmental cost of flights tends to dwarf living costs in most calculators.
Based on the headline, I initially thought it was an announcement, not a job posting, so I tried to think of whose hiring they would bother to announce. My next thought was, "Maybe they're hiring Michael Nielsen?" (I'd forgotten for the moment about the Snowden angle, so I didn't immediately realize you might not be willing to work for them.)
Leaked slides show NSA is eavesdropping on live conversations
Do we have like sectarian wars on HN now? Who's worthy of being on HN and who's not?
Other compilation targets are available, see lmeyerov's posts.
Crazy idea: applying for asylum in Russia.
indeed, at the moment, that's quite simple. The only benefit is the fact is quite easy to integrate and fast. More advance feature should be coming soon.
Good job! Icons are back. Everything looks perfect now :)
Isn't this his response to #2?

> In both cases above, I was pointing to a type of technology. The truth or falsity of what I was saying doesn’t depend upon whether Palantir is a good or bad company. About that question, I am not, and don’t purport to be an expert.
It sounds like you see yourself limited by time, not ability or even money. Since you're a programmer you probably have the intuition to seek out other good programmers. So what you can do is search for a technical partner to create some type of lifestyle business where you can split the profits. I'm sure with all your client relationships you might be able to come up with a few good ideas that solve some niche problems, and you'll even have a starting base of customers if your solution caters to their problems. From my own perspective, I would love to work with someone technical albeit with little time to jump on a side project with me. Even if I was the primary contributor, knowing that my partner can bring money, connections, and technical ability is an enticing proposition.
This is great, it shouldn´t be very difficult to adapt this design to an airplane, with an ipad with a navigation app or something similar.
I agree with you aside from your last comment. That wasn't needed. It's great that we have diversity of opinions on here.
Not that I'm defending Lessig or Palantir (I'm definitely not a fan of Palantir), but I think the point Lessig was making is that of all the options, having one that is accountable and traceable is probably the least bad. That is to say, agencies (both public and private) are going to (and have!) use data gathering technologies; we may not be able to prevent it. The best we may be able to do is ensure that the chain of custody is unbroken, and evidence isn't manufactured, manipulated or otherwise called into doubt. That and start enforcing warrant requirements again.
I realized, thinking about this more, that my reasoning must be backwards on point number 2. If it worked as I said, then putting a current through a peltier would actually cause positive feedback resulting in a perpetual heat pump, which is clearly impossible.

So the current running through a peltier acting as a generator should actually transfer heat from the cold side to the hot side, making it act as a better conductor of heat. I don't know how to reconcile this with argument 1, but as far as my knowledge of thermodynamics is concerned, 2 has to trump 1.

So I figure I must be wrong, and peltier generators must conduct heat quite well. In which case I guess it would be good for summer wear - but then, in the summer, the differential between the human body and the surrounding air isn't all that great.
Corruption came for being so big; too much power in few hands; if Google and the other companies were located in different countries -instead of just in the USA- the NSA would never have amazed so much power. Fear created a breach to give too much power to the government but power corrupts, and big powers corrupts big time.
...are you speaking well of Palantir because...

He is not speaking well of Palantir. He speaks well of two people in Palantir's employ, whom he knows personally, and he cites a piece of Palantir's technology as the kind of thing that the world needs more of — irrespective of whether or not the rest of their oeuvre is good, bad, or indifferent. That's it. Full stop.

He specifically says he's not touching the discussion of whether or not Palantir are good guys or bad guys. He specifically says he's not endorsing them, for compensation or otherwise. He specifically says he thinks that technology that audits every access of a piece of information is a valuable thing to have in the presence of a panopticon. And. Nothing. Else.

Any deeper reading than that is projection or fantasy. Lessig has earned being taken at his word, IMO.
Yeah, WebCL->WebGL buffer sharing is a big deal: having to copy the data from GPU->CPU->GPU for the layout->rendering hand-off is a ~5-10ms hit on the animation loop.

Luckily, the Safari version of WebCL we use has integrated buffer sharing (https://github.com/SRA-SiliconValley/webkit-webcl). I'd expect that to be in the Chrome port being developed. The Nokia port for Firefox a couple years back didn't have it, though I don't know what's going on with the new one @ https://www.khronos.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=792 .

My benchmarks show that asm.js + workers + webgl will have that 5-10ms hit, but otherwise performs at similar scales. If we figure out streaming data transfers to overlap communication with computation, it would be even less.
If you had consented to the search, then anything he found would have been admissible in court; By not giving your consent to the search you made it so anything that was found wouldn't have held up in court. A cop only asks to search your vehicle if he doesn't already have probable cause to do so without your permission.
The whole Lessig/Palantir issue is so illustrative of the tech community's bizarre insistence on ideological purity on political issues, and consequently illustrative of why tech as an industry has so little political influence despite having money and people.
It doesn't solve the #1 problem all HUDs have to solve - view obstruction. That's a very significant portion of your view being effectively removed by the scotch-taped + suction-cupped piece of glass which should be transparent.
The human brain is not a Ferrari, exquisitely hand-crafted and intelligently tuned.

It's been cobbled together over hundreds of millions of years out of whatever spare parts were lying around. It does its job remarkably well considering, but there are obvious design flaws that could be improved.
I still do not think it is true. Money saved on housing and energies would be spend different way (new cars, holidays..).

Prague is like that, most people live at concrete apartments. But they also drive to summer house every weekend and go to holiday four times a year.
Why Obama Was Never Going To Be A Civil Liberties Champion
What do you mean by mind altering drugs? Do you never touch beer? Coffee? What makes you so sure that the drugs you favour are safe for your mind and that others are not?
You can't. It's not a technical problem, because you can always log access. The problem is trusting the logger to be configured properly and to correctly report results.

I pointed this out on the original HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5964763
> Barr seemed to think the CEO of Palantir was the kind of person he could share a plot to disrupt/destroy a journalist's career with, didn't he?

So, what? Now it's not even guilt by association, but guilt by one party stating a desire to associate with the other?
Why Facebook Needs Trending Links
TunnelBuddies, possible the evilest Facebook app out there
Looks like it could be a useful tool. Just a picky, grammar-related thing: the word "setup" in "Setup Rails, Django, databases, search engines & more in seconds." should be "set up", two words, since you're using it as a verb.
I'm not so sure. What if one of those countries is not actually sovereign? What if there is also one-sided industrial espionage happening on a massive scale?

I'm not convinced it's win-win when the game is rigged.

Maybe my reasoning is overly simplistic. Maybe I'm being paranoid. But I'm wary now of every agenda the US is pushing.
Not to be the eternal skeptic, but has anyone seen any pictures of Snowden in the Hong Kong or Moscow airports?
>Personally, I think equating the US with brutal regimes like those of China and Russia are a bit silly, but ok.

"Brutal regimes"? The US has toppled legal governments, supported dictators, spied on it's own people and millions of foreigners, killed people without trial through drones, invaded sovereign countries on BS pretexts, killed peaceful protesters, grabbed resources for a pittance exercising military leverage and/or local paid lackeys, used nuclear bombs in a war (and on a civilians), even conducted medical experiments on unsuspecting people. Not to mention some other dark stuff, like slavery for blacks, concentration camps and relocation for Indians, segregation until 1960+, a nightmarish prison system, and still keeping the death penalty.

How exactly are those other countries any worse? Bothered to ask their citizens -- and not just some overblown vocal minority in Twitter? For one, they haven't fucked everybody the world over.
Sounds like great news for Glenn Greenwald. Can we see the audit trail for Team Themis and understand more about how Palantir was contracted to be paid $3.6MM for malicious datamining to attack a US journalist?
Design and Implementation of the GNU Alternative Domain System
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5964721
what, you don't think that Ecuador is capable of chartering a private plane to fly from Moscow to Quito?
How do you build a team of the "best in their field" on demand? Recruiting a team takes time...

There's so little money to be made on billing the time running a team as opposed to taking a slice of the team's time. Is your team just a loose collection of other consultants? How do you guarantee they have time available? How do you deal with the huge amounts of funds you have coming in and out of your books without any sort of net on that?
It's nice to see coverage of an exciting trend (of which I'm happy to be a part), but it always cracks me up when financial publications classify companies based on sales rather than profits. Defining a "million dollar company" as a company with a million dollars in annual sales is absurd.
...given that the FISA courts are nothing but a rubber-stamp

How is this 'given'? Do we have any evidence of this whatsoever?
The issue with this is that, say a feed contains 10 items, and that between checking the feed more than 10 items are posted, you will miss items.
I would rather not argue about 'economic sciences' at this time, that subject is usually far more politicized than 'peace.'
Assuming you're American, if you work remotely and have no dependents, you could consider moving abroad to a country with lower cost of living. (Easier to cut expenses than increase revenue.)

You may qualify for the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion (~$96k) if all of your work is performed while you're physically outside the U.S.

I've been researching this topic religiously for the last 9 days and have contacted companies to help me structure everything. I'll write a detailed article when everything is said and done.

As far as Real Estate investing goes, find something that has good bones (layout, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, etc.) and bad aesthetics (overgrown shrubs, needs paint, etc.). Make a low-ball offer, hire someone to fix the aesthetics, and execute a 1031 Exchange to move up the ladder.
Yes, let's apply it to something else:

"A rapist caught raping women, shocking".

Because an organisation doing what it was created for, totally justifies that thing, right?
You might look at Sparkleshare; it's not P2P, but it is open source, self-hosted and encrypted.
Control a LED over serial port using Arduino
"Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness."

I very much respect Sam Harris for taking the consciousness problem seriously. It poses a real problem to (his) atheism, and he, obviously, rejects the substance dualism, which would logically lead to a religious view on us.

However, without a conscious soul, meaning itself loses meaning. What's the ontological support for meaning to rise on?

One thing that is little known about Christianity (as an example) of the first millenium is its fierce fight with illusions, hallucinations and misleading spiritual experiences. Contrary to popular beliefs that religious spiritual experiences are quickly taken for granted for their emotional gratification, this was really not the case. Spiritual experiences were not looked after. They were not provoked. On the contrary. Great care was taken as to discern real experiences from illusory or, worse, misleading ones. The same goes with miracles.

Discernment, the ability to discern over what's real or not, was the most important virtue. Something that modern Christianity, in many areas, has lost. And with it, its credibility.
Perhaps center the camera on the center of mass, rather than the center of the initial point.
The Wikipedia article defines a Dyson sphere as a system of orbiting solar-power satellites meant to completely encompass a star and capture most or all of its energy output.
Minimal Model Tracking for Backbone
The 9th amendment seems to me to protect rights not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution by the Constitution itself. It also gives judicial power of the courts to all cases arising under the Constitution (Article 3, Section 2). These seem to give the courts the responsibility to protect rights retained by the people that aren't explicitly enumerated by the Constitution. Of course, many people do what I see as Scalian mental contortions to arrive at a different conclusion.

There certainly have been cases where "rights" conflicted. One would be the "property rights" of slave owners (slaves being the property in question) vs. the innate rights of the slaves themselves. However, I see this problem of "bad rights" as having been solved by the 14th amendment. What bad interpretations of rights could you see that do not conflict with an existing amendment?
Google threatens to shut down adult blogs with adult advertisements
My take is that he panicked. He knows he's researched, and might be killed, and he reads what's going on on internet, and he just starts to freak out. He has to start freaking out. In the end he's just convinced he's going to lose if he stays in HK, he cannot stand that anymore and decide to cancel his "plan" and leave HK.
It's not that they are naive, it's that they aren't cynical and withdrawn.
The same complaint he makes about "drugs" can also be applied to terms like "legalization" and "regulation" and "prohibition". People react to the terms without coming to a common understanding of what the terms mean, and the conversation doesn't evolve.

For instance, one person can be anti-legalization, and another pro-legalization, and have an argument without realizing that they are both against prison sentences for non-violent crimes against the self. Also, for one person legalization might mean that every substance is openly available, whereas for another it might mean openly available in a highly regulated form, whereas for another it might mean that you have to have a license to ingest, or even an approach like Portugal's where you can still be apprehended(!) and made to appear before a panel even though it's without risk of a prison sentence.

I also think there's a lack of respect for our own proven cognitive biases, and our interconnected societies. I know several medical social workers that have first-hand experience with the negative impact that drug users have on our communities even if the users are technically only ingesting products into their own bodies, aren't dealing, and aren't negatively impacting immediate family members. People might think they are making responsible independent choices when they put some of these substances into their bodies, but that doesn't mean they're always correct - and the burden of these choices can then be put on the shoulders of larger society.
There is a reflective tape you buy specifically for cars that came with HUD from the factory. You could also measure the tach signal for a tachometer too.

(http://www.ebay.com/itm/Head-up-display-OBD-II-HUD-S-200-Typ...)
I have the sensation that palantir and prism must be related in some way.
BAH has a team of security experts that would shut down Anonymous attacks faster than you can say, "lulz".
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometric_passport really? You'd have to find a country not using biometric passports, and a country allowing entrance with non-biometric passports to begin with.
Then add photo and forging the actual paper.

I wouldn't call that easy.
Well, don't keep us in suspense. What definition would you use?
That and start enforcing warrant requirements again.

I think enforcing the law (or creating new laws) and revoking the Patriot act would be far more effective than any technical measures after collection. The restrictions of the Palantir system sound about as effective as Snapchat (that is, not at all effective for a determined user). If you can read it and see it, you can spread information and use it in an uncontrolled way. That's not even considering other attacks like photographs, duplicates of the memory, hacks etc. - once the information has escaped the system into the brain of one user, there is no way to control access.

The best solution is for that information to be collected only when strictly necessary and deleted after use, not stored. That's inconvenient and less effective for spy agencies, but more effective for the privacy of everyone else. If you want to stop universal surveillance, we have to control the collection of the data - anything else is too late in the process to make any meaningful difference and will be subverted over time, as the NSA abuse of their mandate has demonstrated.
Agree. Some people (perhaps tech people are more so in this direction? [1]) see things as black and white and not shades of gray. God forbid you identify yourself as a fanboy of [insert idol] and go against or issue criticism of that idol. You almost certainly, in any forum, will have a hard time doing that. And lose favor.

With respect to all this snowdengate more people seem to have just decided that whatever the government is doing it's wrong, has no benefit and that's that. End of discussion right there. No devil in the details at all.

[1] Simplistically tech people, programmers, math people and the like are binary and deal in exact 1's and 0's. Tech people would be more likely to jump on this particular comment that I made if it didn't fit with their particular world view.
Ecuador has several national airlines, in particular TAME. They could charter a flight with them if they actually wanted to.

Which they don't.

They could also ask a diplomat to escort him.
I am so excited to take this class. JeffE, from all accounts, is an amazing professor.
You can have safety, privacy and security all at the same time.

Is there a single explanation anywhere of how this can be achieved? If it is so straightforward that anyone who thinks otherwise is 'stupid', I would love to know.
This is assuming that the creators of the Dyson sphere haven't also figured out how to absorb the heat energy with extremely high efficiency.
You cannot ensure such a thing.
Personally I do avoid illegal drugs, and many legal ones such as alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, etc. so I don't think it is really fair to assume hypocrisy on makeset's part here.

That being said, I did find their comment to come off a bit arrogant, and dismissive. If you do choose to live a lifestyle where you do not use these substances, like I and many others do, that is okay. But it's not okay to try and push this view on others. In turn, those who do use such substances shouldn't try and push their view on those that don't. Live and let live.