skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They're getting the info directly from Google et al., but they don't have root on Google's servers. Google is required by law (CALEA, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act) to provide the ability for law enforcement to get information from them. This includes - required by law - the ability both to get stored data and to make real-time intercepts of new communications. Google is paid a fee to provide these services as well.

Google et al. have fully complied with this law. The FBI manages the government-end of the CALEA tapping capabilities. The NSA makes requests to the FBI, which passes them on to Google, which flips a switch and enables the tapping of user "xyzzy123". From then on, xyzzy123's stored data and new communications get sent to the FBI through the CALEA connection, which forwards them to the NSA. CALEA also requires the service provider to provide all sorts of metadata about the user.

This IS "direct access" to Google's servers. The denials about this have been carefully worded things that all access is supported by some sort of legal process, etc. The denials are non-denial denials. Yes, GOOGLE (et al.), not the NSA, flips the final switch which sends the data. But Google is required by law to do so, so....... And once the switch is flipped, all of the data is flowing automatically to the NSA.

I hope this is clear.
Groopic For iPhone Mashes Up Group Photos To Include The Missing Photographers
I do self censor, so I won't go around throwing useless insults at an entity that most likely don't really care. But I also think it is important not to be constrained by the only 2 choices in this poll.
Here's my rant, take it for what it's worth :) I keep 4 types of photos:

1.) Personal: This doesn't mean I don't delete, but I generally tend to keep photos even though they might not be really good photos, especially if I only have a few of that day or person. I know I might enjoy looking at them decades later anyway, a blurry photo is better than nothing.

2.) Archival: like taking a photo of a flat before moving in. These aren't very many, so I tend to keep them no questions asked.

3.) Siblings of Keepers: You could call these "proof I really made the keeper photo" photos. Let's say I come across an animal I never photographed before, and like one of the photos enough to publish; then I'll still keep the others around. Or keeping a wider crop in case you change your mind later, etc.

4.) Keepers: here I try to be as harsh as I can. Photography is about painting with light for the pros, for me it's mostly about selection, that's the part of it I enjoy most. I walk around, and from the thousands of things I see each day, only a few make me take out the camera. Then I select keepers (partly before the images even leave the camera), and even years after I might revisit some keepers again, decide that my standards improved, and delete them.

I don't want to tell others how to pursue their hobby, but I think the web is full of galleries not even the owners look at, and that generally, a lot of people need to learn how to delete. The same goes for blogs and whatnot, the idea that everything has to be written on this indelible roll of toilet paper seems silly.

On one extreme, there is being OCD and deliberating endlessly what to keep and how to rank it, on the other there is just making more stuff to throw behind yourself on a pile you never investigate, because it's too awkward to wade around in. Productivity lies somewhere in the middle I think.
> Calling people insane won't win you any favors.

I say exactly what it IS. It IS INSANE.

I do NOT give a fuck about any favors. I don't care about any fucking karma points - we're turning into a turn-key totalitarian system, and people act like nothing has changed.

You got https://prism-break.org/

Now go and do your homework, I'm not your dad.
So it would take 9 minutes at 1-G to get to 4000 MPH?
Not to mention they're completely tapping the cables too…

Guess it's time to find the resources to buy thousands of miles of fiber optics and hope the NSA, GCHQ, and the rest of the global surveillance state doesn't tap those! :D
my site got pulled(erased)after the first day
WTF?
It's more likely that SWAT teams are being used to hide the fact that violent crime is at the lowest levels in decades. Police use terrorism to justify keeping officers on the force when they should be getting laid off. It's makework.
So instead of repeating what was made invisible, make it a constructive comment. Instead of carrying a Windows Phone, Android or iPhone, which smartphone should I carry? How can I start getting my friends off Facebook so I can close my account without losing those connections?

I'm not trying to make the argument to stay, but without viable alternatives, people won't leave.
> Even something as simple as showing my friend the same map I'm looking at so we can talk about it requires bending the role of URIs wildly out of shape.

How so? That 'same map' _is_ the resource being uniformly indicated.

> This link refers to "restaurants around Times Square", which isn't a logical entity

Why not? It's a logical entity, which is a collection viewed a certain way.
Yeah, minus the enormous military expenditures and political meddling. They're going about building empire the smart way: a way in which no one even realizes they are building one and they can pull out at any time without far-reaching political repercussions.
Or maybe Mercer Island to compete with Amazon Fresh?
I'm thinking that of the things that get glorified, hard work is probably one of the better choices.

Better than athletes, getting hammered, drugs, 'balling', and Britney Spears.
Last time this came up I realized that Google is denies overspecificly everything that is not wiretapping. So my take is, that Google is saying "no direct access to the Google servers," as in no access to the actual boxes, while NSA and Guardian use servers in a somewhat looser sense. So my speculation is, that the NSA sits between the TLS reverse proxy and the actual servers.

( The mentionend post for reference and sources:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5965994
)
IMHO, fair enough for some quick functionality, but it looks to me like a boring, unoriginal, standard these days scheme, using bootstrap. Referring to is as a "design" is, to me, a bit of a stretch.

Doesn't put me off the site though, in fact I use it, but the scheme is a bit of an eye roller for me.

I'd prefer to see something that us unique, designed ground up. Something that screams different, yet accessible to all.

But, you know, tastes vary, and I am an olde git!!! If the majority like it, Ill happily get my coat.... :)
suggestion on alternative embed style sounds good. we will surely consider.
The blog has a pretty good intro.
The real problem is that "direct access to servers" is not a specific term. Given the various definitions it could have, everyone could be being truthful.

Some would interpret "direct access" to mean root level access to their entire infrastructure, which sounds absurd to me, yet some people seem to believe that's what's happening. And it's my understanding that this is what Google, facebook, etc. have been denying. They could instead be giving "direct access" to an FTP server or some other portal set up to provide the requested data, meaning that Snowden and these slides are being truthful in that context.

I also think it could be argued that we all gain "direct access" to Google's servers every time we type "www.google.com" into a browser's address bar. It is just not a useful term, and should be replaced with something more specific in all these instances.
Maybe! But I think the savvier approach would be to learn how to create wealth without overwork. For what it's worth, I spent many years overworking, nose-to-the-grindstone, trying to make as much as possible, etc. Had a series of panic attacks. Forced myself to lay off the gas pedal and work smarter. Actually make more money now than I did then. And I'm much happier and more relaxed. And I probably do better work.
The Federal government absolutely would not mandate a monopoly over the country for safety concerns. The vehicles are already licensed on a per-state basis and it stands to reason that states or cities, who already regulate taxis, would extend that power to autonomous taxis.

Which means, if SF gives a monopoly to Google, then LA might give one to Mercedes, while NYC gives one to Ford. (Or whatever). The point being, there is still competition overall to win the business of municipalities.
Thanks, that's helpful! Yep, we'll try using more pictures next time.
Can you please describe the target group of people who will need an ecnrypted group chat?

I'm asking because I've made secure alternative to e-mail ResoMail, but I don't see a large pool of users ready to switch to secure comunications.
That is exactly what I meant :).
One thing I really miss from Geocities is the "structured browsing" that allowed me to find sites from a given subject without using search by word.

Also, I miss letting the user decide what is the subject of his/her site and where to put it in the hierarchy. It doesn't fit for some sites, but it did give a sense of "organization" that textual search cannot really match... especially when you don't know what you're looking for exactly, or just randomly browsing.

I also liked the naming. I didn't even know what "Cape Canaveral" meant at the time, but I do remember there were lots of interesting (for me) sites that ended up under this directory.
We applied to YC with exactly this idea. We made it to the interview, but were turned down. I wrote about that experience: http://tghw.com/blog/pull-hard

We pulled our bootstraps hard and tried to get it going, but soon realized that there's a pretty big flaw with the idea: most photographers have no idea that they should backup their photos. They know hard drives crash, but they never expect it to happen to them.

This meant that we'd essentially have to become insurance salesmen, convincing people that bad things will happen to them.

Eventually, we decided to shut it down, which I also wrote about: http://tghw.com/blog/well-that-sucks-what-else-you-got

The old homepage is still up at http://www.snaposit.com/.
Quick answer - someone says that the future is imperfect:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Future_Imperfect/Chapter3.html
I think it's also worth noting that the intended audience of these slides wasn't the general public/press. It's possible the purpose of using wording like "directly from the servers" was simply to delineate the origin of the data from the data pulled off the wire, not the mechanism of retrieval (e.g. some backdoor outside of the existing legal procedure for acquiring such data). I just picture the person who wrote these slides and chose those words either laughing their ass off, or face-palming right now. The companies involved have been pretty explicit (at great risk I might add by putting their founders' names on the denials) that there isn't "direct access" or anything like it.

The real story here is the "Upstream" collection. Just horribly irresponsible behavior for a steward of much of the Internet's infrastructure. Shameful.
How much is the service/delivery charge?
I believe Photry (www.photry.com, currently in beta, I'm the founder) could be a possible solution in the long run. Since we started, a lot has changed on online photo storage market.

With that in mind we've started to look more on how photographers with larger photo volumes could benefit from our service. From the feedback from few photographers we've already included some features (RAW photos with smaller JPG thumbnails, workspaces and personal sharing for example) that will make the day to day workflow a bit easier. Currently our goal is to build something that would fit better for professional photographers (public for clients, ordering prints and possibly integrated payment flows, win/mac client + plugins for your favorite photo software).

Pricing wise we are currently not the cheapest but we have thoughts on how to make this better for high volume photographers. If you're one of them then please send me an email (martin at photry.com) and I would love to talk a bit further what we plan to do and if we would fit your storage needs.
You mean like Apple did with music?
> It's weird how people still struggle to understand that one should always price according to what a customer is willing to pay, rather than some sort of magic formula "price = cost + socially-acceptable-profit".

What one should do depends on one's goals. To maximize profits, and ignoring the costs involved in doing so, one should charge each customer what that individual customer is willing to pay. Approximating this is a big motivation most market segmentation schemes.

Of course, doing so naively can maximize short-term profits while negatively affecting goodwill, which can then hurt long term profits.

Also, even ignoring goodwill, pricing to maximize returns from the current market for a good or service can limit the ability to develop new markets for it.
If they knew, they couldn't tell you (being secret and all.)
Show HN: Genome Laser Burning Man project now on Github
Genome Laser is an Burning Man art project in collaboration with Control Tower that is planning to blast the individual human genome across the Playa via laser beam. The project code is now on Github under an open source MIT license.
Avoiding Microsoft, Google, and Apple doesn't leave many smart phone options either.
What do you mean? I just picked random Key values from that and could download those files with no problem. This is a crazy privacy issue!
It appears that Loom is founded by photographers.

http://www.loom.com/about

I'd love to hear more about this service from some users. I am bumping up against Dropbox limits with my photos as well.
> Rather, we should be discussing realistic solutions.

Everything has already been discussed. Multiple times over. And when you repeat yourself, you get downvoted.
Great post. I appreciate the focus on minimalism and hobbyist photographers. I think it'd be an interesting project to take on. The technical side doesn't sound too difficult, plug into Amazon, lightroom/aperture.

While the post mentions avoiding externals I think a handy feature would be to push to both an external drive, glacier, and then remove the RAWs locally. That way you have two copies, so the data is actually backed up. Trusting all of your photography to amazon not losing data doesn't sound ideal.
This page doesn't display for me. The top bar loads but lower is just a blank off-black page with no images or text. I enabled Javascript and saw no change. Clicking and right clicking anywhere below the address bar does nothing.

Latest chrome on fully-updated win8...
And all this time I thought a torrent file had the actual peers in it. So you don't even really need the .torrent if you have the addresses of some trackers that know where the files are that you want?
Sounds awesome but doesn't that require the assumption that you would only ever use a car as a grocery transporter?
Once you have PHP you don't need any other languages.
I think this is a positive step, but doesn't go far enough. It looks like investing is still limited to accredited investors (individual income above $200k, household income above $300k, or net worth above $1M). So basically, most engineers who work at these companies can't invest in companies in their industry, but inexplicably their doctor can.

I'm not one to beat the drum of deregulation, but I think the accredited investor requirements are stupid and wrong. The beauty of the securities laws is that they democratized investing by addressing some of the information asymmetries in the public markets. Regimes that reduce disclosure requirements at the expense of creating accredited investor requirements throw the baby out with the bathwater. Essentially, you cut off many promising investments to the masses, and also artificially prop up the returns to a certain class of investors by lowering the supply of capital. It's a solution that's worse than the problem.
They ARE the market for laptops under 300 dollars. Any growth in that market means big numbers because it barely exists.

This is just more Google cock holding.
Why Scala Rocks
The other option is that the slides use ambiguous language.
It's actually higher than a Banana Equivalent Dose, and you can't always directly compare radiation exposure like that based on dosage.
Apple is absolutely wrong with Most Favored clause. Even if they did not conspire with publishers directly, publishers effectively had the same opportunity and re-did their contracts with Amazon.
The most concerning thing is that current law is granting amazon an unequivocal monopoly status. Lossleader strategy is employed to the extreme by amazon. Laws need to address that. At some point Amazon will raise prices. Current situation is essentially a loss for consumers and publishing industry.
One thing I noticed in passing when reading the articles about this today: the accredited investor rules have not been updated for inflation since they were passed in 1982.

If they had been, by my calculations, the net worth requirement would be $2.41m instead of $1m and the income requirement $482k instead of $200k. Definitely easier to get accredited these days...
This is true but a lot of these murders are gang related so it isn't quite a great comparison not?

I know the topics of guns in america is a hot topic in general but even for the usa the general trend is downward.
3 Simple Techniques To Increase Your Blog Traffic
I'm in constant awe of the state of fear in this country.
Post-Reader RSS Subscriber Counts
Can you make an actual argument, please? I'm interested in hearing what you have to say if you've got something to say other than snarky one-liners.
The progress that has been made in Haskell in the past decade leads me to believe that the issues with the current system can be solved with better abstractions, and possibly new syntax. Or if the solution isn't possible in Haskell, that it will be born of a similar philosophy.

I don't yet know whether fear of monads is something the programming community will grow out of, or whether there is a more fundamental reason people have difficulty with them. From what I've seen, the response of most people on finally "getting" monads is "Wait that's it?", so I'm inclined to believe a significant part of the hurdle is the fear itself.
Anything that keeps us scared and submissive works well for the plutocracy. Citizens should never think that they live in a neighborhood, oh no, they live in a terrorist infested war zone.
Outsourcing Your Project: How and Where to Find Developers
Besides GA, which I use for the public website, I am using an in-house web app to track activation and frequency of use.

My app is a windows app, not web. Mixpanel is nice, but it doesn't quite fit my case where I need to see individual events, per user.
Pivotal Speaks on Scaling Mobile Infrastructure
Why Micro-Gardening Could Go Big
Yeah, I'd expect the market for this is more niche but could be high revenue-per customer. As a wedding photography studio we'd pay 100$/mo in a heartbeat if this was done well.

[Edit]

Also note that OP wasn't really just pitching "backup". He wants you to reduce the footprint his images take up locally. I think the messaging to casual and hobbyist users probably ought to play on this. Note Loom's taglines "more room to play". Backup is probably boring for people not under the pressure of liability like pros are.
I've been looking into Glacier, but the pricing in the case where I might want to retrieve a substantial portion of my data is quite complex. As far as I can tell, the headline $0.01/GB rate for overages they quote is misleading. They don't, as you might expect from that language, calculate ([GB retrieved] - [5% of GB stored]) x $0.01 and bill you that.

Rather, they charge you on a monthly basis, according to your highest hourly retrieval rate from any single hour applied to the whole month (standardized at 720 hours). So if your peak hourly retrieval in a month was 10 GB/hr above your pro-rated free quota for that hour, you're charged for 7200 GB of retrieval overage, or $72, even if you retrieved nowhere near 7 TB of data. For companies with relatively constant retrieval this doesn't matter, but for small users, someone who has a large overage one day will be charged as if they were incurring the same overage continually all month.

To put it concretely, if you store 200GB of photos and then do a bulk retrieval, you aren't charged $1.90 ((200-10) x 0.01). Rather, the xfer is counted as 4 hours, so you have a peak transfer of 50 GB/hr. Your free daily retrieval is allocated to the hours in the day you retrieved data, so in this case 10/4 = 2.5 GB/hr free. So your overage is 47.5 GB/hr. Multiply by 720 and $0.01, and the fee for retrieving 200GB of photos is $342. Plus $22.88 in outgoing AWS bandwidth.

Or at least, I think that's what their pricing page says. Maybe someone else can better interpret this explanation: http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_will_I_be_charged_wh...
What are you looking for? Are you asking that Google+ automatically brings over all of your Twitter followers? Or automatically Circles everyone you follow? I don't think either of those would work out very accurately. I'm not sure what the barrier is that is keeping you from trying Google+, considering it's completely free, it's competitor is completely free, Google+'s character limit is far greater than any of its competitors (so you can post the same stuff)...

You literally can just try Google+ for a while, use it to create content, and if you don't like it you can go back to Twitter. They're not mutually exclusive. Google+ doesn't deactivate your Twitter account. It doesn't edit your hosts file to null route www.twitter.com. There are even browser plugins that let you post all your existing Twitter and Facebook content to Google+ retroactively, and let you post to both for future posts as well.

So... that doesn't seem like it's marketing's fault. I'm not sure what would be a barrier to entry to something that's completely free and demands literally nothing of you.
Interesting description of what structs are in C#. However, I found the descriptions in C and C++ very lacking, specially the nonsense about stack vs heap allocation.
Hang in there, friend.
Also, the struct in C++ is allocated on the heap.

Not correct. Just as in C, in C++, all objects - be they primitive types, instances of structs or classes - are allocated on the stack by default. If you want them allocated on the heap, you must explicitly request it.
This idea is great, but it ignores on very real problem. Namely that you still have not addressed the issue of bandwidth. Take for example your 4th of july example. If I were to do that upload the way you describe, I would already be over my monthly bandwidth allotment with my ISP as would many hobbyists.
Contracts of that sort have been around for decades. The enforceability of them is somewhat questionable.
Peter Gabriel’s ‘Interspecies Internet’
> you couldn't tap in without disturbing the optical signal

Well of course you can't. If you're going to split it off to read it, then you're "disturbing" it by definition.

Whether or not you can do such that it's not noticeable to the proper end parties, of course, is a different story.
This approach is great - giving small things for free, but isn't working for every clients. It's horrible for you when your customer is't paying a lot (small projects, low prices etc.). They are overdemanding, don't like your work, put a lot of changes and thinking that you should't do it for free.
Yes, the thing I also noted first was that it doesn't have any bootstrap/router (only 'bootstrap' is the one that's included at the top of each .php-file, wordpress-style). Development must have been pure pain. :(

I really understand why people hate PHP so much when all they get to see is purely non-optimized shit. It generally has a really bad reputation which it doesn't deserve. Especially in HN-circles.